Mr Laughland also argues that Nazism's central features were war and racial persecution, whereas Soviet communism was neither racist nor (under Stalin) expansionist.
John Laughland, a British historian at the pro-Kremlin Institute for Democracy and Co-operation in Paris, argued on the Russia Today channel that politicians make bad historians.
Mr Laughland, who helps to run a Eurosceptical lobby group called the European Foundation, argues that it is not just the familiar figures in the pro-European pantheon Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and the like who preached the virtues of European unity.