The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia

Rating:
Summary: Point Counterpoint
Review: If one wanted to do a comparative history of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, then Richard Overy would not be the worst choice. He is one of the leading historians of the Nazi dictatorship, with his books on the air war, Goering and why the Allies lost. By contrast, his reading skills in Russian are limited, and his archival sources are non-existent, but he keeps a close eye on the scholarly literature. What Overy has done is not write a comparative biography of the two men, but a comparative history of their two regimes. He starts off by looking at the two dictators, and the circumstances in which they won power. Then he discusses the way they ruled things, their utopianism and their attacks on religion. He then looks at official culture, how they organized their economy, how they organized their armies, the way they fought their wars, their policies on nationalities and the regime of their camps.

The result is a hugely informative book that provides the latest research on a whole host of topics, and presents a complex view of many issues. Like many recent scholars he emphasizes the way consent, not coercion, undergirded the regimes. He points out that the Gestapo had only 20,000 people to watch over all of Germany, including the secretaries, while once one removed the staff and the border guards the NKVD only had 20,000 people to look over the USSR. Whether it is the Nazi campaign against the Gypsies (not as genocidal as the Holocaust), or the way each side treated the prisoners of war from the others (the Soviets come out better here), whether it is the hierarchies of the concentration camps, or the assassination attempts against Hitler, or the Communists' strategy against the Orthodox Church, on topic after topic we have a thorough, complex and well-researched discussion of the issue. Overy also provides many striking details. When Hitler came to power he promoted the judge who gave him an extremely lenient sentence for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch. Stalin loved hunting, Hitler hated it. For all of Hitler's Wagnerian aura, his favorite opera was actually "the Merry Widow". At the height of the German Eastern Advance, the Soviet Union could only call upon 23% of the coal output and 28% of the iron output of The Third Reich. More members of the German Communist Politburo were killed by Stalin than by Hitler. For their many minorities the Soviet Union offered 92 alphabets in 125 languages, and for the centenary of Pushkin, produced 27 million copies in 66 languages.

Although he is critical of the totalitarian interpretation, Overy tends to emphasize the similarities of the regimes. The dictators themselves, he notes early on, had very different personalities with the empty Hitler who lived only for mass charisma contrasting with the more gregarious Stalin who slowly mastered the party and had to work to achieve his cult. The Nazi Party was more influential, and oddly more lawless, with Stalin's Russia too big and rural and illiterate to achieve the same kind of depth. But both regimes shared a similar utopianism, and a similar hostility to religion, capitalism and intellectual freedom. Of course, Overy points out that while Stalin was willing to use war as a tool, he was fundamentally defensive. There is no question here that the Soviet Union was the victim of an aggressive attack. There is also no question that the Soviet Union, with help from lend-lease, managed an amazing mobilization of its economy, in contrast to the Nazis who could not do so until it was too late. Nazi racism was genuinely genocidal, while the Soviet Union genuinely believed in the diversity of its people, though that did not save it from outbreaks of xenophobic paranoia. In the world of concentration camps, 40% of the Nazi's prisoners died, while about 15% of the Gulag's did. But then most of the Gulag's victims were not political prisoners. (In the Nazi extermination camps, of course, everyone was supposed to die, and at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor more than 99.9% of them did).

There are some criticisms one can make. Much of the case on Hitler's "anti-capitalism" is based on his rhetoric, or on gestures like the mass wearing of uniforms. (David Cesarani's new biography of Eichmann suggests he was not the low-class beneficiary of Nazi social mobility that Overy suggests.) Overy also relies of Herman Rauschning, a source Ian Kershaw's biography was much more skeptical of, while Richard Steigmann-Gall has pointed out that Hitler's Table Talk, which Overy cites to demonstrates Hitler's hostility to Christianity, has been mistranslated in key places. The conclusion is somewhat mediocre. Science is blamed, while Overy says the two dictators were united by illiberalism, a hostility to the "liberal idea of progress" and a hostility to diversity. But both regimes supported some sort of progress, and the Soviet Union supported a diversity of cultures certainly as liberal as its predecessors or successors. An emphasis on ideology as a cause overlooks the fact that one reason why the Bolsheviks were so dogmatic, cruel and intolerant was because there was so little purchase under Tsarism, the first World War and the Russian civil war for open-mindedness, charity and mercy. By contrast, nothing in Germany's 20th century experience explains Nazi anti-semitism. Nevertheless, this is the leading book on the similarites and differences of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting thesis
Review: Overy makes the controversial thesis that Hitler's regime was more revolutionary than Stalin's Russia. Overy claims that the Nazi party began to take over areas of the German economy while Stalin after the nineteen thirties left the economy in the hands of economist and engineers. Also during the war years the Nazi party was taking over control of military operations, but Stalin was ceding control to his generals. The Gestapo was not constrained by any law while the Soviet NKVD in the early forties was scrutinize by some judicial oversight. Finallly the Nazis eliminated ethinic groups based on their race and the Soviets judged other ethinic groups based on their loyalty to the Soviet state. The main weakness of Overy's book is that he skims over Stalin's collectivization drive and how it resulted in the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens through stravation and repression. Despite this weakness, I would reccomend this book for anyone ineterested in a comparason of these two regimes.