Author:
Publication: The Economist
Date: August 9, 2007
URL: http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9616751
In their different ways they were as bad as
each other, the three monsters of 20th-century Europe. That is an oddly controversial
statement. Hitler is almost universally vilified; Lenin remains entombed on
Red Square as Russia's most distinguished corpse; and modern Russia is looking
more kindly on Stalin's memory.
Robert Gellately elegantly scrutinises their
differences and highlights their similarities. He places all three men in
the context of a Europe shattered by the first world war. "Before 1914
they were marginal figures," he writes, without "the slightest hope
of entering political life." The whirlwind of destruction that started
in 1914 turned their fantasies of racial purity and class dictatorship into
reality, killing people on a scale unknown in human history.
Anyone who still believes in the myth-assiduously
propagated by the Soviet Union and its admirers-of the "good Lenin"
will find the book uncomfortable reading. The author outlines with exemplary
clarity Lenin's cruelty, his illegal and brutal seizure of power, his glee
in ordering executions, the institution of mass terror as a means of political
control and the construction of the first camps in what later became the gulag.
"Far from perverting or undermining Lenin's legacy, as is sometimes assumed,
Stalin was Lenin's logical heir," he writes icily.
Mr Gellately busts another myth too: that
Hitler seized power by fear and force. The combination of anti-Jewish and
anti-Bolshevik rhetoric played well with the German public. People felt humiliated
by defeat and impoverished by recession, and Hitler blamed "the Jews"
for both.
Hitler looked on Soviet methods with contempt.
His model was what Mr Gellately calls "consensus dictatorship":
cautious, sounding out public opinion and changing course when necessary.
Unlike Stalin, Hitler did not make a habit of murdering his closest allies.
The Nazi party never experienced the ritual purges that were a habitual feature
of Soviet Communist Party life under Stalin. Hitler's adversaries were so
demoralised by the seeming success of his regime that few offered systematic
resistance. It was only as defeat loomed in the last months of the war that
ordinary Germans had a taste of the official paranoia that had been their
Soviet counterparts' daily fare for 25 years.
Lucid prose and vivid examples make the book
admirably accessible to non-specialists. But it also engages expertly in one
of the most closely fought historiographical battles of past decades, the
Historikerstreit (to give it its German name). Was the bacillus of totalitarianism
that infected Germany first bred in Russia? Some German historians, notably
Ernst Nolte, have argued that Hitler's crimes were both a distorted copy of
atrocities already committed under communism and to some extent a defensive
reaction to them. To caricature the argument: Germany declared war on Jews
because Jews (at least communist ones) had declared war on Germany.
Mr Gellately has no time for Mr Nolte, who
he says is guilty of an "astonishing and reprehensible replication of
Nazi rhetoric". Just because many communists were Jews does not mean
that there was anything remotely rational in Hitler's constant conflation
of "Jewish-Bolshevism". Nazi anti-Semitism, he insists, was "rooted
in German nationalism."
The argument about the origins of Nazism will
run and run. But there is little danger of Germany rehabilitating Hitler,
even in the driest and most academic corners of historical theory. In Russia,
by contrast, Stalin's memory is being burnished. A new guide for history teachers
describes Stalin as the Soviet Union's "most successful leader";
it admits that "political repression" took place, but says it "was
used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite."
President Vladimir Putin, welcoming this guide, compared Stalin's Great Terror
of 1937 with the allied bombing of Hiroshima. It would be interesting to hear
Mr Putin's tame historians debate the Stalin era with Mr Gellately.
Mr Gellately sets a high standard for anyone
writing about comparative dictatorship. But perhaps some future scholar, matching
this author's knowledge of German and Soviet history but possessing equal
mastery of China's communist decades, could write a more complete account
of 20th-century horrors, including that missing monster, Mao Zedong.
