Allen Lane £25 pp896

Some comparisons are more helpful than others. It is absurd, for example, to compare Tony Blair with Mussolini, and kooky to compare recent abuses by coalition forces in Abu Ghraib with the atrocities perpetrated by the wartime Wehrmacht. Guantanamo Bay is not the Gulag.

Some comparisons stir considerable passions. Take those made between Hitler and Stalin. The term totalitarianism, used by most people to describe Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, still raises eyebrows in influential academic circles. There are fewer academics who can dismiss the deaths of millions of people as collateral flotsam on the “Great Helmsman” Stalin’s course to paradise, and suffer no diminution of their status as “national treasures”. But there is broader opposition to any attempts to sully the supposedly higher ideals of socialism through association with a regime that was at root irrational, nihilistic and predatory. Killing people by virtue of their putative “race” is seen as a greater evil than annihilating people by dint of their ascriptive “class” or national and political allegiances, real or suspected.

The idea of comparing Hitler and Stalin is not an original one. My bookshelves bulge with dusty tomes by, among others, Raymond Aron, Franz Borkenau, Alfred Cobban, Franklyn Ford, Waldemar Gurian, Hans Kohn, and Frederick Voigt, just to take authors from the 1930s and 1940s. Self-evidently, such books could not incorporate a representative selection of the enormous scholarly literatures that have been devoted to communism and Nazism, or political messianism and totalitarianism since, nor the current enormous interest in individual and social morality in history that preoccupies such thinkers as Jonathan Glover or Tzvetan Todorov. That, in essence, is what Richard Overy has done in The Dictators and, notwithstanding his reliance on Russian-speaking researchers, and some significant omissions in the relevant German-language literature, he has performed this daunting task better than one has seen it performed before.

Since the narrative of Nazism, as opposed to that of Lenino-Stalinism, is well known, Overy has opted for discussion of central themes, such as the role of the leader and the sole permitted party; the quest for a “new man” and “new woman”; utopian “scientistic” reconstruction, and so on. As so much is already known about Hitler and Stalin, from countless biographies, Overy concentrates on the creation of what amounted to political cults around these redemptive figures: the one promising racial dominance, the other the onset of social “justice” on earth. A pseudo-religious vision was camouflaged with a crude scientism. Whereas Hitler catered to diffuse historical longings for a Führer figure that were intensified by the crises of the Weimar Republic, Stalin assumed the mantle of Lenin, who was then reduced to a ghostly tutelary presence in the background. In a strikingly similar way, the public arena was refashioned so as to accommodate their cults, which in both cases interacted with the fantasy life of ordinary people, as so well described by Ian Kershaw and Nina Tumarkin.

What Overy does not quite explain is how these political cults related to Christianity, notably German liberal Protestantism, or to the pervasive secularism that challenged it in the century before the advent of his dictators. A tendency to deify the state was a mounting source of worry to all Popes from the mid-19th century; their early 20th-century successors were equally concerned about the worship of race or class.

Overy takes the easier path of describing how public space and public time were filled with images of his would-be masters of the universe, with men and women marching and singing together at times of the leaders’ choosing, in architectural arenas shaped by their realised or projected megalomaniac visions. The desired goal was of human beings scurrying around like urbanised ants amid dead edifices, while the countryside was populated by bronzed ploughmen and rosy-cheeked milkmaids. One paradise was racial, the other based on social “justice”: both thrust their “enemies” into circumstances resembling hell.

He devotes some excellent chapters to the mechanics and realities of single-party dictatorship in states where the rule of law was hollowed out, and where the personal trade-off for party members was power and status v a high degree of anxiety and constant self-surveillance. Overy, who is not indifferent to questions of right and wrong, also brilliantly evokes the altered moral universe that these regimes hoped would characterise their subjects, many of whom were all-too-willing to be reconstructed.

Contrasts are important to any comparison. Take how both regimes dealt with their imaginary demons. The National Socialists did not experience anything comparable to the Stalinist purges. The Soviets did not shuffle populations for the same reasons as the Nazis, who were engaged in purifying German “blood” of racial contaminants. The language was the same, with its talk of “pests” and “vermin”, but there is a subtle difference between decimation and annihilation, even if that distinction would have hardly consoled a Chechen or Volga German en route to Siberia, as opposed to a Jewish person bound for Auschwitz. Similarly, while the Soviets sometimes took over concentration camps from the SS, replacing “Work Liberates” with their own exhortations “Order, Discipline, Cleanliness”, they never created anything resembling Auschwitz or other centres of mass extermination. Whatever the differences that Overy describes, both regimes were akin in that they broke through the “dykes of civilisation” that the 19th century regarded as impermeable. In that sense, Overy’s monumental comparative history is invaluable.

DEAD RECKONING

Though they fought to the death in the second world war, Stalin and Hitler were not always totally antipathetic to each other. Stalin, in particular, could not hide his admiration on occasion for the ruthless tactics of his fellow dictator. When news arrived in Moscow, for instance, of Hitler’s 1934 purge of the SA leadership, in which some 85 men were shot in one day, Stalin was heard to cry out at a Politburo meeting: “Hitler, what a great man! This is the way to deal with your political opponents.”

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