Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism
Various historians and other authors have carried out a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism, with particular consideration to the similarities and differences between the two ideologies and political systems, the relationship between the two regimes, and why both came to prominence simultaneously. During the 20th century, comparisons of Nazism and Stalinism were made on totalitarianism, ideology, and personality cult. Both regimes were seen in contrast to the liberal democratic Western world, emphasising the similarities between the two.[1]
"Hitler and Stalin" redirects here. For the 1991 book by Alan Bullock, see Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives.
Political scientists Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Carl Joachim Friedrich, and historian Robert Conquest were prominent advocates of applying the totalitarian concept to compare Nazism and Stalinism.[2][3] Historians Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer highlight the differences between Nazism and Stalinism, with Geyer saying that the idea of comparing the two regimes has achieved limited success.[4] Historian Henry Rousso defends the work of Friedrich et al., while saying that the concept is both useful and descriptive rather than analytical, and positing that the regimes described as totalitarian do not have a common origin and did not arise in similar ways.[5] Historians Philippe Burrin and Nicolas Werth take a middle position between one making the leader seem all-powerful and the other making him seem like a weak dictator.[5] Historians Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin take a longer historical perspective and regard Nazism and Stalinism not as examples of a new type of society but as historical anomalies and dispute whether grouping them as totalitarian is useful.[6]
Other historians and political scientists have made comparisons between Nazism and Stalinism as part of their work. The comparison has long provoked political controversy,[7][8] and in the 1980s led to the historians' dispute within Germany known as the Historikerstreit.[9]
Other scholars[edit]
In 1952, British historian Alan Bullock wrote the first comprehensive biography of Hitler, which dominated Hitler scholarship for many years.[150][151][152] His Hitler: A Study in Tyranny showed him as an opportunistic Machtpolitiker ("power politician") devoid of principles, beliefs, or scruples, whose actions throughout his career were motivated only by a lust for power. Bullock's views led in the 1950s to a debate with Hugh Trevor-Roper, who posited that Hitler possessed beliefs, albeit repulsive ones, and that his actions were motivated by them.[153] In 1991, Bullock published Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, in which he showed how the careers of Hitler and Stalin, whose "personal malice marked him out from Hitler, who was astonishingly tolerant of inadequate colleagues",[154] fed off each other to some extent. The book was a success, despite Bullock's friends fearing it would flop and others who doubted the two lives were parallel in any meaningful sense, and Bullock came to the thesis that Stalin's ability to consolidate power in his home country and not to over-extend himself enabled him to retain power longer than Hitler, whom Bullock favoured to spend a weekend with, as part of a frivolous question, because "although it would have been boring in the extreme, you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive."[154] American historian Ronald Spector praised Bullock's ability to write about the development of Nazism and Stalinism without either abstract generalisation or irrelevant detail.[155][156] Israeli academic Amikam Nachmani wrote that Bullock's Hitler and Stalin "come out as two blood-thirsty, pathologically evil, sanguine tyrants, who are sure of the presence of determinism, hence having unshakeable beliefs that Destiny assigned on them historical missions—the one to pursue a social industrialised revolution in the Soviet Union, the other to turn Germany into a global empire."[157]
According to Stalin's interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, Stalin spoke highly of the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 and viewed Hitler as a "great man" who had demonstrated "the way to deal with your political opponents." Berezhkov also suggested parallels between Hitler's inner party purge and Stalin's mass repressions of the Old Bolsheviks, military commanders, and intellectuals.[158]
In his work on fascism, American historian Stanley G. Payne said that although the Nazi Party was ideologically opposed to communism, Hitler and other Nazi leaders frequently expressed recognition that only in the Soviet Union were their revolutionary and ideological counterparts to be found.[159] Both placed a major emphasis on creating a "party-army", with the regular armed forces controlled by the party. In the case of the Soviet Union, this was done through the political commissars, while Nazi Germany introduced a roughly equivalent leadership role for "National Socialist Guidance Officers" in 1943.[159] In his work on Stalinism, French historian François Furet commented that despite ideological differences, Hitler personally admired Stalin and publicly praised him on numerous occasions for seeking to purify the Soviet Communist Party of Jewish influences, especially by purging Jewish communists, such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Karl Radek.[160] American academic Richard Pipes drew attention to Stalin and antisemitism in a parallel with Nazi antisemitism. He states that soon after the 1917 October Revolution, the Soviet Union undertook practices to break up Jewish culture, religion, and language. In the fall of 1918, the Soviet Communist Party set up the Jewish section Yevsektsiya, with a stated mission of "destruction of traditional Jewish life, the Zionist movement, and Hebrew culture."[161] By 1919, the Bolsheviks confiscated Jewish properties, Hebrew schools, libraries, books, and synagogues under newly imposed anti-religious laws, turning their buildings into "Communist centers, clubs or restaurants." After Stalin rose to power, antisemitism continued to be endemic throughout Russia, although official Soviet policy condemned it.[162]
Marxist political scientist Michael Parenti stated that many of the narratives which equate Nazism, or fascism more generally, and Stalinism, or communism more generally, are often simplistic and usually omit the class interests of each respective movement. Parenti says that the fascists in Germany and Italy, despite "some meager social programs" and public works projects designed to bolster nationalist sentiment, supported and served the interests of big business and the capitalist class at the expense of the workers by outlawing strikes and unions, privatising state-owned mills, plants, and banks along with farm cooperatives, abolishing workplace safety regulations, minimum wage laws and overtime pay, and subsidising heavy industry. This resulted in the fascists having many admirers and supporters among the capitalist class in their nations and the West, including the United States. By contrast, while stating there were deficiencies in Marxist–Leninist states, some of which he attributes to maldevelopment due to outside pressure from a hostile capitalist world, and acknowledging the numerous state-sanctioned imprisonments and killings, which he says were exaggerated for political reasons, Parenti asserts that the Stalinist regime in particular "made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care and women's rights", and communist revolutions in general "created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers and Western capitalists."[163]
Jacques Sémelin writes that Stéphane Courtois and Jean-Louis Margolin "view class genocide as the equivalent to racial genocide." Alongside Michael Mann, they contributed to "the debates on comparisons between Nazism and communism", with Sémelin describing this as a theory also developed in The Black Book of Communism.[164] According to historian Andrzej Paczkowski, only Courtois made the comparison between communism and Nazism. Meanwhile, the other sections of the book "are, in effect, narrowly focused monographs, which do not pretend to offer overarching explanations." Paczkowski wonders whether it can be applied "the same standard of judgment to, on the one hand, an ideology that was destructive at its core, that openly planned genocide, and that had an agenda of aggression against all neighbouring (and not just neighbouring) states, and, on the other hand, an ideology that seemed clearly the opposite, that was based on the secular desire of humanity to achieve equality and social justice, and that promised a great leap of forward into freedom", and stated that while a good question, it is hardly new and inappropriate because The Black Book of Communism is not "about communism as an ideology or even about communism as a state-building phenomenon."[165]
In comparing the deaths caused by both Stalin and Hitler's policies, historians have asserted that archival evidence released after the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirms that Stalin did not kill more people than Hitler. In 2011, American historian Timothy Snyder said the Nazi regime killed about 11 million non-combatants (which rises to above 12 million if "foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included"), with comparable figures for Stalin's regime being roughly 6 and 9 million.[166] Australian historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft posited that "[t]he Stalinist regime was consequently responsible for about a million purposive killings, and through its criminal neglect and irresponsibility it was probably responsible for the premature deaths of about another two million more victims amongst the repressed population, i.e. in the camps, colonies, prisons, exile, in transit and in the POW camps for Germans. These are clearly much lower figures than those for whom Hitler's regime was responsible." According to Wheatcroft, unlike Hitler, Stalin's "purposive killings" fit more closely into the category of "execution" than "murder", given he thought the accused were indeed guilty of crimes against the state and insisted on documentation. In contrast, Hitler wanted to kill Jews and communists because of who they were, insisted on no documentation, and was indifferent at even a pretence of legality for these actions.[167]
According to historian Thomas Kühne, going back to the Historikerstreit, conservative intellectuals such as Ernst Nolte and the Holocaust uniqueness debate, the attempts to link Soviet and Nazi crimes, citing books such as Snyder's Bloodlands as prominent examples, are "as politically tricky today as it was then. As it seems to reduce the responsibility of the Nazis and their collaborators, supporters and claqueurs, it is welcomed in rightist circles of various types: German conservatives in the 1980s, who wanted to 'normalise' the German past, and East European and ultranationalists today, who downplay Nazi crimes and up-play Communist crimes in order to promote a common European memory that merges Nazism and Stalinism into a 'double-genocide' theory that prioritises East European suffering over Jewish suffering, obfuscates the distinction between perpetrators and victims, and provides relief from the bitter legacy of East Europeans' collaboration in the Nazi genocide."[168]
Kristen Ghodsee, an ethnographer of post-Cold War Eastern Europe, contends that the efforts to institutionalise the "double genocide thesis", or the moral equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and the victims of communism (class murder), and in particular, the recent push at the beginning of the global financial crisis for the commemoration of the latter in Europe, can be seen as the response by economic and political elites to fears of a leftist resurgence in the face of devastated economies and extreme inequalities in both the East and West as the result of neoliberal capitalism. She states that any discussion of the achievements under communism, including literacy, education, women's rights, and social security, is usually silenced. Any discourse on the subject of communism is focused almost exclusively on Stalin's crimes and the "double genocide thesis", an intellectual paradigm summed up as such: "1) any move towards redistribution and away from a completely free market is seen as communist; 2) anything communist inevitably leads to class murder; and 3) class murder is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust." By linking all leftist and socialist ideals to the excesses of Stalinism, Ghodsee says that the elites in the West hope to discredit and marginalise all political ideologies that could "threaten the primacy of private property and free markets."[169]
Historian Nicholas Doumanis states that the totalitarian perspective of equating Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin is not conceivable and is a misunderstanding of the two distinct natures of the regimes, which is why they were enemies. Stalin's main goal was to create a socialist state, under the banner of socialism in one country, that was autarkic, industrialised, and multiethnic. Genocide was not in Stalin's plans, rather nationalism and nation-building were, and it was not inherent in the building of a non-capitalist, non-expansionary state.[170] Political scientist Laure Neumayer states that The Black Book of Communism contributed greatly to legitimising "the equivalence of Nazi and Communist crimes" by "making criminality the very essence of communism." Neumayer writes that the book "figures prominently in the 'spaces of the anti-communist cause' comparably structured in the former satellite countries", which are "a major source of the discourse" criminalising the communist period.[171]
Some research institutions are focusing on the analysis of fascism/Nazism and Stalinism/communist states, and the comparative approach, including the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies in Germany, the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Czechia, and the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland. Nonetheless, the comparison of Nazism and Stalinism remains a neglected field of academic study.[121]