The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia [Hardcover]

Richard Overy (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393020304 | ISBN-13: 978-0393020304 | Publication Date: September 2004 | Edition: First edition.

IF THE PAST CENTURY will be remembered for its tragic pairing of civilized achievement and organized destruction, at the heart of darkness may be found Hitler, Stalin, and the systems of domination they forged. Their lethal regimes murdered millions and fought a massive, deadly war. Yet their dictatorships took shape within formal constitutional structures and drew the support of the German and Russian people. In the first major historical work to analyze the two dictatorships together in depth, Richard Overy gives us an absorbing study of Hitler and Stalin, ranging from their private and public selves, their ascents to power and consolidation of absolute rule, to their waging of massive war and creation of far-flung empires of camps and prisons. The Nazi extermination camps and the vast Soviet Gulag represent the two dictatorships in their most inhuman form. Overy shows us the human and historical roots of these evils.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Comparisons between Hitler and Stalin and their regimes are nothing new, but this dense, comprehensive, scholarly investigation is more nuanced than most. Overy sidesteps the simplistic debate over which dictator was more evil and focuses on how they, and the systems they created, were similar and different. He delves into their regimes thematically, in topics ranging from police states and economic systems to wartime behavior. The results yield intriguing historical insights, although the book demands a careful reading. For instance, Overy notes that both Hitler and Stalin created cults of personality, but for Hitler "personality was the defining criterion of leadership"; Stalin, on the other hand, emphasized Communist ideology first and embraced a personality cult only when he realized it could cement his stranglehold on power. Interestingly, while the Nazi Party increasingly relied on workers' support and ideology, Stalin's Communist Party—the "vanguard of the proletariat"—relied more and more on middle-class technocrats. At times Overy restates points long known to historians, e.g., both leaders pursued negative utopias, but from different bases: class warfare was Stalin's justification, while Hitler chose biological purity. But when he points out the differences in their policies toward minorities and nationalities—Hitler adhered to a racial ladder, while Stalin, a Georgian, flip-flopped to suit his political goals—Overy's analytical strength and depth of knowledge emerges. 32 pages illus.; maps.
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From Booklist

Conceding that Alan Bullock's Hitler and Stalin (1991) is the standard dual biography, Overy tackles an old controversy about Hitlerism and Stalinism: the degree to which they are similar. Assessing kinship may strike nonhistorians as impertinent in the context of each system's mountain of victims, but Overy explains this work as a necessary empirical foundation for the historiography of the two dictatorships. The dictators' personalities are brought forward only as they pertain to their governing and propaganda apparatuses; most pertinent of all is the way each man regarded himself as a world-historical actor with a "redemptive" mission. Overy spreads that insidiously essential aspect of the Hitler and Stalin dictatorships across the divisions of his analysis, which include the cultlike panegyrics to the leader; their popular support; their military buildups; and, crucially, their fantasy ideologies, without which their crimes and World War II are difficult to imagine occurring. From a notable historian of WWII, this serious integration of extant scholarship will be of use to student and professional researchers. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 849 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First edition. edition (September 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393020304
• ISBN-13: 978-0393020304
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,290,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An interesting thesis, September 20, 2004

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1. "John Henninger" (Littleton, CO United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (Hardcover)

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Good, July 30, 2005

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Tom Munro "tomfrombrunswick" (Melbourne, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (Hardcover)

In recent times libertarians following Hayek have suggested that the regimes of Hitler and Stalin were two sides of the same coin. Overy who has written a very good book on the reason why the allies won the Second World War examines the two regimes.

One of the more interesting chapters is that dealing with the two economic systems. In some respects there were significant similarities. In the 30's both systems achieved amazing growth figures. The Soviet by around 100% the German by some 50%. In both economies growth was fuelled by massive investment by depressing living standards. In Russia the collectivisation policy allowed for the siphoning of farm income to fund machine imports. In Germany wages were regulated and kept at depression levels. The Soviet system allowed some private enterprise to flourish mainly in small plots and the German system had large state enterprises developing synthetic rubber and oil.

Many other aspects of the regimes were similar, the control of culture, the idealisation of the leader the means of repression. However there were also significant differences. Hitler believed in a sort of racial mercantilism where the key to prosperity of society was the geographic size of the country. To achieve wealth a country must have an empire. That empire was to be administered by those of the "German" race who operated a slave type system in the conquered territories. Inferior races were to be serfs denied education and citizenship. No one of course was going to voluntarily be part of that empire so that one had to have a strong army. In fact the key role of the government, in the Nazi State was to provide that army so that the country could achieve territorial expansion and safeguard the destiny of the race.

The Soviet system although having the same concentration camps, the same elements of repression was more a child of the enlightenment. Historically Russia had been a country that had celebrated the role of the "Russian People" in the development of the Czarist empire. Under the communists the country was not even known as Russia but the more abstract Union of Socialist Soviets. Broadly it was a repellent system but not a racist one. This meant that during the crisis of the Second World War it was better able to mobilise its resources and win. The Germans by their policy of racial exclusivity limited the potential size of their armies and were appalling at using the resources of their conquests.

41 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Point Counterpoint, September 9, 2004

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[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (Hardcover)

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.