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

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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.

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.

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.

Overy is more than a scholar; he is a deep thinker. There is a world of difference. "The Dictators" is a seminal work comparing how the two greatest dictators of all time exercised control over their political, economic, and military systems all while laying out the implications of this control.

It is the painstaking comparison, often paragraph-by-paragraph, that gives this work its magisterial quality. But what really makes "The Dictators" work is how it builds on Overy's previous work, "Why the Allies Won," which assumed that the Allied victory was not a forgone conclusion in 1940 and asked, and answered, probing questions about comparative command structures, production economies, and capital sources.

Without this base, Overy's latest could have become just another book on Hitler and Stalin. And a boring one at that. With it, however, we get insights unavailable elsewhere. Having studied Marxism, Leninism, and the Soviet Union for forty years, I was deeply impressed.

The next step in this line of scholarship is to put it in the context of falling information costs. Wealth is created when increasing amounts of ever cheaper information can be substituted for other resources like land, labor, and capital. "The Dictators" describes how Hitler and Stalin did the opposite, systematically lowering the cost of information or themselves and raising it for everyone else.

Following Overy's reasoning in "Why the Allies Won" the question is, absenting world war, was the Dictator system sustainable? If so, for how long? This question is critical to understanding the future of China as it tries to contain falling information costs and keep some semblance of Party leadership. And critical to us in trying to manage our relationship with China. Next book Mr. Overy?

Editing: Five Stars. Comparing two systems across so many functions page-by-page and often paragraph-by paragraph can quickly become unwieldy and most would advise strongly against it. Better to keep each leader to his own chapter. But Overy carries this off and his editor wisely let him proceed.

Copy Editing: Five Stars

This is an outstanding side-by-side comparison of the Soviet communist socialism to the German national socialism. The title is somewhat misleading: it is not a double biography of Hitler and Stalin (which is good; I've had enough of both). It is about the two political systems, one possessed by a social utopia (Bolshevik socialism), the other by a racial utopia (German national socialism)). In both cases a militant regime took over a defeated former empire. In theory they had nothing in common except for the mutual hatred; in practice they converged to remarkable similarities and even collaboration. Overy's conclusions are supported by colossal factual material. Highly recommended.

The Dictators, of course, porvided a lot of information about Stalin and Hitler, but one thing was prevailant throughout the book: numbers. The facts Richard Overy presented to the reader left little to be doubted about his thesis, but also it was hard to understand them (and it blocked the flow). I rate this 4 stars because although my criticisms may be harsh, it taught me much about Hitler and Stalin, it will serve as a good reference book, and I may want to reread it when I have a fuller understanding of the two Dictators. (This is coming from a 10th Grade history enthusiast)

Richard Overy's "The Dictators, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia" is a wonderful look at two of the most repressive regimes in history and the men who led them. Overy compares how both men maneuvered their way into power in their respective nations. The 'Utopia' both men sought is considered heavily throughout this work- the 'Racial State' for Hitler and the 'Classless State' for Stalin.

Overy's comparison of the men of course addresses the events that led to their epic showdown in World War II, and this makes for some of the work's most fascinating chapters. For instance, Overy presents the growing arms race between Germany and the USSR in the 1930s as the natural precursor to the Cold War arms race between the USSR and the United States. The relationships between both dictators and their military leaderships is also very illuminating as both men considered themselves quite adept at military affairs after their service in WWI and the Russian Civil War, respectively.

This comparative study of the two regimes is must reading for students of modern European History and stands along side Robert Gellately's "Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe" as one of the great works on the subject.

I have seen some criticism of this book, including from professional historians, but I don't see it. I found this to be an absorbing and fascinating look at both Hitler & Stalin, as the author cuts back and forth between their careers. The compare and contrast method really works quite well, and this book also gives Overy a chance to re-look at some of his work on Nazi Germany & Soviet Russia, after Soviet archives were coming available. I think this is a great work of history by a major historian- one who has proved his knowledge of a wide range of WWII matters. Not for the dilletante- its quite long, but for the serious WWII reader its a rewarding experience.

Richard Overy's book The Dictators sought to compare the ideological similarities and differences exemplified by Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. He examines many different factions of both regimes. He starts by looking at how these two dictatorships were able to come about and concludes that without the occurrence of World War I and a little bit of luck, these regimes could not have risen. Overy then goes on to look at the style in which these two dictators ruled. He explains that they claimed the democracy of the West divided the nation into a class system. They wanted true democracy that gives undisputed power to one political party to represent the country. Overy also suggests that Hitler and Stalin were not dictators just for the sense of power, but in order to reach their goal of a Utopia even though their ideas of Utopia differed. Hitler's utopia was a racially pure society, while Stalin's utopia was a classless society. Both of these rulers knew that they faced another inevitable war, and they both heavily involved themselves in the militaristic strategies of their countries. Overy states that WWII would become a total war because it would determine if the ideology of each system would survive. Lastly Overy focuses on the nationalism and racism in each dictatorship, which led to the mass extermination as well as deportation of people. He explains that due to the nationalism and anti-Semitism in both countries it was easy for people to look past the rumors of work and extermination camps.

This book in fairly in depth, and a slow read due to the immense amount of information Overy includes. At times Overy seems a little to eager to place Stalin and Hitler in the same category when comparing the two dictatorships, and you must take what Overy says with a grain of salt. He is however clearly very knowledgeable on what he is writing and is very in tune with the ideas he is trying to set across. Overy does not lack data or support throughout his book. If you are interested in how dictatorships come to be and how they are able to keep their power this is a great book for you to read. Some parts are a little harder to get through than others, but overall the topic is interesting and very well written.

Richard Overy's The Dictator's: Hitler's Germany and Stalin' Russia provides great insight for those lacking in solid history of the time period. Although the book demands some knowledge of the time period, making for a slow read and visits to "Google" to further ones knowledge of any number of particulars, the book provides a solid understanding of both the two dictators as human beings and their dictatorships. Overy glides over the basic facts of familial history and upbringing to focus on the reasoning behind each rise to power. The books format, although lacking a chronological format, flows well in providing a side by side comparison on topics such as economic systems and cultural control. The book educates the reader on the way each viewed his territories and its people, as well as the "utopia" so interestingly referred to within its pages. Overy explains how each Stalin and Hitler felt war and conflict was inevitable, yet for different reasons. Hitler felt any dictator had to go through war, as if it was a right of passage. Stalin felt as though to defend his ideological beliefs, war was a necessary measure. Although a slow read, and sometimes heavy; the book leaves the reader with an understanding of the time and the reasoning behind these trying periods in history. The book is long, yet contains many illustrations to break it up and the work entices the reader to reach the next chapter and learn of a new comparison. One would be hard pressed to find criticism regarding the wealth of knowledge contained in the work; it proved well researched and informative from start to finish.