Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Robert Gellately (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 14, 2007

This remarkably ambitious book tells the story of the great social and political catastrophe that enveloped Europe between 1914 and 1945. In a period of almost continuous upheaval, society was transformed by two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Combining a powerful narrative with profound analysis, acclaimed historian Robert Gellately argues that these tragedies are inextricably linked and that to consider them as discrete events is to misunderstand their genesis and character. Central to the catastrophe, of course, were Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, and this book makes use of recently opened Russian and German sources to explain how these dictators’ pursuit of utopian—and dreadfully flawed—ideals led only to dystopian nightmare.

In a groundbreaking work, Gellately makes clear that most comparative studies of the Soviet and Nazi dictatorships are undermined by neglecting the key importance of Lenin in the unfolding drama. Rejecting the myth of the “good” Lenin, the book provides a convincing social-historical account of all three dictatorships and carefully documents their similarities and differences. It traces the escalation of conflicts between Communism and Nazism, and particularly of the role of Hitler’s anathema against what he called “Jewish Bolshevism.” The book shows how the vicious rivalry between Stalin and Hitler led inescapably to a war of annihilation and genocide. The reverberations of this gargantuan struggle are felt everywhere to this day.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Historian Gellately's (Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany) new work insists on Lenin's inclusion in any effort to understand the two major and deadly dictatorships of 20th-century Europe, Soviet communism and Nazism. Every horrendous act of the Stalin era had been seeded by Lenin, the author argues. Moreover, the Soviet and Nazi systems developed in tandem, each carefully eying the other, learning from each other, as they both reached an apex of brutality and terror. In developing this analysis, Gellately provides informed but somewhat plodding accounts of the two systems. Not all of the arguments stand up to scrutiny. In the 1930s, the struggle between Communism and Nazism became a deadly rivalry for world domination the author writes. But in the 1930s Stalin cared for little beyond the Soviet Union and was hardly bent on global conquest. Gellately's approach is relentlessly one-sided in its focus on ideology as the causative factor in history. Even the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution is treated as backdrop for the implementation of ideology, rather than as an earthquake-like event that well into the 1950s shaped the thinking of Soviet leaders. Gellately is better on the Third Reich, but overall this is an unsatisfying and uninspired history. 16 pages of photos. (Aug. 20)
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From Booklist

A historian of Nazi Germany (Backing Hitler, 2001), Gellately here compares it to its totalitarian enemy, Soviet communism. At pains to distinguish the two dictatorships both ideologically and by their political support, Gellately reviews their roots in the rubble of World War I. Underscoring Lenin's contempt for liberal democracy and dedication to mass violence, the author argues that Leninism had a logical continuator in Stalin—which, while not an original thesis, is one that Gellately capably sustains. Switching to Germany and the radically anti-Semitic nationalist resentments from which Hitler emerged, the author tracks events in the Nazi ascent to power and stresses the popularity Hitler had acquired by the late 1930s. Having poised history before what became the Holocaust, Gellately, as part of his argument for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, however similar numerically it was to Stalin's death tolls, details the menaces in Hitler's rhetoric, such as his notorious 1939 "prophecy" of Jewish "annihilation" in the event of war. But discussing either tyrant, Gellately achieves his aim of describing for general readers the draconian inhumanity of their rules. Taylor, Gilbert

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 720 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (August 14, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400040051
• ISBN-13: 978-1400040056
• Product Dimensions: 1.7 x 6.9 x 9.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #756,739 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert Gellately is the Earl Ray Beck Professor of History at Florida State University and recently was the Bertelsmann Visiting Professor of Twentieth-Century Jewish Politics and History at Oxford University. He is the author of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe; The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945; and Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

112 of 115 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Germans made Lenin, and Lenin made Hitler September 29, 2007

By Antonio

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book wanders over well-tilled ground. How many books have there been on Hitler and the Nazis, on the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks, on Lenin and Stalin? Yet it does bring the old facts into new light. The Germans made Lenin, because they ferried him and his compères from Zürich to Petrograd in 1917, as a way to cause a Revolution and end the war in the Western Front. Bolshevik barbarism, begun by Lenin and ably furthered by Stalin, briefly emulated by followers in Austria, Germany, Hungary and elsewhere, terrified the Germans, a nation of property-owners. Thus, when the Great Depression struck and millions of Germans found themselves unemployed after hyperinflation in 1923 had destroyed their savings, and the Communists tried several times to overthrow the Government, many bürgers were only too happy to give their vote to the Nazis.

Nazi terror was totally different from the Bolshevik variety. Practically anyone could be victimized in Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union, even old-time Communists: Stalin killed most of them in his successive Terrors. Not in Hitler's Germany: there, only unpopular outsider groups were reppressed, like Communists (whom even the Socialists were happy to see in concentration camps), gypsies, homosexuals and of course Jews. Only in its final winter did Nazism really exhibit its nihilistic face in Germany itself, as portrayed in Eric Johnson's "Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans". However, once the Germans started to carve their empire they began to show what they had in store for the rest of humanity: First in Austria (where many of the most brutal SS officers came, like Adolf Eichmann or Odilo Globocknick), then in the Sudeten, next in Czechia, in Poland, in Yugoslavia and Greece, and finally the Soviet Union, each time behaving more brutally. The dead are prominent characters in Gellately's book, as Lenin, Stalin and Hitler blithely consigned to banishment or horrible death ten thousand here, fifty thousand there, for page upon page upon page of this long book. The cumulative effect is sickening.

But Gellately also has a keen eye for the memorable detail. Here a few notable tidbits:

- Hitler never received funds from big business until after he was in power.

- Colonel Stauffenberg, who in 1944 tried to kill the Führer with a bomb, in 1933, as young lieutenant, was so overcome with joy when Hitler became Chancellor that he led an impromptu celebration march in Bamberg. When he was executed as a traitor, a relative was shocked, since the Colonel was the only real Nazi in the family.

- The German law that legalized sterilization (the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases) was cribbed from the California sterilization act of 1909.

- When in 1939 Germany and its ally the Soviet Union invaded Poland, the Soviets killed or drove to their deaths 3 or 4 times as many people as the Nazis, even though the territory they occupied only held a population half the size of the Germans'.

- Here is a chilling phrase from Stalin, indicating the fate of the Baltic upper classes after the Soviet invasion in 1939: "Comrade Beria will take care of the accommodations of our Baltic Guests".

- Hitler's favorite photographer, Hoffman, apparently knew of German military plans, since from 1940 onwards he showed photographs of the countries the Nazis intended to invade before the invasions happened. I thought: that's amazing.

- Perhaps the most horrible image in the book to this reader is narrated by a woman in Saint Petersburg during the 900-day siege, when people where so hungry they would eat anything. In April 1942 she saw a corpse with a backpack huddled against a lamppost. She saw it for several weeks, as first the backpack, then the clothes, then the underclothes disappeared, and eventually the flesh and entrails of the corpse, skeletonized.

- Himmler's 1943 operation to kill the Jews at the camp in Majdanek was named "Operation Harvest Festival".

- Hitler thought Mussolini was a pussy and that only Stalin and he were "World historical figures". Stalin apparently agreed.

- Harriman, Roosevelt's envoy to Moscow, thought Stalin was better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill: he regarded him as the most inscrutable and contradictory character he ever met.

- The proposal that the Soviet Union keep the parts of Poland it occupied since September 1939 and that Poland be indemnified with parts of Germany was Churchill's. Stalin concurred.

- Beria was shocked when he heard, through telephone interception, that Roosevelt thought both Stalin and Churchill similarly untrustworthy.

- When the Red Army soldiers went into Germany, they couldn't understand why the Germans, so rich, had invaded them "what could they have wanted that we might have had", they asked. And so on, and so on.

Virtually every page is filled with similar juicy data. That is history as it ought to be written.

I've read many history books this year. The only one I enjoyed as much as this one is Tim Blanning's "The Pursuit of Glory", which is one of my top three history reads, along with McCullough's "Reformation" and Beevor's "Berlin". I have purchased Gellately's "Backing Hitler", which I hope to enjoy as much as "Lenin, Stalin and Hitler". I thank my stars that I didn't have to live in those countries, through those times, but am glad that Gellately is around to tell me what they were like.

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A detailed analysis of the Soviet and Nazi repressions September 2, 2007

By Graham

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Despite the title, Lenin only appears in the introductory chapters. Gellately carefully reminds us of Lenin's extreme ruthlessness and his enthusiasm for executions and terror as weapons to establish his intended Soviet utopia, thus establishing the pattern that was developed by Stalin. But the bulk of the book is focused after Lenin's time, on the vast repressions of Hitler and Stalin's regimes.

One of the themes of the book is the degree to which Soviet communism drove the rise of Nazism. Gellately argues strongly that Hitler could never have gained power without the threat and example of Russian revolutionary terror. The various attempts in 1918-1920 to launch a Bolshevik revolution in Germany all failed disastrously, but combined with the nearby presence of a Soviet Union spouting world revolutionary rhetoric, they caused many to look in alarm for strong anti-communist leaders. This quest returned in force with the great depression and the perceived failure of the Weimar democracy. And, fatefully, in order to combat the feared Red Menace, many seemed to believe that aping its ruthless methods was both legitimate and necessary.

Gellately also explores how Hitler linked Judaism and Bolshevism, so that the threat to Germany became the "Bolshevik Jews". This wasn't a particularly obvious linkage, but Hitler somehow managed to create a mythical "Jewish Bolshevism" that bizarrely combined the alleged Jewish masterminds of Wall Street and Moscow into a single threat against the German race. This phantasm served Hitler well, as a single scapegoat for all of Germany's ills, but left the Jews doubly exposed.

Gellately highlights the very different relationships the Soviet and Nazi systems had with the mass of the populace. Lenin and Stalin saw themselves as having a quasi-divine Marxist mandate which had no need of popular endorsement and which entitled them to ruthlessly impose their policies on a reluctant people. In contrast, Gellately characterizes the Nazis as a "dictatorship by consent". The Nazis held absolute power, but they sought the genuine support of the masses, not simply their obedience. To a very large extent they obtained it. Even hostile sources, such as socialist undercover reporters, agreed that throughout the 30s there was genuine widespread and enthusiastic support for the regime and its policies. While the Nazis suppressed all opposing views, they also carefully built support for their own policies and were quick to adjust or even reverse positions that seemed unpopular. Gellately argues that provided the regime was delivering economic stability and expansionist successes, the population was willing to actively support it.

The bulk of the book focuses on the details of the repressive machinery (from gulags to death camps to specific massacres) continually re-emphasizing that these were driven by systematic strategies originating at the very hearts of the two systems. This makes for grim reading, but valuable history.

52 of 60 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Historian explores the influence of three brutal world leaders August 26, 2007

By Roy E. Perry

Format:Hardcover

In Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, Robert Gellately, the Earl Ray Professor of History at Florida State University, has written a sobering and chilling account of the unspeakable terror visited upon Europe, and indeed upon the entire world, during the first half of the 20th century.

The years between 1914 and 1945 witnessed World War I, the Russian revolution and the triumph of Bolshevism, the Great Depression, the dictatorships of the Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, World War II, the genocide of the Holocaust, and the construction of the Gulag.

While the brutalities of Stalin and Hitler are well known, Gellately points out that a key figure is often neglected or minimized in the chronicle of European barbarism: Vladimir Illych Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin.

In his famous speech in 1956, which renounced the atrocities of Stalin and signaled a "thaw" in the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev claimed that "the bad Stalin" had corrupted "the good Lenin."

"Khrushchev trotted out the myth of Lenin the noble and good," writes Gellately, "to save the 'inner truths' of Communism from association with what were belatedly recognized as 'Stalinist evils."

This myth of the noble and good Lenin, claims Gellately, no longer convinces. Documents from the newly opened Russian archives make abundantly clear that Lenin was the most extreme of the radicals, the leader who pressed for terror as much as, and probably more, than anyone. Far from perverting or undermining Lenin's legacy, as is sometimes assumed, Stalin was Lenin's logical heir.

Gellately began this work as a study of the conflicting ideologies of Communism and Nazism and the murderous rivalries of Stalin and Hitler. At first, he didn't include Lenin as a major figure. As he conducted his research, however, and tried to reconstruct the events leading up to World War II, he began to see that much of what he wanted to say was inexorably leading back to Lenin and the beginnings of the Soviet dictatorship.

"My book deviates from the standard appraisal," he writes, "by giving significant attention to Lenin and by putting the story in proper chronological sequence." Lenin was, says Gellately, "a heartless and ambitious individual who was self-righteous in claiming to know what was good for 'humanity,' brutal in his attempt to subject his own people to radical social transformation, and convinced he held the key to the eventual overthrow of global capitalism and the establishment of world Communism."

Lenin and Stalin were not alone in their utopian visions which turned Europe into a dystopia. Adolf Hitler offered his followers a "Social Darwinism," a pseudo-scientific philosophy emphasizing a brutal will to power, He preached that the historical mission of the "Aryan master race" (Germanic peoples) was to exterminate "inferior races," which he referred to as "sub-humans," "parasites," "vermin," and "trash."

The brunt of Hitler's wrath was directed against the Jews, who, he ranted, were responsible for the cowardly "stab in the back" at the end of World War I, and who, he raved, were the sinister instigators of Bolshevism.

Although Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler includes highlights of military action during the Second World War, the lion's share of the book deals with social and political developments in the Soviet Union and Germany, and especially with the suffering and death of untold millions of people in the labor camps of the Russian Gulag and the death camps of Nazi Germany.

Gellately shows how the Holocaust was, and remains, unprecedented. It was (Gellately here quotes Professor Omer Bartov of Brown University) "the industrial killing of millions of human beings in factories of death ordered by a modern state, organized by a conscientious bureaucracy, and supported by a law-abiding, patriotic, 'civilized' society."

In the Epilogue, Gellately writes, "This book is an attempt to record the evils perpetrated by both Soviet Communism and German Nazism and to figure out how it came about that, separately and together, the two systems brought such misery and destruction to the world."

The Roman playwright Plautus (c. 250 B.C.) wrote, "Lupus est homo homini" ("Man is a wolf to man"). If anyone doubts the truth of this aphorism, he or she should read Gellately's disturbing volume.