ALSO BY ROBERT GELLATELY
Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933—1945
The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials (edited by Robert Gellately)
The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder and Other Mass Crimes in Historical Perspective (edited with Ben Kiernan)
Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (edited with Nathan Stoltzfus)
Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789—1989 (edited with Sheila Fitzpatrick)
The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933—1945
The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics, 1890—1914
TO MARIE
CONTENTS
Abbreviations and Glossary
Note on Russian Spelling and Dates
Maps
Introduction
PART ONE: LENIN’S COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP
1 The First World War and the Russian Revolution
2 On the Way to Communist Dictatorship
3 Civil Wars in the Soviet Union
PART TWO: THE RISE OF GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM
4 Nazism and the Threat of Bolshevism
5 First Nazi Attempt to Seize Power
6 Hitler Starts Over
PART THREE: STALIN TRIUMPHS OVER POLITICAL RIVALS
7 Battle for Communist Utopia
8 Lenin’s Passing, Stalin’s Victory
9 Stalin’s New Initiatives
10 Stalin Solidifies His Grip
PART FOUR: GERMANS MAKE A PACT WITH HITLER
11 Nazi Party as Social Movement
12 Nazism Exploits Economic Distress
13 “All Power” for Hitler
PART FIVE: STALIN’S REIGN OF TERROR
14 Fight Against the Countryside
15 Terror as Political Practice
16 “Mass Operations”
17 “Cleansing” the Soviet Elite
PART SIX: HITLER’S WAR AGAINST DEMOCRACY
18 Winning Over the Nation
19 Dictatorship by Consent
20 Persecution of the Jews in the Prewar Years
21 “Cleansing” the German Body Politic
PART SEVEN: STALIN AND HITLER:
INTO THE SOCIAL CATASTROPHE
22 Rival Visions of World Conquest
23 German Racial Persecution Begins in Poland
24 Hitler and Western Europe
25 The Soviet Response
26 The War Spreads
PART EIGHT: HITLER’S WAR ON “JEWISH BOLSHEVISM”
27 War of Extermination as Nazi Crusade
28 War Against the Communists: Operation Barbarossa
29 War Against the Jews: Death Squads in the East
30 The “Final Solution” and Death Camps
PART NINE: HITLER’S DEFEAT AND STALIN’S AGENDA
31 Greatest Crisis in Stalin’s Career
32 Between Surrender and Defiance
33 Soviets Hold On, Hitler Grows Vicious
34 Ethnic Cleansing in Wartime Soviet Union
PART TEN: FINAL STRUGGLE
35 From Stalingrad to Berlin
36 Stalin Takes the Upper Hand
37 End of the Third Reich
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Photographic Credits
ABBREVIATIONS AND GLOSSARY
Bolsheviks Majority faction of the RSDLP, founded in 1903
Central Committee Soviet Communist Party supreme body, elected at Party congresses
Cheka (or Vecheka) Chrezvychainaia Kommissiia (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counterevolution and Sabotage); the original Soviet secret police, 1917–22, whose members were called Chekists even after many name changes
Comintern Communist International organization
Gestapo Geheime Staatspolizei (secret state police, also called Staatspolizei or Stapo)
GPU-OGPU Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie (State Political Administration)-Obedinennoe Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie (Joint State Political Administration); the Soviet secret police, 1922–34
Gulag Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei (main camp administration); eventually in charge of Soviet concentration camps
ITK corrective labor colony (USSR)
ITL corrective labor camp (USSR)
Kadets Russian Constitutional Democratic Party (liberals)
kolkhoz (pl. kolkhozy) collective farm
KPD Communist Party of Germany
Kripo Criminal Police
kulaks “rich” peasants
lishentsy Soviet people “without rights”
Mensheviks Minority faction of the RSDLP, founded in 1903
NEP New Economic Policy (1921–29) introduced by Lenin
NKVD Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), but widely used initials for the secret police when, from 1934, the GPU-OGPU was reorganized into the NKVD and named GUGB NKVD
NSDAP National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi Party)
OKH High Command of the German Army
Okhrana tsarist secret police
OKW High Command of the German Armed Forces
Politburo main committee of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party
Pravda main newspaper of the Bolsheviks, and later the semiofficial paper of the Communist Party
RSDLP Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the main Marxist party
SA Sturmabteilung (the Nazi Brownshirts)
SD Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service of the Nazi Party)
Sipo Sicherheitspolizei (security police); founded in 1936 as the umbrella organization for the Gestapo and Kripo
Sopade Executive of the Exile SPD, with headquarters in Prague (1933–38), Paris (1938–40), and London (1940)
soviet Russian for “council;” in German, Rat
Sovnarkom/SNK Council of People’s Commissars; the government body established by the Russian Revolution
SPD Social Democratic Party of Germany, briefly fractured into the MSPD (Majority wing) and the USPD (Independent wing)
SS Schutzstaffel; Himmler’s Black Corps
Stavka High Command of the Soviet Armed Forces
vozhd’ leader
Wehrmacht German Armed Forces
zek slang for zaklyuchennyi, Gulag prisoner
NOTE ON RUSSIAN SPELLING AND DATES
I have generally used the most common translations of Russian names, such as Leon Trotsky; Maxim Gorky, rather than Gorki; Georgy, rather than Georgii. I have omitted diacritical marks and other such features of the Russian language in the endnotes. Dates in the Russian section of the book prior to February 1918 are given according to the Julian calendar (or “Old Style”), which was twelve days behind the Western calendar in the nineteenth century and thirteen days behind it in the twentieth. January 31, 1918, was the last day of Julian calendar in Russia, with the next day becoming February 14.
INTRODUCTION
The names of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler will forever be linked to the tragic course of European history in the first half of the twentieth century. Only weeks after the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks created secret police forces far more brutal than any that had existed under the tsar. The Nazis followed suit and were no sooner in power than they instituted the dreaded Gestapo. Under both regimes millions of people were incarcerated in concentration camps where they were tortured and frequently worked to death. The Nazis invented camps equipped for the industrial killing of millions of Jewish women, men, and children on the basis of supposed racial criteria.
The Soviet and Nazi dictators wer
e themselves products of the structural changes generated by the Great War. Before 1914 they were marginal figures and would not have had the slightest hope of entering political life. Only in their dreams could they have imagined themselves as powerful rulers and leaders of mass movements. But once the “war monster” was released in 1914, the social and political crisis that swept across Europe opened up wholly new opportunities for the radicals and utopians.1
Every corner of Europe was affected by catastrophe that enveloped the continent for the next three decades. There were two world wars, the Russian Revolution and civil war, the Fascist takeover in Italy, the Nazi seizure of power, and the Holocaust. As well, there were numerous other uprisings and coups. The dark energies released by the hatreds, anxieties, and ambitions can be gleaned in part from the enormous scale of the killing. Far more men in uniform and still more civilians were struck down than in any comparable period in history. This book focuses on the dominant powers of the time, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, but analyzes the catastrophe itself in global terms, in an effort to lay bare its large-scale political and ideological nature. From this perspective, we can see that the tragedies endured by Europe were much more than discrete events. They were inextricably linked and an integral part of the bitter rivalry waged by the Communists and the Nazis for world domination.
In the First World War something on the order of eight million men were killed in action, seven million permanently disabled, and another fifteen million seriously wounded. An estimated five million civilians lost their lives through “war-induced causes,” such as disease and malnutrition. These civilian casualties do not include those of Russia, where the situation was worst of all, magnified ultimately by (two) revolutions in 1917, followed by a civil war and famine.2 All this happened in what was to be only the first phase of the great social and political catastrophe. The next round was to be deadlier still.
The First World War’s social effects cannot be underestimated. “All inhabitants of Europe were exposed to the militarization of life and language, the erosion of individual freedom and social differences, the disruption of economic life, the drain of wealth, the hardships caused by food shortages, the growth of collectivization and bureaucracies, the collapse of the international system, and the release of huge reservoirs of aggressivity and violence.”3
There would be no returning to the old ways. In tsarist Russia the regime had been tottering before 1914, and after more than three years of sacrifice the national will to carry on was all but dissipated. By early 1917 despair and resentment had led directly to the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II. A new provisional government disastrously tried to carry on the war, but the army’s morale and will to continue went from bad to worse. By October, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, seizing the moment to their own political advantage, had succeeded in taking power almost without firing a shot; there was no one left to defend the government. The war had opened the door to revolution and Communism. Thereafter, Lenin and the Bolsheviks combined terror and missionary zeal at home with a fervent belief that it was their destiny to bring the blessings of Communism to the West.
Russia was not alone in losing its monarchs. In 1918 and 1919 in Central Europe, Socialist and Communist revolutions followed the lost war and drove out the old leaders. There were also unsuccessful attempts to establish Communist regimes in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, and elsewhere. In the early 1920s there were several renewed efforts, with Soviet encouragement and assistance, to bring about a Russian-style revolution in Germany.
The postwar “normality” in Europe was marked by political violence, attempted (and successful) coups, assassinations, bands of uniformed thugs in the streets, and general instability. This climate was conducive to the rise of new parties, and above all to the emergence of radicals and dictators of the right and the left who, backed by the enraged, the zealots, and notably also by young “idealists,” tried to turn the general crisis to their own advantage. After 1918, when the war ended, there was a persistent feeling of living merely in an interregnum between wars.
The war monster was prepared for the next round that began in September 1939. The Second World War was, however, anything but a rerun of the old conflicts that had been in abeyance since 1918. From the mid-1930s, the ideological and political conflict between Nazism and Communism that had raged for more than a decade was reflected in growing international tensions. The new conflict erupted over Poland, and it escalated across Western Europe until ultimately the world descended into a maelstrom of destruction and horror that was far deadlier than even the Great War.
In Europe the ideological clash between Nazism and Communism added an entirely new dimension to the conflict that had engulfed the same nations during the Great War. There was a new viciousness, as the armed forces threw aside the conventions of war and national and ethnic hatreds roared out of control. Ethnic cleansing, “population transfers,” deliberate targeting of civilians, and mass crimes became the order of the day. One way or another every country on the continent became entangled in the Holocaust.
The systematic mass murder of the Jews at the hands of German forces during the Second World War was at the heart of the great catastrophe I deal with in this book. The Jewish people in Europe became caught up in the hatreds and emotions following the First World War. They were killed in the hundreds of thousands in the Russian civil war (1918–21). Those crimes, committed mainly by “White” forces against the “Reds,” were the worst pogroms in Russian history, far deadlier than anything that had been seen in the days of the tsars.
The sheer scale of the calamity that befell Europe in the Second World War defies the imagination. A sense of being immersed in the great catastrophe was conveyed in numerous ways by many people, few more strikingly than a Russian artist during the siege of Leningrad. She wrote in her diary:
In all this worldwide phantasmagoria, I feel some kind of satanic romanticism, and in addition, grandeur, a head-long irrepressible rush to death and destruction.
Some horrible and violent whirlwind has landed on earth, and everything has gotten mixed up and has started to spin in black smoke, fire, and snowstorm.
And we, we Leningraders, choking in the siege, are microscopic grains of sand in this whole, immense cyclone.4
A monster like the one unleashed in 1941 could not be chained up so easily, and the war did not end abruptly with V-E day, on May 8, 1945, when the Allies celebrated their victory. Social strife in the form of brutal acts of retribution, ethnic cleansing, and civil wars raged on until 1953 and the death of Stalin.5
This book began as a study of the conflicting ideologies of Communism and Nazism and the murderous rivalries of Stalin and Hitler. I did not initially include Lenin as a major figure. However, as I conducted my research and tried to reconstruct the events leading up to the Second World War, I began to see that much of what I wanted to say was leading me back, over and over, to Lenin and the beginnings of the Soviet dictatorship.
The two best studies dealing with Soviet Communism and German National Socialism focus on Stalin and Hitler and hardly mention Lenin at all. Their point of departure is to compare the two regimes through a methodology that takes Hitler as the principal figure and then examines the parallels with Stalin. But it is never explained why Hitler is placed before Stalin. After all, long before anyone had ever heard of Hitler, Stalin was politically active, and he was a powerful Soviet dictator many years before the Nazi leader became chancellor of Germany.6
My book deviates from the standard approach by giving significant attention to Lenin and by putting the story in proper chronological sequence. It also corrects for the tendency of most studies of Stalinism to ignore Lenin or relegate him to a background role. Too often Lenin comes across as a prudent and wise, or at least well-intentioned, founding father whose vision was polluted by the murderous Stalin. Yet Lenin is central not just to the foundation of Soviet Communism but also to its subsequent development. It was precisely his will to power that drove on t
he doubters among fellow Bolsheviks in 1917. Without a hint of moral scruple or sense of national loyalty, Lenin desperately hoped for Russia’s defeat in the First World War and ridiculed fellow Bolsheviks who thought they should defend their country.
In March 1917 the world of the tsars came crashing down, and for a short while, under the new provisional government, Russia became one of the freest countries in the world. At the time Lenin was nowhere near Petrograd, the capital; he was living in Switzerland. Emboldened by events, he now returned to his homeland. He was determined to destroy what remained of the old social and political order in Russia and intent on killing any chance that the new Russia would become a liberal democracy.
Lenin, the man born Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov on April 10, 1870, “Old Style,” grew up in a family of comfortable means. He had been an early convert to revolutionary activism and was perhaps the most intransigent practitioner of Russian Marxism in the prerevolutionary period. As the founder of Soviet Communism, he was the key advocate of establishing the one-party state, the concentration camps, and the terror. He insisted, within days of the October Revolution, that civil and legal rights had to be curtailed. Only weeks later he pushed for a new secret police (the Cheka). He set the intolerant tone of the new regime and relentlessly pursued a widening circle of enemies. Nor were terror and dictatorship simply reactions to the exigencies of governing, for Lenin embraced both more than a decade before the Russian Revolution. When the tsarist regime came under pressure in 1905, for example, Lenin was not satisfied with the idea of reforming it into a constitutional monarchy or even liberal democracy.7
When they met for the first time in mid-December 1905, Stalin was already in tune with Lenin but disagreed with Lenin’s change of tactics to participate in elections made possible by the October reforms. Nevertheless, Stalin learned to take his cues from the “great man,” for the two agreed that the ends justified any means and that the ultimate aim was dictatorship of the proletariat—with the emphasis on the former.8
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