Lenin had remarkably little empathy for the hopes and aspirations of the common people, whether they were peasant farmers or members of the industrial working class. He believed that the workers were the only “revolutionary class” but, if left to their own devices, they would want “merely” better wages and social improvements—in other words, tradeunion demands that, in his eyes, betrayed their limited imagination. The Russian writer Maxim Gorky accurately summed up Lenin’s attitude in November 1917, at the very start of the new regime, when its character was barely defined. “The working class is for Lenin what ore is for the metalworker. Is it possible, under all present conditions, to mold a socialist state from this ore? Apparently it is impossible; however—why not try? What does Lenin risk if the experiment should fail?”9
Leninism was based on the idea that professional revolutionaries would form an avant-garde or vanguard party and rule in the name of the proletariat. They would not waste time on the “sham” of liberal democracy, which they regarded as nothing more than the government of the hated bourgeoisie. Getting rid of the absolute monarchy and replacing it with a constitutional system was merely a prelude to a more authentic revolution. None of this was going to happen without bloodshed, and Lenin took it as self-evident that the class struggle meant civil war. He was convinced that Communism had to be forced through violently. His followers were elitist to the core and assured of their own superiority. They took it upon themselves to create a new world from top to bottom.
Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhughashvili, or Joseph Stalin, was born December 21, 1879, according to the official biography published during his lifetime, but historians now agree that the real date was December 6, 1878. We have no idea why he lied about the date of his birth. The man himself had undeniable gifts, but originality was not one of them. He proudly and intentionally built on Lenin’s foundations. To put it another way: Stalin initiated very little that Lenin had not already introduced or previewed. Stalin was Lenin’s logical successor, priding himself on being a true disciple, though he was to transform the Soviet Union in ways his idol could only dream about.
The myth of the “good Lenin”—the savior—was built into the political culture of the Soviet Union from the start, and Stalin shrewdly played it to his own political advantage. Lenin was actually merciless and cruel. Even the inner circle of the Bolsheviks shuddered at his ferocity and the executions he ordered without any compunction. We should understand the figure of the “good Lenin” as a political instrument, meant to inspire followers at home and abroad.
The “good Lenin” existed before there was a “bad Stalin.” Stalin came from a peasant family in Georgia and was a seminary student prior to taking the path of a professional revolutionary. But his career in the distant Caucasus had little direction until he adopted Lenin as his leader. When Stalin fought for supremacy among Soviet Communists in the early 1920s, he did so not by laying out his own aims but by proclaiming himself Lenin’s most loyal follower and interpreter.
There has been some talk that Lenin, who was growing more seriously ill by the day, wanted to get rid of Stalin in December 1922–January 1923. In his so-called political testament Lenin complained that Stalin was “too rude” and wrote of “removing” him as general secretary of the Party. Lenin’s annoyance with Stalin can be traced to a private event: Stalin had had a personal confrontation with Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. However, as much as he demanded an apology and muttered about Stalin’s manners, he said nothing about removing him from the most important committees in the country (the Politburo and Central Committee), and there is no documentary evidence to suggest he was looking to another possible successor. His main concern was about a split in the Party around the two powerful personalities of Stalin and Leon Trotsky. But he appreciated Stalin deeply. He had fostered him in important ways and ultimately favored him above all the other rivals at the top of the Party.10
The first dictator of the Soviet Union and his future successor had no major theoretical or political differences in the area of Communist doctrine, least of all on the wholesale and ruthless use of terror. Stalin stayed on as general secretary of the Party. In the struggle for power after Lenin died, he easily pushed aside Trotsky, his main rival. From the mid-1920s, when he asserted his dominant position, Stalin justified every zigzag in policy, every twist of the screws, every dose of terror, by tracing it to some statement or other that Lenin had made. I show in this book that far from perverting or undermining Lenin’s legacy, as is sometimes assumed, Stalin was Lenin’s logical heir.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the “good Lenin” was resurrected to chase out the “bad Stalin” and his personality cult. Something had clearly gone wrong with Communism: there were obvious abuses and a gigantic concentration camp system with more than two million prisoners, and the rights of citizens meant nothing. The question was how all that had come to pass. Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech in 1956, which signaled a “thaw” in the Soviet Union, claimed that Stalin had corrupted Leninism. Khrushchev trotted out the myth of Lenin the noble and good to save the “inner truths” of Communism from association with what were belatedly recognized as “Stalinist evils.” Everything that had gone wrong in the country was now placed squarely on Stalin’s shoulders. Khrushchev brought up Lenin’s “testament” and his charges about Stalin’s rudeness to “prove” that the brilliant Lenin had been right all along. Khrushchev asked rhetorically: “Were our Party’s holy Leninist principles observed after the death of Vladimir Ilich?” That they were not was Stalin’s fault, because there was supposedly nothing wrong with Leninism itself.11
This fable about Lenin no longer convinces, as is made abundantly clear from the content and character of the documents coming out of the newly opened Russian archives.12 They reveal Lenin to be the most extreme of the radicals, and the leader who pressed for terror as much as, and probably more than, anyone.
The image of Lenin that emerges from the pages of this book, even the mere mention of him in the title alongside Stalin and Hitler, will disturb some people. A good friend at my American publishers said the very thought of putting Lenin next to Stalin and Hitler in the book’s title would be enough to make her Russian grandmother turn in her grave.
Communism has not suffered the same obloquy as Nazism, notwithstanding all we have come to learn about persecution and mass murder in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere. That may be because Communism was meant to have a universal liberating purpose. It was to bring the end of inequalities and establish real social justice. To many of its adherents, it did not seem to matter much that the Soviet regime produced the exact opposite on almost all counts.13
Like Stalin, Adolf Hitler (born April 20, 1889) was a man of modest origins. For the first three decades of his life, he gave no thought to a career in politics and was instinctively a loner who dabbled in art. He was not even a German citizen, but an Austrian with an odd southern accent who set out in his twenties for Germany, where he continued to peddle his artwork. His personal qualities were not the stuff of the born leader. He was painfully shy, spoke little in public, and wrote less. He served as a volunteer in the German army during the entire First World War but rose no higher than the rank of corporal. He was an outsider even in the trenches at the front.
At the close of the war, Hitler became uncannily attuned to the wave of resentment and bitterness that swept over the defeated country. He spewed hatred for the “November criminals,” those who were allegedly responsible for Germany’s loss, and like many others he wanted to tear up the Treaty of Versailles, which shackled his adopted country with the guilt for the Great War. Unlike the Marxists, Hitler had no grand theory that posited an end point “beyond” history. For Hitler, history was all there was, a constant striving in which German survival and supremacy could only be ensured through the creation of a racially pure “community of the people,” cleansed of Communists, Jews, criminals, social outsiders, and those classified as racially unfit.
We d
o not know much about Hitler’s views before 1919. What is certain is that as he grew up in Austria, he held a highly romanticized understanding of all things German, developed contempt for Austro-Hungarian governmental officials, and had an unmistakable, if vaguely defined, yearning to have his people find a home in a Greater Germany. On the eve of the Great War he was living in Munich and overjoyed in his belief that Germany was at last going to establish itself as the world power he felt to be its birthright. The war eventually threatened to put an end to his nationalist aspirations. At that point the corporal who had heretofore led an uneventful life became politically awake to the meaning of defeat and humiliation and joined the chorus that laid the blame on the Jews.
It should not surprise that Hitler fell into league with nationalist groups, given his long-standing emotional attachment to Germany. But his passionate commitment to a “rebirth” of the nation was fundamentally tied to the view that the Jews were responsible for its betrayal. He had no difficulty adopting a biological racist outlook, though his social Darwinism was in all probability little more than a convenient rationale for his increasingly bitter anti-Semitic views. Growing up in Austria, Hitler likely did not differ from many of his generation in tending toward anti-Jewish attitudes, though it was not until after the Great War that he became the type of rabid anti-Semite we associate with the Nazi movement.
Hitler stood out among the disaffected after the war not just because of his rhetorical skills but, more important, because of the radical nature of his politics, the all-or-nothing attitude he was to demonstrate the rest of his life. By September 1919, it was already on his agenda to “remove” the Jews from Germany “altogether.” It is extremely doubtful that even he, at that time, could have imagined how that impulse would play out in the Second World War, but those who thronged to hear him speak in the 1920s could sense that fanatical right-wing politics—a crackdown on “law and order,” the Communists, and above all the Jews—would be at the heart of a Hitler leadership.
Hitler’s anti-Semitic phobia soon became entangled with a feverish anti-Bolshevism. He followed the pattern of other anti-Semites in grossly exaggerating the number of Jews involved in Communism in Germany and the Soviet Union, but his hatred of the Jews could not be reduced to their supposed sympathy for Communism. More significantly, he portrayed them as the natural enemies of the nation.
On August 13, 1920, in Munich, Hitler gave what amounted to his “programmatic” statement on anti-Semitism. He invited his audience to envision what great heights of culture and art Germany might reach if the nation came together. He claimed that the Jews could never be part of this effort because, unlike Germans (more generally “Aryans”), they did not see work as a social and moral obligation. He maintained that the Jews would always live as outsiders in another state, as agents, businessmen, and dealers.14 He continued to hone this theme. For example, on November 2, 1922, he described the Jews as a people who were by nature international. They were able to thrive throughout history in so many diverse environments, speaking different languages, always having a sense of themselves as a people, he said. His greatest fear was that this “race,” which he regarded as “lower,” might well be capable of undermining German culture and thus its national identity. He believed the Jews had been “destroyers of culture” from the earliest times, in Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and ancient Rome.15
Whereas many observers might perceive capitalism and Communism as deadly enemies, with little in common, Hitler saw both as infused with the spirit of internationalism and thus as sharing a common ground of natural enmity against the nation. From this perspective, one simply could not be both for internationalism and for Germany. Hitler held stubbornly to the view that the Jews, as a people with no homeland of their own, had no stake in belonging to the nation because their real interests lay elsewhere, with capitalism or Communism.
It was with this inflexible belief in the Jews as the natural enemies of Germany that Hitler became the most resolute opponent of Lenin and Stalin and what he disparagingly called “Jewish Bolshevism.” He fought for more than a decade to get into power, and thereafter set out to reshape Germany and then Europe according to an ideology to which he had committed himself early and held on to until the end. He was intent on war almost from the day of his appointment as chancellor on January 30, 1933, and in 1939 he got it. The clash of Nazi and Communist ideologies reached critical proportions in June 1941 and became the Vernichtungskrieg— or war of annihilation against Jews and Communists—for which he lusted.
This book, then, holds that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was rooted in his radical and racially tinged German nationalism and that his war against Communism was an extension of his war against the Jews. My position is strictly opposed to that of Ernst Nolte, who believes that Nazi anti-Semitism was a reaction to Soviet Communism and that the crimes of the Nazis, including the annihilation of the Jews, were “copies” of crimes committed by the Soviets. Nolte goes so far as to maintain that there was a “rational core” to Hitler’s persecution of the Jews in that as a group they were active in the Communist movement. He suggests that the Jews could be taken as having declared war on Germany, with the implication that Nazi Germany was put in the position of defender of the homeland. Nolte’s statements are an astonishing and reprehensible replication of Nazi rhetoric, notwithstanding his unsuccessful maneuverings to distance himself from the racist ideology of the Third Reich. Suffice it to say he has been roundly and rightly condemned not only for advancing the untenable and shocking position that the Jews were somehow to blame for their own destruction but also for denying against all the evidence that Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in German nationalism.16
For Hitler, anti-Semitism was a fundamental plank of Nazi ideology. It drew for its sustenance on nationalist aspirations in place before the Great War and was heightened to a maddening degree by the country’s defeat. With Hitler’s idea of Soviet Communism as yet another Jewish plot to destroy the nation, Nazi ideology soon overreached the national dimensions of a country fretting over the lost war and despised Versailles Treaty. As he created the Nazi movement and built the Third Reich, with continuing scrutiny of the Soviet Union, his determination to “remove” the Jews from Germany assumed a mission of worldwide scope.17 It is only by examining Hitler’s venomous attitudes toward the Jews and how these were connected to his anti-Bolshevism that we can get a sense of the viciously obsessive nature of his anti-Semitism and its primacy in Nazi ideology and politics, nationally and internationally.
In the 1930s the struggle between Communism and Nazism became a deadly rivalry for world domination. It was above all this clash that led to the darkest chapters of the great social and political catastrophe of the century. The democratic European countries were no match for these two power-hungry upstarts, and it was only the entrance of the Americans into the Second World War, albeit on the side of the Soviet Union, that managed to overcome the might of Germany. In return, the United States would have its hands full with the Communists in the ensuing Cold War, which was to last half a century.
This book provides a social-historical account of the Soviet and Nazi dictatorships and documents their similarities and differences. I agree with Charles Maier that it is crucial to preserve the distinctions and contrasts.18
Russia in 1914 was arguably the most politically repressive state on the continent. It was still an agricultural and undeveloped society, with more than one hundred languages spoken by its multiethnic population. Seventy-nine percent of them were illiterate according to the census of 1897. Germany by contrast was modern, highly cultured, ethnically homogeneous, and economically advanced. It had long since attained nearly universal literacy and was on the way to liberal democracy. Good citizens in Germany, as in most parts of Austria, prided themselves on the rule of law. “Social peace and good order” was a well-known German proverb, and in that respect it was quite unlike the far more violent and unruly Russian society. The uproar and chaos in the streets of Germany aft
er the war—much of it caused by the Nazis—made people ready to embrace Hitler, who promised to bring an end to such unquiet times. The older contrasts with Russia did not disappear, but colored the Communist and Nazi dictatorships that emerged.
Stalin and Hitler have been viewed as “populist politicians.”19 My research does not support that perspective. In fact, the two dictators were very different. Hitler was a model example of a charismatic leader, a man with the gift of instant communication with the masses. Stalin was utterly lacking in charisma, at least until the end of the Second World War. He was a workaholic, the ultimate bureaucratic pencil pusher. In his concern for administrative details he was the exact opposite of Hitler, who wanted others to make most of the decisions “in his place” while he reserved the important ones—perhaps only 5 percent—for himself.20
Far from being “populists,” Stalin and Lenin before him were self-proclaimed leaders of the vanguard. They did not appeal to public opinion nor try to build on the popular mood. Even in their own minds they derived their legitimacy and authority not from the people but from Marxism and the laws of history, of which they supposedly had superior knowledge. Hitler, on the other hand, believed passionately that political authority had to be based on popularity and that no regime could be a true nation if not backed by the people belonging to it.
Hitler had nothing but contempt for the Soviet-style dictators and the terror they used on their own people, and in stark contrast he set out to win over the hearts and minds of all non-Jewish Germans in a communal bonding based on the “exclusion” of the Jews and others deemed racially unfit. What he wanted was dictatorship by the consent of the initiated.21 Hitler’s hybrid form of government can be called a consensus dictatorship.22 I agree with Ian Kershaw that Hitler’s popularity and authority “formed the central vehicle for consolidating and integrating society in a massive consensus for the regime.”23
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler Page 2