Unlike his Soviet counterparts, Hitler proceeded relatively cautiously. For example, he tried to prepare popular opinion in advance of new initiatives, and when these ran up against objections, he frequently backed off. That point held true for the campaign against the churches and for the persecution of the Jews inside Germany. This tendency was in marked contrast to Lenin and Stalin, who never retreated in the face of opposition and often resorted to immediate and ruthless terror. The Orthodox Church, beloved by so many traditionalist Russians, was all but wiped out. The Communists burned down many ancient houses of worship and enslaved the priests, whereas the Nazis recoiled when a few people objected to some local radical’s decision to remove crucifixes from the schools.
In the USSR, Party purges and the rituals of public self-criticism and self-flagellation formed an integral part of Communist practice under both Lenin and Stalin. There was nothing of the kind in Nazi Germany. Hitler operated by heaping praise on the German spirit and cheering on good citizens as they responded in kind to him. He reserved his venom for the Jews, political opponents like Communists, and outsider groups like homosexuals and Gypsies. There was one (relatively small) purge in 1934, horrible, to be sure, but not to be overestimated. Hitler was loath to dismiss even corrupt Party officials, as if he did not want to admit his misplaced faith in them. To keep up morale during the war and also to avoid having Germans question his authority, Hitler merely asked generals to resign or take sick leave when he found them wanting, whereas Stalin had many such people shot. The popular field marshal Erwin Rommel was allowed to take poison in October 1944 because of his suspected involvement in the attempt to assassinate Hitler in July.
Above all, Hitler despised the universal claims of Communism. His movement, like his regime, saw itself as anchored in “blood and soil,” in the here and now, even as it preached a future utopia for racially fit Germans only. The Nazi message was exclusivist or particularist. It opened its doors, but barely a crack, for a relatively few Nordic Europeans. Otherwise the Greater Germania of the future or the New Order—or whatever it would be called—would be sealed off, and the only contact with other “races” would be of the kind between masters and slaves. There would be no “brotherhood of man,” but what Hitler imagined as an inevitable and endless Darwinian struggle of the “superior” to fend off the “inferior.” (Needless to say, like many others before and since, he possessed only a crude understanding of Darwin.) The Nazi “final solution” took the lives of millions of innocent people before Hitler was finally stopped, in 1945, amid the rubble of a bombed and burning Germany.
Soviet and Nazi regimes both gained followers from among the idealists, the young, and the better educated. Such people virtually worshipped their leaders, and even the ice-cold rationalists among them could recall the ground seeming to tremble beneath their feet when they came into the presence of these men. One young Russian Communist, who was found guilty at war’s end of “showing pity for the Germans, for bourgeois humanism, and for harmful statements on questions of current policy,” was not only expelled from the Party but imprisoned. Actually the word “prison” could not be tolerated in the Soviet “utopia,” so he was sent to what was called Kharkov’s House of Corrective Labor. Remarkably enough, inside this “house” he said he “became even more consistent a Stalinist. What I was afraid of, more than anything else, was that my sense of personal injury would impair my view of what remained most important to the life of my country and of the world. That vision was essential to me as a source of my spiritual strength, of my conception of myself as part of a great whole.” Even if the judges and secret police were wrong, he “believed that no amount of mistakes or miscalculations or injustices could alter the aggregate or halt the coming triumph of Socialism.”24
The promise of material gain and improvement in their way of life won converts to Communism and Nazism. Both regimes had to provide a minimum of life’s necessities to win and maintain support. Moreover, many Soviet Communists and Nazis were fixated on making life comfortable for themselves and practiced every form of immorality, perversity, cruelty, and criminality imaginable. In the Third Reich the extent of profiteering and corruption knew no limits, above and beyond how Party leaders, members, and ordinary citizens gained at the expense of the Jews.25 In the Soviet Union the nomenklatura, or those whose names were entered on “lists,” had every possible privilege, from special apartments and stores to schools and dachas.26 They embodied the cruel commandment issued by the pigs in George Orwell’s satirical Animal Farm (1945): “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
But materialist explanations for Communist or Nazi supporters are inadequate. Millions committed to the cause, not simply for personal gain but in spite of suffering and loss. Indeed, the spirit of self-sacrifice among committed Communists and Nazis was one of the features that make this era in Europe so striking. What is transmitted in diaries, letters, and autobiographies from the period was the faith and conviction of the “true believers.”
Contrary to some recent works, I believe the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not aimed primarily at acquiring their property in order to finance the Third Reich. In conversations with Goebbels, as elsewhere, Hitler comes across as someone who was fanatically focused on what he regarded as the anti-Semitic mission in defense of the fatherland. Killing all the Jews was a war aim in his mind and extended to the murder even of those Jews working for the armaments industry, where there was a short supply of labor by 1943. All were killed not for economic gain but in spite of economic losses. Materialist explanations for killing workingage Jewish males in 1943 and 1944, at a time when the regime needed their labor, are not plausible, and the claims do not hold up under scientific scrutiny.27
My previous work and research interests have been in social history, and this book is no exception. Once again I have placed special emphasis on the victims and their stories, but my account of what happened to them is by no means exhaustive. It is a harrowing tale, even if whole volumes of suffering and death could not be included within the constraints of one book. I have dwelled longer on what seem to me to be the representative mass crimes and tried to explain these as best I could.
The Soviet side of the story could not have been told before the collapse of Communism and the opening of the Russian archives. I gathered so much material on the period as a whole that I could not possibly include it all and had to cut much that was already written. I regret not dealing in depth with Soviet and German public opinion, and the cultural side of these dictatorships, but these matters must await another book. In addition, I have planned a sequel study that focuses in greater detail on the last part of the war and the first years of the peace that followed.
PART ONE
LENIN’S COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP
1
THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
The First World War strained the regime of Tsar Nicholas II to the breaking point. Initially, in August 1914, the nation rallied around the flag. Politicians and the urban middle classes welcomed the war, and the army went off to defend their “Slavic brothers” in Yugoslavia against German and Austrian aggression. The Duma, Russia’s national assembly, dissolved itself to symbolize the country’s support of the government. But no one in Europe, let alone in Russia, visualized the war to come, the devastation it would cause, and how long hostilities would last.
The tsarist empire had the largest army in Europe but lacked the resources to fight a prolonged struggle. Before the first year of the fighting was over, there were shortages of all kinds. Replacement troops were being trained without rifles and sent onto the battlefield, where they were to go among the dead and wounded to pick up the weapons they needed.
By the beginning of 1917, widespread discontent over the ghastly sacrifices of the war, food shortages, and high prices led to bitter strikes and hostile demonstrations. A police report for January 1917 from Petrograd, the newly renamed capital, spelled
out the darkening situation:
“These mothers, exhausted from standing endlessly in lines and having suffered so much watching their half-starving and sick children, are perhaps much closer to a revolution than Messrs. Miliukov, Rodichev, and Co. [leaders of the liberal Kadet Party], and of course much more dangerous.”1
The pent-up resentments and grievances were ignited by a demonstration in the capital on February 23, when a peaceful march for women’s rights was joined by striking workers. Cries rang out for bread, and people exclaimed, “Down with the tsar!” By February 26, under orders from the tsar, troops fired on demonstrators. Some of the soldiers were sickened by what they did, and then the next day the revolution began as mutinous troops rampaged through the streets killing or disarming police. Crowds shouting “Give us bread,” “Down with the war,” “Down with the Romanovs,” and “Down with the government” attacked police headquarters.
Instead of charging the crowds, tens of thousands of peasant soldiers, their mentality shaped by decades of grievances against the system, went over to the people. Together they exploded in a mixture of rage and revenge that rumbled on for days. The police put machine guns atop buildings, but even these were ineffective against the angry tumult.2
Tsar Nicholas II was informed, and on March 2, in a meeting at the front, Aleksandr Guchkov and Vasily Shulgin, deputies of the State Duma, laid out the stark options. Guchkov pronounced the home front and military out of control. The situation, he said, was not “the result of some conspiracy,” but represented “a movement that sprang from the very ground and instantly took on an anarchical cast and left the authorities fading into the background.”
The upheaval had spread to the army, Guchkov continued, “for there isn’t a single military unit that isn’t immediately infected by the atmosphere of the movement.” He believed that it might be possible to prevent the inevitable if a radical step was taken. He explained:
The people profoundly believe that the situation was caused by the mistakes of those in authority, in particular the highest authority, and this is why some sort of act is needed that would work upon the popular consciousness. The only path is to transfer the burden of supreme rulership to other hands. Russia can be saved, the monarchical principle can be saved, the dynasty can be saved. If you, Your Majesty, announce that you are transferring your power to your little son, if you assign the regency to Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, and if in your name or in the name of the regent instructions are issued for a new government to be formed, then perhaps Russia will be saved. I say perhaps because events are unfolding so quickly.3
Dismayed at this turn of events, Nicholas II accepted the inevitable, and on March 3, 1917, he abdicated, also in the name of his gravely ill son. The tsar stepped down in favor of his brother Grand Duke Mikhail, who tried to get assurances of support in the capital. He asked leading figures from the Duma, including Prince Georgii Lvov, Mikhail Rodzianko, and Alexander Kerensky, whether they could vouch for his safety if he accepted the crown. None thought they could, so Mikhail was left with little choice but to refuse the crown.4 In fact a third of the members of the State Duma formed a “provisional committee” on the afternoon of February 27, and by March 2, with the tsar’s abdication, that became the new provisional government.5
The American ambassador in Petrograd witnessed what he regarded as “the most amazing revolution.” He reported that a nation of 200 million living under an absolute monarchy for a thousand years had forced out their emperor with a minimal amount of violence. The three-hundred-year rule of the Romanov dynasty was over.6 In fact the revolution was not “bloodless,” for in Petrograd alone estimates of the new government put the killed or wounded at 1, 443. Even the higher figures mentioned were small in comparison with what was to follow.7
LENIN AND THE BOLSHEVIKS
The main Marxist party, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), including the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, had nothing to do with this liberal revolution that swept away the Romanovs. Lenin was in Switzerland. Stalin was isolated in western Siberia, in exile since 1913. Most other top Bolshevik and Menshevik leaders were far removed from the action as well, with Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin five thousand miles away in North America.
But just over seven months after the February liberal revolution, the world learned of the October Communist revolution, headed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It was to change the course of world history, and the twentieth century was to be the bloodiest ever.
Lenin was born into a well-to-do family in Simbirsk. His parents named him Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov. Later, following the practice of Russian revolutionaries, he took Lenin as his pseudonym. His grandfather on his mother’s side, Dr. Alexander Blank, was Jewish, about which a great deal was made later on, but Lenin had no memory of him at all, and there was no connection with Judaism in his life. Lenin’s father was a higher civil servant, and the family lived in the style of provincial dignitaries. His father died from a sudden illness in early 1886.
Lenin’s older brother Alexander was at university in St. Petersburg at the time. He was involved with one of the many revolutionary groups and identified with Russia’s intelligentsia, who were raised on Western education and saw their own society as culturally and politically backward.
For decades the intelligentsia had striven to bring Russia up to Western standards. Each generation experimented with different revolutionary tactics. Sometimes the mood gave rise to nihilists who rejected everything, and at other times revolutionaries were inspired by the idea of going to the people to “instruct” them.8
The intelligentsia from the 1870s onward grew more radical. On March 1, 1881, one of many splinter groups assassinated Tsar Alexander 11, in hopes of stirring up massive social and political unrest and sparking revolution. Lenin’s brother joined another group intent on killing the successor to the throne, Alexander III. However, the ever-vigilant Okhrana, the secret police, got wind of the conspiracy. The plan had been to attack the tsar on March 1, 1887, the anniversary of the last tsar’s death. Arrests followed, and, shockingly for his family, Lenin’s older brother was hanged along with four others in May.
The young Lenin reacted quietly to these dramatic events. He had always been diligent in school, and he went back to his books and continued his studies. He registered as a student in the law faculty at Kazan University in the fall of 1887.
Little is known about Lenin’s extracurricular activities in this period, but as one might expect, he had some contact with student radicals and probably participated in protests against the government. As the brother of the conspirator and would-be assassin Alexander, he likely came under particular scrutiny from the tsarist authorities. While he was certainly not the student radical that subsequent Soviet lore made him out to be, he was duly rounded up by the police for the part he allegedly played in demonstrations. He was expelled from the university in December 1887 and exiled to Kokushkino, but by mid-1890 he was allowed to begin the process of registering as an external student at St. Petersburg University, from which he was awarded a law degree in November 1891. In the meantime, he had become a voracious reader of left-wing literature.
Lenin gravitated toward the fledgling Russian Marxist movement rather than the Russian populists, who emphasized agrarian Socialism. According to Karl Marx, the Socialist revolution was to be expected in the most advanced countries when the contradictions of mature capitalism reached a crisis that could not be resolved within the prevailing economic conditions. Even for committed Russian Marxists, it was certainly debatable whether Marx’s theories really fitted Russia, but Lenin took a doctrinaire approach and tried to “prove” that capitalism already existed there. He did not waver from this position and later, in 1899, published a large tome on the topic. Although it was filled with statistics and analysis of the driest kind, it surprisingly got the attention of young radicals in distant parts of the Russian Empire. Anastas I. Mikoyan, slightly younger (born 1895) than Lenin, but later to becom
e a long-serving member of the Soviet government under Stalin, was given the book. His circle in the Caucasus first became acquainted and impressed with Lenin’s thought in that highly technical volume.9
No matter what the statistics were supposed to prove, the plain fact was that capitalism in Russia was still in its infancy. (Lenin admitted as much many times later in life.) For Russian Marxists, the dilemma was what to do in the here and now. They lived in a society that was more feudal than capitalist, and thus—according to Marx himself—was not yet “ready” for a Socialist revolution.
Lenin’s revolutionary activities got him arrested in December 1895 and held in a St. Petersburg prison. He was allowed to have books and was anything but mistreated. It was not until early 1897 that he was sent to “administrative exile” in Siberia. Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya (herself an exiled radical), one of Lenin’s staunchest supporters, called herself his fiancée and in 1898 asked the authorities if she could join him in Shushenskoe. They soon married. He was permitted considerable freedom to study and write, so exile for Lenin was more of an opportunity than a deprivation. Just after the turn of the century, when they left Siberia, Lenin’s self-image as a fighter for the cause had been strengthened, his Marxist convictions had taken a yet more radical turn, and he had written What Is to Be Done? That small pamphlet would make him widely known to the underground Russian Marxist movement just getting off the ground.10
The largest Marxist Party of the day was the German Social Democratic Party. It had hundreds of thousands of members, Party newspapers, and a substantial delegation of elected Socialist politicians. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) was founded at a congress held in Minsk in March 1898. The meeting hardly merited the title of congress, with a total of nine activists present, the low number indicating how marginal the Russian Marxists were at the time.
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler Page 3