Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  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.

  As I have explained, the ideological battle lines between Soviet Communism and German Nazism had their origins in the First World War. We can trace them to the collapse of the old regime in Russia, when it became possible for a fringe group of radicals to get control of the state apparatus. Lenin’s prescience was to recognize more than anyone that the new provisional government of early 1917 had made a mistake in continuing the war and it would inevitably fall. He saw that the reins of power would soon be there for the taking, and by October he had convinced his more timid comrades that they should grasp them. Maxim Gorky, that shrewd observer of his time, was aghast at the sheer recklessness of the Bolshevik seizure of power. He wrote, barely two weeks into the revolution, that the Leninists imagined themselves to be the “Napoleons of socialism.” He sincerely believed they would destroy what was left of Russia, and called forth a chilling image: “The Russian people will pay for this with lakes of blood.”1

  Lenin introduced Soviet Communism, complete with new secret police and concentration camps. He was responsible for suppressing all liberal freedoms and for ridding the country of a Constituent Assembly that might have led toward democracy. In January 1918 it was he who demanded the assembly be shut, and when there were protests, he ordered demonstrators shot down. The seals put on the doors of the Duma were not broken until the 1990s, when long-suffering citizens finally had a chance to determine their own fate again.

  Once in power, Lenin enthusiastically hunted down anyone who did not fit in or who opposed the new regime, and he introduced the Communist Party purges that periodically called forth nationwide witch hunts. Whole classes came to be deemed superfluous, be they nobles, members of the bourgeoisie, or “rich” peasants. Holding up the terrorists of earlier European revolutions as their models, Lenin and his followers shed blood with such complete abandon that they made their heroes look restrained and hesitant by comparison. Stalin took his cue from his mentor and was later only too delighted by the thought that he walked in the footsteps of Ivan the Terrible, by reputation the most ruthless of the tsars.

  The Soviet Union adopted the ideological mask of collective leadership, all in the name of the proletariat and peasants, but the political structure put in place by Lenin was especially susceptible to being manipulated by shrewd operators like himself and his successor. Lenin did not become dictator simply by taking on the mantle of chairman of Sovnarkom (in effect the premier). Rather, he made his will prevail by his control of the great Marxist texts and perhaps above all by his ferocity. These qualities and his brilliance added up to a certain kind of charisma that gave him a hold on his comrades and on large sections of the country.

  After Lenin’s death, Stalin emerged triumphant. A fanatical Leninist before any of his rivals, he had been elevated from obscurity by the great man himself, who saw to it that the “wonderful Georgian” would belong to the uppermost ranks of the Bolshevik Party and Soviet state. Later on, Lenin had a falling-out with Stalin but grudgingly admitted that, on balance, his protégé had fewer marks against him than the others.

  Stalin was too cunning to claim he was Lenin’s successor, even as he insinuated himself into that very spot. For example, he avoided taking over Lenin’s place as chairman of Sovnarkom, but he ensured it went to a relative nobody, Aleksei Rykov, and in 1930 he passed it on to Molotov. Stalin decided the situation was threatening enough in May 1941 that he took the job himself. He, like Lenin, was never the head of state—the chairman of the Central Executive Committee, or what might be called the president.

  By the mid-1920s Stalin was dictator in everything but name, and Trotsky and other rivals were removed from the Politburo and soon dumped from the Party. But it would have been out of keeping with the myths of Communist ideology to proclaim that he had won. By custom he did not sit at the head of the table, and it was in keeping with the image of “collegial” leadership that he would continue to argue his points, to make “suggestions,” and like Lenin also to be formally challenged by the members of the ruling circle. These rituals, like the constitution, merely veiled his dictatorship. On Stalin’s fiftieth birthday in 1929 he was widely applauded and praised, but he still craved the one thing he lacked, namely the adoration and respect showered on Lenin, not just by members of the Party, but by many others as well. He had secured his position as dictator by making himself into the keeper of Lenin’s memory, by becoming the most devoted Leninist of all. It took some time before he could present himself as sufficiently distinct from Lenin and thus also as one to be held in awe on his own account.

  Lenin and Stalin successively headed a vanguard Party and presided over a similarly inclined dictatorship. They made decisions from on high, brushed obstacles aside, and all but ignored public opinion. Those who deviated from the Party line were defined as enemies or wreckers. While many people, above all in the countryside, hated everything Communism stood for, there were plenty of idealists whose deepest wish was to follow Lenin and Stalin.

  The contrasts with Hitler’s dictatorship, in style and substance, were considerable. The führer of the Nazi Party, with his explicit mission to launch a simultaneous assault on Jews and Bolsheviks, made it clear from the early 1920s that his plan was to establish a dictatorship. He was appointed head of government in 1933, and after President Hindenburg’s death the next year was acclaimed also head of state. It was not just these positions that elevated Hitler, but the charismatic bond that quickly emerged with the German people. He ostentatiously put his apparently undisputed power and leadership on display for all to see and loved public reviews, fanfare, parades, spectacle, and speeches before the multitudes. He soaked up the adulation and scorned Stalin as a mere secretary and pencil pusher.

  Hitler sought an authoritarian regime backed by the “German” people, what I have referred to as a consensus dictatorship. He flattered Germans with the idea of establishing their own “community of the people” and aimed terror primarily against social outsiders, individuals who belonged to specified groups, the Jews, Communists, criminals, Gypsies, or homosexuals. Many good citizens embraced or at least accepted such persecutions as part of the bargain for the “accomplishments” of the new system.2

  The two regimes were distinguished by their ideologies. As the founder of Communism, Lenin developed plans for the conquest of power based on his vanguard interpretation of Marxist teachings. Stalin in his turn became the chief proponent of Leninism, the “provisional dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” which in fact was the forced communization of Soviet society. It was Stalin who determined the Party “line,” that is, the interpretation of what needed to be done and what was constituted by Leninism-Marxism at any given moment. The ideas had enormous appeal among the Party faithful because of the promises they made and the vistas of hope they offered. That hundreds of thousands of people, and ultimately millions, would have to be sacrificed was quietly and conveniently ignored by the idealists and the utopians.

  Hitler blended an ideology out of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Bolshevism, with a desire for lebensraum in the east. Whereas Lenin wanted to bring the Soviet “paradise” to the world, the Nazi utopia was designed for Germans only. In the future, certain select Western Europeans might be allowed—like the Norwegians, Danes, Dutch, and a few others—but most would be excluded.

  Together with many others in Germany, Hitler developed a particularly radical phobia about the Jews in the shadow of the First World War. In 1919 and the years that followed, he raged against what he called “Jewish Bolshevism” and insisted that the Jews had taken over Russia and threatened Germany and the West.

  Although revolutions on the Soviet model failed in postwar Germany, the repeated efforts to bring them about spread anxiety. Here was a nation of property owners, and for
the Reds to threaten them in 1919 or again in 1923 was to drive the great majority to the right and into the arms of newly emerging parties like the Nazis.

  Hitler became the first in a long line of twentieth-century dictators who sought popularity by going after the Communists or other revolutionaries and crusading in the name of law and order. These campaigns, plus the obvious success at beating unemployment and the first great victories in foreign affairs, turned the down-and-out straggler into a beloved führer.

  Both dictatorships used terror, but in somewhat contrasting ways. The Communist variety was inflicted overwhelmingly against patently innocent people. Anyone in the Soviet Union could run afoul of the terror, and in that sense it was completely arbitrary. The means corrupted and destroyed the ends. How can we sum up all the suffering or even the fatalities resulting from the continuous Communist terror from 1917 to Stalin’s death? We would have to count all the deliberate murders in the civil war, the famines, and collectivization. Then we would have to add those killed in the Great Terror and during the wartime ethnic cleansing, the Red Army soldiers executed by their own on various grounds, and all those who died or were killed in the Gulag.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suggested that Soviet authorities used “internal repression” from the October Revolution up to 1959 to kill an estimated sixty-six million. He admits the figure is tentative and will need adjusting by future research.3 He had been a “true believer” himself and for a time held on to his faith in Communism even in the Gulag. His book points an accusing finger at anyone today, in his own country or anywhere else, who might suggest there were “productive” aspects to Soviet terror.

  More recent estimations of the Soviet-on-Soviet killing have been more “modest” and range between ten and twenty million. In the penal system alone, according to one scholar, 2, 749, 163 died between 1929 and 1953. These numbers are still incomplete, not only because they do not cover every year since 1917 but also because they exclude labor colonies completely.4 The total makes no mention of the deaths in transit or the hundreds of thousands executed by quota during the Great Terror or done to death during the wartime ethnic cleansings and in countless other ways.

  Anne Applebaum is right to insist that the statistics “can never fully describe what happened.”5 They do suggest, however, the massive scope of the repression and the killing.

  A haunting sense of what happened is conveyed in remarkably few words by David Remnick, in the late 1980s a reporter for the Washington Post. He accompanied Aleksandr Milchakov of Memorial—a group trying to rescue the murdered victims from oblivion—to see the mass graves around Moscow. He heard from witnesses how at the Donskoi Monastery in the 1930s, the furnaces of the crematoriums worked all night to get rid of the executed bodies delivered there. Fine ash went up the chimneys and covered the domes of nearby churches, the roofs of houses, and the fresh snow. Great ditches were filled with the remnants scraped from the cooling incinerators. Everyone in the area knew what was going on and adjusted to it. No one knows how many such sites there were across the great land.6

  The murderousness of Hitler’s regime came in its final years. Nazi terror was used mainly during the war and then outside the borders of the “old” Reich. In Hitler’s first six years in power, state-sponsored killing was highest in 1933, when in camps like Dachau there were fifty or fewer deaths and in most others there were fewer than ten. A maximum of “several hundred” were killed in all the early camps.7

  The terror of these early years was real enough, but it was primarily aimed against Jews, specific social outsiders like criminals, and certain political opponents, above all the Communists. As a recent study puts it, apart from those groups “the average German’s chances of avoiding secret-police harassment were high.”8 Soviet terror was an entirely other matter. In Germany it is true that thousands suffered dreadfully in the first camps, most of them Communists, but they were usually released after a short and nightmarish stay. The aim was not to terrorize the population as a whole. Even the left-wing Socialists were not particularly unhappy at the fate of the Communists. Most people wanted an end to the violence and uproar in the streets, and to have middle-class values restored. In that respect the silent majority was in tune with the regime from the outset. Indeed, as Ian Kershaw has rightly concluded, because the first waves of Nazi terror were aimed primarily at Bolshevism, “the violence and repression were widely popular. The ‘emergency decree’ that took away all personal liberties and established the platform for dictatorship was warmly welcomed.”9

  Hitler was a strong advocate of the death penalty and talked about it often. However, until 1939, there was only one year in which the regular courts sentenced more than 100 to capital punishment, and not all of these were carried out. The People’s Court used the death penalty even less in the same period. Between 1934 and 1939 an average of 18 per year were sentenced to die, but many of these were commuted. Over the course of the Third Reich all civil courts sentenced around 16,500 people to death, and mainly during the war. Most of the defendants were non-Germans, and as many as one-quarter of the sentences were commuted. This is by no means the full story of “legalized” terror, for during the war—particularly in its last phase—many people were killed without trial.10

  The war changed everything, starting in Poland in 1939, when the terror went wild. Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, spread the horror and began the bloodiest chapter in the age of social catastrophe. This war became the greatest killer of all time and so unprecedented in its many appalling faces that it raised questions about the very meaning and future of Western civilization.

  The Soviet people endured by far the greatest number of casualties. In 1990, after years of repressing the truth, General Mikhail A. Moiseyev, chief of the Soviet General Staff, said that 8, 668, 148 men and women were lost in the war. The figure includes those killed, missing in action, prisoners who did not return, accidental deaths, suicides, and so on. General G. F. Krivosheyev, who also studied this matter, agreed on the fatalities and also on the “medical casualties,” which he put at 18, 344, 148. The latter number meant that some wounded were counted more than once. These figures for the USSR alone are roughly equal to the entire military losses in the First World War.11

  The experts also agree that as in Europe as a whole, civilian deaths in the Second World War were even greater than the military losses. One of the lowest estimates for the USSR is that 16.9 million were killed. That would bring the total losses in that country to a staggering 25.5 million, well over 10 percent of the population in 1939.

  Germany’s losses were far worse than those it suffered in the First World War. Combined with Austria, which was incorporated into the Reich in 1938, the total deaths by 1945 had reached 7.2 million, of which 3.2 million were civilians. These fatalities represented close to 10 percent of the 1939 population.12

  European Russia was laid to waste either during the invasion or while the Nazis were in retreat, when the Wehrmacht exercised its own scorched-earth policy. Metropolitan areas like Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kiev, and many other cities were reduced to ruins. Countless villages and towns were destroyed along with factories, bridges, and tens of thousands of miles of railway. The efforts of whole generations were wiped out without a second thought.

  Across Europe an estimated 36.5 million were killed.13 We will never know the exact number. Hitler and his regime have to bear the burden of responsibility for this turn of events.14

  It is chilling to be reminded of the inhumanity surfacing in the argument that the terror unleashed by Lenin and Stalin, through forced collectivization and industrialization, was vindicated by the survival of the USSR in the Second World War. Yet many made that argument and were apparently even cheered by the view that the Soviets had ultimately prepared the country well for the supposed inevitable clash with the West. Surely a more wasteful, immoral, and inhumane approach cannot possibly be imagined than the one adopted by Soviet leaders. No rulers could be mo
re profligate with the lives of their own citizens. On a whim Stalin and his cronies had their own people enslaved and built miles of railroad that were unneeded and went unused; had canals hacked out of granite that proved to be too shallow and were practically useless; and ordered glamour projects to reflect their own glory that would have made the pharaohs blush. And on top of all that Soviet leaders left their country hopelessly vulnerable to war and ignored the best evidence provided by their own spies. When the attack came, all kinds of improvisations had to be made with the enemy already at the gates.

  The crime that sets the Third Reich apart was the mass murder of the Jews. The Holocaust stands alone. The Soviet Union never had factories designed to produce nothing but mass death, even if they managed to kill millions just the same.

  The mass murder in the Nazi camps constructed expressly to kill the Jews was without precedent. Around 2 million were gassed with carbon monoxide in Chelmo, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Zyklon B gas killed more than a million in Auschwitz-Birkenau and tens of thousands in Majdanek. If we include those shot outside camps or persecuted to death in the ghettos and elsewhere, then the number rises to at least 5.3 million. The great majority of the Jewish victims came from Poland, the USSR, Romania, and Hungary. Practically everywhere Jews lived was affected, whether in distant Norway and Greece or the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.15

  The “regular” camps spread like a cancer during the war, when most of the Germans in them, as we saw, were made up of Communists and groups like the “antisocial elements.” The percentage of Germans began to fall throughout the war until 1945, when they made up between 5 and 10 percent of the total. The camp population itself rose steadily during this period, despite shockingly high mortality rates, but it was internationalized and drew victims from across Europe. Between 795, 889 and 955, 215 prisoners died in these hellholes—figures that do not include the Jews who were gassed or murdered in other ways. Every nation in Europe was represented among those who died, most coming from Eastern Europe. As dreadful as this death toll is, it is likely an underestimation. The number includes around 100,000 who perished during the “evacuations” of all the camps at the end of the war. Other scholars put the number twice as high.16