Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  21. Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas, 111.

  22. Peter Holquist, “To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, 2001), 111–44.

  23. See Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York, 1995), 109.

  24. Eduard M. Dune, Notes of a Red Guard (Urbana, Ill., 1993), 168-69.

  25. See the memoir of a captured Red Army soldier and his evidence in ibid., 163-64.

  26. Volkogonov, Lenin: politichesky portret, vol. 1, 360–61.

  27. Cited in Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 180.

  28. Nicolas Werth, “A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union,” in Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 99.

  29. Ibid., 101–3.

  30. Holquist, Making War, 187. The human face of the tragedy can be seen in the novel And Quiet Flows the Don by the Nobel Prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov.

  31. Cited in Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 3, The Iron Ring (London, 1995), 39.

  32. Sergey Petrovich Melgounov, The Red Terror in Russia (London, 1926).

  33. Leggett, Cheka, 200; Werth, “A State Against Its People,” 106-7.

  34. Cited in Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 135.

  35. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 4, 27 (Jan. 11, 1918).

  36. Trotsky to Zinoviev, in Meijer, Trotsky Papers, vol. 2, 443.

  37. See the vivid correspondence in ibid., 153-255.

  38. Josef Korbel, Poland Between East and West: Soviet and German Diplomacy Toward Poland, 1919-1933 (Princeton, N.J., 1963), 16-67.

  39. Cited in Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York, 1974), 101.

  40. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, 391–94; Figes, People’s Tragedy, 753.

  41. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 377; Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917-1921 (London, 1991), 321–23, 342; Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, 337-41.

  42. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 386-87.

  43. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 768.

  44. Table in Nove, Economic History, 58. The index of one hundred in 1913 reached twenty-one in 1921.

  45. Ibid., 76.

  46. For a full study, see Bertrand M. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford, Calif., 2000).

  47. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 779.

  48. Volkogonov, Lenin: politichesky portret, vol. 2, 159-160.

  CHAPTER 4: NAZISM AND THE THREAT OF BOLSHEVISM

  1. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich, 1943), 139, 171.

  2. See Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (New York, 1999), 348; Anton Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Weg begann in München, 1913-1923 (Munich, 2000), 45.

  3. Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Weg, 102-22.

  4. Ibid., 174-76.

  5. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, 1914-1949 (Munich, 2003), 232.

  6. Cited in Heinrich August Winkler, Weimar, 1918-1933: Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich, 1998), 29.

  7. Ibid., 41.

  8. Detlev J. K. Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), 44.

  9. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 207.

  10. Winkler, Weimar, 64, 69.

  11. Albert S. Lindemann, The “Red Years”: European Socialism vs. Bolshevism, 1919-1921 (Berkeley, Calif., 1974), 190.

  12. Allan Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria: The Eisner Regime and the Soviet Republic (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 217, 271–72.

  13. Cited in Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, abr. ed. (Oxford, 1969), 455.

  14. Ibid., 477-81; Winkler, Weimar, 56-57.

  15. See the complete list of demands, Dec. 14, 1918, in Wolfgang Treue, ed., Deutsche Parteiprogramme, 1861–1961 (Berlin, 1961), 91.

  16. Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic (London, 1988), 8-10.

  17. Nov. 20, 1918, article, cited in Eric Waldman, The Spartacist Uprising (Milwaukee, 1958), 111.

  18. Cited in Winkler, Weimar, 58.

  19. Ibid., 60.

  20. Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria, 299-300.

  21. Cited in ibid., 319.

  22. Winkler, Weimar, 80; Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria, 320.

  23. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 38, 321–22.

  24. Cited in David Clay Large, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich (New York, 1997), 116.

  25. Winkler, Weimar, 81.

  26. See Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, N.J., 2004), 85.

  27. Cited in Large, Where Ghosts Walked, 120.

  28. Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), 108. For a critique of her feigned anti-Bolshevism, see Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik: Sozialgeschichte einer revolutionären Bewegung (Darmstadt, 1996), 71.

  29. See Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus: Die Geschichte des Deutschvölkischen Schutz-und Trutz-Bundes, 1919-1923 (Hamburg, 1970), 181–83.

  30. Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Weg, 221–24.

  31. Esser cited in Georg Franz-Willing, Ursprung der Hitlerbewegung, 1919-1922 (Oldendorf, 1974), 52-55. See also Hitler, Mein Kampf, 232.

  32. See Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Weg, 209-12; also Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (London, 1998), 118-20.

  33. Letter in Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 88-90.

  34. Card in Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Weg, opp. 259; for Hitler’s account, see Hitler, Mein Kampf, 236-44.

  35. Winkler, Weimar, 89-95; Kolb, Weimar Republic, 21–33.

  36. Treue Deutsche Parteiprogramme, 146-49.

  37. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 556.

  38. Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen, 1914-1933 (Munich, 2000), 48.

  39. Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Weg, 272, 274.

  40. Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936, 156-57.

  41. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 658.

  42. Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Weg, 292.

  43. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 650–51.

  44. For a recent account, see Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945 (Cambridge, U.K., 2005), 30–47.

  45. Speeches in Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 451–57, 458-59.

  46. Kai-Uwe Merz, Das Schreckbild: Deutschland und der Bolschewismus, 1917 bis 1921 (Berlin, 1995), 452.

  47. Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 108-9.

  48. Ibid., 127-29.

  49. June 6, 1920, in ibid., 140.

  50. Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 165-66.

  51. Aug. 6, 1920, in ibid., 172.

  52. Dec. 8, 1920, in ibid., 276.

  53. July 21, 1920, in ibid., 163.

  54. Aug. 7, 1920, in ibid., 175.

  55. Ibid., 279.

  56. Citations in Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: politichesky portret (Moscow, 1987), vol. 2, 265-66.

  57. Eric D. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton, N.J. 1997), 103-5.

  58. Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 298-302.

  59. Ibid., 317-20.

  CHAPTER 5: FIRST NAZI ATTEMPT TO SEIZE POWER

  1. Sven Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde: Gewalt und Gemeinschaft im italienischen Squadrismus und in der deutschen SA (Cologne, 2002), 256.

  2. Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (New York, 1982), 171.

  3. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York, 2004), 89, 275 n. 1.

  4. Mack Smith, Mussolini, 52-56.

  5. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich, 1943), 774.

  6. Hitler Aufzeichnungen,
721–22.

  7. Heinrich August Winkler, Weimar, 1918-1933: Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich, 1998), 190.

  8. Georg Franz-Willing, Ursprung der Hitlerbewegung, 1919-1922 (Oldendorf, 1974), 355.

  9. Cited in Anton Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Weg begann in München, 1913-1923 (Munich, 2000), 304.

  10. Winkler, Weimar, 186-88; Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic (London,1988), 45-46.

  11. See newspapers, Jan. 12, 1923, in Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 785-86.

  12. Winkler, Weimar, 188-89.

  13. Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924 (New York, 1993), 5.

  14. For the impressions of a young man in Berlin, see Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen, 1914-1933 (Munich, 2000), 54-68. Also Winkler, Weimar, 207.

  15. See Rosa Leviné-Meyer, Inside German Communism: Memoirs of Party Life in the Weimar Republic (London, 1977), 46-55.

  16. Winkler, Weimar, 200, 210–16.

  17. For an account based on an interview with Brandler, see Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929 (New York, 1959), 142-45.

  18. See Richard A. Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg: Labor Politics in the Early Weimar Republic (Stanford, Calif., 1966), 125-26.

  19. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1966), 390–91.

  20. Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 794-97.

  21. Ibid., 811.

  22. Feb. 26, 1923, speech, in ibid., 840.

  23. March 25, 1923, speech, in ibid., 848-49.

  24. See, for example, March 27, 1923, speech, in ibid., 853.

  25. June 17, 1923, speech, in ibid., 937.

  26. April 10, 1923, speech, in ibid., 876, 881.

  27. May 1 police report, in ibid., 918-19.

  28. See, for example, Aug. 5, 1923, speech, in ibid., 965.

  29. May 17, 1923, speech, in ibid., 929.

  30. 30 Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 955-62; see also 920.

  31. Ibid., 1023-26.

  32. Ibid., 1027.

  33. Peter Longerich, Die braunen Bataillone: Geschichte der SA (Munich, 1989), 33-36.

  34. Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 990.

  35. Ibid., 991–92.

  36. Cited in Harold J. Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch (Princeton, N.J., 1972), 213.

  37. Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 1022.

  38. Feldman, Great Disorder, 736.

  39. Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 221–24; Feldman, Great Disorder, 778-79.

  40. Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 238-56; Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (London, 1998), 204.

  41. Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 259-60.

  42. Ibid., 260.

  43. Ibid., 264-67.

  44. Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler: The Missing Years (1957; New York, 1994), 91–109.

  45. Cited in Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 287-88.

  46. Hanfstaengl, Hitler, 100.

  47. Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 290–312, 342-43.

  48. Cited in ibid., 351.

  49. See Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936, 211; Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 356-65.

  50. Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 1210.

  51. Cited in Winkler, Weimar, 252.

  52. Feldman, Great Disorder, 780–802; Winkler, Weimar, 237.

  CHAPTER 6: HITLER STARTS OVER

  1. Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 1226.

  2. Hitler to Adolf Gemlich, Sept. 16, 1919, in ibid., 88-90.

  3. Cited in Noakes and Pridham, vol. 1, 37.

  4. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (London, 1998), 242-43.

  5. For an overview, see Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s World View: A Blueprint for Power (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).

  6. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich, 1943), 751.

  7. Ibid., 318.

  8. The modern concept of “Aryan” is usually attributed to linguistic writings in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York, 1978), 39-44.

  9. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 420–21.

  10. The problems of tracing Hitler’s racist ideas are shown well by Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York, 2004).

  11. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 579-80.

  12. Ibid., 585-86.

  13. Ibid., 739, 742.

  14. Ibid., 743.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid., 751–52.

  17. See the authoritative Gerhard L. Weinberg, ed., Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to “Mein Kampf” (New York, 2003).

  18. This statement is in Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came to Power (repr., Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 240.

  19. Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler: The Missing Years (1957; New York, 1994), 128.

  20. Ibid., 131–32.

  21. VB, Feb. 26, 1925, in Hitler: Reden, Schriften, vol. 1, 4-9.

  22. See VB, Feb. 27, 1925, in Hitler: Reden, Schriften, vol. 1, 14-32.

  23. Hitler: Reden, Schriften, vol. 1, 14 n. 5, 36.

  24. Ibid., 35-37.

  25. Heinrich August Winkler, Weimar, 1918-1933: Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich, 1998), 281.

  26. VB, Feb. 25, 1926, in Hitler: Reden, Schriften, vol. 1, 294-96.

  27. Feb. 15, 1926, in Elke Fröhlich et al., eds., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels (Munich, 2005ff.), part 1, vol. 1–2, 55-56.

  28. Ibid., 73.

  29. Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936, 270–77.

  CHAPTER 7: BATTLE FOR COMMUNIST UTOPIA

  1. On Stalin’s family background and early years in the Caucasus, see Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 3-55.

  2. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, 29-30.

  3. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 1, 59-61 (Sept.-Oct. 1904), 74-80 (Jan. 1905), articles.

  4. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, 78-80, 134-37.

  5. Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917 (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 21–22.

  6. Service, Stalin, 70; Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929 (New York, 1973), 107-8; Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin (New York, 1996), 63-65.

  7. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 1, 84-88 (Feb. 15, 1905), pamphlet.

  8. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 13, 369-77, article.

  9. Cited in Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1966), 90.

  10. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 1, 193-95 (Nov. 20, 1905), pamphlet; 206-13 (March 8, 1906), article.

  11. Ibid., 206-38 (March 8, 1906).

  12. Service, Stalin, 74-75; Deutscher, Stalin, 102-3.

  13. Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 112-22; for more, see Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: politichesky portret (Moscow, 1987), vol. 1. 101–4. Some funds were also donated to the cause by wealthy people.

  14. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 144-50; Service, Lenin, 204-5.

  15. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 2, 359-67 (Jan. 1913), pamphlet.

  16. See Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001).

  17. See Robert M. Slusser, Stalin in October: The Man Who Missed the Revolution (London, 1987), 244-55.

  18. For the refutations, see Service, Stalin, 140–47.

  CHAPTER 8: LENIN’S PASSING, STALIN’S VICTORY

  1. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 45, 69-88 (March 27, 1922, speech).

  2. March 15, 1921, speech, in ibid., vol. 43, 68-69.

  3. Dec. 23, 1921, speech, in ibid., vol. 44, 291–329.

  4. July 5, 1922, speech, in ibid., 53-54.

  5. Feliks Ivanovich Chuev and Vyacheslav Molotov, Sto sorok besed s Molo-tovym: iz dnevnika F. Chueva (Moscow, 1991), 200.

  6. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 44, 298-99.

  7. George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford, 198
1), 346-48.

  8. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 44, 396-97.

  9. Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 444-46.

  10. March 27, 1922, speech, in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 45, 89-114.

  11. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 6, 172.

  12. See John Löwenhardt, James R. Ozinga, and Erik van Lee, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Politburo (London, 1992), 11.

  13. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929 (New York, 1973), 212.

  14. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: politichesky portret (Moscow, 1987), vol. 2, 106-7.

  15. See ibid., vol. 1, 300. There is a serious error in the English translation on this point in the book.

  16. Chuev and Molotov, Sto sorok besed, 179-80; Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York, 1989), 68.

  17. Service, Lenin, 445.

  18. Volkogonov, Lenin: politichesky portret, vol. 2, 40; Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York, 1995), 464-65.

  19. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 250–53.

  20. Service, Lenin, 452. For an alternative view, long held, see Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (New York, 2005), 24-26.

  21. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 474.

  22. Cited in Volkogonov, Lenin: politicheskyportret, vol. 1, 350–51; vol. 2, 185-86.

  23. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 45, 343-48.

  24. Chuev and Molotov, Sto sorok besed, 239; Medvedev, Let History Judge, 75, 80–81.

  25. Letters reprinted in Medvedev, Let History Judge, 72-73.

  26. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 289-90.

  27. Dmitri Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediya. Politichesky portret J. V. Stalina (Moscow, 1989), vol. 1, part 1, 251.

  28. Chuev and Molotov, Sto sorok besed, 184-85.

  29. Cited in Medvedev, Let History Judge, 118-19.

  30. Ibid., 112.

  31. Opening speech, March 8, 1921, in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 43, 5-6.

  32. For the letters, see Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 483-85.

  33. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 6, 220–33 (May 27, 1924), speech.

  34. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York, 1974), 325-26; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary220–22.