Millennium issue: Hitler and Stalin
The heights of evil
Dec 23rd 1999 | from the print edition
AS NIGHTMARES go, the similarities are striking. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin gave us the word “totalitarian”. No regimes, ever, had encompassed with such totality the peoples under their sway. Few had such mad ideas, none the means so intensively to stuff their subjects’ heads with them. None had both the technology and the readiness to kill on so huge a scale. They murdered by the million, terrorised by the hundred million—and, Hitler for 12 years, Stalin for 29, until his death, they got away with it.
Yet the differences were large. For one, Hitler was appointed chancellor, in January 1933, constitutionally, and with a ballot-box mandate: his National Socialists had won 37% of the vote in the free-and-fair Reichstag elections of July 1932, more than any other party. By 1939, rising living standards, a new sense of order, albeit forcefully imposed, and success abroad had won him huge popularity, which the hysteria of war and conquest then increased. For those Germans, the bulk, who supported him, or at least kept their heads down, life was far better, until the Soviet army and the Anglo-American airforces got to work in 1943, than the grim years of inflation and then unemployment after humiliation in the first world war.
Russia’s Communists never had such popular backing, except maybe in the joy of victory over Germany in 1945. Lenin took power in 1917 in a coup. His Bolsheviks won under 25% of the votes for a constituent assembly in the only national election they ever allowed, far behind a rural party of the left. Starting, it’s true, from a low base, in 74 years they never gave Russia’s people more than a hint of prosperity from a state-run economy built—above all under Stalin, leader from 1924 till his death in 1953—by ruthless means.
The Term Paper on Stalin Year Plan
Stalin When people here the word "Russia", they immediately think of the poor living conditions which the Russians have been subject to for the last sixty years. They think of the Communist government, and then their thoughts turn to the leader who implanted communism into the Russian government and took away peoples' basic rights. It is the name of a man who ruled Russia by a totalitarian ...
Yet in many ways they outdid Hitler. They lasted far longer in power. They beat him in battle, and then for half a century made the Soviet Union the world’s second superpower. And they managed, violently, a deep transformation of society. A nation four-fifths peasant and two-thirds illiterate was industrialised, urbanised and educated within 30 years. The entire economy was torn from private hands, entire social classes demonised and destroyed. The once mighty Russian church became, on sufferance, a eunuch of the state. Hitler, charismatic and revolutionary by temperament, did none of this. He uprooted Germany’s political establishment, but not the fundamentals of its economy or the social order.
Nor were the two ideologies mirror images of each other. Communism offered a coherent belief system, based on a false theory of the perfectibility of man and the pseudo-science of economic determinism. It had universal appeal: brutal in fact, but seemingly idealistic, the system solidified under Stalin won admiration in many poor countries, and from a host of clever fools in rich ones.
Hitler’s notions were woollier, more mystical, resting on such concepts as will, authority, racial superiority and worship of the leader. They spoke only to the German-speaking Reich, though he had emulators among those who upheld fascism (a different idea, though the two are often thought the same) in Italy and Spain. He successfully spoon-fed an educated nation vile anti-Jewish fantasies that should have been spat out by any ten-year-old. But only the besotted (which included neither Mussolini nor Franco) could take them seriously, except in their more than vile results. Although Stalin too used a cult of personality, his system survived him; it is unlikely that Hitler’s could have.
One thing the two had in common: ruthless violence. Both used ferocious internal repression. The edge here goes to Stalin. Even Hitler’s armies of snoopers, his 95 Germans a day convicted of political crimes in 1933-39, his political murders, concentration camps and killings of Jews and left-wingers in that period, cannot match Stalin’s record. Russia had traditions of secrecy and violence; but the isolation, paranoia and terror that kept the Soviet people in thrall for so long exceeded anything comparable, anywhere, ever.
The Term Paper on Hitler Youth And Bdm Year 9 Project
By ilham Mukhtar Introduction Germany was left in an awful state after World War One. Suffering from the depression, having extremely high unemployment rates, street battles against communism, and occupation in most of its territories- the German Youth Movement went through a revival and many new youth groups were formed. Some of them were similar to our modern boy scouts, while others were nature ...
Both men also oversaw worse than that: mass murder. Hitler’s massacre of European Jews was an act of genocide without millennial equal. It is a cruel irony that Germany’s own half-million, attacked from 1933 on, had more chance of flight in 1933-39 than the millions in Nazi-occupied countries, once their fate had been decided on in 1942. Slavs, Gypsies and what the Nazis saw as other sub-species also were killed in millions. Add on the 40m-50m dead, direct and indirect, of the war that Hitler unleashed in 1939 and he must lead history’s list of infamy.
Unless Stalin does. He, even if not alone, must share the guilt of war; whatever the errors of Britain and France, it was his pact with Hitler in August 1939 that gave the green light. And the total of Stalin’s victims in peace-time in his own country—no serious estimate is below 11m, some much higher—far exceeded those that Hitler had notched up by 1939. That many died of famine due to forced collectivisation in Ukraine and elsewhere in 1928-33, in deportations of entire peoples later, or, at all times, in inhuman labour camps, rather than by overt execution, lessens his guilt not a jot. At his death in 1953, the labour camps had never been so full.
The two countries and peoples have emerged very different from their past. Russia, like much of the eastern Europe that it misruled for nearly 45 years, is still mired in poverty, corrupt, barely democratic. Vanquished Germany, soon allied with its western conquerors, rapidly rose from the ashes of totalitarianism to become a decent land of freedom and prosperity. And peace.
There is no answer to the question which was more evil, Hitler or Stalin? Stalin’s legacy, by the weight of time, has proved harder to offload. But both men defy moral measurement. It is like asking whether pulling out toenails or giving electric shocks to the genitals is the more acceptable form of torture.
The Essay on Stalin Russia Country Policy
Stalinism. To mention this term, this policy, is to evoke panic and fright in almost all Russians. Stalin rose to become the dictator of Russia in 1929, and remained in that position until 1953. He morphed the Soviet Union from what was once one of the world's most underdeveloped countries to one of the greatest in industrialization. "Socialism in one country" was his policy, and it quickly became ...
from the print edition | Europe
