Brothers Under the Skin

On one occasion, Berman had slow-waltzed with Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister. “You surely mean Mrs. Molotov,” asked the interviewer, Polish journalist Teresa Toranska. “No. Mrs. Molotov was in a labor camp,” Berman answered matter-of-factly, adding that in the waltz he played the part of the lady, with Molotov leading. Throughout the night, Stalin was sticking to his DJ duties, while carefully watching everybody. When asked if they enjoyed themselves, Berman gave a qualified assent: “Yes, it was pleasant,” he said, “but with an inner tension.”

No kidding.

The scene of this Monster Mash is included in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s bestselling biography from last year, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Montefiore benefited greatly from the partial opening of the Russian State Archives in 1999: We meet Stalin humiliating his minions, tapping his pipe out on Nikita Khrushchev’s bald pate and asking if it is hollow, Stalin pruning his roses, Stalin signing death warrants, Stalin singing traditional Russian folk songs, and Stalin reassuring everybody that “life has become merrier, comrades, life has become better.” A succession of secret police bosses guard his throne: Yagoda, who collected bullets dug out of his victims’ brains and smoked pipes shaped like genitalia; the bisexual dwarf Yezhov, who, when not torturing people, was arranging flatulence contests among the commissars; and, of course, the unspeakable Beria, cruising the streets in his armored black Packard in search of young girls to rape.

Stalin is no longer the gray figure of the past, an abstract, inscrutable sphinx, but (in terms of colorfulness) at last catching up with his old enemy, Hitler, who has long had a whole historical cottage industry devoted to him.

The problem with focusing narrowly on the personalities of these people is that the reader invariably starts wondering how such freaks and lowlifes could ever have obtained power in the first place. The point is that these were not just two-bit gangsters, but men of vast ambition, messiahs with a program. To understand their success, you need more of the background–political, economic, and intellectual–that allowed them to claw their way to the top and to stay there.

This is what Richard Overy’s massive study sets out to provide. Overy is professor of history at King’s College London. Unlike Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1991), Overy’s book is not biography in the traditional sense. It is more a series of comparative essays on key aspects of the dictatorships–their cult of personality, their legal, economic, and cultural policies, their war-fighting capabilities, and their camp systems–while remaining saturated with the spirit of their creators. These were very personal dictatorships, created in the image of their makers.

In the process, Overy pays close attention to the writings of both. Many Western observers have a tendency to dismiss such writings as mostly empty rhetoric and mad rantings, since no serious person could hold such views. Unfortunately, they often do, whether it be a Hitler or Stalin, a Mao Zedong, Ayatollah Khomeini, or Pol Pot. “In each dictatorship,” Overy notes, “a unique moral universe was constructed to justify and explain its actions. The moral plane was not an irrelevance, but a key battleground.” We ignore such writings at our peril.

There were, of course, obvious differences in character and style between the two men. Hitler was a grand visionary, a gambler and dreamer, who considered himself an artist. Stalin was a careful, opportunistic schemer. Hitler was more distant and formal, while Stalin liked posing as the reassuring uncle, with his pipe and moustache, a man “upon whose knee a child would like to sit,” in the phrase of the onetime American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies.

Hitler enjoyed performing in front of huge audiences; Stalin seldom appeared in public. As orators, Hitler would tear off into a primal scream, while Stalin was a slow and deliberate speaker. Occasionally, Stalin would display a certain mocking hangman’s humor, such as when, in a newspaper article, he casually dismissed the millions of famine deaths in the Ukraine as having been caused by excessive zeal among officials who were “dizzy with success.”

Likewise, there were fundamental differences in the ideology of the two utopias: One was universal in its ambitions on behalf of the working class, while the other was for Germans only–which explains why you will find apologists for communism at Western universities to this day. But though different in style and ideology, Stalin and Hitler were kindred spirits, and their states were kindred states. Visiting Berlin in 1940, a Soviet interpreter named Valentin Berezhkov was struck by how much he recognized from home: “The same kind of worship of the leader, the same kind of mass rallies, similar art and architecture.”

Both leaders came from deprived backgrounds, with enormous chips on their shoulders, and both shared a profound sense of destiny. They saw themselves as the embodiment of their people: Hitler as the redeemer of the German nation, Stalin as the guardian of Lenin’s revolutionary legacy. Both used scientific argument to legitimize their regimes. Hitler built on Darwin and Nietzsche and the race theories of social biologists like Ernst Haeckel and Ludwig Woltmann and saw the world’s races engaged in a ruthless struggle for survival, with the Aryans representing the highest stage of evolution. Stalin built on Hegel and Marx, seeing the working class as representing the apex of historical achievement. To this was added the pseudoscience of geneticist Trofim Lysenko, who preached the primacy of the environment over heredity, and thereby provided the theoretical basis for that wonder of human engineering, the New Soviet Man.

In making their cases, both resorted to casuistry. They would dismiss the humanist ideal of objectivity as an absurd bourgeois concept, while claiming that they represented a moral absolute: Stalin spoke of “the laws of history” and Hitler talked of “nature’s stern and rigid laws.” Both saw victory as inevitable.

Terror is the defining characteristic of the modern totalitarian state. In both dictatorships, Overy carefully traces the rhetoric of parasites and disease, of opposition being seen as illnesses in the body politic, against which radical measures must be taken. The Kulaks and Jews were cancers that had to be excised. The judicial systems in these states existed, Overy notes, “not to protect the individual from the state, but to protect the state from the individual.” As Stalin so trenchantly put it, “Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.” The Soviets were generally more careful than the Nazis in keeping up appearances, going through the motions of bogus confessions and trials.

The camps were the logical outcome of both systems. But in the Soviet Union, the camps had an economic rationale, since they were designed to get labor out of the inmates, and thereby support the regime. In the Soviet camps, there was a 40 percent chance of getting out alive; in the Nazi slave labor camp system, only 14 percent emerged. Of course, the extermination camps had no kind of economic logic whatsoever, as they worked against German war aims by diverting resources and tying up railway lines. The attempt to exterminate a whole people is what makes Hitler unique.

The most troubling question remains why so few resisted. Of course, there was the fear factor. As a German Social Democrat notes in the book, “It is difficult to be brave every day.” But fear alone does not suffice as a reason. The unpleasant truth is that both systems enjoyed wide support. According to Overy, “neither system can be properly understood without accepting this conclusion.” After World War I, the populations of Germany and Russia had endured chaos, deprivation, and civil war. They longed for salvation, order, and a strong hand.

Accordingly, there was never any shortage of informers in either system. Overy relates that two-thirds of the cases that landed on the Gestapo’s desk did so through help from the public. And though there were several attempts on Lenin’s life–including one man who wanted to take a belated potshot at his corpse in the mausoleum–nobody tried to assassinate Stalin. When he died in 1953 Stalin was genuinely mourned by millions who saw him as the man who had industrialized Russia and had saved it during World War II.

In passing judgment on the inhabitants of totalitarian systems, it is always easy to stand on the moral high plain. The horrible thing about effective dictatorships is that they seek to implicate everyone: Living in them, people make moral compromises, big or small–which is what proves so complicated when it comes to reestablishing just government afterwards.

Henrik Bering is a journalist and critic.