In August 1939, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin circled each other warily, like a couple of barroom brawlers trying to decide whether to fight it out or gang up on somebody else. Messengers scurried between them with proposals for the deal of the century, a treaty between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Until almost the end, Hitler was haunted by a question that could have occurred only to someone like him: was Stalin a Jew? He sent his personal photographer to the negotiations in Moscow for a close-up to see whether they were “ingrown and Jewish, or separate and Aryan.” Stalin passed the earlobe test and the cynical treaty was concluded, enabling the two dictators to invade Poland and split it between them. Said an admiring Stalin: “Hitler knows his business.”
The brief alliance and the long, bloody rivalry between Hitler and Stalin determined the course of World War II and much of our subsequent history. Only now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union unification of Germany, are we coming out from under their shadows. The similarities between the two dictators, as much as their differences, are the subject of a massive new double biography by British historian Alan Bullock, who made his name with a biography of Hitler a generation ago. He shows that Hitler and Stalin were uniquely responsible for the epic disasters inflicted on the world by their regimes. The fact that they lived at the same time and contended in the same arena was the misfortune of millions.
Unlike the well-traveled leaders of our own age, Hitler and Stalin rarely left home, and they never met. The closest they came was in 1913, when Hitler, a down-and-out student, and Stalin, a frustrated revolutionary, were in Vienna at the same time. Many of the similarities between them are mere coincidence, the product of shared pathologies; Stalin’s extermination of the kulaks did not inspire Hitler’s genocide against the Jews. Yet what comes through most vividly in this ponderous volume is the eerie echo of each man’s character in the evil genius of the other.
Both were resentful outsiders who began their long-shot careers as loners on the farthest fringes of society. Both were visceral anti-Semites. Both regarded their own followers as “a resource to be mobilized, not a membership to be represented.” Their success owed much to the fact that they were prepared to commit crimes that ordinary people couldn’t even imagine. “Ruthlessness in Stalin’s eyes, as in Hitler’s, was a sovereign virtue, to be curbed only for the sake of expediency,” Bullock writes. He concludes that Hitler and Stalin were self-absorbed narcissists and clinically paranoid, as well. “I trust no one,” Stalin once said, “not even myself.”
Each man took power by more or less legal means and then pursued a secret agenda, imposing a “revolution from above,” as Stalin put it. Hitler’s goal was to obtain Aryan Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe; Stalin’s mission was to forcibly modernize the Soviet Union. They considered themselves to be what Hegel called “world-historical individuals,” supermen destined to carry out the will of providence and unfettered by ordinary morality.
Bullock is sometimes too kind to Stalin. Apart from wartime casualties, Stalin’s repression caused up to twice as many deaths as Hitler’s tyranny. But Bullock argues that the Holocaust was a worse offense against humanity because “mass murder became not an instrument but an end in itself.” Stalin’s purges and atrocities, in which millions of his own people died, were not “an expression of madness” but the pursuit of objectives “with a logic that was consistent both politically and psychologically,” he writes. The distinction would not have consoled any of Stalin’s victims.
The two tyrants had to clash. Hitler’s grand design for a new German empire depended on preempting Stalin’s dream of a modernized Soviet Union. Hitler scrapped the Nazi-Soviet treaty in June 1941, when he made the biggest mistake of his life and invaded the Soviet Union. The Germans were fortunate enough to lose the war; they got over Hitler long before the Soviet people escaped from the dead hand of their dictator. Stalin long regretted the collapse of his Devil’s pact with Hitler. Even after the war ended, he was still complaining that “together with the Germans we would have been invincible.” His disappointment was our good fortune.
