TOTALITARIANISM

A hundred years ago, a malignant form of governance, both modern and barbaric,
started to exist. As it grew, it swept across Eurasia, enveloping the largest territorial
state on the planet and cloning itself elsewhere. As the decades passed, the
monstrosity was given a name: totalitarianism.
Its original Russian manifestation had two German connections.

One was historical and ideological: Russian revolutionaries claimed to be the

founders of the promised land prophesied by Karl Marx, a 19th-century Prussian-
born philosopher.

The other was contemporaneous and geopolitical: In an effort to win World War I,
Emperor Wilhelm II’s high command helped Russian Marxists seize power and make
peace with Berlin.

Looming in the future was Germany’s own experience with totalitarianism: the
emergence in the early 1930s of a predatory police state that initiated the Holocaust
and a world war, more baleful than the first.

While the blame for this carnage can be parceled out to a lot of murderers,
psychopaths, toadies, cowards and, of course, those who were “just following
orders”, at the end of the day the twin evils were the work of two individuals: Stalin
and Hitler.

Of the many books that deal with these two world-changing figures, “Hitler and
Stalin: Parallel Lives,” by the British historian Alan Bullock, published in 1992, is
the best and certainly, at more than 1,000 pages, the most comprehensive. Bullock’s
thesis is persuasive. Despite their differences in age, background and temperament
and despite their mortal hostility in World War II there was a symbiosis, even an
affinity, between the two: in their careers, their ideologies, their methods and their
psyches.

They were both foreigners: the master of the Kremlin was a Georgian, not a Russian;
the German Führer was an Austrian. Both, Bullock says, were narcissists. Both
insisted on cults of personality and made themselves into high priests of warped
versions of 19th-century social theories (Stalin’s Marxism, Hitler’s toxic combination
of social Darwinism and the ideas of Nietzsche). Both were homicidal paranoiacs,
determined to deport, enslave and exterminate entire categories of human beings: in
Stalin’s case, the kulaks during the collectivization campaign; in Hitler’s, not just
Jews but Slavs, Romani and numerous others.
Also, neither of these malevolent geniuses would have emerged from obscurity were
it not for the first great cataclysm of the 20th century, then known as the Great War.

Stalin was already a ruthless and canny militant in the 1890s when Hitler was still a
youngster. He was found in St. Petersburg, where a wave of social turmoil and
political protests forced the czarist government to accede to limited democratic
reforms including a parliament (Duma) and a multiparty system. That was not the
outcome Stalin and his fellow Bolsheviks wanted.

The decrepit imperial government was ready for the ash heap of history before its
decision in 1914 to enter the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary along with
their Ottoman allies. The consequences were the devastation of Russia’s economy,
the exhaustion of its population and a string of humiliating defeats on the battlefields
that triggered mutinies and kindled a revolution that came in two stages.

Twelve years later, in November 1917, they had another chance to quash the
democrats and impose a dictatorship. This time they got lucky, largely because
Russia suffered a perfect storm of ill fortune and colossal folly.

In February 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated in favor of a provisional government

headed by the liberal Alexander Kerensky and consisting of progressives, socialists
and the more moderate Communists. Meanwhile, the disciplined and fanatic
Bolshevik wing of the Communist Party was organizing, arming and propagandizing
the masses with promises of “peace, land and bread.” They knew they could crush
fierce internal resistance only if they sued for peace with Germany.

As for the Germans, they too wanted quiet on the eastern front. They knew that
Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks’ principal leader, had always opposed Russia’s entry
into the war. But Lenin was in exile in Switzerland. In a spectacular instance of one
great power instigating regime change in another, the Germans essentially
weaponized Lenin’s willpower and charisma by infiltrating him back into Russia in
a closed railroad car.

Lenin threw himself into rallying his fellow radicals while under the protection of
Stalin, who smuggled him from one safe house to another. By November, the
Bolsheviks had the forces and support they needed to lead an armed insurrection by
workers and soldiers that overthrew the provisional government.

Lenin spent four years consolidating the Red Revolution and routing its enemies, the
Whites. In 1921, he realized his ruthlessness had brought the Soviet state to the brink
of collapse just as it was aborning. He softened some of his more repressive policies
and retreated from the harshest form of socialism.

But Russia then suffered another blow. Lenin had his first debilitating stroke, opening
the way for his successor, Stalin, to quash the founding father’s economic reforms
and double-down on the imposition of the century’s first totalitarian state.
The Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 was reminiscent of the Bolsheviks’ in an important
respect one that we should keep in mind in today’s world. Autocrats and their
supporters exploited the populist backlash against weak liberal democracies. Both the
Kerensky interlude in Russia and the Weimar Republic in Germany failed to deliver
economic security to their constituents.

As Bullock shuttles between his two subjects, he continues to refute commentators

who have treated Stalinism and Nazism as diametrically opposed ideologies by
labeling the first internationalist and the second nationalist. In fact, those terms were,
in this pairing, a distinction without a difference. Both regimes were chauvinistic and
expansionist, and both were police states with one-man rule and a reliance on terror,
concentration camps and the Big Lie.

Hitler believed that the Third Reich would endure a thousand years. It lasted a dozen.
For the first eight, he and Stalin, while geopolitical rivals, sometimes found common
ground. Hitler’s minions admired and copied some of Stalin’s techniques of spying
and liquidating enemies.

In 1939, much as Lenin and Kaiser Wilhelm had done, Stalin and Hitler made
peace though pre-emptively. They had their foreign ministers sign a pact
guaranteeing that neither side would attack the other, while divvying up Poland and
smaller countries. Late that year and into the next, the German Gestapo and the
Soviet secret police, the N.K.V.D., held a series of conferences to coordinate their
occupations.

Bullock’s answer to that question came in his earlier biography of Hitler, who
“invaded Russia for the simple but sufficient reason that he had always meant to
establish the foundations of his thousand-year Reich by the annexation of the territory
between the Vistula and the Urals.”

But there is no dispute about the consequence of Hitler’s decision to open a second
front. Even though his invasion force got close enough to see the Kremlin towers, he
siphoned off military resources from the west, and he underestimated his new
Russian enemy. The battle for the major city that bore Stalin’s name is regarded as
one of the largest, longest and bloodiest in history, and the Germans lost, never to
recover.

As the tide turned, the good news was that the Red Army was crucial in bringing
about Germany’s total defeat. The bad news was that, in the name of liberation,
Stalin’s legions enslaved much of Nazi-occupied Eastern and Central Europe for the
next four decades, condemning the people of those countries to the double curse of
suffering both kinds of 20th-century totalitarianism.

From today’s vantage, it is hard to end on that upbeat note. The current leader of
Russia, Vladimir Putin, is known to toast Stalin’s birthday, suggesting nostalgia and
respect for Russia’s nightmare years. More to the point, he is turning back the clock
not yet to totalitarianism, but to something akin to it. He has resumed Russian
expansion of its sphere of domination, repressed his critics and, almost certainly,
ordered or condoned “wet affairs” for dealing with political enemies.

The institutions of American democracy are beginning to check and counterbalance

ominous actions and attitudes emitting from the Oval Office. Meanwhile, the
European Union, while still wobbly, seems to be finding its feet again. And here’s a
stunning but welcome irony: The chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, seems,
however reluctantly, ready to take a key role in reinforcing the leadership and
concept of the political West if the current American president is unable or unwilling
to do so himself.

Bibliography:

BBC news on totaitarianism

Oilproject, secret servicies during the cold war

History book "Millennium"