A number of authors have carried out comparisons
of Nazism and Stalinism, in which they have
considered the similarities and differences
of the two ideologies and political systems,
what relationship existed between the two
regimes, and why both of them came to prominence
at the same time.
During the 20th century, the comparison of
Stalinism and Nazism was made on the topics
of totalitarianism, ideology, and personality
cult.
Both regimes were seen in contrast to the
liberal West, with an emphasis on the similarities
between the two.
The political scientists Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Hannah Arendt and Carl Friedrich and historian
Robert Conquest were prominent advocates of
applying the "totalitarian" concept to compare
Nazism and Stalinism.
== Hannah Arendt ==
=== 
The origins of totalitarianism ===
One of the first scholars to publish a comparative
study of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet
Union was Hannah Arendt.
In her 1951 work, The Origins of Totalitarianism,
Arendt puts forward the idea of totalitarianism
as a distinct type of political movement and
form of government, which “differs essentially
from other forms of political oppression known
to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship.”
Furthermore, Arendt distinguishes between
a totalitarian movement (such as a political
party with totalitarian aims) and a totalitarian
government.
Not all totalitarian movements succeed in
creating totalitarian governments once they
gain power.
In Arendt’s view, although many totalitarian
movements existed in Europe in the 1920s and
1930s, only the governments of Stalin and
Hitler succeeded in fully implementing their
totalitarian aims.Arendt traced the origin
of totalitarian movements to the nineteenth
century, focusing especially on antisemitism
and imperialism.
She emphasized the connection between the
rise of European nation-states and the growth
of antisemitism, which was due to the fact
that the Jews represented an “inter-European,
non-national element in a world of growing
or existing nations.”
Conspiracy theories abounded, and the Jews
were accused of being part of various international
schemes to ruin European nations.
Small antisemitic political parties formed
in response to this perceived Jewish threat,
and, according to Arendt, these were the first
political organizations in Europe that claimed
to represent the interests of the whole nation
as opposed to the interests of a class or
other social group.
The later totalitarian movements would copy
or inherit this claim to speak for the whole
nation, with the implication that any opposition
to them constituted treason.
European imperialism of the nineteenth century
also paved the way for totalitarianism, by
legitimizing the concept of endless expansion.
After Europeans had engaged in imperialist
expansion on other continents, political movements
developed which aimed to copy the methods
of imperialism on the European continent itself.
Arendt refers specifically to the “pan-movements”
of pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism, which promised
continental empires to nations that had little
hope of overseas expansion.
According to Arendt, “Nazism and Bolshevism
owe more to Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism
(respectively) than to any other ideology
or political movement.”
=== Recruitment, propaganda and indoctrination
===
Arendt argues that both the Nazi and Bolshevik
movements “recruited their members from
[a] mass of apparently indifferent people
whom all other parties had given up,” and
who “had reason to be equally hostile to
all parties.”
For this reason, totalitarian movements did
not need to use debate or persuasion, and
did not need to refute the arguments of the
other parties.
Their target audience did not have to be persuaded
to despise the other parties or the democratic
system, because it consisted of people who
already despised mainstream politics.
As a result, totalitarian movements were free
to use violence and terror against their opponents
without fear that this might alienate their
own supporters.
Instead of arguing against their opponents,
they adopted deterministic views of human
behavior and presented opposing ideas as “originating
in deep natural, social, or psychological
sources beyond the control of the individual
and therefore beyond the power of reason.”
The Nazis in particular, during the years
before their rise to power, engaged in “killing
small socialist functionaries or influential
members of opposing parties” both as a means
to intimidate opponents and as a means of
demonstrating to their supporters that they
were a party of action, “different from
the ‘idle talkers’ of other parties.”Totalitarian
governments make extensive use of propaganda,
and are often characterized by having a strong
distinction between what they tell their own
supporters and the propaganda they produce
for others.
Arendt distinguishes these two categories
as "indoctrination" and "propaganda".
Indoctrination consists of the message that
a totalitarian government promotes internally,
to the members of the ruling party and that
segment of the population which supports the
government.
Propaganda consists of the message that a
totalitarian government seeks to promote in
the outside world, and also among those parts
of its own society which may not support the
government.
Thus, “the necessities for propaganda are
always dictated by the outside world,” while
the opportunities for indoctrination depend
on “the totalitarian governments’ isolation
and security from outside interference.”
The type of indoctrination used by the Soviets
and the Nazis was characterized by claims
of “scientific” truth, and appeals to
“objective laws of nature.”
Both movements took a deterministic view of
human society and claimed that their ideologies
were based on scientific discoveries regarding
race (in the case of the Nazis) or the forces
governing human history (in the case of the
Soviets).
Arendt identifies this as being in certain
ways similar to modern advertising, in which
companies claim that scientific research shows
their products to be superior, but more generally
she argues that it is an extreme version of
“that obsession with science which has characterized
the Western world since the rise of mathematics
and physics in the sixteenth century.”
By their use of pseudoscience as the main
justification for their actions, Nazism and
Stalinism are distinguished from earlier historical
despotic regimes, who appealed instead to
religion or sometimes did not try to justify
themselves at all.
According to Arendt, totalitarian governments
did not merely use these appeals to supposed
scientific laws as propaganda to manipulate
others.
Rather, totalitarian leaders like Hitler and
Stalin genuinely believed that they were acting
in accordance with immutable natural laws,
to such an extent that they were willing to
sacrifice the self-interest of their regimes
for the sake of enacting those supposed laws.
For instance, the Nazis treated the inhabitants
of occupied territories with extreme brutality
and planned to depopulate Eastern Europe in
order to make way for colonists from the German
“master race,” despite the fact that this
actively harmed their war effort.
Stalin repeatedly purged the Communist Party
of people who deviated even slightly from
the party line, even when this weakened the
party or the Soviet government, because he
believed that they represented the interests
of “dying classes” and their demise was
historically inevitable.
=== The Leader ===
Arendt also identifies the central importance
of an all-powerful leader in totalitarian
movements.
As in other areas, she distinguishes between
totalitarian leaders (such as Hitler and Stalin)
and non-totalitarian dictators or autocratic
leaders.
The totalitarian leader does not rise to power
by personally using violence or through any
special organizational skills, but rather
by controlling appointments of personnel within
the party, so that all other prominent party
members owe their positions to him.
With loyalty to the leader becoming the primary
criterion for promotion, ambitious party members
compete with each other in trying to express
their loyalty, and a cult of personality develops
around the leader.
Even when the leader is not particularly competent
and the members of his inner circle are aware
of his deficiencies, they remain committed
to him out of fear that without him the entire
power structure would collapse.
=== The "enemies" ===
Once in power, according to Arendt, totalitarian
movements face a major dilemma: they built
their support on the basis of anger against
the status quo and on impossible or dishonest
promises, but now they have become the new
status quo and are expected to carry out their
promises.
They deal with this problem by engaging in
a constant struggle against external and internal
enemies, real or imagined, so as to enable
them to say that, in a sense, they have not
yet gained the power they need to fulfill
their promises.
According to Arendt, totalitarian governments
must be constantly fighting enemies in order
to survive.
This explains their apparently irrational
behavior, for example when Hitler continued
to make territorial demands even after he
was offered everything he asked for in the
Munich Agreement, or when Stalin unleashed
the Great Terror despite the fact that he
faced no significant internal opposition.
=== Concentration camps ===
Arendt points out the widespread use of concentration
camps by totalitarian governments, arguing
that they are the most important manifestation
of the need to find enemies to fight against,
and are therefore “more essential to the
preservation of the regime’s power than
any of its other institutions.”
Although forced labor was commonly imposed
on inmates of concentration camps, Arendt
argues that their primary purpose was not
any kind of material gain for the regime:
“The only permanent economic function of
the camps has been the financing of their
own supervisory apparatus; thus from the economic
point of view the concentration camps exist
mostly for their own sake.”
The Nazis in particular carried this to the
point of “open anti-utility,” by expending
large sums of money, resources and manpower
– during a war – for the purpose of building
and staffing extermination camps and transporting
people to them.
This sets apart the concentration camps of
totalitarian regimes from older human institutions
that bear some similarity to them, such as
slavery.
Slaves were abused and killed for the sake
of profit; concentration camp inmates were
abused and killed because a totalitarian government
needed to justify its existence.
Finally, Arendt points out that concentration
camps under both Hitler and Stalin included
large numbers of inmates who were innocent
of any crime – not only in the ordinary
sense of the word, but even by the standards
of the regimes themselves.
That is to say, most of the inmates had not
actually committed any action against the
regime.
=== The future of totalitarian systems ===
Throughout her analysis, Arendt emphasized
the modernity and novelty of the governmental
structures set up by Stalin and Hitler, arguing
that they represented “an entirely new form
of government” which is likely to manifest
itself again in various other forms in the
future.
She also cautioned against the belief that
future totalitarian movements would necessarily
share the ideological foundations of Nazism
or Stalinism, writing that “all ideologies
contain totalitarian elements.”
== 
Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski ==
=== 
Totalitarian systems and autocracies ===
The totalitarian paradigm in the comparative
study of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union
was further developed by Carl Friedrich and
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote extensively
on this topic both individually and in collaboration.
Similar to Hannah Arendt, they state that
“totalitarian dictatorship is a new phenomenon;
there has never been anything quite like it
before.”
Friedrich and Brzezinski classify totalitarian
dictatorship as a type of autocracy, but argue
that it is different in important ways from
most other historical autocracies.
In particular, it is distinguished by a reliance
on modern technology and mass legitimation.
Unlike Arendt, Friedrich and Brzezinski apply
the notion of totalitarian dictatorship not
only to the regimes of Hitler and Stalin,
but also to the USSR throughout its entire
existence, as well as the regime of Benito
Mussolini in Italy and the People’s Republic
of China under Mao Zedong.
Carl Friedrich noted that the “possibility
of equating the dictatorship of Stalin in
the Soviet Union and that of Hitler in Germany”
has been a deeply controversial topic and
a subject of debate almost from the beginning
of those dictatorships.
Various other aspects of the two regimes have
also been the subject of intense scholarly
debate, such as whether Nazi and Stalinist
ideologies were genuinely believed and pursued
by the respective governments, or whether
the ideologies were merely convenient justifications
for dictatorial rule.
Friedrich himself argues in favor of the former
view.
Friedrich and Brzezinski argue that Nazism
and Stalinism are not only similar to each
other, but also represent a continuation or
a return to the tradition of European absolute
monarchy on certain levels.
In the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, the monarch ultimately
held all decisional power, and was considered
accountable only to God.
In Stalinism and Nazism, the leader likewise
held all real power, and was considered accountable
only to various intangible entities such as
“the people”, “the masses” or “the
Volk.”
Thus the common feature of autocracies – whether
monarchical or totalitarian – is the concentration
of power in the hands of a leader who cannot
be held accountable by any legal mechanisms,
and who is supposed to be the embodiment of
the will of an abstract entity.
Friedrich and Brzezinski also identify other
features common to all autocracies, such as
“the oscillation between tight and loose
control.”
The regime alternates between periods of intense
repression and periods of relative freedom,
often represented by different leaders.
This depends in part on the personal character
of different leaders, but Friedrich and Brzezinski
believe that there is also an underlying political
cycle, in which rising discontent leads to
increased repression up to the point at which
the opposition is eliminated, then controls
are relaxed until the next time that popular
dissatisfaction begins to grow.Thus, placing
Stalinism and Nazism within the broader historical
tradition of autocratic government, Friedrich
and Brzezinski hold that “totalitarian dictatorship,
in a sense, is the adaptation of autocracy
to twentieth-century industrial society.”
However, at the same time, they insist that
totalitarian dictatorship is a “novel type
of autocracy” and argue that twentieth century
totalitarian regimes (such as those of Hitler
and Stalin) had more in common with each other
than with any other form of government, including
historical autocracies of the past.
Totalitarianism can only exist after the creation
of modern technology, because such technology
is essential for propaganda, for surveillance
of the population, and for the operation of
a secret police.
Furthermore, when speaking of the differences
and similarities between fascist and communist
regimes, Friedrich and Brzezinski insist that
the two kinds of totalitarian governments
are “basically alike” but “not wholly
alike” – they are more similar to each
other than to other forms of government, but
they are not the same.
Among the major differences between them,
Friedrich and Brzezinski identify in particular
the fact that communists seek “the world
revolution of the proletariat,” while fascists
wish to “establish the imperial predominance
of a particular nation or race.”
=== 
Five pillars of totalitarian systems ===
In terms of the similarities between Nazism
and Stalinism, Friedrich lists five main aspects
that they hold in common: First, an official
ideology that is supposed to be followed by
all members of society, at least passively,
and which promises to serve as a perfect guide
towards some ultimate goal.
Second, a single political party, composed
of the most enthusiastic supporters of the
official ideology, representing an elite group
within society (no more than 10 percent of
the population), and organized along strictly
regimented lines.
Third, “a technologically conditioned near-complete
monopoly of control of all means of effective
armed combat” in the hands of the party
or its representatives.
Fourth, a similar monopoly held by the party
over the mass media and all technological
forms of communication.
Fifth, “a system of terroristic police control”
that is not only used to defend the regime
against real enemies, but also to persecute
various groups of people who are only suspected
of being enemies or who may potentially become
enemies in the future.Two first pillars of
any totalitarian government, according to
Friedrich and Brzezinski, are the dictator
and the Party.
The dictator, whether Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini,
holds supreme power.
Friedrich and Brzezinski explicitly reject
the claim that the Party, or any other institution,
could provide a significant counterweight
to the power of the dictator in Nazism or
Stalinism.
The dictator needs the Party in order to be
able to rule, so he may be careful not to
make decisions that would go directly against
the wishes of other leading Party members,
but ultimate authority rests with him and
not with them.
Like Arendt, Friedrich and Brzezinski also
identify the cult of personality surrounding
the leader as an essential element of a totalitarian
dictatorship, and reference Stalin’s personality
cult in particular.
They also draw attention to the fact that
Hitler and Stalin were expected to provide
ideological direction for their governments
and not merely practical leadership.
Friedrich and Brzezinski write that “unlike
military dictators in the past, but like certain
types of primitive chieftains, the totalitarian
dictator is both ruler and high priest.”
That is to say, he not only governs, but also
provides the principles on which his government
is to be based.
This is partly due to the way that totalitarian
governments arise.
They come about when a militant ideological
movement seizes power, so the first leader
of a totalitarian government is usually the
ideologue who built the movement that seized
power, and subsequent leaders try to emulate
him.
==== Dictator and his henchmen ====
The totalitarian dictator needs loyal lieutenants
to carry out his orders faithfully and with
a reasonable degree of efficiency.
Friedrich and Brzezinski identify parallels
between the men in Hitler and Stalin’s entourage,
arguing that both dictators used similar people
to perform similar tasks.
Thus, for example, Martin Bormann and Georgy
Malenkov were both capable administrators
and bureaucrats, while Heinrich Himmler and
Lavrentiy Beria were ruthless secret police
chiefs responsible for suppressing any potential
challenge to the dictator’s power.
Both Hitler and Stalin promoted rivalry and
distrust among their lieutenants so as to
ensure that none of them would become powerful
enough to challenge the dictator himself.
This is the cause of an important weakness
of the totalitarian regimes: the problem of
succession.
Friedrich points out that neither the Nazi
nor the Stalinist government ever established
any official line of succession or any mechanism
to decide who would replace the dictator after
his death.
The dictator, being the venerated “father
of the people,” was regarded as irreplaceable.
There could never be any heir apparent, because
such an heir would have been a threat to the
power of the dictator while he was alive.
Thus the dictator’s inevitable death would
always leave behind a major power vacuum and
cause a political crisis.
In the case of the Nazi regime, since Hitler
died mere days before the final defeat of
Germany in the war, this never became a major
issue.
In the case of the USSR, Stalin’s death
led to a prolonged power struggle.
==== Totalitarian Party ====
Friedrich and Brzezinski also identify key
similarities between the Nazi and Stalinist
political parties, which set them apart from
other types of political parties.
Both the Nazi Party and the CPSU under Stalin
had very strict membership requirements and
did not accept members on the basis of mere
agreement with the Party’s ideology and
goals.
Rather, they strictly tested potential members,
in a manner similar to exclusive clubs, and
often engaged in political purges of the membership,
expelling large numbers of people from their
ranks (and sometimes arresting and executing
those expelled, such as in the Great Purge
or the Night of the Long Knives).
Thus, the totalitarian party cultivates the
idea that to be a member is a privilege which
needs to be earned, and total obedience to
the leader is required in order to maintain
this privilege.
While both Nazism and Stalinism required party
members to display such total loyalty in practice,
they differed in the way they dealt with it
in theory.
Nazism openly proclaimed the hierarchical
ideal of absolute obedience to the Führer
as one of its key ideological principles (the
Führerprinzip).
Stalinism, meanwhile, denied that it did anything
similar, and claimed instead to uphold democratic
principles, with the Party Congress (made
up of elected delegates) supposedly being
the highest authority.
However, Stalinist elections typically featured
only a single candidate, and the Party Congress
met very rarely and simply approved Stalin’s
decisions.
Thus, regardless of the differences in their
underlying ideological claims, the Nazi and
Stalinist parties were organized in practice
along similar lines, with a rigid hierarchy
and centralized leadership.Each totalitarian
party and dictator is supported by a specific
totalitarian ideology.
Friedrich and Brzezinski argue, in agreement
with Arendt, that Nazi and Stalinist leaders
really believed in their respective ideologies
and did not merely use them as tools to gain
power.
Several major policies, such as the Stalinist
collectivization of agriculture or the Nazi
“final solution”, cannot be explained
by anything other than a genuine commitment
to achieve ideological goals, even at great
cost.
The ideologies were different and their goals
were different, but what they had in common
was a utopian commitment to reshaping the
world, and a determination to fight by any
means necessary against a real or imagined
enemy.
This stereotyped enemy could be described
as “the fat rich Jew or the Jewish Bolshevik”
for the Nazis, or “the war-mongering, atom-bomb-wielding
American Wallstreeter” for the Soviets.
==== Ideology and symbolism ====
According to Friedrich and Brzezinski, the
most important difference between Nazi and
Stalinist ideology lies in the degree of universality
involved.
Stalinism, and communist ideology in general,
is universal in its appeal and addresses itself
to all the “workers of the world.”
Nazism, on the other hand, and fascist ideology
in general, can only address itself to one
particular race or nation – the “master
race” that is destined to dominate all others.
Therefore, “in communism social justice
appears to be the ultimate value, unless it
be the classless society that is its essential
condition; in fascism, the highest value is
dominion, eventually world dominion, and the
strong and pure nation-race is its essential
condition, as seen by its ideology.”
This means that fascist or Nazi movements
from different countries will be natural enemies,
rather than natural allies, as they each seek
to extend the dominion of their own nation
at the expense of others.
Friedrich and Brzezinski see this as a weakness
inherent in fascist and Nazi ideology, while
communist universalism is a source of ideological
strength for Stalinism.
Friedrich and Brzezinski also draw attention
to the symbols used by Nazis and Stalinists
to represent themselves.
The Soviet Union adopted the hammer and sickle,
a newly-created symbol, “invented by the
leaders of the movement and pointing to the
future.”
Meanwhile, Nazi Germany used the swastika,
“a ritual symbol of uncertain origin, quite
common in primitive societies.”
Thus, one is trying to project itself as being
oriented towards a radically new future, while
the other is appealing to a mythical heroic
past.
==== Propaganda and terror ====
Totalitarian dictatorships maintain themselves
in power through the use of propaganda and
terror, which Friedrich and Brzezinski believe
to be closely connected.
Terror may be enforced with arrests and executions
of dissenters, but it can also take more subtle
forms, such as the threat of losing one’s
job, social stigma and defamation.
“Terror” can refer to any widespread method
used to intimidate people into submission
as a matter of daily life.
According to Friedrich and Brzezinski, the
most effective terror is invisible to the
people it affects.
They simply develop a habit of acting in a
conformist manner and not questioning authority,
without necessarily being aware that this
is what they are doing.
Thus, terror creates a society dominated by
apparent consensus, where the vast majority
of the population appears to support the government.
Propaganda is then used to maintain this appearance
of popular consent.
Totalitarian propaganda is one of the features
that distinguishes totalitarian regimes as
modern forms of government and separates them
from older autocracies, since a totalitarian
government holds complete control over all
means of communication (not only public communication
such as the mass media, but also private communication
such as letters and telephone calls, which
are strictly monitored).
The methods of propaganda were very similar
in the Stalinist USSR and in Nazi Germany.
Both Joseph Goebbels and Soviet propagandists
sought to demonize their enemies and present
a picture of a united people standing behind
its leader to confront foreign threats.
In both cases there was no attempt to convey
complex ideological nuances to the masses,
with the message being instead about a simplistic
struggle between good and evil.
Both Nazi and Stalinist regimes produced two
very different sets of propaganda – one
for internal consumption and one for potential
sympathizers in other countries.
And both regimes would sometimes radically
change their propaganda line as they made
peace with a former enemy or got into a war
with a former ally.
Yet, paradoxically, a totalitarian government’s
complete control over communications renders
that government highly misinformed.
With no way for anyone to express criticism,
the dictator has no way of knowing how much
support he actually has among the general
populace.
With all government policies always declared
successful in propaganda, officials are unable
to determine what actually worked and what
didn’t.
Both Stalinism and Nazism suffered from this
problem, especially during the war between
them.
As the war turned against Germany, there was
growing opposition to Hitler’s rule, including
within the ranks of the military, but Hitler
was never aware of this until it was too late
(see: 20 July plot).
In 1948, during the early days of the Berlin
Blockade, the Soviet leadership apparently
believed that the population of West Berlin
was sympathetic to Soviet Communism and that
they would request to join the Soviet zone.
Given enough time, the gap between real public
opinion and what the totalitarian government
believes about public opinion can grow so
wide that the government is no longer able
to even produce effective propaganda, because
it does not know what the people actually
think and so it does not know what to tell
them.
Friedrich and Brzezinski refer to this as
the “ritualization of propaganda”: the
totalitarian regime continues to produce propaganda
as a political ritual, with little real impact
on public opinion.
==== Arrests, executions and concentration
camps ====
The totalitarian use of mass arrests, executions
and concentration camps – also noted by
Arendt – was analyzed at length by Friedrich
and Brzezinski.
They hold that “totalitarian terror maintains,
in institutionalized form, the civil war that
originally produced the totalitarian movement
and by means of which the regime is able to
proceed with its program, first of social
disintegration and then of social reconstruction.”
Both Stalinism and Nazism saw themselves as
engaging in a life-or-death struggle against
implacable enemies.
But to declare that the struggle had been
won would have meant to declare that most
of the totalitarian features of the government
were no longer needed.
A secret police force, for instance, has no
reason to exist if there are no dangerous
traitors who need to be found.
Thus the struggle, or “civil war” against
internal enemies, must be institutionalized
and must continue indefinitely.
In the Stalinist USSR, the repressive apparatus
was eventually turned against members of the
Communist Party itself in the Great Purge
and the show trials that accompanied it.
Nazism, by contrast, had a much shorter lifespan
in power, and Nazi terror generally maintained
an outward focus, with the extermination of
the Jews always given top priority.
The Nazis did not turn inward towards purging
their own party except in a limited way on
two occasions (the Night of the Long Knives
and the aftermath of the 20 July plot).
The peak of totalitarian terror was reached
with the Nazi concentration camps.
These ranged from labor camps to extermination
camps, and they are described by Friedrich
and Brzezinski as aiming to “eliminate all
actual, potential, and imagined enemies of
the regime.”
As the field of Holocaust studies was still
in its early stages at the time of their writing,
they do not describe the conditions in detail,
but do refer to the camps as involving “extreme
viciousness.”
They also compare these camps with the Soviet
Gulag system, and highlight the use of concentration
camps as a method of punishment and execution
by Nazi and Stalinist regimes alike.
However, unlike Hannah Arendt, who held that
the Gulag camps served no economic purpose,
Friedrich and Brzezinski argue that they provided
an important source of cheap labor for the
Stalinist economy.
== Moshe Lewin and Ian Kershaw ==
=== Germany and Russia ===
The comparative study of Nazism and Stalinism
was carried further by other groups of scholars,
such as Moshe Lewin and Ian Kershaw together
with their collaborators.
Writing after the dissolution of the USSR,
Lewin and Kershaw take a longer historical
perspective and regard Nazism and Stalinism
not so much as examples of a new type of society
(like Arendt, Friedrich and Brzezinski did),
but more as historical “anomalies” – unusual
deviations from the typical path of development
that most industrial societies are expected
to follow.
Therefore, the task of comparing Nazism and
Stalinism is, to them, a task of explaining
why Germany and Russia (along with other countries)
deviated from the historical norm.
At the outset, Lewin and Kershaw identify
similarities between the historical situations
in Germany and Russia prior to the First World
War and during that war.
Both countries were ruled by authoritarian
monarchies, who were under pressure to make
concessions to popular demands.
Both countries had “powerful bureaucracies
and strong military traditions.”
Both had “powerful landowning classes,”
while also being in the process of rapid industrialization
and modernization.
And both countries had expansionist foreign
policies with a particular interest in Central
and Eastern Europe.
Lewin and Kershaw do not claim that these
factors made Stalinism or Nazism inevitable,
but rather that they help to explain why the
Stalinist and Nazi regimes developed similar
features.
=== Similarities and differences of the systems
===
Ian Kershaw admitted that Stalinism and Nazism
are comparable in “the nature and extent
of their inhumanity,” but noted that the
two regimes were different in a number of
aspects Lewin and Kershaw question the usefulness
of grouping the Stalinist and Nazi regimes
together under a “totalitarian” category,
saying that it remains an open question whether
the similarities between them are greater
or smaller than the differences.
In particular, they criticize what they see
as the ideologically-motivated attempt to
determine which regime killed more people,
saying that apologists of each regime are
trying to defend their side by claiming the
other was responsible for more deaths.
==== Personality cult ====
Lewin and Kershaw place the cult of personality
at the center of their comparison of Nazism
and Stalinism, writing that both regimes “represented
a new genre of political system centred upon
the artificial construct of a leadership cult
– the ‘heroic myth’ of the ‘great
leader’, no longer a king or emperor but
a ‘man of the people.”
With regard to Stalinism, they emphasize its
bureaucratic character, and its “merging
of the most modern with the most archaic traits”
by combining modern technology and the latest
methods of administration and propaganda with
the ancient practice of arbitrary rule by
a single man.
They compare this with the Prussian military
tradition in Germany, which had been called
“bureaucratic absolutism” in the eighteenth
century, and which played a significant role
in the organization of the Nazi state in the
twentieth century.Kershaw agrees with Mommsen
that there was a fundamental difference between
Nazism and Stalinism regarding the importance
of the leader.
Stalinism had an absolute leader, but he was
not essential.
He could be replaced by another.
Nazism, on the other hand, was a “classic
charismatic leadership movement,” defined
entirely by its leader.
Stalinism had an ideology which existed independently
of Stalin.
But for Nazism, “Hitler was ideological
orthodoxy” – Nazi ideals were by definition
whatever Hitler said they were.
In Stalinism, the bureaucratic apparatus was
the foundation of the system, while in Nazism,
the person of the leader was the foundation.Moshe
Lewin also focuses on the comparison between
the personality cults of Hitler and Stalin,
and their respective roles in Nazi Germany
and the Soviet Union.
He refers to them as the “Hitler myth”
and the “Stalin myth,” and argues that
they served different functions within their
two regimes.
The function of the “Hitler myth” was
to legitimize Nazi rule.
The function of the “Stalin myth” was
to legitimize not Soviet rule itself, but
Stalin’s leadership within the Party.
Stalin’s personality cult existed precisely
because Stalin knew that he was replaceable,
and feared that he might be replaced, and
so needed to bolster his authority as much
as possible.
While the “Hitler myth” was essential
to Nazi Germany, the “Stalin myth” was
essential only to Stalin, not to the Soviet
Union itself.
==== Intrinsic instability of totalitarian
systems ====
Together with fellow historian Hans Mommsen,
Lewin argues that the Stalinist and Nazi regimes
featured an “intrinsic structural contradiction”
which led to “inherent self-destructiveness”:
they depended on a highly organized state
bureaucracy which was trying to set up complex
rules and procedures for every aspect of life,
yet this bureaucracy was under the complete
personal control of a despot who made policy
decisions as he saw fit, routinely changing
his mind on major issues, without any regard
for the rules and institutions which his own
bureaucracy had set up.
The bureaucracy and the leader needed each
other, but also undermined each other with
their different priorities.
Mommsen sees this as being a much greater
problem in Nazi Germany than in Stalin’s
Soviet Union, as the Nazis inherited large
parts of the traditional German bureaucracy,
while the Soviets largely built their own
bureaucracy from the ground up.
He argues that many of the irrational features
of the Nazi regime – such as wasting resources
on exterminating undesirable populations instead
of using those resources in the war effort
– were caused by the dysfunction of the
Nazi state rather than by fanatical commitment
to Nazi ideology.
In accordance with the Führerprinzip, all
decisional power in the Nazi state ultimately
rested with Hitler.
But Hitler often issued only vague and general
directives, forcing other Nazi leaders lower
down in the hierarchy to guess what precisely
the Führer wanted.
This confusion produced competition between
Nazi officials, as each of them attempted
to prove that he was a more dedicated Nazi
than his rivals, by engaging in ever more
extreme policies.
This competition to please Hitler was, according
to Mommsen, the real cause of Nazi irrationality.
Hitler was aware of it, and deliberately encouraged
it out of a “social-darwinist conviction
that the best man would ultimately prevail.”
Mommsen argues that this represents a structural
difference between the regimes of Hitler and
Stalin.
In spite of its purges, Stalin’s regime
was more effective in building a stable bureaucracy,
such that it was possible for the system to
sustain itself and continue even without Stalin.
The Nazi regime, on the other hand, was much
more personalized and depended entirely on
Hitler, being unable to build any lasting
institutions.
==== Stalin and Hitler ====
Kershaw also saw major personal differences
between Stalin and Hitler and their respective
styles of rule.
He describes Stalin as “a committee man,
chief oligarch, man of the machine” and
a “creature of his party,” who came to
power only thanks to his party and his ability
to manipulate the levers of power within that
party.
Hitler, by contrast, came to power based on
his charisma and mass appeal, and in the Nazi
regime it was the leader that created the
party instead of the other way around.
According to Kershaw, “Stalin was a highly
interventionist dictator, sending a stream
of letters and directives determining or interfering
with policy,” while Hitler “was a non-interventionist
dictator as far as government administration
was concerned,” preferring to involve himself
in military affairs and plans for conquest
rather than the daily routine of government
work, and giving only broad verbal instructions
to his subordinates regarding civilian affairs,
which they were expected to translate into
policy.
Furthermore, although both regimes featured
all-pervasive cults of personality, there
was a qualitative difference between those
cults.
Stalin’s personality cult was “superimposed
upon the Marxist-Leninist ideology and Communist
Party,” and could be abandoned (or replaced
with a personality cult around some other
leader) without major changes to the regime.
On the other hand, “the ‘Hitler myth’
was structurally indispensable to, in fact
the very basis of, and scarcely distinguishable
from, the Nazi Movement and its Weltanschauung.”
The belief in the person of Adolf Hitler as
the unique savior of the German nation was
the very foundation of Nazism, to such an
extent that Nazism found it impossible to
even imagine a successor to Hitler.
Thus, in Kershaw’s analysis, Stalinism was
a fundamentally bureaucratic system while
Nazism was the embodiment of “charismatic
authority” as described by Max Weber.
Stalinism could exist without its leader.
Nazism could not.
== Rousso, Werth, and Burrin ==
The topic of comparisons between Nazism and
Stalinism was also studied in the 1990s and
2000s by historians Henry Rousso, Nicolas
Werth and Philippe Burrin.
=== The differences between Stalinism and
Nazism ===
Rousso defends the work of Carl Friedrich
by pointing out that Friedrich himself had
only said that Stalinism and Nazism were comparable,
not that they were identical.
Rousso also argues that the popularity of
the concept of totalitarianism (the way that
large numbers of people have come to routinely
refer to certain governments as “totalitarian”)
should be seen as evidence that the concept
is useful, that it really describes a specific
type of government which is different from
other dictatorships.
At the same time, however, Rousso notes that
the concept of totalitarianism is descriptive
rather than analytical: the regimes described
as totalitarian do not have a common origin
and did not arise in similar ways.
Nazism is unique among totalitarian regimes
in having taken power in “a country endowed
with an advanced industrial economy and with
a system of political democracy (and an even
older political pluralism).”
All other examples of totalitarianism (including
the Stalinist regime) took power, according
to Rousso, “in an agrarian economy, in a
poor society without a tradition of political
pluralism, not to mention democracy, and where
diverse forms of tyranny had traditionally
prevailed.”
He sees this as a weakness of the concept
of totalitarianism, because it merely describes
the similarities between Stalinism and Nazism
without dealing with the very different ways
they came to power.
On the other hand, Rousso agrees with Hannah
Arendt that “totalitarian regimes constitute
something new in regard to classical tyranny,
authoritarian regimes, or other forms of ancient
and medieval dictatorships,” and he says
that the main strength of the concept of totalitarianism
is the way it highlights this inherent novelty
of the regimes involved.
=== Conflict between the dictator and bureaucracy
===
Nicolas Werth and Philippe Burrin have worked
together on comparative assessments of Stalinism
and Nazism, with Werth covering the Stalinist
regime and Burrin covering Nazi Germany.
One of the topics they have studied is the
question of how much power the dictator really
held in the two regimes.
Werth identifies two main historiographical
approaches in the study of the Stalinist regime:
Those who emphasize the power and control
exercised by Joseph Stalin himself, attributing
most of the actions of the Soviet government
to deliberate plans and decisions made by
him, and those who argue that Stalin had no
pre-determined course of action in mind, that
he was reacting to events as they unfolded,
and that the Soviet bureaucracy had its own
agenda which often differed from Stalin’s
wishes.
Werth regards these as two mistaken extremes,
one making Stalin seem all-powerful, the other
making him seem like a weak dictator.
But he believes that the competing perspectives
are useful in drawing attention to the tension
between two different forms of organization
in the Stalinist USSR: an “administrative
system of command,” bureaucratic and resistant
to change but effective in running the Soviet
state, and the strategy of “running the
country in a crudely despotic way by Stalin
and his small cadre of directors.”
Thus, Werth agrees with Lewin that there was
an inherent conflict between the priorities
of the Soviet bureaucracy and Stalin’s accumulation
of absolute power in his own hands.
According to Werth, it was this unresolved
and unstated conflict that led to the Great
Purge and to the use of terror by Stalin’s
regime against its own party and state cadres.In
studying similar issues with regard to the
Nazi regime, Philippe Burrin draws attention
to the debate between the “Intentionalist”
and “Functionalist” schools of thought,
which dealt with the question of whether the
Nazi regime represented an extension of Hitler’s
autocratic will, faithfully obeying his wishes,
or whether it was an essentially chaotic and
uncontrollable system that functioned on its
own with little direct input from the Führer.
Like Kershaw and Lewin, Burrin says that the
relationship between the leader and his party’s
ideology was different in Nazism compared
to Stalinism: “One can rightly state that
Nazism cannot be dissociated from Hitlerism,
something that is difficult to affirm for
Bolshevism and Stalinism.”
Unlike Stalin, who inherited an existing system
with an existing ideology and presented himself
as the heir to the Leninist political tradition,
Hitler created both his movement and its ideology
by himself, claiming to be “someone sent
by Providence, a Messiah whom the German people
had been expecting for centuries, even for
two thousand years, as Heinrich Himmler enjoyed
saying.”
Thus, there could be no real conflict between
the Party and the leader in Nazi Germany,
because the Nazi Party’s entire reason for
existence was to support and follow Hitler.
However, there was a potential for division
between the leader and the state bureaucracy,
due to the way that Nazism came to power – as
part of an alliance with traditional conservative
elites, industrialists, and the army.
Unlike the USSR, Nazi Germany did not build
its own state, but rather inherited the state
machinery of the previous government.
This provided the Nazis with an immediate
supply of capable and experienced managers
and military commanders, but on the other
hand it also meant that the Nazi regime had
to rely on the cooperation of people who had
not been Nazis prior to Hitler’s rise to
power, and whose loyalty was questionable.
It was only during the war, when Nazi Germany
conquered large territories and had to create
Nazi administrations for them, that brand
new Nazi bureaucracies were created without
any input or participation from traditional
German elites.
This produced a surprising difference between
Nazism and Stalinism: When the Stalinist USSR
conquered territory, it created smaller copies
of itself and installed them as the governments
of the occupied countries.
When Nazi Germany conquered territory, on
the other hand, it did not attempt to create
copies of the German government back home.
Instead, it experimented with different power
structures and policies, often reflecting
a “far more ample Nazification of society
than what the balance of power authorized
in the Reich.”
=== The role of terror and violence ===
Another major topic investigated by Werth
and Burrin was the violence and terror employed
by the regimes of Hitler and Stalin.
Werth reports that the Stalinist USSR underwent
an “extraordinary brutalization of the relations
between state and society” for the purpose
of rapid modernization and industrialization,
to “gain one hundred years in one decade,
and to metamorphose the country into a great
industrial power.”
This transformation was accomplished at the
cost of massive violence and a sociopolitical
regression into what Werth calls “military-feudal
exploitation.”
The types of violence employed by the Stalinist
regime included loss of civil rights, mass
arrests, deportations of entire ethnic groups
from one part of the USSR to another, forced
labor in the Gulag, mass executions (especially
during the Great Terror of 1937-38), and most
of all the great famine of 1932-33, known
as the Holodomor.
All levels of Soviet society were affected
by Stalinist repression, from the top to the
bottom.
At the top, high-ranking members of the Communist
Party were arrested and executed under the
claim that they had plotted against Stalin
(and in some cases they were forced to confess
to imaginary crimes in show trials).
At the bottom, the peasantry suffered the
Holodomor famine (especially in Ukraine),
and even outside of the famine years they
were faced with very high grain quotas.Werth
identifies four categories of people that
became the targets of Stalinist violence in
the USSR.
He lists them from smallest to largest.
The first and smallest group consisted of
many of Stalin’s former comrades-in-arms,
who had participated in the revolution and
were known as “Old Bolsheviks.”
They were dangerous to Stalin because they
had known him before his rise to power and
could expose the many false claims made by
his personality cult.
The second group consisted of mid-level Communist
Party officials, who were subject to mass
arrests and executions in the late 1930s,
particularly during the Great Purge.
Eliminating them served a dual purpose: It
helped Stalin to centralize power in the Kremlin
(as opposed to regional centers), and it also
provided him with “corrupt officials”
that he could blame for earlier repressions
and unpopular policies.
Werth draws parallels between this and the
old Tsarist tradition of blaming “bad bureaucrats”
– rather than the Tsar – for unpopular
government actions.
The third group was made up of ordinary citizens
from all walks of life who resorted to petty
crime in order to provide for themselves in
the face of worsening living standards (for
example by taking home some wheat from the
fields or tools from the factory).
This type of petty crime became very widespread,
and was often punished as if it were intentional
sabotage motivated by political opposition
to the USSR.
The fourth and largest category consisted
of ethnic groups that were subject to deportation,
famine, or arbitrary arrests under the suspicion
of being collectively disloyal to Stalin or
to the Soviet state.
This included the Holodomor famine directed
at the Ukrainians, the deportation of ethnic
groups suspected of pro-German sympathies
(such as the Volga Germans, the Crimean Tatars,
the Chechens and others), and eventually also
persecution of ethnic Jews, especially as
Stalin grew increasingly antisemitic near
the end of his life.Burrin’s study of violence
carried out by the Nazi regime begins with
the observation that “violence is at the
heart of Nazism,” and that Nazi violence
is “established as a doctrine and exalted
in speech.”
This marks a point of difference between Nazism
and Stalinism, according to Burrin.
In Stalinism, there was a gulf between ideology
and reality when it came to violence.
The Soviet regime continuously denied that
it was repressive, proclaimed itself a defender
of peace, and sought to conceal all the evidence
to the contrary.
In Nazism, on the other hand, “doctrine
and reality were fused from the start.”
Nazism not only practiced violent repression
and war, but advocated it in principle as
well, considering war to be a positive force
in human civilization and openly seeking ”living
space” and the domination of the European
continent by ethnic Germans.Burrin identifies
three motivations for Nazi violence: political
repression, exclusion and social repression,
and racial politics.
The first of these, political repression,
is common in many dictatorships.
The Nazis aimed to eliminate their real or
imagined political opponents, first in the
Reich and later in the occupied territories
during the war.
Some of these opponents were executed, while
others were imprisoned in concentration camps.
The first targets of political repression,
immediately after Hitler’s rise to power
in 1933, were the parties of the Left in general
and the Communists in particular.
Then, after the mid-1930s, repression was
extended to members of the clergy, and later
to the conservative opposition as well (especially
after the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler
in 1944).
The death penalty was used on a wide scale,
even before the war.
During the war, political repression was greatly
expanded both inside Germany and especially
in the newly occupied territories.
Political prisoners in the concentration camps
numbered only about 25,000 at the beginning
of the war.
By January 1945 they had swelled to 714,211
– most of them non-Germans accused of plotting
against the Reich.The second type of Nazi
violence, motivated by exclusion and social
repression, was the violence aimed at purging
German society of people whose lifestyle was
considered incompatible with the social norms
of the Nazi regime (even if the people involved
were racially pure and able-bodied).
Such people were divided into two categories:
homosexuals and “asocials.”
The “asocials” were only vaguely defined,
and included “Gypsies, tramps, beggars,
prostitutes, alcoholics, the jobless who refused
any employment, and those who left their work
frequently or for no reason.”The third and
final type of Nazi violence, by far the most
extensive, was violence motivated by Nazi
racial policies.
This was aimed both inward, to cleanse the
“Aryan race” of “degenerate” elements
and life unworthy of life, as well as outward,
to seek the extermination of “inferior races”.
Germans considered physically or mentally
unfit were among the first victims.
One of the first laws of the Nazi regime mandated
the forced sterilization of people suffering
from physical handicaps or who had psychiatric
conditions deemed to be hereditary.
Later, sterilization was replaced by murder
of the mentally ill and of people with severe
disabilities, as part of a “euthanasia”
program called Aktion T4.
Burrin notes that this served no practical
political purpose – the people being murdered
could not have possibly been political opponents
of the regime – so the motivation was purely
a matter of racial ideology.
The most systematic and by far the most large-scale
acts of Nazi violence, however, were directed
at “racially inferior” non-German populations.
As laid out in Generalplan Ost, the Nazis
wished to eliminate most of the Slavic populations
of Eastern Europe, partly through deportation
and partly through murder, in order to secure
land for ethnic German settlement and colonization.
But even more urgently, the Nazis wished to
exterminate the Jews of Europe, whom they
regarded as the implacable racial enemy of
the Germans.
This culminated in the Holocaust, the Nazi
genocide of the Jews.
Unlike in the case of all other target populations,
the Jews were to be exterminated completely,
with no individual exceptions for any reason.
== Geyer and Fitzpatrick ==
In Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism
Compared, editors Michael Geyer and Sheila
Fitzpatrick disputed the concept of totalitarianism,
noting that the term entered political discourse
first as a term of self-description by the
Italian Fascists and was only later used as
a framework to compare Nazi Germany with the
Soviet Union.
They argued that the totalitarian states were
not as monolithic or as ideology-driven as
they seemed.
Geyer and Fitzpatrick describe Nazi Germany
and the Stalinist USSR as “immensely powerful,
threatening, and contagious dictatorships”
who “shook the world in their antagonism.”
Without calling them totalitarian, they identified
their common features, including genocide,
an all-powerful party, a charismatic leader,
and pervasive invasion of privacy.
However, they argue that Stalinism and Nazism
did not represent a new and unique type of
government, but rather that they can be placed
in the broader context of the turn to dictatorship
in Europe in the interwar period.
The reason they appear extraordinary is because
they were the “most prominent, most hard-headed,
and most violent” of the European dictatorships
of the 20th century.
They are comparable because of their “shock
and awe” and sheer ruthlessness, but underneath
superficial similarities they were fundamentally
different and that “when it comes to one-on-one
comparison, the two societies and regimes
may as well have hailed from different worlds.”According
to Geyer and Fitzpatrick, the similarities
between Nazism and Stalinism stem from the
fact that they were both “ideology driven”
and sought to subordinate all aspects of life
to their respective ideologies.
The differences stem from the fact that their
ideologies were opposed to each other and
regarded each other as enemies.
Another major difference is that Stalin created
a stable and long-lasting regime, while Nazi
Germany had a “short-lived, explosive nature.”
Notably, the stable state created by Stalinism
was based on an entirely new elite, while
Nazism, despite having the support of the
traditional elite, failed to achieve stability.However,
the two regimes did borrow ideas from one
another, especially regarding propaganda techniques
(most of all in architecture and cinema),
but also in terms of state surveillance and
antisemitism.
At the same time, they both vigorously denied
borrowing anything from each other.
While their methods of propaganda were similar,
the content was different.
For instance, Soviet wartime propaganda revolved
around the idea of resisting imperial aggression,
while Nazi propaganda was about wars of racial
conquest.
Geyer and Fitzpatrick also take note of the
fact that both Stalinism and Nazism sought
to create a New Man, an “entirely modern,
illiberal, and self-fashioned personage,”
even though they had different visions about
what being a “New Man” would mean.
=== Biopolitics, eugenics and social engineering
===
Among the other authors contributing to the
volume edited by Geyer and Fitzpatrick, David
Hoffmann and Annette Timm discuss biopolitics
and the pro-natalist policies of the Nazi
and Stalinist regimes.
Both governments were highly concerned over
low fertility rates in their respective populations,
and applied extensive and intrusive social
engineering techniques to increase the number
of births.
Reproductive policies in the Soviet Union
and Nazi Germany were administered through
their health care systems—both regimes saw
health care as a key pillar to their designs
to develop a new society.
While the Soviet Union had to design a public
health care system from scratch, Nazi Germany
built upon the pre-existing public health
care system in Germany that had existed since
1883, when Otto von Bismarck's legislation
had created the world's first national public
health care program.
The Nazis centralized the German health care
system in order to enforce Nazi ideological
components upon it, and replaced existing
voluntary and government welfare agencies
with new ones that were devoted to racial
hygiene and other components of Nazi ideology.The
Nazi and Stalinist attempt to control family
size was not unique, as many other European
states practiced eugenics at this time, and
the Stalinist and Nazi ideals were vastly
different.
In fact, they had more in common with third
parties than with each other: Nazi Germany’s
policies were rather similar to those in Scandinavia
at the time, while the USSR’s policies resembled
those in Catholic countries.The common point
between Nazi and Stalinist practices was the
connection of reproduction policies with the
ideological goals of the state — "part of
the project of a rational, hypermodern vision
for the re-organization of society".
There were nevertheless substantial differences
between the two regimes' approaches.
Stalin's Soviet Union never officially supported
eugenics as the Nazis did—the Soviet government
called eugenics a "fascist science"—although
there were in fact Soviet eugenicists.
The two regimes also had different approaches
to the relationship between family and paid
labor—Nazism promoted the male single-breadwinner
family while Stalinism promoted the dual-wage-earner
household.
=== Mass violence, xenophobia and persecution
of ethnic minorities ===
In another contribution to the same volume,
Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth discuss
the topic of mass violence, and the way that
it was used by both Stalinism and Nazism.
Both Stalin's Soviet Union and Nazi Germany
were violent societies where mass violence
was accepted by the state, such as in the
Great Terror of 1937 to 1938 in the Soviet
Union and the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and
its occupied territories in World War II.Both
the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany
utilized internment camps led by agents of
the state – the NKVD in the Soviet Union
and the SS in Nazi Germany.
They also both engaged in violence against
minorities based on xenophobia – the xenophobic
violence of the Nazis was outspoken but rationalized
as being against "asocial" elements while
the xenophobic violence of the Stalinists
was disguised as being against "anti-soviet",
"counter-revolutionary" and "socially harmful"
elements – a term which often targeted diaspora
nationalities.
The Stalinist Soviet Union established "special
settlements" where the "socially harmful"
or "socially dangerous" who included ex-convicts,
criminals, vagrants, the disenfranchised and
"declassed elements" were expelled to.
These "special settlements" were largely in
Siberia, the far north, the Urals, or other
inhospitable territories.
In July 1933, the Soviet Union made a mass
arrest of 5000 Romani people effectively on
the basis of their ethnicity, who were deported
that month to the "special settlements" in
Western Siberia.
In 1935, the Soviet Union arrested 160,000
homeless people and juvenile delinquents and
sent many of them to NKVD labor colonies where
they did forced labor.The Nazi regime was
founded upon a racialist view of politics
and envisioned the deportation or extermination
of the majority of the population of Eastern
Europe in order to open up “living space”
for ethnic German settlers.
This was mainly intended to be carried out
after an eventual German victory in the war,
but steps had already started being taken
while the war was still ongoing.
For instance, by the end of 1942, the Nazis
had deported 365,000 Poles and Jews from their
original homes in western Poland (now German-annexed)
and into the General Government.
A further 194,000 Poles were internally displaced
(not deported to another territory but expelled
from their homes).
The Nazis had also deported 100,000 persons
from Alsace, Lorraine, and Luxembourg, as
well as 54,000 Slovenians.Stalinism in practice
in the Soviet Union pursued ethnic deportations
from the 1930s to the early 1950s, with a
total of 3 million Soviet citizens being subjected
to ethnic-based resettlement.
The first major ethnic deportation took place
from December 1932 to January 1933, during
which some 60,000 Kuban Cossacks were collectively
criminally charged as a whole with association
with resistance to socialism and affiliation
with Ukrainian nationalism.
From 1935 to 1936, the Soviet Union deported
Soviet citizens of Polish and German origins
living in the western districts of Ukraine,
and Soviet citizens of Finnish origins living
on the Finland-Soviet Union border.
These deportations from 1935 to 1936 affected
tens of thousands of families.
From September to October 1937, Soviet authorities
deported the Korean minority from its Far
Eastern region that bordered on Japanese-controlled
Korea.
Soviet authorities claimed the territory was
"rich soil for the Japanese to till" – implying
a Soviet suspicion that the Koreans could
potentially join forces with the Japanese
to unite the land with Japanese-held Korea.
Over 170,000 Koreans were deported to remote
parts of Soviet Central Asia from September
to October 1937.
These ethnically-based deportations reflected
a new trend in Stalinist policy, a "Soviet
xenophobia" based on ideological grounds that
suspected that these people were susceptible
to foreign influence, and which was also based
on a resurgent Russian nationalism.After Nazi
Germany declared war on the Soviet Union in
1941, the Soviet Union initiated another major
round of ethnic deportations.
The first group targeted were Soviet Germans.
Between September 1941 and February 1942,
900,000 people – over 70 percent of the
entire Soviet German community – were deported
to Kazakhstan and Siberia in mass operations.
A second wave of mass deportations took place
between November 1943 and May 1944, in which
Soviet authorities expelled six ethnic groups
(the Balkars, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Ingush,
Karachai, and Kalmyks) that together numbered
900,000.
There were also smaller-scale operations involving
ethnic cleansing of diaspora minorities during
and after World War II, in which tens of thousands
of Crimean Bulgarians, Greeks, Iranians, Khemshils,
Kurds, and Meskhetian Turks were deported
from the Black Sea and Transcaucasian border
regions.Two ethnic groups that were specifically
targeted for persecution by Stalin's Soviet
Union were the Chechens and the Ingush.
Unlike the other nationalities that could
be suspected of connection to foreign states
which shared their ethnic background, the
Chechens and the Ingush were completely indigenous
people of the Soviet Union.
Rather than being accused of collaboration
with foreign enemies, these two ethnic groups
were considered to have cultures which did
not fit in with Soviet culture – such as
accusing Chechens of being associated with
“banditism” – and the authorities claimed
that the Soviet Union had to intervene in
order to “remake” and “reform” these
cultures.
In practice this meant heavily armed punitive
operations carried out against Chechen “bandits”
that failed to achieve forced assimilation,
culminating in an ethnic cleansing operation
in 1944, which involved the arrests and deportation
of over 500,000 Chechens and Ingush from the
Caucasus to Central Asia and Kazakhstan.
The deportations of the Chechens and Ingush
also involved the outright massacre of thousands
of people, and severe conditions placed upon
the deportees – they were put in unsealed
train cars, with little to no food for a four-week
journey during which many died from hunger
and exhaustion.The main difference between
Nazi and Stalinist deportations was in their
purpose: while Nazi Germany sought ethnic
cleansing to allow settlement by Germans into
the cleansed territory, Stalin's Soviet Union
pursued ethnic cleansing in order to remove
minorities from strategically important areas.
== Other scholars ==
Other historians and political scientists
have also made comparisons between Nazism
and Stalinism as part of their work.
Stanley Payne, in his work on fascism, said
that although the Nazi Party was ideologically
opposed to communism, Adolf Hitler and other
Nazi leaders frequently expressed recognition
that only in Soviet Russia were their revolutionary
and ideological counterparts to be found.
Both placed a major emphasis on creating a
"party-army," with the regular armed forces
controlled by the party.
In the case of the Soviet Union this was done
through the political commissars, while Nazi
Germany introduced a roughly equivalent leadership
role for "National Socialist Guidance Officers"
in 1943.François Furet, in his work on communism,
noted that Hitler personally admired Soviet
leader Joseph Stalin, and on numerous occasions
publicly praised Stalin for seeking to purify
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of
Jewish influences, especially by purging Jewish
communists such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev,
Lev Kamenev and Karl Radek.Richard Pipes draws
attention to Stalin and his antisemitism in
a parallel with Nazi antisemitism.
He notes that soon after the 1917 October
Revolution, the Soviet Union undertook practices
to break up Jewish culture, religion and language.
In the fall of 1918, the Soviet Communist
Party set up the Jewish section Yevsektsiya,
with a stated mission of “destruction of
traditional Jewish life, the Zionist movement,
and Hebrew culture.”
By 1919, the Bolsheviks began to confiscate
Jewish properties, Hebrew schools, libraries,
books, and synagogues in accordance with newly
imposed anti-religious laws, turning their
buildings into "Communist centers, clubs or
restaurants."
After Joseph Stalin rose to power, antisemitism
continued to be endemic throughout Russia,
although official Soviet policy condemned
it.
On August 12, 1952, Stalin's personal antisemitism
became more visible, as he ordered the execution
of the most prominent Yiddish authors in the
Soviet Union, in an event known as the "Night
of the Murdered Poets".
Shortly before his death, Stalin also organized
the anti-Semitic campaign known as the Doctors'
plot.
A number of research institutions are focusing
on the analysis of fascism/Nazism and Stalinism/communism,
and the comparative approach, including the
Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on
Totalitarianism in Germany, the Institute
for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in the
Czech Republic and the Institute of National
Remembrance in Poland.
In comparing the deaths caused by both Stalin
and Hitler's policies, some historians have
asserted that archival evidence released after
the collapse of the USSR confirms that Stalin
did not kill more people than Hitler.
American historian Timothy D. Snyder, for
example, after assessing such data, says that
while the Nazi regime killed approximately
11 million non-combatants (which rises to
above 12 million if "foreseeable deaths from
deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration
camps are included"), Stalin's deliberately
killed about 6 million (rising to 9 million
if foreseeable deaths arising from policies
are taken into account).
Australian historian and archival researcher
Stephen G. Wheatcroft posits that "The Stalinist
regime was consequently responsible for about
a million purposive killings, and through
its criminal neglect and irresponsibility
it was probably responsible for the premature
deaths of about another two million more victims
amongst the repressed population, i.e. in
the camps, colonies, prisons, exile, in transit
and in the POW camps for Germans.
These are clearly much lower figures than
those for whom Hitler's regime was responsible."
Wheatcroft also says that, unlike Hitler,
Stalin's "purposive killings" fit more closely
into the category of "execution" than "murder",
given he thought the accused were indeed guilty
of crimes against the state and insisted on
documentation, whereas Hitler simply wanted
to kill Jews and communists because of who
they were, and insisted on no documentation
and was indifferent at even a pretence of
legality for these actions.Kristen R. Ghodsee,
an ethnographer of post-Cold War Eastern Europe,
contends that the efforts to institutionalize
the "double genocide thesis", or the moral
equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race
murder) and the victims of communism (class
murder), and in particular the recent push
at the beginning of the global financial crisis
for commemoration of the latter in Europe,
can be seen as the response by economic and
political elites to fears of a leftist resurgence
in the face of devastated economies and extreme
inequalities in both the East and West as
the result of neoliberal capitalism.
She notes that any discussion of the achievements
under communism, including literacy, education,
women’s rights, and social security is usually
silenced, and any discourse on the subject
of communism is focused almost exclusively
on Stalin's crimes and the "double genocide
thesis", an intellectual paradigm summed up
as such: "1) any move towards redistribution
and away from a completely free market is
seen as communist; 2) anything communist inevitably
leads to class murder; and 3) class murder
is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust."
By linking all leftist and socialist ideals
to the excesses of Stalinism, Ghodsee concludes,
the elites in the West hope to discredit and
marginalize all political ideologies that
could "threaten the primacy of private property
and free markets."The comparison of Stalinism
and Nazism remains a neglected field of academic
study.
== In political discourse ==
The comparison of Nazism and Stalinism has
long provoked political controversy, and it
led to the historians' dispute within Germany
in the 1980s.In the 1920s, the Social Democratic
Party of Germany (SPD), under the leadership
of Chancellor Hermann Müller, adopted the
view that "red equals brown", i.e. that the
communists and Nazis posed an equal danger
to liberal democracy.
In 1930, Kurt Schumacher said that the two
movements enabled each other.
He argued that the Communist Party of Germany,
which was staunchly Stalinist, were "red-painted
Nazis."
This comparison was mirrored by the social
fascism theory advanced by the Soviet government
and the Comintern (including the Communist
Party of Germany), which accused social democracy
of enabling fascism and went as far as to
call social democrats "social fascists."
After the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was
announced, The New York Times published an
editorial arguing that "Hitlerism is brown
communism, Stalinism is red fascism."Marxist
theories of fascism have seen fascism as a
form of reaction to socialism and a feature
of capitalism.
Several modern historians have tried to pay
more attention to the economic, political
and ideological differences between these
two regimes than to their similarities.The
2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience
and Communism, initiated by the Czech government
and signed by figures such as Václav Havel,
called for "a common approach regarding crimes
of totalitarian regimes, inter alia Communist
regimes" and for
reaching an all-European understanding that
both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes
each to be judged by their own terrible merits
to be destructive in their policies of systematically
applying extreme forms of terror, suppressing
all civic and human liberties, starting aggressive
wars and, as an inseparable part of their
ideologies, exterminating and deporting whole
nations and groups of population; and that
as such they should be considered to be the
main disasters, which blighted the 20th century.
The Communist Party of Greece opposes the
Prague Declaration and has criticized "the
new escalation of the anti-communist hysteria
led by the EU council, the European Commission
and the political staff of the bourgeois class
in the European Parliament."
The Communist Party of Britain opined that
the Prague Declaration "is a rehash of the
persistent attempts by reactionary historians
to equate Soviet Communism and Hitlerite Fascism,
echoing the old slanders of British authors
George Orwell and Robert Conquest."The 2008
documentary film The Soviet Story, commissioned
by the Union for Europe of the Nations group
in the European Parliament, published archival
records which listed thousands of German Jews
who were arrested in the Soviet Union by the
NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs)
from 1937 to 1941 and handed over to Gestapo
or SS officials in Germany.
These German Jews had originally sought asylum
in the USSR.
The documentary film accuses Stalin's regime
of being an accomplice in Hitler's Holocaust
by arresting these asylum seekers and sending
them back to Germany.Since 2009, the European
Union has officially commemorated the European
Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism
and Nazism, proclaimed by the European Parliament
in 2008 and endorsed by the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2009,
and officially known as the Black Ribbon Day
in some countries (including Canada).The former
President of the European Parliament and Christian
Democratic Union member, Hans-Gert Pöttering,
argued that "both totalitarian systems (Stalinism
and Nazism) are comparable and terrible."In
some Eastern European countries the denial
of both Nazi and Communist crimes has been
explicitly outlawed, and Czech foreign minister
Karel Schwarzenberg has argued that "there
is a fundamental concern here that totalitarian
systems be measured by the same standard."
However, the European Commission rejected
calls for similar EU-wide legislation, due
to the lack of consensus among member states.A
statement adopted by Russia's legislature
said that comparisons of Nazism and Stalinism
are "blasphemous towards all of the anti-fascist
movement veterans, Holocaust victims, concentration
camp prisoners and tens of millions of people
... who sacrificed their lives for the sake
of the fight against the Nazis' anti-human
racial theory."British journalist and Labour
Party (UK) aide Seumas Milne posits that the
impact of the post-Cold War narrative that
Stalin and Hitler were twin evils, and therefore
Communism is as monstrous as Nazism, "has
been to relativise the unique crimes of Nazism,
bury those of colonialism and feed the idea
that any attempt at radical social change
will always lead to suffering, killing and
failure."
== 
See also ==
The Soviet Story
Bloodlands
