I know, I know, my thoughts exactly: Do we need another book about Hitler and Stalin? This review seems thoroughly convinced of that:

The huge books about war and the dictators keep coming, as if the historians were queuing up to dump their slabs of learning on a grave. We should be grateful. The sheer weight of these volumes, to say nothing of their weighty research, keeps the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin trapped in the tomb.

None the less, a reader facing yet another tome is bound to ask whether there is much left to be said about those two monsters. But a few pages of Richard Overy's new book are enough to remove doubt. This is a superb work, comprehensive and written with rare fire and intelligence.

 

Like many good historians, Overy was compelled to write by a sense of having been misled. He was taught, not so long ago, that the reason why so many millions obeyed and worshipped Hitler and Stalin was a simple one - fear of state terror. Overy sets out to show that this explanation is hopelessly crude.

 

Fear of the penalties for protest was important, of course, but both regimes drew wide consent from the majority who were neither active dissenters (a tiny fraction) nor party enthusiasts. More broadly, the chaos of the Twenties left both populations feeling that it was better to be 'pro' whatever the leadership did than 'anti', and that social unity mattered more than the right to criticise.

 

Hitler and Stalin took over societies already riddled with fear of the future, with paranoia about conspiracies and with hatred of 'others' expressed in murderous language. Both dictatorships were able to replace the notion of moral and legal absolutes with 'historical absolutes': the idea that law must be subordinated to the 'iron laws' of development, whether Marxist-Leninist or racism. Dictatorship flourished in a climate of perpetual emergency. 'The moral universe... made the state's crimes explicable not as crimes but as necessary precautions to prevent a greater injustice.' At the end of this road stood Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, who was outraged to be accused of theft at his postwar trial but showed no remorse for murdering hundreds of thousands of human beings.

 

Overy asks what made the two regimes similar and what made them different. He wastes no time on the old 'equivalence' argument that Hitler and Stalin were both totalitarian psychopaths who killed millions and were therefore as bad as each other. Their differences were very real. Constantly, Overy contrasts the universalism of Stalin's utopia, aimed at 'an equal and happy future', with Hitler's vision reserved for the Germanic race alone. But he uses this contrast as an analytic tool, not as mitigation for Stalin's crimes.

 

In the same way, he is not saying that it was better to be arrested by the NKVD than by the Gestapo when he notes: 'It is the utterly lawless character of state repression in Germany by the end of the dictatorship that makes the chief difference between the Soviet and German security systems'.

 

His point is that the Stalinist bureaucracy, which kept up at least the pretence of courts with judges, was in many ways a more controllable and versatile apparatus than the Nazi machine.

 

This difference was decisive for the outcome of the gigantic war which began in 1941 (and cost the lives of more than 11 million soldiers in less than four years). Here, Overy challenges received ideas. The notion of the Soviet Union's 'infinite resources' is misleading. After the conquest of the western USSR in 1941, Germany controlled far greater supplies of manpower, production and raw materials.

 

Stalin won for three main reasons. First, because the Red Army simply outfought the Wehrmacht with better strategy and tactics. Second, because Soviet central control of the economy was more effective; the Soviet Union overtook Germany in artillery and tank production in the critical year of 1942-3. Third, Stalin became more aware of his own limitations as the war went on and relied increasingly on the judgment of trusted generals. Hitler, in contrast, grew more convinced of his own genius and by 1945 was interfering in almost every military decision.

 

This version makes the ultimate Soviet victory even more impressive. It also undermines the 'weak dictatorship' school of thought, which has tried to deconstruct the notion of two all-powerful dictators. Stalin and Hitler delegated authority, but both, Overy insists, retained almost absolute power to intervene at any level. The difference was that Soviet central control was more flexible. The German system was too rigid to mobilise resources quickly (but the belief that the Nazis refused to conscript women for war work is a myth).

 

But the resemblances are inescapable. Both tyrannies relied on a desperate ideology of do-or-die confrontation. Both were obsessed by battle imagery: 'The dictatorships were military metaphors, founded to fight political war.' And despite the rhetoric about a fate-struggle between socialism and capitalism, the two economic systems converged strongly. Stalin's Russia permitted a substantial private sector, while Nazi Germany became rapidly dominated by state direction and state-owned industries.

 

In a brilliant passage, Overy compares the experience of two economic defectors. Steel magnate Fritz Thyssen fled to Switzerland because he believed that Nazi planning was 'Bolshevising' Germany. Factory manager Victor Kravchenko defected in 1943 because he found that class privilege and the exploitation of labour in Stalinist society were no better than the worst excesses of capitalism.

 

As Overy says, much that the two men did was pointless. Why camps? Prisons would have held all their dangerous opponents Who really needed slave labour, until the war? What did that colossal surplus of cruelty and terror achieve for the regimes? 'Violence was... regarded as redemptive, saving society from imaginary enemies.' Both dictators relied on a cult of science, social or biological. Both, above all, created a stupefying gap between what anyone could see was happening and what was proclaimed to be happening. But most people preferred to believe rather than to see.

 

It is the memory of that deception which still, generations later, darkens our hopes of constructing a future through politics.

 

(The Guardian/Observer)