Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock - Book Report/Review Example

Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives Speaking from a strictly ideological standpoint, fascism and communism are on opposite ends of the political spectrum. This, however, does not explain exactly how the two people responsible for the most deaths in the 20th century, Hitler and Stalin, subscribed to ideologies that are supposedly inherently opposite of each other. Logic would dictate that regimes which are supposedly so different from one another would result in different outcomes. If there is one thing that we can take away from this, it is that the real world outcomes of ideologies do not match what they are supposed to be in theory. This subject is covered in detail and in depth in the book Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. The book does not necessarily attempt to say that both Hitler and Stalin might as well have been the same person; the subtitle is Parallel Lives, and parallel lines do not meet our merge. The introduction of the book makes mention of an attempt by certain German historians who attempted to show how Stalin was just as bad as Hitler. He, of course, might have been, but obviously history with an agenda is not going to be unbiased. These historians were simply attempting to quasi-apologize for Germany’s role in WWII and the Holocaust by pointing out how the world was not any better off by having Stalin in power at the end of WWII. Instead, author Alan Bullock shows similarities in Stalin’s and Hitler’s lives, as well as the dissimilarities. As an author and historian without an agenda, Bullock’s book attempts to show how we can learn more about more men, their ideas, and the reigns by examining, comparing, and analyzing both of them objectively. An interesting aspect of both Hitler and Stalin was that they both felt that they were creating an ideal state, and that a lot of national pride was behind their motivations. If there is one common thread throughout most of history, it is that rulers who eventually are successful in their reign are more remembered more fondly than rulers who are overthrown. This was their justification for their atrocities to an extent. As Bullock states, “History would justify and forgive them, as it had forgiven their predecessors—provided they were successful” (343). We can even make this comparison between Hitler and Stalin; while they both were responsible for the deaths of millions of people, Hitler is generally considered by the public at large to be the worst dictator ever. Consider the use of images of Hitler and the Nazi party in edgy humor. These images evoke strong reactions in people, though the same cannot be said for Stalin and his Communist party unless they had a personal experience with Russia, Stalin’s government, or other Communist states. While historians might hold Hitler and Stalin in equal regard, it is clear that Hitler is generally considered the worse of the two by non-historians. As was mentioned, they justified their means for what they saw as their eventual ends, of which both were similar. They both wished to raise their countries out of their current difficulties and turn them into powerful and respected nations: Hitler saw himself as called on by Providence to rescue the German people from the humiliation of defeat…to restore them to their rightful historic position as a master race…Stalin saw his mission as ending the centuries-old backwardness of Russia, turning a peasant society into a modern industrialized country and at the same time creating the first socialist state in the world (343). Both of these men felt as though they were called upon by history and the world in general to blaze the path into the future. Stalin in specific felt that not only was he called upon to shape the future, but he had discovered the formula that had shaped the past in Marxism-Leninism. By recognizing the patterns of the past, Stalin thought that he could then turn around and use this to shape the future. This makes sense to a certain extent, but it does meet with a few logical problems. First, it is most likely a fallacy to thin that any pattern from the past could shape the future as well. If there has been one trend that can be pointed to in history, it is that things change, and the way that people consider governments and themselves changes as well. The difficulty in attempting to locate a pattern in history is that the only recognizable pattern is that things change. There really isn’t any way to predict what will happen, especially considering that the communist government of Russia failed and has been replaced. Stalin could not have predicted that with his model. Both Hitler and Stalin felt that not only were they in particular meant to have a large impact on the history of the world, but they were born at a time that was particular crucial in the history of the world as well: “Seeing himself in this perspective of world history, Hitler believed he had been born at a similarly critical time…the Nazis had the comparable task of replacing the dying civilization of the West” (349). This is, of course, probably more of a matter of ego; anybody with any amount of power will probably come to the conclusion that they are at a historically momentous time. However, the thing to consider is whether or not there has ever been a tie period that was less important historically. Civilizations rise and fall all the time throughout history. History has gone through so many drastic changes that it’s not really possible to state that one period or specific time has been more important to history than any other. So what we can learn about these two men as that they had a similar sense of self-importance and a view that what they needed to accomplish was so important because of the times they were living in that they justified whatever ruthless means that they deemed necessary to use in order to accomplish their goals. A similarity in both Stalin’s and Hitler’s rule was that neither of them took power through revolutionary means. What this means is that, to a certain extent, they had a certain amount of support from the people of their country and from the government as well. Of course, neither of them could have done so if they had explained the measures that they would be using to do so. They did not simply seize power by overthrowing the current government. Doing this creates a less stable government, which they both must surely have known. When power is seized by force, a certain population of the country will obviously consider the government to be illegitimate. If people in a country consider the ruler to be illegitimate, then they will be looking for ways to remove that person from power. As this is the case, the ruler of the country will always be having to worry about the extent to which another revolution is likely to overthrow them and take over in a position of power. It is only by rising through the ranks of power does a ruler appear to be legitimate. Both Hitler and Stalin were concerned with their legitimacy, but they also were concerned with how to centralize the power within themselves while appearing to simply be a part of the government as opposed to a singular, overbearing tyrant. As for Hitler, he used the constitution of the country to in essence get rid of it: “without waiting for the Enabling Act, Hitler had no sooner sworn to uphold the constitution on taking office than he immediately set about destroying it by the use of the president’s emergency powers, provided by the constitution, so reconciling the contradictory faces of National Socialism as a revolutionary movement committed to observing legality” (302). There was nothing technically illegal about what Hitler did to gain the power that he did. As this was the case, he was able to legitimately to be the ruler of Germany without anyone questioning the legality of his actions. Doing so allowed him to not worry about a counter-revolution, and since this was the case, Hitler was able to concentrate his efforts upon how to obtain absolute power and spread the German empire. Of course, Hitler knew well enough that he couldn’t completely abolish every form of resistance at once. A forthright and direct attempt to extinguish all opposing political power would only create more opposing political power. As such, Hitler used opposing forces to his advantage by making them appear to still yield some sort of power: “It was characteristic of Hitler’s tactics that he did not abolish the Reichstag overnight, and even from time to time made use of it as a lawmaking body when it suited him—for example, to pass the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of 1935” (312). It was only once Germany was at full-fledged war that Hitler no longer bothered to keep up the appearances of a full government. The use of the Reichstag to pass the laws that he wanted only made him all the more powerful because he was able to make it appear as though he was not actually in total control of the law-making body of the country. In this right, Hitler could be considered a puppet master, and this ability allowed him to yield the total control without repercussions because he did not appear to have total control. Stalin as well took power from the inside of the government in order to appear as a legitimate ruler. Stalin as well wished to improve the conditions of his country, but instead of believing in the superiority of the people of his country, Stalin instead wished to raise what was mostly an old-fashioned, peasant country into a leading world super power. Stalin’s rise to power was perhaps more slowly timed and required more strategy than that of Hitler’s rise to power. For instance, Stalin had Trotsky to deal with, who for a time represented his main rival for power within the Russian government. In 1927 when Stalin eventually secured his position over Trotsky, “Stalin secured the agreement of the Central Committee to order ‘administrative measures’ (the code phrase for coercion) to requisition grain by force” (254). Stalin’s basic strategy of rising to power and becoming the dominant force in the Communist Party was to gain the support of certain members to gain more power, then once the power these members had helped him gain was finalized, he turned against those people in order to maintain his power. If these people were able to use their influence to help him gain power, they surely would have been able to use their influence to take power away from them as well. This was why Stalin more or less burned his bridges as he went; with these influential people out of the way once he had gained form them what he could, he secured his power by turning on his former allies. The use of “administrative measures” was simply installed to help the government in times of crisis, such as when there is hardship or war. Stalin knew that in order for him to maintain the kind of power that he was seeking, he knew that he had to run the government at all times as though there was a war. In doing so, Stalin was able to use a government granted power to do away with government intervention of his power: There is no better example of this than the skill with which he habituated the Communist Party to use the “administrative measures to enforce requisitioning, while presenting these as a response to a temporary emergency, never reveling until the winter of1929-1930 how far he meant to go in making them permanent. As we can see, both Hitler and Stalin gradually ascertained more and more power, and once they had ascended to the highest position possible within governmental checks and balances, the used government provisions to fully place sole power within their grasp. Otherwise these two rulers would not have been able to keep and command their power with such authority and less worries of opposition. A difference between Hitler and Stalin was in their official positions. As Fuhrer, Hitler was recognized as the official leader of not only his party but the country as well. Because of this, he did not have to worry about any peers who would attempt to remove him from power and take his place, as his position was unique to him. Though Stalin eventually came to a position where people were too afraid to openly oppose him anymore, this is not the same as being in the position of power as Hitler was in, and it is likely that Stalin perpetually lived worrying that some usurper was plotting to remove him from power and take his place. The way he had come to the extent of power that he did was not technically supposed to happen the way it did, but of course Hitler manipulated the German constitution in order to do so. Nobody could really consider themselves to be the heir to Hitler’s position, so he was that much more secure in his position and his power. This was not the case with Stalin; his position as leader was in a much less official capacity, and there were many people who could have been considered to be his successors or heirs. As such, Stalin felt the threat of competition for his position constantly, which is why he felt the need to purge himself of this competition so drastically and on a regular basis: “Hitler was never troubled by the need for recognition that haunted Stalin, and the Nazi part experienced none of the convulsive series of purges that Stalin imposed on the Communist party leadership” (349). This difference comes from the differences in their ideologies for the most part; the Communist party, a party exemplifying equality, could not have one single figurehead in charge of it. As such, there could be no kind of reciprocal exchange between Stalin and the masses. Hitler enjoyed a sense of mutual glorification as he would make speeches that raised the spirits and expectations of the German people, who in return would display their adoration for their leader who was promising them greatness: It was a two-way relationship. Hitler not only gave his audience reassurance and hope, but also received back renewal of his confidence and confirmation of his own self-image” (352). As the central figure of his government, and as part of a government that allowed for one single person to be exemplified in this way, Hitler basically had an entire country as a sort of support system. Stalin completely lacked this, and he also lacked the kind of self-confidence that Hitler had. For one thing, while Hitler wished to dig his country out of the hole that his predecessor had left it in, Stalin was forced to live I the shadow of a leader who he and everyone else considered to be the ideal leader, Lenin: Stalin was unable to overcome his suspicion that the rest of the party leadership, even when they supported his policies and supported him, would never accept him as the equal of Lenin, still less see him in the light in which he saw himself” (353). Stalin knew perfectly well that the conspiracy was a fiction, the scenario for which had been prepared on his orders and was constantly revised to meet his criticisms. Yet at another level of his consciousness he found no difficulty in believing that it was essentially true. His whole life had been spent in a conspiratorial atmosphere (417). As Stalin had stepped on more than a few toes in his rise to power, he was naturally concerned that those he had betrayed or hurt in some way would seek their revenge upon him. The author states that the evidence of most of these conspiracies were non-existent, but it is hard to imagine Stalin not being the target of revenge plots. It is difficult, of course, to speculate on the extent to which any of Stalin’s paranoid feelings were justified, but we can comment on the extent to which the feelings did exist, the measures Stalin took to soothe those feelings, and the death that resulted as a result of his paranoia. Hitler, on the other hand, dealt less with plots internal to his country o his life than he did on threat to his life from other countries. Of course, Hitler had the entire Allied countries that were attempting to remove him from his seat of power once the War officially started, so when Hitler committed suicide in his bunker, this was not paranoia. While the author traces both Stalin and Hitler through their early lives, the book becomes more interesting in its comparison of the two men in 1934. This year is the year that marks the two men as equals in a political sense: “from then on any comparison between him and Stalin can be made on more equal terms…1934 was a watershed for both men, and this makes it possible not only to look back and compare their careers up to the end of that year, but also to look forward and establish pointers for the future” (343). While differences in age force the author to take a certain approach, they had something in common: they both had to start their political careers from basically nothing. As the author notes, Stalin was from the start in possession of the knowledge that he wanted to play a role in the politics of his country. The difficulty came from extended periods of imprisonment or exile. Hitler, on the other hand, tried multiple paths, including that of an artist, before he practically stumbled upon his natural gift as a public speaker which led him into his role in German politics. These two men at an early age showed almost no indication of being in a position to make such an extreme effect on the history of the 20th century. Though, the author notes, there is not any actual evidence of their perceived narcissism, such as in to be found in the diary of Napoleon, it is hard to imagine that these two men did not share a similar sense of driving self-importance that led them both to decisions that furthered their careers. Nazism and Stalinism were aligned in their reliance upon power. Though supposedly ideologically opposed, Hitler and Stalin utilized similar methods: “Nazism and Fascism glorified will, authority, power, and war. Their validity depended upon their success…Adding the words ‘of the proletariat’ to dictatorship could not disguise the fact that it meant an unrestricted and ruthless exercise of power, including terrorism and the repression of all other parties” (967). The author notes the certain amount of speculation that communism necessarily had to go through such a period as Stalinism, though of course that is something that we do not know for sure. What we do know is that while Fascism is set up to not even attempt to give the appearance of anything other than the dictatorship, Communism, especially the dictatorship of the proletariat, is setup in such a way as to be easily manipulated to an extent of being a complete dictatorship: Stalin was proved right in his belief that the 1936 constitution would make an extraordinary impression abroad; but by the time he made his speech the Russian people—and the Communist party in particular—had begun to learn that its provisions were in practice compatible with a reign of terror (467). For all of the differences in ideologies that they subscribed to, one gets the feeling that if Stalin had been born a German and Hitler had been born a Russian that similar results would still have happened. Of course, for all of the similarities in their ascensions to power and the way they kept that power, Hitler and Stalin found themselves on the opposite ends of the War. They were, of course, ideologically opposed countries, Fascists and Communists, and considering that Hitler’s plan was to eventually conquer the world in a Napoleonic fashion, obviously Russia was not ever going to align itself with Germany. Considering that Hitler rose in power mostly to lead his country to war against the rest of the world, it seems as though the outcome of Hitler’s failure was inevitable. The dreams of supremacy for the Aryan race and for Germany’s ascension of being the sole super power in the world were obviously delusional, but of course Hitler wouldn’t have been able to inspire his country to war if it had not been for his claims of supremacy in the first place. Hitler knew that he had failed when he took his own life, considering the Allied forces were on their inevitable march forward and Germany was fighting a losing battle on the Russian front as well. Stalin’s dreams and ideals of a communist empire were eventually dashed, though he did not actually live to see it. The collapse of the Soviet Union took place decades after Stalin’s death, though it is quite obvious that Stalin’s goals were not reached. With the overthrow of communism in other countries that were under the communist bloc as well, such as Czechoslovakia, the majority of the world’s communist governments have fallen by the way, the one major exception being China. Even though Stalin did not lose in WWII and the Soviet Union did not collapse until several decades after his death, the only way to view Stalin is as an eventual failure as well, and even if Stalin’s reputation might not be as bad outside of the community of historian’s, it would not be a stretch to say that history has not forgiven him for his methods. As the subtitles suggest, they had parallel lives, considering they both failed at their attempts. Also, considering their opposing, though never actually clashing, roles in the War, the metaphor of parallel lines is even more fitting as they never met, their lives intersecting, at any point in their lives or during WWII. In summation, perhaps what can be learned from the examples of Hitler and Stalin is that extremism leads to tyranny. Far-right and far-left ideologies yielded the same results. Instead of blaming the particular ideologies, perhaps the most appropriate way to approach this would be to say that governments built around extreme ideologies are open to more extreme subversion than more central, balanced governments. It is not so much the ideologies that are to blame but people in general; no matter what type of government people attempt to set up, be it one that calls for total equality for all, there will be people who will attempt to subvert it to their own will and purposes. Marx would probably be happy with the idea that his theories and viewpoints are so associated with Stalin. However much Stalin used Marxism-Leninism to justify his actions, there can be no doubt in the fact that he himself embodied these principles in no sense at all. Lenin used the government to gain as much power behind himself as he could; this is obviously not the actions of a person who believes in absolute equality for all. Wrestling power from others and getting rid of people who were in his way cannot be justified with the eventual ends. If a system of government, or the lack of a government which is the goal of pure communism, is forced to resort to such measures, then obviously the system will be completely contradictory and ineffective as its ideals were not used in any way to achieve their ultimate ends. Even democracy and capitalism can be very easily taken advantage of. However, they are less open to the outright total hijacking of the government by a single individual such as was the case with Hitler and Stalin. Instead of referring to the evils of Fascism and Communism, perhaps the more appropriate statement would be to say that these are simply institutions that were taken advantage of by men who knew no bounds in regards to achieving their goals. Though they might have felt that history would justify them, obviously this has not been the case as they are considered the two worst mass murderers of the 20th century. It is difficult, however, to think that anyone could have ever justified Hitler and Stalin is unimaginable, regardless of whekther they were successful in their ventures. Of course, we can’t put ourselves in the viewpoint of historical circumstances that never happened, and we would like to think that we would consider Hitler a monster if he had succeeded, but that is a circumstance we thankfully don’t have to consider. Read More