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Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7.4 (2006) 919-929


Reviewed by
John Connelly
Dept. of History
University of California, Berkeley
3229 Dwinelle Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-2550 USA
jfconnel@berkeley.edu
Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia. 848 pp. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. ISBN 0393020304. $35.00 (cloth). 849 pp. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. ISBN 0393327973. $21.95 (paper).

Hitlerism and Stalinism are "comparable" in the banal way that all things can be put next to one another and studied. The question is what we can learn by comparing the two dictatorships. Richard Overy does not explicitly respond to this question but rather names "two purposes" for his massive study: "to supply an empirical foundation on which to construct any discussion of what made the two systems either similar or different" and "to write a comparative 'operational' history of the two systems in order to answer the large historical question about how personal dictatorship actually worked" (xxxiii–xxxiv). 1

This would seem a shallow conceptual foundation for over 800 pages of text. Overy is not concerned. Nor does he engage debates on the totalitarian character of the two regimes, on whether they were variants of "modernity," or on whether they constituted "political religions." 2 Instead, Overy groups his analysis around what Robert Merton might have called "social mechanisms": [End Page 919] building blocks of sociological theory of the middle range, below general laws but above simple description. 3 His chapters are about the economies, cultural revolutions, party-states, terror machines, moral discourses, camp systems, cults of personality, roots of popular support, and militaries. In his view, the two regimes must stand together in historical analysis because in their time they stood "apart from anything else" (645)—above all in their human costs. 4

Those costs resulted not from intent to destroy but rather from intent to create: ideal worlds. Overy portrays the dictators as restlessly active in making their utopias; in neither place was "the future ideal ever relegated to the status of mythology" (262). But mythology was not entirely absent, for "both dictatorships were predicated on the myth of perfectibility" (261). If there was a core commonality to the two regimes it was their scientism: neither Hitler nor Stalin doubted science's power to capture reality and then to change it. The difference was in the science they enlisted.

The Nazi utopia was biological and committed the regime to developing "a pure racial body capable of reproduction along narrowly defined demographic lines. Individual worth and well-being were measured in terms of biological usefulness and race value, above all the willingness to accept the sacrifice of the self for the survival of the species." The Soviet leading science was sociological, set on creating "a progressive society based around the satisfaction of human needs" (264). If Stalin was inspired by Lamarck in his belief that environment might reshape human nature, the Nazis were disciples of Darwin and sought to remold genetic inheritance through breeding. For them, the "new man was born rather than made" (245).

This ideological distinction suggests deeper differences between the regimes, a point Overy appears to grant when he writes that the competing "social utopias were profoundly different in purpose": the Nazis promoted race as an absolute value while the Soviets esteemed the "practical hard-working and politically acceptable proletarian" (241). Later in the book he even writes [End Page 920] that the two regimes constituted "distinct species" because of their lack of "common ground … on issues of race and nation" (590).

Yet for most of the work this apparently clear distinction fades into an inexplicable vagueness. For example (and most egregiously) in a chapter entitled "Nations and Races" Overy speaks of the "complex and ambiguous nature of the issues of race and nation under Stalin and Hitler" and alleges that the "definition of nation, race, and state was a central political question in both dictatorships. National and racial issues spawned much of the excessive violence...

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