Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (review)

In 1999 the sociologists Randall Collins and David Waller grouped the concept of totalitarianism among the "theories that were completely wrong." The editors and authors of this collection would certainly agree. With one exception (about which more below), all of the contributors include an obligatory remark that totalitarianism as a concept is not very useful in analyzing Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Third Reich.

So, one might well ask, why beat the dead horse once again? Fortunately, this collection, which grew out of a series of conferences between 2002 and 2005, is far more than yet another look at "totalitarianism." It is in fact one of the best efforts to study Stalinism and Nazism from a comparative perspective. The book is unique in a number of ways. To begin with, each essay has two authors, one an expert on Soviet history and the other a specialist on Nazi Germany. The essays are also quite long and based upon prodigious research in primary and secondary sources; the editors persuaded the publisher to allow the contributors an average of forty pages to lay out their findings. The volume is also a superb example of genuine comparative history rather than parallel analyses standing side by side. Finally, in what is becoming almost a rarity nowadays, the book has a full-scale and quite complete bibliography.

Beyond Totalitarianism contains nine essays grouped into four over-arching themes: governance, violence, socialization, and entanglements. In a brief review it is not possible to discuss all of the contributions in detail, but it should be said that all of the essays break new ground in comparing the two paradigmatic violent regimes of the twentieth century. In addition, a few essays stand out even above this general level of excellence. "The Political (Dis)Orders of Stalinism and National Socialism" by Yoram Gorlizki and Hans Mommsen contrasts the style of dictatorship practiced by Stalin and Hitler. Despite his growing personal power, Stalin remained a man of the Party who felt at home in endless committee meetings. Hitler, on the other hand, had little respect for institutions of any kind, including the Nazi Party. His style of rule was intensely personal, relying on delegation of power to trusted individuals rather than institutional bodies. The two dictators also had different ultimate aims. Stalin wanted to transform what remained of the old social structure, while Hitler was interested in mobilizing Germany with its established social structure intact.

A number of the essays demonstrate that while the two regimes started from entirely different ideological premises, their practical policies were often remarkably similar. David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm's "Utopian Biopolitics" investigates the pro-natal policies of the two states. The motivation in the Third Reich, of course, was improving the racial profile of the Volk and providing soldiers for foreign conquest. In contrast, Stalin's USSR sought to increase the number of proletarian workers. But in both cases the regime set out to foster population increases.

Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth's "State Violence" investigates the use of terror under Stalinism and Nazism. Both regimes persecuted defined out-groups. In the case of the Nazis this was a fairly constant set of categories—Jews, "a-socials," Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, and a few others. In the Stalinist polity the targets shifted: under such rubrics as "anti-party types," "class-aliens," or "enemies of the people," the regime terrorized, in addition to "a-socials" and "former people" (i.e., of pre-revolutionary social standing), a growing number of non-Russian ethnic groups identified in one way or another with "the imperialist enemy." Because Stalin's targets changed so many times, the number of victims was larger than under Hitler (comparing internal enemies, of course).

The essay by Christopher R. Browning and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, "Frameworks for Social Engineering," is one of the best. The authors compare the "pursuit of political utopias" (p. 264) by the two regimes...