Nazis and Stalinists: Mutual Interaction or Tandem Development?

After the controversy surrounding Ernst Nolte and the debate on the singularity of the Holocaust that started in the mid-1980s, it has taken German historians and historians of Germany a long time to reconsider a comparison of the National Socialist and Soviet dictatorships. The older debate over the Sonderweg focused exclusively on comparing developments in Germany and Western Europe (plus the United States). The East went, for the most part, unmentioned. If it was at all included in such comparisons, then it appeared only with regard to issues of economic or social history and primarily within the framework of the theory of modernization or the so-called "world system." Such studies mostly described the history of Eastern Europe as one of deficiency or of "semi-colonial" dependency.¹ Today these views themselves have become part of history, and Russia is widely accepted as a participant in the process of European modernization.² Issues of transfer and transnationality have begun to interest historians only in recent years. Particularly the fourth and last part of this collection of essays investigates the mutual entanglements between Germany and Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1945.

This collection presents the reader with a systematic and competent comparison of the two dictatorships. Unlike earlier attempts, it distinguishes itself by offering comparisons in specifically chosen fields that emerge from the collaborative efforts of specialists in German (National Socialist) and Soviet (Stalinist) history. Thus it was possible to avoid the marginalization of one perspective by the other. The systematic comparison showed, according to Michael Geyer, that the specialists in German history were able to profit from the innovative approaches and questions of the specialists in Soviet history. In the past, one used to get the impression that analyses of the Soviet system somehow reproduced something of the backwardness of the analyzed object itself. Yet despite all the catching up that has been done in the research on the Soviet Union, there remains a discrepancy in results, interests, questions, and approaches. Therefore the achievement of these specialists on National Socialist and Soviet history has to be commended all the more. They were able to agree on specific issues and analyze them in four parts: aspects of the governing structure and governance (Yoram Gorlizki and Hans Mommsen, as well as David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm); violence and terror (Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth, Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel); socialization (Christopher R. Browning and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Alf Lüdtke, and Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck); and, last but not least, the German-Soviet war and the confrontation of cultures (Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, Katerina Clark and Karl Schlögel).

The result is a one-to-one comparison that promises a number of new insights about parallels and differences, and it can be safely said that this collection fulfills all expectations.

As the choice of the title Beyond Totalitarianism shows, we have moved past "totalitarianism" as a leading paradigm in analyzing the two systems, yet we cannot quite free ourselves from its hold. We do not seem capable of dispensing entirely with the old models of types of rule from the political and social sciences. In his introduction, Michael Geyer revisits and discusses these models at length. Present-day studies of Soviet and German society, however, are determined by socio-historical approaches and an interest in cultural history. They also reflect today's mistrust of grand macro-historical and historical-philosophical models. Nevertheless, those models still serve as a point of departure for the investigations at hand, even if it is merely to modify or dismiss them, because like all models, they cannot do justice to the rich shadings inherent in social reality. This applies to the interaction not only among social groups but also between the leaders and the population, to mention but one binary model, not to forget the motivation and subjective perception...