More Overy on Hitler, Stalin

After a break (link), I’ve gone back and finished Richard Overy’s absorbing The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004). Overy certainly has an eye for the telling detail:

• The October Revolution and the attendant Civil War left the Red Army almost devoid of resources—so devoide that “on May Days in the 1920s Red Army men paraded through Red Square on bicycles.” (446)
  

• On their drive to Moscow in 1941, the Nazis moved so fast that “they entered the city of Orel with the streetcars still running.” (493)

• By 1927, the Soviets had recognized 172 ethnic minorities, and 192 distinct languages. The goal of linguistic modernization drove the campaign to extend Latin script to Arab linguages—sometimes faster than the growth of cultural comprehension. “One Kyrgyz instructor, having successfully instilled the letters of the alphabet into her class by rote, sent off to Moscow for another set.” (554)

• Prisoners packed off in boxcars en route to the Gulag found they could escape by chopping through the floor and dropping onto the railroad tracks below, “but after a time the guards fitted an improvised steel scythe beneath the last freight car to cut escapees in half as they lay on the tracks.” (563)

• Guards at Auschwitz carried “a notorious whip nicknamed ‘Interpreter’ because it could speak to the multinational workshop in any language.” (622-3)

I should add that Overy’s book is far more than mere anecdote. It is a rich, dense, detailed comparative study, resisting easy summary—unless to say that “resists easy summary” is itself a kind of summary. I’ll forgive my self for pillaging the cherries out of this cake, but the whole product deserves far more respectful and extensive attention than it is going to get here. It does remind me to go back and take a second look at one of Overy’s earlier efforts, Why the Allies Won, which I skimmed with interest but perhaps insufficient care a few years back—and which, happily, I seem not to have given away.

Life Imitates Mel Brooks

Life imitates Mel Brooks: more cullings from Richard Overy, The Dictators (2004)

• “So anxious were [planners] to match [Stalin’s] vision … that the huge Moskva Hotel, built with the same over-high classical portico found on the designs for Berlin, was constructed with two wings of completely different styles because Stalin had mistakenly approved as a single design tweo separate submissions placed on a table in front of him.” (223)

• Stalin’s “favorite film was said to be the 1938 production of V olga! Volga! a musical comedy that ends with the triumphant completion of the Moscow-Volga canal by regiments of prisoner-labourers …” (238)

• There were 34 assassination attempts against Hitler, none against Stalin (though plenty of people wanted to). “Lenin was the victim of two attempts on his life. Many years later, a man was caught in the Lenin mausoleum trying to shoot the embalmed corpse.” (326)

• Those émigré Russians who try to be Nazis? Evidently the mustache was part of the rigging: “each [was] comically adorned with Hitler’s familiar toothbrush mustache and a uniform like that of a railway guard…” (336)

• Builders of a superblock at Magnitogorsk, the “new industrial city” forgot to include a sewer system (228). [I seem to recall reading about the same problem with a new barracks built by the Austrian Empire in the 1890s…]

Overy on State Terror

Is the United States a fascist dictatorship? Of course not. But it may be small consolation; think of those bumper stickers that say “George Bush—Not as Bad as Saddam.” But reading Richard Overy’s The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004) is enough to give you the chills, particularly his chapter on “States of Terror”—the development and maintenance of terror mechanisms in each of his two subject states.

For starters, Overy makes the point that for the insiders, it wasn’t really terror at all:

For much of the life of both dictatorships the public war against terror won widespread approval and even co-operation from the two populations. Though fear might now seem the most rational of responses to what were, by any standards, fearful regimes, that fear was projected onto the victims of discrimination and state reporession. ‘Terrorists’ were excluded and persecuted not only by the organs of state security, but by a population made anxious thorugh orchestrated programs of public vilification.

—Richard Overy, The Dictators 177 (2004)

Overy goes on to show how neither Hitler’s Germany nor Stalin’s Russia began as a fully-developed police state. In an unsettling parallel, he shows how each dictator advanced down the road state terrorism by deploying a vivid, dramatic, but in the end entirely fortuitous disruption—in Germany, the Reichstag Fire of 1933, in Russia, the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934. In each case, the emerging dictator used a dramatic challenge as a hook on which to climb towards absolute power, unanswerable and outside the law.

More generally, Overy shows how state terror grows by the frog-in-a-pot approach—slowly turning up the heat so the subject doesn’t quite realize what has happened to it until it is all over and done.

Overy also shows how, particularly in German, the forces of state terror ultimately become a law unto themselves, and how (if it is any consolation) the terror forces to some extent come to devour their own. For what it is worth, he also shows how conventional estimates of deaths from internal terror (but excluded the holocaust) are perhaps exaggerated—the number more likely in thousands or tens of thousands than millions or tens of millions. Small consolation: it’s still not a road down which any citizen or polity would willingly want to go.

Roughage

Women wrote to Hitler asking him to father their children. One woman wrote that her marriage had broken down because of her commitment to the leader: 'From the first moment when I heard of Adolf Hitler, he gave me a new faith, he brought me strength and power and love. He is my idol, and I will devote my life to him.' Women, so it was claimed, were to be seen at Hitler's Bavarian retreat at Berchtesgaden eating handfuls of the gravel that the Führer had just walked across.

--Richard Overy, The Dictators 131 (2004)