The Evil That Two Men Did

Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, the two most powerful personifications of evil in this century, are still impossible to explain fully. They shouldered their way into politics as resentful, hate-filled egoists, but so did thousands of their contemporaries. To anyone scrutinizing the young Hitler or Stalin, writes Alan Bullock, the Oxford University historian, “a suggestion that he would play a major role in twentieth-century history would have appeared incredible.” At 30, Hitler was a street-corner speechmaker in Munich, and Stalin was in prison for plotting an oil workers’ strike in Baku.

“They developed over time,” says Lord Bullock — he became a life peer in 1976 — so he decided to study that process in a comparative, parallel biography of the two, something no one else has done. Bullock is the author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952), the first great postwar biography of the dictator. “I’m a narrative historian, and in the course of the narrative,” he says, “it comes clear” precisely how Hitler and Stalin rose to supreme power in Germany and Russia.

Though Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (Knopf; 1,081 pages; $35) runs a densely written thousand pages, detailing the two lives stage by stage, not everything comes clear. Most readers willing to take the long journey will hope that Bullock’s exhaustive analysis of the biographical literature and newly opened archives might somehow explain what caused Hitler and Stalin. There was something inhumanly dark and cold in both leaders that made them willing to do literally anything to fulfill what they felt was their mission.

Unfortunately, as Bullock writes, “the process by which these convictions took possession of their minds remains a mystery.” He generally avoids psychohistory, but observes matter-of-factly that both Hitler and Stalin were paranoid and insensitive to humanity — that is, unable to accept that other people were as real as they. Both were, in fact, incapable of normal relationships. One word Bullock does not use is “monster,” because he sees horror in the fact that they were human.

The source of Hitler’s political success was his oratory. He began as no more than an idle, self-deluded, uneducated young man who liked World War I army life because it gave him a sense of purpose. In 1919 that suddenly changed when he discovered, as he said, “I could make a good speech.” He turned out to be a bold, sharp political tactician as well, but it was his hypnosis of the masses that made him the Fuhrer, the unchallenged leader.

Stalin — rough, conspiratorial, despising authority — was a natural Marxist revolutionary. While studying at a Russian Orthodox seminary in his native Georgia, he became a convert to Marx and never changed course. His career contrasted with Hitler’s because his movement already had a leader, Lenin. Unlike Hitler’s public portrayal of himself as a man of destiny, Stalin’s style was stealthy, behind the scenes.

As General Secretary of the Communist Party, Stalin appeared, calculatedly, to be simply an organization man. But he was far more than that because he had perfected the technique of using the details of organization to amass political power. Once he became the vozhd, the master, he ruthlessly annihilated all those who once were loyal to Lenin and all who might consider questioning his authority.

Both despots believed utterly in themselves and were indifferent to the ^ suffering and destruction they caused to achieve their ends. Hard as it is to realize it, Bullock writes, “the key to understanding both Stalin and Hitler is . . . that they were entirely serious about their historic roles.” In private they were boring and boorish. The mistake their political enemies and would-be partners repeatedly made was to underestimate the men and the extremes to which they would go.

Hitler had nothing like the domestic program of development and collectivization Stalin rammed through at the cost of millions of lives. He was really interested only in foreign conquests, and one in particular: an Aryan empire in Eastern Europe. Hitler was driven by a slogan-ridden ideology that he formed as a youth, reading cheap pamphlets in Vienna, and never changed. He had, Bullock finds, no capacity whatever for critical thinking. He believed the German “master race” had three enemies: Slavs, Marxists and Jews.

To eliminate them, Hitler had an ultimate plan to conquer Ukraine and European Russia for colonization by racially pure Aryans. The original Slavic populations would be deported or kept as slaves, educated only enough “to understand our highway signs.” In 1941 Hitler actually began to carry out that program and in going to war with the Soviet Union also put into effect his “final solution to the Jewish problem,” the extermination of European Jewry. While Stalin had more people put to death than Hitler did, Bullock maintains the Nazi Holocaust is unique because “mass murder became not an instrument but an end in itself.”

Russia, under Stalin’s direction, was Hitler’s nemesis in World War II. But while that war freed most of Germany from despotism, the shackles of Stalinism stayed in place in the Soviet Union for another 40 years. Russia is still trying to find its way toward democracy. Bullock maintains that only a confluence of violent upheavals and unusual leaders can produce a Hitler or a Stalin, and “such occasions are not common.” But it has happened within living memory, and Bullock’s monumental history reminds us how unwise it would be to conclude it cannot happen again.