NP The Dictators

[jbor]

Review of _The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia_
by Richard Overy 

Excerpt:

The regimes led by Hitler and Stalin are the benchmark for dictatorship in
the 20th century. Terror and legal nihilism prevailed in both countries.
Civil associations outside the regular control of the party-state were
suppressed or traumatised into compliance. The economy, society and culture
were penetrated by central political authority. An official ideology was
imposed. Cultic reverence was demanded for the supreme leader, führer or
vozhd, who sent commands down through a smoothly functioning hierarchy. A
whole new form of modernity seemed to have been invented. As the cold war
intensified after the second world war, the theory underwent elaboration as
writers contrasted the German and Soviet historical experience with the
practices and values of liberal democracy. The Third Reich and the prewar
USSR were said to constitute a composite model of rulership:
totalitarianism. 

Richard Overy's large book is the latest attempt to compare those two states
and their societies. His work is based on a mountain of reading, especially
in English and German, and a quarter of the pages consist of endnotes and
bibliography. He is formidably up to date and presents the material in
accessible prose. This is a book that needed to be written.

Overy avoids questions of categorisation but it would seem that he dislikes
totalitarianism as a theory. His chapters suggest that he believes that
Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR shared more features in their techniques
of rule than they held peculiarly to themselves. These features included the
conventional ones picked out by historians writing in the totalitarianist
tradition. The book is packed with examples of arbitrary leadership, state
terrorism and central command. What marks it off from much earlier
scholarship is Overy's insistence that such states should not be regarded as
"normal" 20th-century states but as freak outgrowths of the catastrophe of
the first world war. [...]"

Continues at:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0%2C6121%2C1268020%2C00.html

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