TLS: Hitler and Stalin together
THE DICTATORS
Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia
Richard Overy
848pp. | Allen Lane
The Penguin Press.
£25. US: Norton. $35.
0 393 02030 4 | 0 713 99309 X
Review by Jane Caplan
The age of the bourgeoisie has come to an end”, said Hitler in January 1945, “never to return.” What was coming to a humiliating end in January 1945 was, of course, Hitler’s own age, which he had managed to keep going for just over 1 per cent of its promised duration. “Bourgeois” Europe had survived its crisis, if only just: chastened, transfigured, but ecognizable. Meanwhile, Stalin was reaching the apogee of his political career. He was the victorious leader of a wounded but triumphant Communist nation and the acknowledged ally of the two remaining world powers. Despite the regrettable persistence of the capitalist West, he was poised to establish in Eastern Europe a regional placeholder for the international socialist revolution that had failed to materialize after 1917. It was to take another decade before Stalin’s pedestal began to crumble in its turn: not with the kind of cataclysmic blow that had brought Hitler’s life and his Reich to their crushing end, but through the cautious posthumous chiselling of the next generation of Soviet leaders. Richard Overy sees the First World War as the proximate cause (though he might not use such a stark word) of the two dictatorships, in his gripping new study. In the dictators’ eyes, the War and its outcome – revolution for Russia, defeat for Germany – signed the death warrant of the nineteenth-century Western European social and political order, bourgeois, liberal and individualist: a death warrant that Hitler and Stalin were equally eager to execute.
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2108783
