Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe Book

Here they are, the evil triumvirate who definitively proved how there's no one more dangerous than someone determined to save the world. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler--they all had a vision of utopia and it was going to take a long, tortuous climb up a mountain of corpses to reach it. Unfortunately, they weren't deterred.

One aim of this work is to dispel the so-called "myth" of Lenin as a benevolent "true communist" who wasn't "as bad" as Stalin. gellately does a great job shooting this down, but Orlando Figes already exposed it as a sham in his epic history of the Russian Revolution. Far from perverting or undermining Lenin's legacy, Stalin was his logical heir. Heck, even Molotov though that Lenin was more "severe" than Stalin.

Remarkably ambitious, Gellately's book does a fine job in meeting its own goals. All the major aspects of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are covered in fair to exhaustive detail.

Gellately examines these leaders' differing definitions of socialism. He also details their use of terror as a political weapon. In fact, Stalin's terror is comparable to the Holocaust since it eventually targeted entire ethnicities.

Nazi terror was quite different from the Bolshevik variety. Pretty much anyone could be victimized in Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union, even old-time Communists: Stalin killed most of them in his successive purges. Not in Hitler's Germany: there, only unpopular outsider groups were persecuted, like Communists (whom even the Socialists were happy to see in concentration camps), gypsies, homosexuals and of course Jews. Only in its final winter did Nazism really exhibit its nihilistic face in Germany itself. However, once the Germans started to carve their Reich they began to show what they had in store for the rest of humanity: First in Austria (where many of the most brutal SS officers came, like Eichmann or Globocknick), then in the Sudeten, next in Czechia, in Poland, in Yugoslavia and Greece, and finally the Soviet Union, each time behaving more brutally. The dead are prominent characters in Gellately's book, as Lenin, Stalin and Hitler blithely consigned to banishment or horrible death ten thousand here, fifty thousand there, for page upon page upon page of this long book. The cumulative effect is gruesome.

Another interesting angle that Gellately explores is Hitler's hatred of communism. While everyone else saw communism and capitalism as opposites or enemies, Hitler viewed both as a form of "internationalism." Thus, he reasoned, since the Jews had no homeland, their real interests lay in communism or capitalism. So Hitler's anti-Semitism was rooted in his radical German nationalism, and his anti-Communism was an extension of his anti-Semitism. Thus, Hitler's anti-Semitism was NOT a reaction to Soviet communism.

The great social upheaval of this time period also highlight the dangers of political and national instability. When moderate representative governments do not seem to "work", well-meaning but foolish citizens turn to deceptive and attractive-seeming regimes that know exactly what to promise in order to gain power.