A couple of stinkers

Sam Leith

THE DICTATORS: HITLER'S GERMANY, STALIN'S RUSSIA by Richard Overy Penguin, 125, pp. 849, ISBN 071399309X

c hat raised him,' wrote Robert Lowell wrote Robert Lowell

in his poem 'Stalin',

was an unusual lust to break the icon, / joke cruelly, seriously, and be himself'. One of the shocking and exemplary virtues of Richard Overy's book on the two most horrible regimes of the European 20th century, is that it is, often, terribly funny. I don't use 'terribly', here, as a random intensifier. Both Hitler and Stalin operated at the juncture between high camp and death camp. The joke both cruel and serious plays around these stories.

Brecht's version of Hitler — the resistible Arturo Ui — is for most of his story a comic figure; as was Chaplin's. The rhetoric of dictatorship was peculiarly vulnerable to having its absurdity exposed to ridicule and Goring, rather chillingly, used to carry a leather-bound notebook in which he anthologised jokes he heard told against him.

Overy's own humour is the better for being dry. Hitler, he writes, though teetotal, 'allowed himself a little brandy in milk to help him sleep, and was observed with a glass of champagne the morning Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor'. Among the stash of treasured possessions found in a salt mine after his suicide, Overy records, was a copy of a song called 'I'm the Captain in my Bathtub'. Of such details, so presented, is great history made.

Hitler and Stalin had more in common than moustaches and genocide, and this is not the first time they have been discussed alongside each other. Alan Bullock's 1991 Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives had a biographical slant. The approach here is not so much narrative as thematic. What Overy is interested in are the styles and structures of the two dictatorships, and the creepy ways in which they seemed to shadow each other. His apocalyptic overture is the 1941-45 war between them: a conflict of staggering scale and horror conducted by 'two amateur warlords'.

Overy has produced an engrossing, well written and wise book. It is very level in tone. He avoids alike the temptations of offering a mystical account of 'evil', and crude Freudianism; but nor does he subscribe to the glib historical determinism that says that the rise of a Hitler was the automatic result of Germany's humiliation after the first world war (i.e. that if Hitler hadn't been Hitler someone else would have been). He is judicious in showing the way in which each leader worked with what was there, shaping institutional structures and public discourse to his personal requirements.

There were many contrasts. Hitler came to power in a state with an established tradition of judicial independence, and yet managed more or less completely to ignore the law. Stalin had an open goal in that department: from 1917, Tsarist law was jettisoned, and revolutionary law was '99 per cent political'. Yet however absurd the 'trials', Stalin's enemies were seldom murdered or sent east without at least the pretence of legal process.

Dictatorial power was in both cases as much de facto as de jure. Overy emphasises the customary or 'ascriptive' nature of both Hitler's and Stalin's authority. In both cases, dictatorship flourished with the consent of the governed. Totalitarianism, he suggests, is a chimera. Stalin micro-managed more than Hitler (the latter only rolling up his sleeves for Operation Barbarossa, when he decided to forgo his nightly movies and get stuck in), but neither could exert personal control beyond a certain point. Nor did the bulk of either populace live in constant terror. Unless you were unfortunate enough to be in one or other of the 'enemy within' groups, you could easily live. Overy says, through years of dictatorship without being aware of more than one or two acts of state repression. Yet, he writes, 'each dictatorship exposed a wide gulf between the stated goal and the social reality'. That gap was plastered over by aggressive, brutal and frequently comical denial.

Among those sent to the gulags during Stalin's periodic convulsions of paranoia, for example, were Esperanto speakers and stamp-collectors. The manufacture or possession of saxophones in Soviet Russia was made illegal, to counteract the threat from jazz. And during the war against Hitler the standard school songbook contained such uplifting tunes as 'Song for Stalin' Tankists' March' and, my favourite, 'I Am Thirteen (soon I'll go to a mobilisation centre.)' That there were no recorded attempts on Stalin's life reflects, perhaps, the care he took to avoid them, even having long curtains shortened so that the feet and ankles of any would-be assassins hiding behind them would be visible. One of at least 42 attempts to knock Hitler off was thwarted when its architect got stuck in a lavatory with a faulty lock.

You wouldn't want to invite either man to dinner. Hitler was a prig; even in his inner circle, he was 'mein Fiihrer' and he almost never used the familiar `Du' to associates. Stalin was more of a laugh, but a tedious practical joker: 'Pepper was liberally sprinkled on dinnertime dishes; tomatoes were put on chairs; vodka was substituted for drinking water,' Both regimes were utopian in character, though their utopianisms were almost exactly antithetical. Hitler's was a racial nationalism, based on what Overy at one point calls 'vulgar Darwinism'. Stalin's was a cult of political ideology — he didn't seem to give a hoot about race, and nationalisms were tolerated and even encouraged, until they seemed to threaten the Revolution. The distinction is brought out in the sciences they favoured: Soviet science cleaved to Lamarckian ideas about the environmental influence on inheritance, and dismissed Nazi eugenics as 'zoological nonsense'.

In neither case, Overy suggests, was the cult of personality an end in itself. For Stalin to seize and hold power, he needed to cast himself as the inheritor and interpreter of Leninism. Hitler's messianic singularity was part of his racial theory, a sort of political version of the antinomian heresy. The extent of those cults, though, was remarkable. At Berchtesgaden, women were said to have been seen eating handfuls of the gravel that Hitler had just walked across.

Both were what Malcolm Muggeridge called 'dawnists': believers that, correctly led or sufficiently brutalised, through racial destiny or historical immanence, their populations would arrive at a broad sunlit upland of perfection. And that goal justified whatever they did along the way. Overy's work, without stridency or heavyhandedness, still has suggestive things to say about the way any instinctively authoritarian state goes about manufacturing consent:

The words 'terror' and 'terrorist' were applied not to the policemen and security agents who enforced state repression, but to those who opposed the dictatorships. Both systems saw themselves at the forefront of a war against international terrorism. What is now defined as ruthless state terror was viewed by Hitler and Stalin as state protection against the enemies of the people. This very different perception of 'terror' is central to an understanding of the relationship between the security forces and society. 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 repression. 'Terrorists' were excluded and persecuted not only by the organs of state security, but by a population made anxious through orchestrated programmes of public vilification.

Makes yer think, dunnit?