Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler
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Meldungen aus dem Reich Regular SD reports on public opinion from across Germany
1941 god 1941 god: Dokument, ed., A. N. Yakovlev (Moscow, 1998)
Noakes and Pridham Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Documents on Nazism (Exeter, 1974ff.)
NYT New York Times
RGBL Reichsgesetzblatt; official German gazette
SDFP Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, ed. Jane Degras (New York 1978)
Stalin, Sochineniia J. V. Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1952ff.); the complete collected works in Russian
VB Völkischer Beobachter; main Nazi newspaper
INTRODUCTION
1. See Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War (Boston, 1954), 13–14.
2. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1987), 278.
3. Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 217.
4. Anna Petrovna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, March 8, 1942, diary entry, reprinted in Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds., Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (Pittsburgh, 2002), 31.
5. See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York, 2005), 35.
6. See Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (Toronto, 1991); and Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (New York, 2004).
7. See, for example, his remarks at the third congress of the RSDLP in London (April 1905), in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10, 126–29.
8. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 1, 193-95, articles of Nov. 20, 1905; 206-13, March 8, 1906.
9. Novaya zhizn, Nov. 10, 1917, reprinted in Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture, and the Bolsheviks, 1917-1918 (New Haven, Conn., 1995), 89.
10. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 45, 343-48, his “last testament.”
11. Speech reprinted in Strobe Talbott, ed., Khrushchev Remembers (Boston, 1970), 571.
12. See Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, Conn., 1996).
13. Eric J. Hobsbawm, a prominent historian, frankly said that if the Communists had produced the promised “radiant tomorrow,” then the violent deaths of fifteen or twenty million people in the Soviet Union would have been “justified.” See Michael Ignatieff’s famous interview with him in the Times Literary Supplement, Oct. 28, 1994, 16.
14. Adolf Hitler, “Warum sind wir Antisemiten?” in Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 184-204.
15. See his “Positiver Antisemitismus der Bayerischen Volkspartei,” Nov. 2, 1922, in Hitler Aufzeichnungen, 717-21.
16. For important aspects of the controversy, see esp. François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism (Lincoln, Neb., 2001). Original material from the bitter exchanges in the 1980s can be found in “Historikerstreit.” Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich, 1987). For a recent perspective see the remarks by four historians in German History (2006), 587-607.
17. See the interesting essays, which all but exclude Lenin, in the collections of Henry Rousso, ed., Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared (Lincoln, Neb., 2004); and Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, U.K., 1997).
18. Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 71–84.
19. Richard Overy, foreword to Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl, eds., The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin from the Interrogations of Hitler’s Personal Aides (New York, 2005), xi.
20. See Hitler’s comments to Himmler in Werner Jochmann, ed., Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, 1941–1944 (Hamburg, 1980), 82.
21. See the highly instructive contrasts drawn by Stefan Plaggenborg, “Stalinismus als Gewaltgeschichte,” in Stefan Plaggenborg, ed., Stalinismus: Neue Forschungen und Komplexe (Berlin, 1998), 71–112.
22. Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2001). For a useful review, see Volker Ulrich, “Die Konsensdiktatur,” Die Zeit, March 2002; also Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, 1914-1949 (Munich, 2004), 675-83.
23. Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), 147.
24. Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever (New York, 1977), 92-93.
25. See Frank Bajohr, Parvenüs und Profiteure: Korruption in der NS-Zeit (Frankfurt am Main, 2001).
26. See Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class (Garden City, N.Y., 1984); and Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange (New York, 1998).
27. For a return to a materialist explanation that ignores the roles of idealism and ideology in the mass murder of the Jews, see Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg, und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 2005). For a review, see Michael Wildt, “Alys Volksstaat: Hubris und Simplizität einer Wissenschaft,” in Mittelweg 36 (June-July 2005), 69-80.
CHAPTER 1: THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
1. Quoted in Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalev, eds., The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 1997), 46.
2. Reports of U.S. ambassador in U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1918. Russia (Washington, D.C., 1918), vol. 1, 1–14.
3. Doc. 25, March 2, 1917, in Steinberg and Khrustalev, Fall of the Romanovs, 96-97.
4. Doc. 29, March 3, 1917, in ibid., 105.
5. Mark D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917: Documents (New Haven, Conn., 2001), 57.
6. U.S. Department of State, Russia (1918), vol. 1, 5-6.
7. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York, 1996), 321.
8. See the classic account by Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (London, 1960).
9. Anastas Mikoyan, Memoirs (Madison, Conn., 1988), vol. 1, 31–32.
10. Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin (New York, 1930–32), vol. 1, 8-48.
11. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, 6-191.
12. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 1, 56-61 (Sept.-Oct. 1904), letters.
13. Nicolai Valentinov, Vstrechis Leninysm (New York, 1953), 71–119.
14. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10, 21–31.
15. Ibid., vol. 11, 93-104.
16. See Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, Calif., 1995), 324.
17. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 12, 224-28.
18. See, for example, his critique of the Socialists’ agrarian program in ibid., vol. 16, 193ff.
19. Ibid., vol. 30, 327-28.
20. Ibid., vol. 31, 131–44.
21. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin, vol. 2, 208-10.
22. Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 294.
23. Pravda, April 7, 1917.
24. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1990), 394; Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929 (New York, 1973), 165-66.
25. See Manfred Hildermeier, Geschichte der Sowjetunion, 1917-1991 (Munich, 1998), 72-80.
26. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 399-405.
27. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 78.
28. Ibid., 149-50.
29. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 427-29.
30. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 170, 173.
31. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 3, 130–33 (July 23, 1917), article.
32. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 436-38; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 436-37.
33. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 156-57.
34. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 33, 123-307.
&n
bsp; 35. Boris Souvarine, Staline: Apergu historique du bolchévisme, new ed. (Paris, 1985), 157.
36. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 442-51.
37. Ibid., 454.
38. See, for example, Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 3, 206-9 (Aug. 13, 1917); 286-88 (Sept. 12, 1917).
39. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 34, 239-47.
40. See the discussion in Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1932; New York, 2001), 936-41.
41. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 34, 391–93.
42. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 1003.
43. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 34, 419-22, 435-36.
44. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 1011.
45. Service, Lenin, 305-7.
46. Cited in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 (Oxford, 1954), 304.
47. Leonard Schapiro, 1917: The Russian Revolutions and the Origins of Communism (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1984), 129-30.
48. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 1030–31.
49. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 3, 387-90.
50. Hildermeier, Geschichte der Sowjetunion, 111–12.
51. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 491.
52. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 493.
53. Hildermeier, Geschichte der Sowjetunion, 112.
54. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 312.
55. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 35, 1.
56. Estimate is by Sir Alfred Knox, cited in Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 310 n. 3.
57. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 489; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 498.
58. MarcFerro, The Bolshevik Revolution: A Social History (London, 1980), 255.
59. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919; Harmondsworth, U.K., 1982), 104.
60. See the table in Pipes, Russian Revolution, 542.
61. Pamphlet of July 1905, in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 11, 102-4.
62. Ibid., vol. 35, 191–94.
CHAPTER 2: ON THE WAY TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP
1. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 35, 13-18.
2. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: politichesky portret (Moscow, 1987), vol. 1, 250–51.
3. See the examples given in Lenin’s October 26 speech on land. See also docs. 123-32, in Mark D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917: Documents (New Haven, Conn., 2001), 293-308.
4. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 35, 23-24.
5. See the memoir of Eduard M. Dune, Notes of a Red Guard (Urbana, Ill., 1993), 87.
6. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 35, 28-29.
7. Ibid., 53-56.
8. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919; Harmondsworth, U.K., 1982), 239-40.
9. Ibid., 239.
10. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York, 1996), 510–11.
11. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1990), 534-36.
12. Ibid., 502-3.
13. Ibid., 526-31.
14. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 509; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 544. At the time some estimated the crowd at 200,000.
15. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 35, 162-66.
16. Ibid., 156-57.
17. Cited in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford, 1981), 17.
18. Ibid., 19.
19. Jan. 9, 1918, republished in Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts, Essays on Revolution, Culture, and the Bolsheviks, 1917-1918 (New Haven, Conn., 1995), 126.
20. “Plekhanovo terrorye,” in Lenin, Polnoesobraniesochinenii, vol. 35, 184-86.
21. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 35, 238-42.
22. It became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in another constitution adopted in January 1924. For the above, see Pipes, Russian Revolution, 550–55; Figes, People’s Tragedy, 513-15.
23. See Elise Kimerling, “Civil Rights and Social Policy in Soviet Russia, 1918-1936,” Russian Review (1982), 30.
24. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 35, 357-58.
25. Isaac N. Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution (New York, 1953), 145.
26. Ibid., 146.
27. Leggett, Cheka, 58-61.
28. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 594-95; Figes, People’s Tragedy, 547-51.
29. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 36, 210–11.
30. Ibid., 503.
31. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 (New York, 1973), vol. 2, 432-55.
32. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 50, 106.
33. Cited in Leggett, Cheka, 114 (emphasis mine).
34. Cited in Pipes, Russian Revolution, 802.
35. Leggett, Cheka, 100, 233.
36. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 50, 142-43.
37. See doc. 24, in Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 50.
38. See Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (1920) cited in Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 3, The Iron Ring (London, 1995), 37.
39. Michael Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag: The Soviet Prison Camp System, 1917-1934 (Lexington, Ky., 1993), 152 n. 7; Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, 142-47.
40. Peter H. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice Under Stalin (Cambridge, U.K.,1996), 17-48.
41. David J. Dallin and Boris 1. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven, Conn., 1947), 150–51.
42. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 45, 190–91.
43. Andrzej J. Kaminski, Konzentrationslager 1896 bis Heute (Munich, 1990), 34-35.
44. See Jan M. Meijer, ed., The Trotsky Papers, 1917-1922 (London, 1964), vol. 1,109 n. 4; Kaminski, Konzentrationslager, 72-73; for a slightly different dating, see Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York, 2003), 8.
45. Cited in Pipes, Russian Revolution, 808-9.
46. Doc. 28, n.d., likely Sept. 3 or 4, 1918, in Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 56.
47. Cited in Leggett, Cheka, 108.
48. Ibid., 111.
49. Jörg Baberowski, Der rote Terror: Die Geschichte des Stalinismus (Munich, 2003), 40.
50. Cited in Leggett, Cheka, 109-10.
51. Kaminski, Konzentrationslager, 73.
52. Cited in Pipes, Russian Revolution, 834.
53. Applebaum, Gulag, 9.
54. Leggett, Cheka, 178-81; Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System (London, 2000), 14.
55. See Nicolas Werth, “A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union,” in Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 114.
56. Volkogonov, Lenin: politichesky portret, vol. 1, 413-15; Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, 157.
57. Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, 173.
58. This organization is devoted to recovering the memory of those who suffered and died under Communism.
59. See Joel Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot, Das Jahrhundert der Lager: Gefangenschaft, Zwangsarbeit, Vernichtung (Berlin, 2001), 139-40.
60. See the account of Solovki and Kem in Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, 181–88.
61. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1932; New York, 2001), 295-96.
62. Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y. 1990), 40.
63. Ibid., 126. For the desertion figures, see Figes, People’s Tragedy, 599.
64. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 35, 195-205.
CHAPTER 3: CIVIL WARS IN THE SOVIET UNION
1. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: politichesky portret (Moscow, 1987), vol. 1, 349.
2. Stalin, “The Foundations of Leninism,” in his Sochineniia, vol. 6,112 (April 26-30 and May 9-18, 1924).
3. Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 330–31.
4. Doc. 9.9, in Ronald Kowalski, ed., T
he Russian Revolution, 1917-1921 (New York, 1997), 143-44; Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1990), 50–51; George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford, 1981), 64.
5. Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922 (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 337-41.
6. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 4,128 (Aug. 31, 1918); 130 (Sept. 19, 1918).
7. Cited in Boris Souvarine, Staline: Apergu historique du bolchévisme, new ed. (Paris, 1985), 205.
8. Trotsky to Lenin, in Jan M. Meijer, ed., The Trotsky Papers, 1917-1922 (London, 1964), vol. 1, 72-74; see also Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York, 1989), 56-59; Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929 (New York, 1973), 192-96.
9. Volkogonov, Lenin: politichesky portret, vol. 1, 374.
10. Jörg Baberowski, Der rote Terror: Die Geschichte des Stalinismus (Munich, 2003), 41.
11. Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s-1990s (Cambridge, U.K., 1998), 103-8.
12. Instructive here is George F. Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (New York, 1960), 70–115.
13. Serge Schmemann, Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village (New York, 1997), 208.
14. Krasnyi mech (Red Sword), Aug. 18, 1919, cited in Leggett, Cheka, 203.
15. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 2, 332-47; useful here is Jacob Miller, “Soviet Theory on the Jews,” in Lionel Kochan, ed., The Jews in Soviet Russia Since 1917 (Oxford, 1970), 46-63.
16. Strobe Talbott, ed., Khrushchev Remembers (Boston, 1970), 266-67; Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, N.J., 2004), 106-16.
17. Slezkine, Jewish Century, 175.
18. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York, 1996), 676-77; Slezkine, Jewish Century, 178-79.
19. See Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, 1967), 114, 119-20.
20. See Peter Kenez, “Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War,” in John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (New York, 1992), 300.