The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  The other ethnic group to suffer disproportionately during collectivization were the Kuban Cossacks, whose resistance to the policy led to their wholesale deportation to Siberia. Nor were these the only victims of Stalin’s ‘ethnic cleansing’. Between the spring of 1935 and the spring of 1936 around 30,000 Finns were sent to Siberia. In January 1936 thousands of Germans were consigned from the western borderlands to Kazakhstan. In 1937 over a thousand Kurdish families were deported from the southern border region; a year later it was the turn of two thousand Iranians. By this time the regime had thrown aside all restraint. In January 1938 the huge sweep that had initially been launched against Poles was extended by the Politburo into an ‘operation for the destruction of espionage and sabotage contingents made up of Poles, Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians, Kharbintsy, Chinese, and Romanians, both foreign subjects and Soviet citizens’, as well as ‘the Bulgarian and Macedonian cadres’.

  It is sometimes imagined that the Soviet regime was less bureaucratic in its methods than other totalitarian regimes. Yet the evidence in the Russian archives suggests otherwise. Officials drew up meticulous ledgers, breaking down the inmates of the Gulag by nationality, presumably to allow Stalin and his henchmen to monitor the various persecution campaigns. It is also sometimes suggested that Stalin was less murderous than Hitler in his approach to ethnic cleansing. But the difference is one of quantity not quality. To be sure, Soviet camps were concerned more to extract labour from prisoners than to kill them; prisoners were shot in batches at a punishment lagpunkt (labour camp) like Serpantinka, but it was not an extermination camp in the way that, say, Treblinka was. Nevertheless, we should not understate the number of people who lost their lives as a result of Stalin’s persecution of non-Russians, which happened (unlike the Holocaust) in

  Figure 6.2 Victims of Stalinist ‘ethnic cleansing’, c. 1926-1954

  the context not of a total war but of a largely imaginary civil war. Between 1935 and 1938 around 800,000 individuals were arrested, deported or executed as a result of actions against non-Russian nationalities. At the height of the Terror, between October 1936 and November 1938, members of persecuted nationalities accounted for around a fifth of all political arrests but more than a third of all executions. In fact, nearly three-quarters of those who were arrested in the actions against nationalities ended up being executed. Altogether, throughout Stalin’s reign, more than 1.6 million members of non-Russian nationalities died as a result of forcible resettlement (see Figure 6.2).

  One ethnic minority, it might be said, stood out in the Soviet Union – for its eagerness not to stand out. The Jews had been pariahs under Tsarist rule. But they had played a disproportionate role in the Bolshevik Party during the revolutionary years. The 1920s were a good time for Soviet Jews, many of whom embraced the new political culture of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By 1926 around 11 per cent of Jewish trade union members were also members of the Party, compared with a national average of 8 per cent. A year later Jews accounted for 4.3 per cent of Party members, as compared with 1.8 per cent of the Soviet population. One indicator of the increased social integration of the period was the sharp rise in mixed marriages. In the Ukraine and Byelorussia – the heartland of the old Pale – the proportion of Jews marrying out of their faith remained low: less than 5 per cent of marriages in the former were mixed and just over 2 per cent in the latter. In Russia, by contrast, the proportion rose from 18.8 per cent in 1925 to 27.2 per cent two years later. This was not part of a general Soviet-wide trend towards ethnic intermingling, it should be stressed; there was virtually no intermarriage between Russians and Muslims in Central Asia. Even the ethnic barrier between Russians and Ukrainians seems to have been slower to fall. An increasingly urbanized Jewish community also showed signs of abandoning its traditional Yiddish language in favour of Russian. Yet because such a high proportion of the original Bolsheviks had been Jews, attracted to Communism as a way out of Tsarist persecution, a high proportion of victims of Stalin’s Terror were also Jews. And although his prejudice did not manifest itself before the war, Stalin was sooner or later bound to focus on the Jews as an ethnic group whose loyalty could not be depended upon. Why should they – or anyone else, for that matter – have been exempt indefinitely from his pathological mistrust?

  Even before the outbreak of war in 1939, indeed even before 1933, the demonic Georgian had revealed himself, just as Lenin had vainly warned he would, as ‘a real and true “nationalist-socialist”, and even a vulgar Great Russian bully’. To the Western Left, of course, there always seemed a profound difference between communism and fascism. Until as late as the 1980s, Jürgen Habermas and others zealously upheld the dogma that the Third Reich could not legitimately be compared with Stalin’s Soviet Union. But were not Stalin and his German counterpart in reality just two grim faces of totalitarianism? Was there any real difference between Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’ and Hitler’s National Socialism, except that one was put into practice a few years before the other? We can now see just how many of the things that were done in German concentration camps during the Second World War were anticipated in the Gulag: the transportation in cattle trucks, the selection into different categories of prisoner, the shaving of heads, the dehumanizing living conditions, the humiliating clothing, the interminable roll-calling, the brutal and arbitrary punishments, the differentiation between the determined and the doomed. Yes, the regimes were very far from identical, as we shall see. But it is at least suggestive that when the teenage zek Yuri Chirkov arrived at Solovetsky, the slogan that greeted him was ‘Through Labour – Freedom!’ – a lie identical to the wrought-iron legend Arbeit Macht Frei that would later welcome prisoners to Auschwitz.

  7

  Strange Folk

  We want to protect the eternal foundation of our life: our national identity (Volkstum) and its inherent strengths and values… Farmers, burghers and workers must once again become one German people (ein deutsches Volk).

  Hitler, speech at the opening of the Reichstag, March 21, 1933

  I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction of people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or injurious to the racial stock.

  Hitler to Otto Wagener, SA Chief of Staff

  THE LEADER SPEAKS

  It was March 1933. The national mood was feverish and yet expectant. In the wake of his sweeping election victory, the country’s charismatic new leader addressed a people desperate for change. Millions crowded around their radios to hear him. What they heard was a damning indictment of what had gone before and a stirring call for national revival.

  In sombre tones, he began with a survey the country’s dire economic predicament:

  Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return.

  Who was to blame? He left his audience in no doubt. It was ‘the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods… through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence’. But the ‘practices of the unscrupulous money changers’ now stood ‘indicted in the court of public opinion’; they had been ‘rejected by the hearts and minds of men’:

  Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our
civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. [Applause] The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

  This was strong language, indeed, but there was more to come. Contrasting ‘the falsity of material wealth’ with ‘the joy and moral stimulation of work’, he inveighed against ‘the standards of pride of place and personal profit’, to say nothing of the ‘callous and selfish wrongdoing’ that had come to characterize both financial and political life. ‘This Nation’, he declared to further applause, ‘asks for action, and action now.’

  The action the new leader had in mind was bold, even revolutionary. Jobs would be created by ‘direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war’; men would be put to work on ‘greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources’. At the same time, to correct what he called ‘the overbalance of population in our industrial centres’, there would be a ‘redistribution’ of the workforce ‘to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land’. He would introduce a system of ‘national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities’ and ‘a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments’ to bring ‘an end to speculation with other people’s money’ – measures that won enthusiastic cheers from his audience. The country’s ‘international trade relations’ would have to take second place to ‘the establishment of a sound national economy’. ‘We must move,’ he declared, his voice now rising to a climax,

  as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife. With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.

  Not content with this vision of a militarized nation, he concluded with a stark warning to the nation’s newly elected legislature: ‘An unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from… the normal balance of executive and legislative authority.’ If the legislature did not swiftly pass the measures he proposed to deal with the national emergency, he demanded ‘the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis – broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe’. This line brought forth the loudest applause of all.

  Who was this demagogue who so crudely blamed the Depression on corrupt financiers, who so boldly proposed state intervention as the cure for unemployment, who so brazenly threatened to rule by decree if the legislature did not back him, who so cynically used and re-used the words ‘people’ and ‘Nation’ to stoke up the patriotic sentiments of his audience? The answer is Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the speech from which all the above quotations are taken was his inaugural address as he assumed the American presidency on March 4, 1933.

  Less than three weeks later, another election victor in another country that had been struck equally hard by the Depression gave a remarkably similar speech, beginning with a review of the country’s dire economic straits, promising radical reforms, urging legislators to transcend petty party-political thinking and concluding with a stirring call for national unity. The resemblances between Adolf Hitler’s speech to the newly elected Reichstag on March 21, 1933, and Roosevelt’s inaugural address are indeed a great deal more striking than the differences. Yet it almost goes without saying that the United States and Germany took wholly different political directions from 1933 until 1945, the year when, both still in office, Roosevelt and Hitler died. Despite Roosevelt’s threat to override Congress if it stood in his way, and despite his three subsequent re-elections, there were only two minor changes to the US Constitution during his presidency: the time between elections and changes of administration was reduced (Amendment 20) and the prohibition of alcohol was repealed (Amendment 21). The most important political consequence of the New Deal was significantly to strengthen the federal government relative to the individual states; democracy as such was not weakened. Indeed, Congress rejected Roosevelt’s Judiciary Reorganization Bill. By contrast, the Weimar Constitution had already begun to decompose two or three years before the 1933 general election, with the increasing reliance of Hitler’s predecessors on emergency presidential decrees. By the end of 1934 it had been reduced to a more or less empty shell. While Roosevelt was always in some measure constrained by the legislature, the courts, the federal states and the electorate, Hitler’s will became absolute, untrammelled even by the need for consistency or written expression. What Hitler decided was done, even if the decision was communicated verbally; when he made no decision, officials were supposed to work towards whatever they thought his will might be. Roosevelt had to fight – and fight hard – three more presidential elections. Democracy in Germany, by contrast, became a sham, with orchestrated plebiscites in place of meaningful elections and a Reichstag stuffed with Nazi lackeys. The basic political freedoms of speech, of assembly, of the press and even of belief and thought were done away with. So, too, was the rule of law. Whole sections of German society, above all the Jews, lost their civil as well as political rights. Property rights were also selectively violated. To be sure, the United States was no utopia in the 1930s, particularly for African-Americans. It was the Southern states whose legal prohibitions on interracial sex and marriage provided the Nazis with templates when they sought to ban relationships between ‘Aryans’ and Jews. Yet, to take the most egregious indicator, the number of lynchings of blacks during the 1930s (119 in all) was just 42 per cent of the number in the 1920s and 21 per cent of the number in the 1910s. Whatever else the Depression did, it did not destroy American democracy, nor worsen American racism.*

  The contrast between the American and German responses to the Depression illuminates the central difficulty facing the historian who writes about the 1930s. These were the two industrial economies most severely affected by the economic crisis. Both entered the Depression as democracies; indeed, their constitutions had much in common – both republics, both federations, both with a directly elected presidency, both with universal suffrage, both with a bicameral legislature, both with a supreme court. Yet one navigated the treacherous inter-war waters without significant change to its political institutions and its citizens’ freedoms; the other produced the most abominable regime ever to emerge from a modern democracy. To attempt to explain why is to address perhaps the hardest question of twentieth-century history.

  Recovery from the Depression plainly called for new economic policies in all countries; by 1933, as Roosevelt said, the traditional remedies favoured by his predecessor Herbert Hoover had been discredited. Any country that adhered tenaciously to the combination of sound money (the gold standard) and a more or less balanced budget was doomed to a decade of stagnation. Nor were tariffs the answer. However, there was a variety of different ways to engineer economic recovery. At one extreme were the policies of the Soviet Union, based on state ownership of the means of production, central planning and the ruthless coercion of labour. At the other, there was the British combination of currency devaluation, modest budget deficits and a protectionist imperial customs union. Other measures – such as the system of bank deposit insurance introduced in the United States – did not constitute a drastic break with the liberal economic order. Most countries adopted policies somewhere in between these two extremes, combining increased state involvement in employment, investment and the relief of poverty with looser fiscal and monetary policies and measures to limit the free flow and/or pricing of g
oods, capital and labour. The key point is that the political consequences of these new economic policies varied much more between countries than the policies themselves. Only in some countries was the adoption of new economic policies subsequent to, if not actually conditional upon, a political switch to dictatorship. The English-speaking world saw a variety of departures from economic orthodoxy without any erosion of democracy. So too did Scandinavia; it was in the 1930s that the Swedish Social Democrats laid the foundations of the post-1945 European welfare state. Ironically, moves away from democracy in other countries were sometimes justified by the need for more stringently orthodox fiscal policies, on the ground that the parliamentary system, with its special interests represented in the legislature, made it impossible to run balanced budgets. In fact, unbalanced budgets provided a generally beneficial stimulus to demand. It should also be remembered that changes of monetary policy did not require any diminution of democracy since in most countries before the Depression central banks were not democratically accountable. Some had their independence from parliamentary control legally enshrined. Others – notably the Bank of England and the Banque de France – were still considered to be private firms, accountable to their shareholders rather than to voters, even if their role and mode of operation were governed by statute.

  Moreover, only in a sub-set of countries did the end of democracy also mean the end of liberty and the rule of law. Although the weakening of parliamentary power was often associated with increased persecution of ethnic minorities, it was in fact logically possible to have the one without the other. Liberal critics of democracy since Madison, de Tocqueville and Mill had warned against the ‘tyranny of the majority’. It was already apparent in East Central Europe before the Depression that democracy could indeed lead ethnic majorities to discriminate against minorities (see Chapter 5). To be sure, executives unhampered by parliamentary scrutiny found it easier to violate existing laws or constitutions. But the degree to which inter-war authoritarian regimes persecuted individuals or particular social groups varied widely. In some cases dictators may actually have been better for ethnic minorities than elected governments willing to give full vent to majority prejudice. More than is commonly realized, authoritarian rulers could act as a check on violently intolerant fascist movements, most obviously in Romania, but also in Poland (see below).