Two figures more than any others tower over the blood soaked terrain of Europe in the 20th century. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
It’s easy to see why. Both established themselves as undisputed dictators of totalitarian regimes in their respective countries and profoundly shaped the politics and history of the world. Not in the least because they became the two great antagonists of WWII.
It’s hardly surprising that when we look back at them we tend see primarily their similarities rather than their differences. Both were brutal, ruthless characters responsible directly and indirectly for the deaths of millions. Both were the centers of personality cults that reached the extremes of religious fanaticism. Both were adept at the manipulation of mass, popular hysteria for political ends and were absolutely merciless in destroying those who opposed them.
Anyone who seeks to understand the nature of totalitarian regimes and how they become established can’t avoid examining their careers.
However, this backward looking perspective tends to obscure more than it illuminates. For all their similarities, Hitler and Stalin came from very different beginnings and followed very different routes to power.
These differences are crucial in understanding how totalitarian politics can develop and function.
Of the two, Hitler will occupy less attention here since the particulars of his rise are generally well known. He was born into a solidly middle class, provincial existence as the son of low level civil servant. His father was reportedly a physically abusive man who beat him regularly. His Mother doted on him and, following his father’s unexpected death, indulged him in his dreams of becoming an artist.
Hitler’s political life didn’t really begin until after his service in WWI. Prior to the war he’d led the classic existence of a starving artist on the streets of Vienna. Following his active service, in the violence and upheaval of the German revolution, he was recruited as an agitator and spy by the military intelligence arm of the Reichswehr. In that role he was assigned to monitor an obscure organization known as the German Workers Party. He was invited to join the Party on the basis of his oratorical skills in 1919 and quickly rose to be the Party’s most popular speaker. Within two years he would establish himself as the head of the party, re-christened as the National Socialist German Workers Party(Nazi), on the strength of his public charisma.
Stalin, in contrast, came from a peasant background of grinding poverty after his alcoholic, cobbler father abandoned him and his mother. Through strenuous effort she managed to see that Stalin received an education, eventually placing him in a seminary in preparation for a career as a priest.
Here we find the first great distinction between Hitler and Stalin. The latter’s active political life began immediately following his exit from school. By 1900 he had come to the attention of the Tsarist secret police for organizing classes in socialist theory as well as co-organizing an illegal May Day mass meeting. Stalin was forced to go underground to avoid arrest. Nevertheless he continued his activities, helping to plan a May Day demonstration of 3000 in 1901 and being elected to the Tiflis Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). He continued his underground activities helping to organize strikes and demonstrations until he was arrested in 1902 and exiled to Siberia in 1903.
Stalin managed to escape his exile on his second try and returned to his underground activities. It was at this time that Stalin joined the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP. This was to set the pattern for the next 14 years of his life. A life of intensive underground political work and political advancement within the RSDLP Bolshevik faction, punctuated by arrests and escapes.
With the outbreak of of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Stalin moved into the forefront of Georgian revolutionary activity, organizing “Battle groups” to disarm local Tsarist police and troops, expropriating/extorting material and monetary support from commercial interests and combating Cossack troops and pro-Tsarist Black Hundreds. In November of that year Stalin was elected as a Georgian delegate to a Bolshevik conference in Tammerfors, Finland where he met Lenin for the first time.
This was the beginning of his direct collaboration with Lenin, during which he oversaw Bolshevik interests in Georgia. In the next three years he continued to engage in illegal actions, most notoriously the ambush of an armed convoy in Yerevan Square with guns and home-made bombs which took around 40 lives.
His climb within the Bolshevik apparatus continued apace, culminating in his appointment to the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912.
So the distinction between Hitler and Stalin is clearly drawn. While Hitler was wandering the streets of Vienna, leading a bohemian existence painting post card views of the city, Stalin was already a hardened veteran of the revolutionary underground, an experienced fighter and organizational climber.
This, I think, is where the root of their divergent paths to power lies.
Hitler, up until the outbreak of WWI, was little more than a somewhat shabby, romantic eccentric, with no political or organizational experience. The war was going to change that.
Hitler’s story is in some ways a familiar and archetypal one. An unknown person rises from obscurity by dint of force of will and personal magnetism to the pinnacle of fame and power, only to be brought low by personal failings and hubris. This is a story as old as civilization and as contemporary as the last Rock Star to hit the skids.
Hitler emerged from the war as a wounded veteran and recipient of the Iron Cross 2nd class for bravery. This combined with his oratorical ability made him a valuable commodity for a struggling, new political party and, as noted, was enough to catapult him into the leadership of that party within two years time.
In short, from its inception Hitler’s career was predicated on his personality. The “cult” was baked in from the beginning. The Fuhrerprinzip was both implicit and explicit in his rise.
In an age of instant celebrity such as ours, this narrative seems easy to comprehend. That’s why we find comparisons to latter day demagogues, fueled by hype and bombast, so readily apparent.
The contrast between this and Stalin’s trajectory could not be more striking. Even as he rose through the structure of the Bolshevik Party, Stalin had remained a man of the shadows. His status outside his Georgian home base relied on his relationship with Lenin and his record as a tireless and seasoned Party worker.
To the extent he was known at all outside of Party circles it was largely due to a single pamphlet that he wrote at Lenin’s behest in 1913; Marxism and the National Question.
This relative obscurity was in part dictated by the fact that so much of his service had been through illegal actions. Some of which had been undertaken in direct defiance of RSDLP policy.
It’s difficult to appreciate, looking back from this side of subsequent history, just how colorless and nondescript Stalin appeared to his contemporaries. The historian Isaac Deutscher described his personality as “bat like”. Even today he appears enigmatic, with no real consensus among historians as to his exact motivations.
What is clear is that his path to power wasn’t built on personal charisma or celebrity. To the contrary. Stalin’s rise was incremental and protracted. A consistent course of organizational maneuver and intrigue over time. A key element of which was the thorough underestimation of Stalin by his opponents. As hard to comprehend as it may be, at the time Stalin was perceived as a second stringer at best. A rather dull, bureaucratic type fit only for Administrative duties and consequently no threat to the rest of the Bolshevik leadership. So un-threatening did Stalin appear that in 1922 he was given the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party.
This was a misjudgment that would have fatal consequences, as the position was responsible for appointing all jobs and assignments for party members. Since the Party was thoroughly entwined with the State, this allowed Stalin to gradually fill all positions of importance and authority with his supporters or allies while simultaneously removing opponents or exiling them to posts far removed from the centers of power and influence. Stalin possessed a patronage system that dwarfed the wildest ambitions of any big city or State Political Boss.
This couldn’t be done overnight of course. It would take time and would depend on not tipping his hand too soon. That required two qualities familiar to anyone who has experience with office politics: stealth and deniability.
Putting his relative obscurity to use, Stalin recast himself as leader of the “Moderate Center” in Bolshevik politics. A practical minded Party Committee man. This enabled him to maneuver between the various factions in the Party Leadership, first inclining to one and then the other, playing them off against each other, all the while steadily strengthening his own position.
The methods he employed should be familiar as well. Unrestrained campaigns of personal vilification. Manufactured smears, distortions and falsehood, all carefully couched in what the Bolsheviks considered politically correct sentiments. With equal care, Stalin insured that in every instance it was his erstwhile allies who bore the onus of these campaigns. Those Allies, all being of greater stature than Stalin, naturally took the leading role, little realizing that in doing so they rendered themselves vulnerable to the same tactics when they were later turned against them. Initially, he used Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky, only to then use Bukharin in the same fashion against all three. In this way Stalin maintained his image as a loyal party man standing above and apart from the vicious infighting of the personal factions that roiled the leadership.
So effective was Stalin’s strategy that as late as 1929 he was seen as a safer, more preferable choice by his opponents on the Left than his opponents on the Right led by Bukharin. Consequently, they failed to unite against him.
To many observers at the time, it seemed that Stalin was sloughing off the extremes of the Party in favor of a more pragmatic, realistic and moderate course. Stalin consciously cultivated this perception, going so far as to publicly criticize the “excesses” and bloody mindedness of his allies, despite the fact that they could not have pursued such tactics without his active collaboration. Having control of the Party apparatus meant that he could have thwarted their efforts had he chosen to. He did nothing of the kind.
By 1930 Stalin had, step by step, isolated and expelled all of his opponents from the leadership, consolidating his political and administrative control of the Party and through it, the State. In so doing, he had successively adopted one position after another, only to discard each in favor of its opposite when the latter offered a greater advantage. His path to power had been that of an organizational man jockeying within a bureaucratic structure.
Even then his personal dictatorship wasn’t completely consolidated. Since he ruled through the Party, it was still conceivable that a rebellion against him might arise within the ranks of the Party. That was a possibility that he wouldn’t eliminate entirely until the onset of the great purge some 5 years later.
His solution possibly inspired by Hitler’s own blood purge of the Nazi Party leadership the preceding year.
In sum, while the similarities between Hitler and Stalin are undeniable, the differences are equally so. Whereas there was, from the beginning, no mistaking Hitler’s goal of personal dictatorship, the same was not true of Stalin. The latter’s drive for absolute power was concealed behind a facade of conventional political posturing and dissembling. It could be compared, using a current analogy, to a frog in a pot of water being brought slowly to a boil.
Hitler, on the other hand, operated with Blitzkrieg speed. Less than two months after becoming Reichs Chancellor, he established his personal Dictatorship via the Enabling Act. From this point onward Hitler was above the Law, the State or the Nazi Party, ruling over all essentially by personal decree. This was in keeping with a regime consciously modeled on the Medieval despotism of the warlord.
Again the contrast with Stalin is apparent. Having based his drive for power on his dominate position within the Bolshevik Party, Stalin ruled through the Party, using its authority to buttress his own and making sure to justify all his actions in terms Party precedent and ideology, gradually, through suppression and repression, reducing it to an instrument of his own policy and caprice. Even at the height of his cult of personality, Stalin maintained the fiction that he was simply acting on behalf of the Bolshevik Party and its ideals.
So what lessons can be drawn from the differences between these two tyrannies?
The most obvious one is that while it is easy enough recognize the threat of authoritarianism and totalitarianism when it presents itself in the form of an open political antagonist, it is not so easy to recognize when it clothes itself in forms and rhetoric that appeal to one’s own convictions. Hitler openly advocated his anti-Democratic, fascist views. Stalin cloaked his intentions in appeals to democratic sentiments of equality, economic and social justice and the liberation of the oppressed.
The next, consequent to the first, is that while Progressives and all who support Democratic values must confront and combat the open authoritarianism and totalitarianism coming from the Right, we must be equally vigilant in guarding against these when they emanate from those supposedly on the same side of the political divide as ourselves.
This is a more difficult task. Because such impulses can not only be disguised but justified as serving the greater good. As human beings we are all prone to cut slack for those we perceive as being “on our side”. This makes us susceptible to arguments that we should overlook behavior by erstwhile allies that we would condemn otherwise. Chiefly the argument that the end justifies the means, or that the urgency of a particular issue renders all other concerns irrelevant.
If the tale of Stalin’s ascent teaches us anything, it is just how false and ultimately fatal such arguments can be.