THE DICTATORS

A sprawling study of the 20th century’s foremost totalitarian systems and their infamous leaders, who are revealed to be, well, alike and different.

Against the French authors of The Black Book of Communism (1997), who asserted that Josef Stalin’s regime was even more monstrous than Adolf Hitler’s, British scholar Overy (The Battle of Britain, 2001, etc.) argues that “the historian’s responsibility is not to prove which of the two men was the more evil or deranged, but to try to understand the differing historical processes and states of mind that led both these dictatorships to murder on such a colossal scale.” Some 900 pages later, the reader will have learned a very great deal about the systematic growth of the totalitarian state; about the evolution of command economies that sought, in Russia’s case, to bring the state into the modern era and, in Germany’s, to overcome the state’s “vulnerable dependence on the wider world economy”; about the proliferation of concentration and labor camps in the 1930s. Overy does not add much to what is known about these systems, though he does remark, usefully, that some of Hitler’s early success came about because Germans were too embarrassed to confront him and that Stalin was no bumpkin, even if he didn’t know how to handle an oyster fork. (Stalin’s personal library, the author points out, numbered 40,000 well-read volumes.) Overy’s conclusions about these rulers’ differing conceptions of the state are unexceptionable: Hitler believed in an ethnic state, Stalin in a historically constructed one, and neither had any use for capitalism. His remarks about the complicity of the dictatorships’ subjects in the crimes of their rulers will not cause a stir these days, as they might have in times past. His notion, however, that Soviet communism was meant to advance human progress at large whereas Nazism was meant to serve one people alone will probably not satisfy those French scholars—and certainly does not constitute a satisfactory defense of the former.

Still, a highly readable account of the two regimes, drawing on an impressive wealth of primary documents.