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Jul. 22nd, 2020 09:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: The Dictators - Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, by Richard Overy
This has been on the shelves for some time, a hand-down from my father when he bought the Kindle edition. It was never going to be a light or pleasant read, but in the end I did find it worthwhile.
It would have been quite appropriate for Overy to title the book The Dictatorships, as this isn't exclusively about the individuals at the top of the regimes, though they do play an obvious major role. Both men needed support and an element of luck to get to the top. It made me uncomfortable that there would be some quantitative comparison between the two, to find one "better" than the other. This did emerge, but in a fairly natural way. It feels as though Stalin gets the benefit of the doubt over the Great Terror, as Overy catalogues much more modest execution counts outside of the period 1937-8. There's a dissonance between the suggestion that Stalin's military regime was defensive, and its actions across Eastern Europe in 1939-40 and after the end of the war. But there's an overarching sense, without feeling biased, that many of the systematic failings in the USSR during Stalin's dictatorship can be attributed to emergence from the chaos of the Tsarist regime and 1917 revolution; on the other hand, the Nazi regime took a recognisably, if weak, democratic state and consciously destroyed it.
Beyond the historical record and analysis, I was curious to see whether the book might suggest things to me about our current leaders. My conclusions are not flattering. If you choose to see them, there are parallels for Trump, Putin, and others. The attempted erosion of checks and balances, whether successful or not, is disturbing: it's not always obvious whether "small" changes can have large consequences. The arrogance of news management, and the curious use of focus groups - but only the right focus groups - by Dr Goebbels, does smell like Classic Dom.
This has been on the shelves for some time, a hand-down from my father when he bought the Kindle edition. It was never going to be a light or pleasant read, but in the end I did find it worthwhile.
It would have been quite appropriate for Overy to title the book The Dictatorships, as this isn't exclusively about the individuals at the top of the regimes, though they do play an obvious major role. Both men needed support and an element of luck to get to the top. It made me uncomfortable that there would be some quantitative comparison between the two, to find one "better" than the other. This did emerge, but in a fairly natural way. It feels as though Stalin gets the benefit of the doubt over the Great Terror, as Overy catalogues much more modest execution counts outside of the period 1937-8. There's a dissonance between the suggestion that Stalin's military regime was defensive, and its actions across Eastern Europe in 1939-40 and after the end of the war. But there's an overarching sense, without feeling biased, that many of the systematic failings in the USSR during Stalin's dictatorship can be attributed to emergence from the chaos of the Tsarist regime and 1917 revolution; on the other hand, the Nazi regime took a recognisably, if weak, democratic state and consciously destroyed it.
Beyond the historical record and analysis, I was curious to see whether the book might suggest things to me about our current leaders. My conclusions are not flattering. If you choose to see them, there are parallels for Trump, Putin, and others. The attempted erosion of checks and balances, whether successful or not, is disturbing: it's not always obvious whether "small" changes can have large consequences. The arrogance of news management, and the curious use of focus groups - but only the right focus groups - by Dr Goebbels, does smell like Classic Dom.