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                                                                                BOOKS, Page 68

The Evil That Two Men Did


In the first parallel biography of Hitler and Stalin, historian
Alan Bullock compares their motives and methods

By BRUCE W. NELAN


    Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, the two most powerful
personifications of evil in this century, are still impossible
to explain fully. They shouldered their way into politics as
resentful, hate-filled egoists, but so did thousands of their
contemporaries. To anyone scrutinizing the young Hitler or
Stalin, writes Alan Bullock, the Oxford University historian,
"a suggestion that he would play a major role in
twentieth-century history would have appeared incredible." At
30, Hitler was a street-corner speechmaker in Munich, and Stalin
was in prison for plotting an oil workers' strike in Baku.

    "They developed over time," says Lord Bullock -- he became
a life peer in 1976 -- so he decided to study that process in a
comparative, parallel biography of the two, something no one
else has done. Bullock is the author of Hitler: A Study in
Tyranny (1952), the first great postwar biography of the
dictator. "I'm a narrative historian, and in the course of the
narrative," he says, "it comes clear" precisely how Hitler and
Stalin rose to supreme power in Germany and Russia.

    Though Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (Knopf; 1,081
pages; $35) runs a densely written thousand pages, detailing the
two lives stage by stage, not everything comes clear. Most
readers willing to take the long journey will hope that
Bullock's exhaustive analysis of the biographical literature and
newly opened archives might somehow explain what caused Hitler
and Stalin. There was something inhumanly dark and cold in both
leaders that made them willing to do literally anything to
fulfill what they felt was their mission.

    Unfortunately, as Bullock writes, "the process by which
these convictions took possession of their minds remains a
mystery." He generally avoids psychohistory, but observes
matter-of-factly that both Hitler and Stalin were paranoid and
insensitive to humanity -- that is, unable to accept that other
people were as real as they. Both were, in fact, incapable of
normal relationships. One word Bullock does not use is
"monster," because he sees horror in the fact that they were
human.

    The source of Hitler's political success was his oratory.
He began as no more than an idle, self-deluded, uneducated
young man who liked World War I army life because it gave him
a sense of purpose. In 1919 that suddenly changed when he
discovered, as he said, "I could make a good speech." He turned
out to be a bold, sharp political tactician as well, but it was
his hypnosis of the masses that made him the Fuhrer, the
unchallenged leader.

    Stalin -- rough, conspiratorial, despising authority --
was a natural Marxist revolutionary. While studying at a
Russian Orthodox seminary in his native Georgia, he became a
convert to Marx and never changed course. His career contrasted
with Hitler's because his movement already had a leader, Lenin.
Unlike Hitler's public portrayal of himself as a man of destiny,
Stalin's style was stealthy, behind the scenes.

    As General Secretary of the Communist Party, Stalin
appeared, calculatedly, to be simply an organization man. But
he was far more than that because he had perfected the technique
of using the details of organization to amass political power.
Once he became the vozhd, the master, he ruthlessly annihilated
all those who once were loyal to Lenin and all who might
consider questioning his authority.

    Both despots believed utterly in themselves and were
indifferent to the suffering and destruction they caused to
achieve their ends. Hard as it is to realize it, Bullock writes,
"the key to understanding both Stalin and Hitler is . . . that
they were entirely serious about their historic roles." In
private they were boring and boorish. The mistake their
political enemies and would-be partners repeatedly made was to
underestimate the men and the extremes to which they would go.

    Hitler had nothing like the domestic program of
development and collectivization Stalin rammed through at the
cost of millions of lives. He was really interested only in
foreign conquests, and one in particular: an Aryan empire in
Eastern Europe. Hitler was driven by a slogan-ridden ideology
that he formed as a youth, reading cheap pamphlets in Vienna,
and never changed. He had, Bullock finds, no capacity whatever
for critical thinking. He believed the German "master race" had
three enemies: Slavs, Marxists and Jews.

    To eliminate them, Hitler had an ultimate plan to conquer
Ukraine and European Russia for colonization by racially pure
Aryans. The original Slavic populations would be deported or
kept as slaves, educated only enough "to understand our highway
signs." In 1941 Hitler actually began to carry out that program
and in going to war with the Soviet Union also put into effect
his "final solution to the Jewish problem," the extermination
of European Jewry. While Stalin had more people put to death
than Hitler did, Bullock maintains the Nazi Holocaust is unique
because "mass murder became not an instrument but an end in
itself."

    Russia, under Stalin's direction, was Hitler's nemesis in
World War II. But while that war freed most of Germany from
despotism, the shackles of Stalinism stayed in place in the
Soviet Union for another 40 years. Russia is still trying to
find its way toward democracy. Bullock maintains that only a
confluence of violent upheavals and unusual leaders can produce
a Hitler or a Stalin, and "such occasions are not common." But
it has happened within living memory, and Bullock's monumental
history reminds us how unwise it would be to conclude it cannot
happen again.