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Joseph Stalin is equivalent to Adolf Hitler
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A
number of authors have carried out comparisons of Nazism and Stalinism,
in which they have considered the issues of whether the two ideologies were
similar or different, how these conclusions affect understanding of 20th
century history, what relationship existed between the two regimes, and why
both of them came to prominence at the same time. The answers to all these
questions are disputed. During the 20th century, the comparison of Stalinism
and Nazism was made on the topics of totalitarianism, ideology, and personality.
Both regimes were seen in contrast to the liberal West, with an emphasis on the
similarities between the two, while their differences from each other were
minimized. Hannah Arendt, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski
were prominent advocates of this "totalitarian" interpretation. The
totalitarian model was challenged in the 1970s by political scientists who
sought to understand the Soviet Union in terms of modernization, and by the
functionalist historians, Martin Broszat
and Hans Mommsen, who argued that the Nazi
regime was far too disorganized to be considered totalitarian. The comparison
of Stalinism and Nazism, which was conducted on a theoretical basis by
political scientists during the Cold War, is now
approached on the basis of empirical research, now that greater information is
available. However it remains a neglected field of academic study.
Similarities
between Stalinism and Nazism
Though
the Nazi party was ideologically opposed to communism, Adolf
Hitler and other Nazi leaders frequently expressed recognition that only in
Soviet Russia were their revolutionary and ideological counterparts were to be
found. Adolf Hitler admired Stalin and Stalinism, and on numerous occasions
publicly praised Stalin for seeking to purify the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
of Jewish influences, noting the purging of Jewish communists such as Leon
Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev
Kamenev, Karl Radek. Joseph Stalin admired Adolf Hitler and
showed admiration for the 1934 purge, the Night of the Long Knives.
Bio-politics
Political
violence and violent societies
Concentration
camps
Works
by historians such as Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber and others in the 1980s
compared the policies of Adolf Hitler and
Joseph Stalin, and drew a parallel between
the concentration camp system in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Margarete
Buber-Neumann in her memoirs from both communist (1937–1940) and
nazi (1940–1945) concentration camps found methods of both regimes to be very
similar. After she was released from Ravensbrück
concentration camp she summarized her observations as follows:
Between the misdeeds of Hitler and those of Stalin, in my opinion, there exists only a quantitative difference. To be sure, Communism as an idea was originally positive, and National Socialism never was positive; it was, since its origin and from its beginning, criminal in its aims and its programme. I don't know if the Communist idea, if its theory, already contained a basic fault or if only the Soviet practice under Stalin betrayed the original idea and established in the Soviet Union a kind of Fascism.— Under Two Dictators (page 300, location 6456, Kindle edition)
Creating
the "New Man"
Militarism
Differences
between Stalinism and Nazism
Socialism
Two-way
comparisons
Atrocities
of the two regimes
History
and scholarship of the comparisons
The
Origins of Totalitarianism
Research
institutions
In
modern politics
The
comparison of Nazism and Stalinism has long provoked political controversy, and
it led to the historians' dispute
within Germany in the 1980s. The debate has continued since the fall of the
Soviet Union and the expansion of the European Union into former Soviet Union
territory, resulting in pronouncements such as the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and
Communism and various related developments known as the Prague Process, supported mainly by the
European Union members most affected by Stalinism.
After
the revolutions of 1989,
European bodies such as the European Union and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe
are increasingly treating Nazism and Stalinism (or sometimes more broadly,
fascism and communism) as two comparable forms of totalitarianism. Growing efforts have been
made to link the two in museums, public monuments, and commemorative days and
events.
The
2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and
Communism, initiated by the Czech government and signed by figures such
as Václav Havel,
called for "a common approach regarding crimes of totalitarian regimes,
inter alia Communist regimes" and for "reaching an all-European
understanding that both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes each to be
judged by their own terrible merits to be destructive in their policies of
systematically applying extreme forms of terror, suppressing all civic and
human liberties, starting aggressive wars and, as an inseparable part of their
ideologies, exterminating and deporting whole nations and groups of population;
and that as such they should be considered to be the main disasters, which
blighted the 20th century."
The
Communist
Party of Greece opposes the Prague Declaration and has criticized
"the new escalation of the anti-communist hysteria led by the EU
council, the European Commission and the political staff of the bourgeois class
in the European Parliament." The Communist
Party of Britain opined that the Prague Declaration "is a
rehash of the persistent attempts by reactionary historians to equate Soviet
Communism and Hitlerite Fascism, echoing the old slanders of British authors George Orwell and Robert Conquest."
The
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's
(OSCE) Vilnius Declaration,
while "acknowledging the uniqueness of the Holocaust," stated that
"in the twentieth century European countries experienced two major
totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Stalinist, which brought about genocide,
violations of human rights and freedoms, war crimes and crimes against
humanity." The Economist argued that "despite Russia's
protests, Stalin was no less villainous than Hitler" but noted: "The
debate will not change the world: the parliamentary assembly is just a talking
shop on the sidelines of the 56-member OSCE. Its resolutions are not legally
binding."
Since
2009, the European Union has officially commemorated the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism
and Nazism, proclaimed by the European Parliament
in 2008 and endorsed by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
in 2009, and officially known as the Black Ribbon Day in some countries
(including Canada).
The
President
of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering,
argued that "both totalitarian systems (Stalinism and Nazism) are
comparable and terrible."
In
some eastern European countries the denial of both fascist and communist crimes
has been explicitly outlawed, and Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg
has argued that "there is a fundamental concern here that totalitarian
systems be measured by the same standard." However, the European Commission
rejected calls for similar EU-wide legislation, due to the lack of consensus among
member states.
The
European Union has established the Platform
of European Memory and Conscience, an educational project originally
proposed by the Prague Declaration, to promote the equal evaluation of
totalitarian crimes in Europe. Several EU member states have established
government agencies and research institutes tasked with the evaluation of
totalitarian crimes, which draw parallels between Nazism and Stalinism or between
fascism and communism. These include the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, the
Polish Institute
of National Remembrance, the Lithuanian International Commission for the Evaluation of the
Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, and
the Hungarian House of Terror
museum. An all-party group in the European Parliament,
the Reconciliation
of European Histories Group, has been formed to promote public
awareness of the crimes of all the totalitarian regimes at the EU level.
A
statement adopted by Russia's legislature said that comparisons of Nazism and
Stalinism are "blasphemous towards all of the anti-fascist movement
veterans, Holocaust victims, concentration camp prisoners and tens of millions
of people …who sacrificed their lives for the sake of the fight against the
Nazis' anti-human racial theory."
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