My father was a formidably erudite man who wore his wide-ranging scholarly acumen lightly and conveyed it deftly often with a kind of mordant humour.  He was fluent in German and French and read Russian somewhat haltingly (it is a difficult language).  Born in 1920, it was not surprising that, given his cultural interests and intellectual talents, the totalitarian nightmare and world war that framed his youth and early adulthood, preoccupied him. 

He wanted to understand what at the deepest level seemed to defy comprehension.  When I became old enough (12 maybe) we would talk often about this, and he would raise questions and suggest pathways to discovery that I never heard or read anywhere else. When he died, I inherited his large library of volumes on German and Russian history, culture, politics, and ideology, not all of which I could read because I did not inherit his facility with languages. But I have dabbled where I could over the years and I remember our conversations more vividly than I remember what, in the joys of my early dotage, I am supposed to do today or where I left my car keys.

One of the many questions that modern scholarship has not fully answered is “why Germany.”  What I mean by that is why in the best-educated country in Europe, did a racialist ideology fall on such fertile ground, such that it made a more effective springboard to power for an Austrian demagogue, than say, a class-based ideology.  My dad would say that the post-World War I misery, the Versailles Treaty, the hyper-inflation were not a sufficient explanatory nexus at all.  All of Europe was decimated by the Great War, communism was proving a seductive option, already in power in Russia, so why did racialism win in Germany?  He pushed me to go deeper into German history and culture to find some answers, and eventually I did.  I will blog my thoughts on this soon; but these explorations provoked another question which I will have a go at now.

Why are Hitler’s crime so much better known than Stalin’s crimes; and why in the parade of historical demagogues does the pock-marked little paranoid who murdered on a conservative estimate, three-to-four-times more human beings than Hitler did, seem to fade into the background so easily in the West as compared to Adolf about whom, literally hundreds of books are still published every year, more than 70 years after his death? Here are some thoughts:

  • Personality
    Reality is a story we shape. We love stories, they are the very fabric of our consciousness.  Hitler is a more compelling story than Stalin — the failed architect and itinerant house painter who fought (bravely enough) in the trenches where he swallowed a bit if gas which gave his voice a peculiar quality, who then went on to use this voice to spellbind mass audiences with inflammatory oratory and built his extremist party from nothing to an ideological juggernaut, now that’s a story!  Stalin, the spider who spent his early life in back-room intrigues, never fought except with fellow communists, who came to power because he was a master of bureaucratic manipulation, slowly pulling all the threads of administrative power into his web, who founded nothing, had no original ideas, was animated only by his all-consuming lust for control of a party mechanism he did not create, now that is a tough one for Hollywood.
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  • The Holocaust Fixation
    There were more than a few holocausts during the 20th century but only one gets a capital “H’ in the West. Is it really surprising that we have Schindler’s List and Sophie’s Choice and nothing analogous rendering Stalin’s crimes into artistic form given the potent influence of American Jews in our culture industries?
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  • The Western Intellectual Love Affair With Communism
    My dad’s formative decade, the thirties was known as the Red decade, and the seductive attractiveness of communism to western intellectuals lasted long after the facts of Stalin’s butcheries and the Gulag started to leak out.  The German philosopher Martin Heidegger was pilloried for a brief flirtation with the Nazis in the early thirties, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, an overt Stalinist well into the later fifties when the facts were known, got away clean. On this subject see my little reading list.
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  • The Obscuring of the Historical Record
    The Soviets had 36 years of control after Stalin died, much time to obfuscate, sanitize, destroy records and actually rewrite history. The Nazis had no such luxury.  This excuse for ignorance is fast diminishing. The facts are there, and have been widely accepted since Solzhenitsyn’s books became best-sellers in the West, yet the imbalance of interest still persists. (My Dad had to write a furious letter to the editors of a Toronto paper that published a story on the anniversary of the Katyn Massacre falsely attributing the murder of more than ten-thousand Polish army officers to the Germans.  This was in the eighties when it was well-known that Stalin did it.
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  • Race vs. Class
    Even intellectuals struggle to express this; but racialism had no great hold on the minds of western intellectuals (who happily ignored the treatment of American blacks in their endless tomes about the evils of racialism in Europe.)  So there was this feeling that Nazism was somehow a fundamental, irredeemable evil whereas totalitarian communism was just an experiment gone wrong. Shucks, if we could only figure out how to create that classless utopia without killing so many people, wouldn’t that be just awesome. Of course totalitarianism, whether race or class-based is pretty much the same irredeemable evil wearing slightly different clothes.  There is no meaningful moral distinction there whatsoever.  But intellectuals keep on trying to find one even to this day.
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  • The Ham-Handedness of the Anti-Communist American Right
    Joe McCarthy’s over-zealousness in the fifties did huge damage to the credibility of the anti-communist critique even though recent scholarship has revealed that a good number of his accusations were based in fact. (Please don’t tell Hollywood, they’ll have a hissy-fit.)

Your Reading List

  • On Stalin’s many purges of his own Party, “The Great Terror” by Robert Conquest.  Still the best single summary in English.
  • “Darkness at Noon” by Arthur Koestler on the peculiar psychology of the Old Bolsheviks, many of whom went to their deaths after admitting to crimes they did not commit. Extraordinarily powerful.
  • “Gulag, a History” by Anne Applebaum. The definitive history of the Gulag, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
  • “The Opium of the Intellectuals” by Lewis Feuer.  On the persistent  seductiveness of communism for western intellectuals.
  • “Russia and Germany – A Century of Conflict” by Walter Laqueur. On what Russian and German elites thought of each other going way back.
  • “A History of Russia” by Igor Idiota in 12 folio volumes. (Just kidding on this one!)