Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism

[1] Political scientists Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Carl Joachim Friedrich, and historian Robert Conquest were prominent advocates of applying the totalitarian concept to compare Nazism and Stalinism.

Arendt identifies this as being in specific ways similar to modern advertising, in which companies claim that scientific research shows their products to be superior; however, she posits more generally that it is an extreme version of "that obsession with science which has characterised the Western world since the rise of mathematics and physics in the sixteenth century.

[30] Arendt highlights the widespread use of internment camps by totalitarian governments, positing that they are the most important manifestation of the need to find enemies to fight against, and therefore they are "more essential to the preservation of the regime's power than any of its other institutions.

"[32] In particular, the Nazis carried this logic to the point of "open anti-utility" by expending large sums of money, resources, and manpower during a war for the purpose of building and staffing extermination camps and transporting people to them.

[42] Placing Stalinism and Nazism within the broader historical tradition of autocratic government, Friedrich and Brzezinski hold that "totalitarian dictatorship, in a sense, is the adaptation of autocracy to twentieth-century industrial society.

"[37] In terms of the similarities between Nazism and Stalinism, Friedrich lists five main aspects that they hold in common: First, an official ideology that is supposed to be followed by all members of society, at least passively, and which promises to serve as a perfect guide towards some ultimate goal.

Several major policies, such as the Stalinist collectivisation in the Soviet Union of agriculture or the Nazi Final Solution, cannot be explained by anything other than a genuine commitment to achieving ideological goals, even at great cost.

Unlike Hannah Arendt, who held that the Gulag camps served no economic purpose, Friedrich and Brzezinski posit that they provided an important source of cheap labor for the Stalinist economy.

Werth reports that the Stalinist Soviet Union underwent an "extraordinary brutalisation of the relations between state and society" for rapid modernisation and industrialisation, to "gain one hundred years in one decade, and to metamorphose the country into a great industrial power.

Eliminating them served a dual purpose; it helped Stalin centralise power in the Kremlin instead of regional centres and provided him with "corrupt officials" that he could blame for earlier repressions and unpopular policies.

[107] The third group was made up of ordinary citizens from all walks of life who resorted to petty crime to provide for themselves in the face of worsening living standards, for example, by taking home some wheat from the fields or tools from the factory.

Such people were divided into two categories: homosexuals and "asocials", who were only vaguely defined, and included "Gypsies, tramps, beggars, prostitutes, alcoholics, the jobless who refused any employment, and those who left their work frequently or for no reason.

[130] The common point between Nazi and Stalinist practices was the connection of reproduction policies with the ideological goals of the state, described as "part of the project of a rational, hypermodern vision for the re-organisation of society".

[139] The Nazi regime was founded upon a racialist view of politics and envisioned the deportation or extermination of the majority of the population of Eastern Europe in order to open up "living space" for ethnic German settlers.

[145] There were also smaller-scale operations involving ethnic cleansing of diaspora minorities during and after World War II, in which tens of thousands of Crimean Bulgarians, Greeks, Iranians, Khemshils, Kurds, and Meskhetian Turks were deported from the Black Sea and Transcaucasian border regions.

[146] The deportations of the Chechens and Ingush also involved the outright massacre of thousands of people and severe conditions placed upon the deportees; they were put in unsealed train cars, with little to no food for a four-week journey during which many died from hunger and exhaustion.

[154][155] Israeli academic Amikam Nachmani wrote that Bullock's Hitler and Stalin "come out as two blood-thirsty, pathologically evil, sanguine tyrants, who are sure of the presence of determinism, hence having unshakeable beliefs that Destiny assigned on them historical missions—the one to pursue a social industrialised revolution in the Soviet Union, the other to turn Germany into a global empire.

"[160] By 1919, the Bolsheviks confiscated Jewish properties, Hebrew schools, libraries, books, and synagogues under newly imposed anti-religious laws, turning their buildings into "Communist centers, clubs or restaurants."

Parenti says that the fascists in Germany and Italy, despite "some meager social programs" and public works projects designed to bolster nationalist sentiment, supported and served the interests of big business and the capitalist class at the expense of the workers by outlawing strikes and unions, privatising state-owned mills, plants, and banks along with farm cooperatives, abolishing workplace safety regulations, minimum wage laws and overtime pay, and subsidising heavy industry.

By contrast, while stating there were deficiencies in Marxist–Leninist states, some of which he attributes to maldevelopment due to outside pressure from a hostile capitalist world, and acknowledging the numerous state-sanctioned imprisonments and killings, which he says were exaggerated for political reasons, Parenti asserts that the Stalinist regime in particular "made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care and women's rights", and communist revolutions in general "created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers and Western capitalists.

According to Wheatcroft, unlike Hitler, Stalin's "purposive killings" fit more closely into the category of "execution" than "murder", given he thought the accused were indeed guilty of crimes against the state and insisted on documentation.

According to historian Thomas Kühne, going back to the Historikerstreit, conservative intellectuals such as Ernst Nolte and the Holocaust uniqueness debate, the attempts to link Soviet and Nazi crimes, citing books such as Snyder's Bloodlands as prominent examples, are "as politically tricky today as it was then.

"[167]Kristen Ghodsee, an ethnographer of post-Cold War Eastern Europe, contends that the efforts to institutionalise the "double genocide thesis", or the moral equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and the victims of communism (class murder), and in particular, the recent push at the beginning of the global financial crisis for the commemoration of the latter in Europe, can be seen as the response by economic and political elites to fears of a leftist resurgence in the face of devastated economies and extreme inequalities in both the East and West as the result of neoliberal capitalism.

By linking all leftist and socialist ideals to the excesses of Stalinism, Ghodsee says that the elites in the West hope to discredit and marginalise all political ideologies that could "threaten the primacy of private property and free markets.

"[168] Historian Nicholas Doumanis states that the totalitarian perspective of equating Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin is not conceivable and is a misunderstanding of the two distinct natures of the regimes, which is why they were enemies.

[174] Prior to this, the signing of the 1933 Treaty of Friendship, Nonaggression, and Neutrality had Fascist Italy become a major trading partner with Stalin's USSR, exchanging Soviet natural resources for Italian technical assistance, which included the fields of aviation, automobile and naval technology.

[179] The 2008 documentary film The Soviet Story, commissioned by the national-conservative Union for Europe of the Nations group in the European Parliament and produced and directed by Latvian filmmaker Edvīns Šnore, compared the atrocities of the two regimes in a reminiscence of the Historikerstreit in the 1980s.

[180] According to Mārtiņš Kaprāns, a communication science expert and researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia, "[s]cholars have argued that The Soviet Story is an effective Latvian response to Russian propaganda, but it also exemplifies the broader problems of post-communist memory politics."

"[187] 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.

[190] 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."