Stalin’s mother Ekaterina, was less indulgent of her son, but just as devoted. When Stalin once complained about her beating him as a boy she replied “That’s why you turned out so well”. She wanted him to be a priest and sent him to a Russian Orthodox Seminary. It was here the foundations for his future took shape; he became literate in Russian, started to think in systematic terms as the church had taught him and became politically aware. “I became a Marxist on account of my humble upbringing and the rigorous intolerance in the Jesuitical discipline that had crushed me so cruelly”. Instead of the bible, he read smuggled copies of Marxist pamphlets, and instead of Christianity, he embraced the new Communist faith. In 1899 aged twenty, Stalin was now involved in underground Communist activities, he left the Seminary and dedicated his life to Revolution. It didn’t take very much to push someone into objecting the social and economic conditions in which most people had to live in that empire, but few “would be” Revolutionaries became quite as committed to authoritarianism, hierarchy, or have the discipline to uphold a class war, by avenging the poor against the rich as Stalin did in those early years. Stalin had all the brutal commitment of a terrorist; he robbed banks, incited violent demonstrations and beat up his opponents. He was arrested and exiled to Siberia seven times, he later described his time in exile “I hung around mostly with criminals, I remember we used to stop at the saloons in town and drink up every Kopek we had, the criminals were nice, salt of the earth types but there were lots of rats amongst the political convicts”. In Siberia, Stalin developed the characteristic which was to be one of the essentials of his rise to power, absolute self sufficiency. He relied on no-one but himself, never sharing his inner most feelings with his comrades, “A good dose of exile in Siberia never hurt me”. Out of exile the wary-watchful provincial radical met the man who would transform his misfortunes, Lenin, the Bolshevik leader. Lenin was immediately taken with the rough Georgian, Stalin appealed to Lenin for a variety of reasons, he was one of the few obviously very able organisers’ of the Bolshevik party within Russia, with vast experience in revolutionary underground work, it would hold him in good stead when the time came for Lenin to search out the people who could be entrusted with responsible functions within Russia.
Hitler had no such sense of direction, for the years that followed him were what exile in Siberia was to Stalin, “I owe it to that period that I grew hatred” he later said. Having had his application to the Viennese Academy of Art rejected twice, the failed artist spent his free time trying to keep warm in the Austrian Parliament building. He would drink in the rabbit nationalism and the anti-Semitism current at the time, what he witnessed there, gave him a lifelong contempt for democracy. His destitution didn’t do what it had for so many other poor and hopeless men in Vienna, and drive him into the arms of the Marxists; instead he developed a horror of Communism believing that a man must succeed by his own efforts. The out break of war in 1914 was a turning point for Hitler, who in contrast to Stalin had grown into adulthood a drifter. Hitler was a regimental runner, taking messages trench to trench often under heavy fire, twice wounded once gassed, he was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, a high distinction. But this war created a heavy blunting for Hitler; he saw death all around him and experienced the loss of friendship every single day. Its later effect would create in him, an almost desire to steep himself in the atmosphere of death and destruction, and because of the very clear links with that extraordinary environment, perhaps was the beginning of why later he would embrace policies of annihilation. “I learnt that life is a cruel struggle, and has no other object than the preservation of the species” For him morality had no place, only the survival of the fittest, the master race would matter now.
Stalin unlike Hitler, didn’t fight in the First World War, he was rejected by the Russian army as unfit because of his damaged arm and was a known political trouble maker. Freed from his military service he pursued his political ambition, he had clear sense of his historical role, a Revolutionary working alongside the party leader Lenin.
There were no moral thresholds of Stalin, and Lenin knew this, but still he promoted him. If you wanted to get results, Stalin was the man to get the job done. As Lenin’s enforcer Stalin seemed to have found his role, it was only in the chaos following WW1 that Hitler found his.
Defeat in war now gave Hitler the strongest characteristic he would share with Stalin, an over whelming sense of a political mission “hatred grew in me. Hatred for those responsible for this deed. In the days that followed, my own fate became known to me” Hitler like millions of others sort scapegoats everywhere, he blamed Marxists, Jews, Democratic Politicians, he was Germany’ misery made flesh He found a home and a voice in the extreme right wing German Workers party in Munich. From the very first, he electrified with his oratory, despite his Austrian accent. He’d always suspected he had a talent for rhetoric, now it was confirmed. “I could speak”He began in committee rooms and beer halls, the effects always the same “Goodness he’s got a gob on him, we could use him” The leader of the workers party said. Spell bound by Hitler’s oratory, many thousands joined the fledging party and in less than a year, Hitler had made it his own. He used all his artistic kills to create the party’s image, introducing the heraldry swastika and the array of banners and symbols which would later reach their apotheosis at the Nuremberg rallies. He translated his own bitterness into the party’s ideology, railing against enemies within and without, Socialists, Communists, Jews, and Capitalists who’d worked together to destroy Germany. He insisted on complete obedience to himself as Fuhrer the leader. Hitler was Nazism and Nazism was Hitler. It was an extraordinary transition for the man who only ten tears ago had been a homeless wastrel. Both Stalin and Hitler were outsiders, Stalin a Georgian and Hitler an Austrian, a point so often overlooked when one talks about the impact they had on these two countries. But they were outsiders who had something to prove, for they had cut themselves off from their roots and in that rootless situation had to tie themselves to something. Stalin tied himself to Lenin’s revolution; Hitler tied himself to the salvation of the German people.
Hitler was confident enough to seize power in Munich, by means of a putsch, a violent coup. The result was Hitler being sent to prison. It’s hers that he writes a personal vision in his book Mein Kampf, (My Struggle). It tells a great deal, not just about Hitler’s geopolitics or is racism, which is well known, but about his general view of human nature and his view of the political process and how societies work and what holds them together.
Stalin meanwhile, with his hands already on the leavers of power, was seeking to tighten his grip. But in a world where Lenin was already the star, he had to veil his ambition, unlike Hitler who made a virtue of his craving for power. Lenin appreciated Stalin’s mix of cunning and ruthlessness; the skills he showed in dealing with party matters led to his appointment as the General Secretary of the Communist Party, and put him in a position where he could build his power base. He was able to quietly select the right people, and put them in places where they would be useful to him. The genius in his power lay in his remarkable ability to get one group of people to destroy the other. Stalin was bitterly aware that he lacked charisma; he had none of Hitler’s mesmeric powers when he spoke in public, but he was supremely skilled at the game of politics. Stalin would turn against those in the Politburo who had helped him, going as far as destroying them in the process.
Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, not as he’d wished as the outright victor of the polls, but as head of a coalition government. The task he had faced on the journey to power was very different from Stalin’s. Stalin had manipulated a party and organisation. But like Stalin in Russia, many had underestimated the Fuhrer, who used the same cunning and manipulation to gain his ends. Germany’s Conservatives believed that once Hitler was in power, that they would be able to control him, they were as wrong as Stalin’s comrades had been. Hitler was a popularist politician, with a lot to prove, he didn’t want to be yet another Conservative, he wanted to be something radically different. Within a matter of 2/3years he demonstrated to the conservatives that they would profit a great deal by reading Mein Kampf. At the core of Hitler’s power lay in his ability to speak, Hitler’s oratory connected him to the people and touched the wellspring of their emotion, as a follower wrote “Hitler’s response to the vibration of the human heart with the delicacy of a seismograph, or wireless receiving set enabling him to act as a loud speaker proclaiming the most secret desires, the sufferings and personal revolts of a whole nation” Before starting a speech, Hitler would feel the mood of the audience, it was a combination of the build up of emotion together with Hitler’s theatrical gestures that gave the speeches their intense power, Hitler’s speech may have appeared spontaneous, but they were in fact carefully calculated.
Stalin’s hold on power had little t do with his public speaking, although he had a number of political talents, oratory cannot be included, its would be inconceivable to think that he too could’ve stood up at the Nazi rallies as Hitler did, and rouse people onto their feet.
Once in power with his rivals dispersed, Hitler was confident of his position, unlike Stalin, he rarely felt threatened by those closest to him, and was loyal to his henchmen to the end. In deep he only purged one senior member of the Nazi party. Ernst Rohm, leader of the Stormtroppers, he was shot, along with eighty or so of his associates. It was a pragmatic move by Hitler to widen his support amongst the middle classes and army.
Stalin, now supreme in Russia, like Hitler he had all the powers of a dictator, and like Hitler, he used them to impose a personal vision. For Stalin it was modernisation, nothing and no one was to stand in the way of its achievement. Stalin always envisaged that the best quick route to a political solution was through a physical solution, if you’ve got a social group that’s giving you trouble politically, eliminate physically. Ideologies need their enemies; Hitler’s were outsiders, Jews, Marxists, Gypsies and homosexuals. Stalin’s were his own people whom he waged a war in the name of the state. He regarded the Russian peasantry especially the rich Kulak small holders, as rural Capitalists holding back the revolution. Millions of peasants were uprooted from their homes and forced into Collective farms and the new industrial cities. The result in the Ukraine, one of the most fertile regions on earth, was starvation; 4 million are now estimated to have died. Stalin believed his claim to modernise the economy, justified his claim to be the heir to Lenin. In a series of Five Year plans he set impossible goals, the building of vast capital projects, canals, dams, railways and the creation of entire new industries. Russia was brought into the modern age. But the advance was only made possible by slave labour.
Stalin built the Gulag, his vast network of labour camps on Lenin’s foundation. North West of Archangel, was the site of the first camp, it was set up many years before Hitler’s concentration camps. Hundreds of thousands were held in this former monastery and its surrounding camps. Many of them deported Kulaks from the Ukraine, where they laboured on Stalin’s roads and railways and his pet project “White Sea Canal”. For those who entered here, there was no hope. Prisoners began their sentences without the provision of food, and often went without shelter; many would have died from cold within the first few months. Originally the prisoners had the possibility of working hard so as to cut short their sentences, but then Stalin suggested that prisoners who worked well should not be released from the camps, the terms gradually began to increase from 3 to 5, 10, finally a 25years duration became the norm. The images of Stalin’s Gulags are less familiar than those of Hitler’s, yet with there watch towers, barracks and barbed wire, they mirror the Nazi concentration camps.
Both systems took a terrible toll of the camp populations, but the gulags which began in the Northwest of Archangel would last over half a century, and would end only with the fall of Communism.
Hitler like Stalin kept his private life, private. Both had a rapport with young children and charming when it served its purpose, but unlike Stalin he was tea-total, vegetarian and a militant non smoker who hated the petty routine of ruling and the reading of long state papers, unlike Stalin.
Stalin put faith only in himself, at the 17th Congress his suspicions were focused on the leader of the Leningrad party, Kirov. He was everything Stalin wasn’t; charismatic, handsome, warm and outgoing popular in the party. To make matters worse he opposed the pace and methods of Stalin’s revolution. Ten months after the congress, Kirov was assinated. His death gave Stalin the excuse needed to start his “Great Terror”. Stalin’s show trials began; disagreement with the leader on any issue, however trivial had become a capital offence. Stalin never forgot those who had opposed him
Alan Bullock, “Hitler and Stalin Parallel lives” (1998) page 4.
