Stalin und die Deutschen

In 2003, on the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin's death, the Institut für Zeitgeschichte hosted an international conference on Stalin's legacy ‘through German eyes’ (p. 12). Based on recently opened (and partly reclosed) sources, the papers were reworked and new ones added to produce this volume. Special topics include the KPD's and Herbert Wehner's degree of agency during the Great Terror (essays by Bert Hoppe and Reinhard Müller), Soviet postwar brutality toward citizens who suffered under the Nazis (Pavel Polian and Nikita Petrov), and the cost-effectiveness of Soviet exploitation of German POWs (Andreas Hilger). More broadly, the fourteen essays treat three main subjects: comparative dictatorship (four papers), Stalin's prewar German policies (three papers), and his postwar German policies. Recurrent themes include how much (and in what form) Stalin feared Germany, the relationship between his pragmatism and his dogmatism, and the primacy of domestic versus foreign aims. In a sense, these are all the same question. For example, in examining the Great Terror, Gerd Koenen rejects the thesis that foreign affairs produced domestic paranoia; instead, the foreign situation provided cover for the ideocratic domestic project. For Jürgen Zarusky, Stalin no less than Hitler, despite (or in keeping with) Marxism's sanctimonious self-stylized rationalism, fits Hannah Arendt's classic description of the irrational totalitarian ideologue: his literal-minded pursuit of doctrinaire goals (such as forced industrialization) and his resultant mass-murderous discovery of innumerable enemies, were impervious to logic, evidence or experience. Even the Stalin of Weimar's ‘golden years’ emerges here looking more ideological: according to Bert Hoppe, Stalin's antipathy toward the ‘Social Democratic temptation’ derived not from a classic balance-of-power consideration—his realistic fear that the ‘Scheidemänner’ would trade the special Soviet-Weimar relationship for an alliance with the West (p. 27)—but from the desire to blunt leftist reforms in Western countries. For Stalin in the period of ‘Socialism in One Country’, the impediment to an anti-Soviet war was that workers abroad bestow their prime loyalty upon the Soviet Union. Western reforms, he feared, might enervate this loyalty (as well as the longer-term prospects for revolution) in favour of domestic reconciliation. A red thread—on the whole unsurprising, but with startling twists—is that Stalin's ideology idiosyncratically defined what Stalin considered geopolitically pragmatic. Another is that Germany scared but seldom awed him. Ideology induced fear, but also overconfidence. One result, explored by Sergei Slutsch, was Stalin's disastrous prewar miscalculation about Hitler. Another, documented by Bernd Bonwetsch and Sergei Kudriasov, was Stalin's condescending postwar treatment of the German Communists. Nothing in this volume supports the recently influential view that the German comrades, defying Stalin, set the course toward partition in Soviet-occupied Germany. Nor is there much comfort here for devotees of Stalin's already reeling reputation as a classic practitioner of Realpolitik.

Democracy · Dictatorship · Economic history · Foreign policy · German · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Classics · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Law · Philosophy