Stalin and Hitler - mutual admiration and exchange of experience. Stalin and Hitler: Coincidences

the site continues a series of publications under the heading "Price of Victory". Today, the guest of the eponymous program on the radio station "Echo of Moscow" historian, writer Elena Syanova talks about the "sympathy" between Stalin and Hitler. The broadcast was conducted by Vitaly Dymarsky and Dmitry Zakharov. You can read and listen to the original interview in full here. link

In fact, neither Hitler, nor Goebbels, nor Hess anywhere, except official documents, do not use the name Stalin. If they exchange some letters, notes, some developments, not already in the final version, but at the stage of work, Dzhugashvili is everywhere. Just imagine how easy it is to write the name Stalin in German letters and how difficult it is to write Dzhugashvili.

Let us recall a small piece from the memoirs of Berezhkov, Stalin's interpreter, who tells how he, together with Molotov, was at Hitler's reception in November 1940 during the negotiations on the Soviet-German pact. And so, at the end of the conversation, before parting, Hitler, shaking Molotov's hand, said: “I consider Stalin an outstanding historical figure, and I myself vanquish myself with the thought that I will go down in history. And, of course, that two politicians like us should meet. I ask you, Mr. Molotov, to convey to Mr. Stalin my greetings and my proposal for such a meeting in the near future.

Hitler: "I consider Stalin an outstanding historical figure..."

One gets the impression that Hitler thought quite a lot about Stalin, but spoke rather sparingly (well, or few of his statements have come down to us). For example, in 1932 (Hess's retelling) another trouble occurred in the Mussolini family, and Hitler noted that his (Mussolini) family would destroy him, as Bonaparte had once destroyed. But as for Stalin, he stressed, here is a politician, a leader who is not influenced by his family, not influenced by relatives, although he has many of them, and, accordingly, draw conclusions. Exactly which ones, one can only guess.

Then 1933. In general, we did not have such a position as Stalin's deputy, but in Germany we did. Hitler's deputy was Rudolf Hess, who had the so-called Hess Bureau - a structure that duplicated a lot of different structures: state, party and others. And there was such an interesting department that studied the personalities of European politicians: their physical characteristics, addictions, weaknesses, shortcomings, families.

And from the very beginning, as soon as this bureau created such a department, some such discrepancy between employees began. Some of the employees argued that after the death of Lenin, Russia, under the leadership of Stalin, took the path of eastern despotism, that is, by the mid-1930s, it had accumulated the features of eastern despotism, precisely based on the personality of Stalin. The second part of the staff said that Stalin was not subject to any national characteristics: he was an internationalist, and Russia was following an international path, having no national coloring. I wonder which of these groups still had a greater influence on Hess? For some reason I think it's the second one. For Hess, Stalin was more of an internationalist, but it's hard to say how much he was able to convey or prove to Hitler.

1937-1938 years. There are quite a few "supposedly" statements by Hitler about Stalin's general purges. Why "supposedly"? Because they are not direct (well, someone wrote down from someone else's words). But nevertheless, the essence of these statements is that Hitler approved of such a "coolness" of this showdown, the will of Stalin. From this, he concluded that in the next 15 years, Russia will not fight.

Let's go back three years. 1934 Hitler destroys his colleague Ernst Röhm and other commanders of the SA assault squads. And as Mikoyan said, again, in the arrangement of Berezhkov, at the very first meeting of the Politburo after the murder of Ryom, Stalin said: “Did you hear what happened in Germany? What a good guy Hitler! That's how to deal with political opponents." So, it is difficult to establish who took an example from whom. Hitler, by the way, was very sorry in 1945 that he had once dealt with Ryom, and not with the generals, following the example of Stalin. It was like that.

March 14, 1939. Hess writes to his friend Albrecht Haushofer: “After Munich, the Führer considers all active Western politicians to be worms that crawled out after the rain, and Stalin is a tank, which, if he moves and goes ...”.

Hitler liked to call Stalin an oriental despot

But about the "Asian breed". 1939 Probably, the mise-en-scene was as follows: Hitler and his entourage in the cinema were watching some, perhaps a Soviet film, where Stalin was. And Bormann writes as follows: “During the viewing, the Fuhrer noticed that the Soviet dictator reminded him of a strong beast of an Asian breed. The Fuhrer expressed regret that this breed was poorly studied by him.

Again 1939. The situation was as follows: Hitler was preparing a keynote speech in the Reichstag with accusations of Poland and a response to Roosevelt on his message of April 14th. In this message, Roosevelt offered himself as a "good intermediary between Germany and Europe" and attached a list of 30 countries that Germany should not attack in the next fifteen or twenty-five years. And if, again, to believe Hess, then Hitler over this message and over this proposal to the United States as an intermediary quite ironically, laughed. Hess himself says this about this: “This colonialist (about Roosevelt) would like to drive the Germans into the reservations, like his Redskins. Us Germans! Us, a great nation! And his united garbage heap dares to dictate to us, the great nation. These pig-faced democrats will only forget Versailles when you (Hitler) embrace Stalin.” That is, there are already some motives for future rapprochement.

And Bormann, by the way, talks about the same thing briefly and to the point. It's in one of his notebooks, which were found in 1945. Here is the entry: “There was talk about a possible contact with the Kremlin. The Fuhrer expressed his unwillingness to go to a personal meeting with Stalin. The Führer, however, agreed that the forthcoming speech to the Reichstag would not contain criticism of the Kremlin and the Soviet system.

Joachim von Ribbentrop and Joseph Stalin at the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact in the Kremlin, August 23, 1939

Note that it was mutual, that is, swearing in both directions stopped. But here, of course, there are no more personal relations between Hitler and Stalin, but pragmatists, diplomacy, geopolitics. This is a period when everyone is screaming about peace, but everyone already understands the need for military blocs, and this groping is going on: who is with whom. Indeed, at the same time, in the summer, negotiations are underway in Moscow: Russia, England, France. Negotiations go on, go on, and Hitler is terribly nervous, because for him the union of Russia with England and France was like death. He himself refuses to go to Moscow, but he constantly has intentions to push someone there. First he tries to send Hess. Why? Hess was brought up in Alexandria, in such an international city, and Hitler believed that Hess would better understand, as he writes, "the primitive pathos logic of an Asian." This, by the way, is also a feature.

Then he starts pushing through the head of the United Trade Union or the Labor Front, Ley. Telegram from the ambassador in Moscow, Schulenburg, to Hitler: “At 11 o’clock, I received Molotov’s consent for an unofficial visit by Dr. Ley. The minister made it clear that Stalin would receive him for a friendly conversation on the day of his arrival. It's August 21st.

But on the same day, negotiations end. And between two and three o'clock Hitler sends Stalin a telegram composed by Hess. The telegram reads as follows: “The tension between Germany and Poland has become unbearable ... a crisis may break out any day ... I believe that if there are intentions of both states to enter into new relations with each other, it seems advisable not to waste time ... I would be glad to receive from you prompt reply. Adolf Gitler".

In 1939, Stalin and Hitler were supposed to meet, but it did not work out.

An interesting thing: during the war, already after June 22, 1941, Hitler, according to various German sources, spoke out quite often about Stalin, and, moreover, he owns such a quote that after the victory over Russia, it would be best to entrust control country to Stalin (of course, under German hegemony), since he is better than anyone else able to deal with the Russians. That is, if you believe this quote from the Fuhrer, he counted on Stalin as a vassal, a manager whom Germany would plant to lead the enslaved Soviet Union.

In the diaries of Goebbels dated March 4, 1945, that is, when the situation Nazi Germany was already hopeless and Hitler sought to negotiate with Moscow, there is such an entry: “The Fuhrer is right when he says that it is easiest for Stalin to commit sharp turn, because he does not have to take public opinion into account ... In recent days, Hitler felt even greater closeness to Stalin, praising him as a man of genius who deserves boundless respect. Comparing himself with Stalin, the Fuhrer did not hide his feelings of admiration, repeatedly repeating that the greatness and steadfastness inherent in both of them know in their essence neither the vacillation nor the pliability characteristic of bourgeois politicians.

Telegram from Hitler to Stalin, August 1939

An interesting detail: throughout the war, not a single statement (trustworthy) of Hitler about Stalin as a commander, strategist, tactician was recorded. That is, he never appreciated it from this point of view. But we note that Hitler valued Stalin more than Western politicians: Churchill, Roosevelt, and so on.

With Roosevelt, in general, it is more difficult. This was the second politician that Hitler did not understand. He somehow did not have enough time to figure it out. The first was Stalin. Hitler considered him an opaque person, just like an Asian who is absolutely inadequate in general to common sense from the point of view of Hitler, who can behave absolutely unpredictably. By the way, he believed that some of Stalin's decisions were just dictated by this Asian unpredictability, this illogicality.

Hitler valued Stalin more than Churchill and Roosevelt

And finally, a quote from Rudolf Hess, who, sitting in Spandau, describes this cowardly, nervous behavior of Hitler on the eve of Ribbentrop's arrival: “Two wedges gathered their courage before knocking each other out. However, as it became clear after the defeat, the Fuhrer was the only one who fully felt then, in the 39th, the demonic power of the Eastern despot, which we all underestimated, and, in the end, turned out to be right.

Stalin and Hitler: on the way to power

In order to free people from centuries of oppression, deliver them from incredible suffering, calm their souls, seized with anxiety and confusion, who grew up without knowing security - one day fate will send a person born in the name of these goals, and he eventually achieves what people have longed for so long.

Adolf Gitler " Mein Kampf", 1926 1

Spring 1924. The plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) met on May 18, a few days before the 13th Party Congress. On the same day, Lenin's widow handed over to the Committee a sealed letter, dictated with pain by her seriously ill husband in 1922. Five copies of this letter were made, each sealed with a wax seal. Lenin asked his wife to convey this letter to the next party congress, as he could not address the delegates himself due to illness. But she delayed the letter until he died a year later on January 21, 1924. The letter contained Lenin's political testament. It was opened, read and discussed by the Central Committee. The testament is remembered primarily for the fact that it mentioned Stalin: "Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary [in April 1922], has concentrated unlimited power in his hands, and I am not convinced that he will be able to use it properly" 2 . Stalin knew the contents of this letter before it was opened; one of Lenin's secretaries, worried possible consequences of this will, showed it to Stalin immediately after Lenin had finished dictating it. After reading this letter by a handful of party leaders, Stalin issued a stern order to Lenin's assistant to burn it, not knowing that the other four copies of the letter were already in the safe 3 . What Stalin did not know was that, a few days later, Lenin dictated an appendix to the letter that could have ruined his political career. Enraged by Stalin's rudeness and arrogance, he advised the party to "find ways to transfer him" and replace him with someone "more tolerant" and "less capricious".

Lenin's proposal, announced so soon after his death and which could have been of great importance to loyal members of the party, was not placed on the agenda of the congress. It was discussed at a closed session of the Central Committee. One of the participants in this meeting later recalled Stalin, who was sitting on the steps of the podium when the will was read out, and how he looked "small and miserable"; although at the same time his facial expression was outwardly calm, “it was clearly visible from his face that his fate was being decided” 5 . Grigory Zinoviev, who was supported by the chairman of the committee, Lev Kamenev, who was sitting at the table in Lenin's place, suggested that the letter should not be considered on the grounds that Lenin was not fully aware of himself when he wrote it. Stalin allegedly offered his resignation from his post, but this offer was not accepted by his associates in the party leadership. A reservation was made at the congress to encourage Stalin to take Lenin's remark seriously and change his behavior in the direction of being more in line with his position. Stalin was saved not only by his ostentatious modesty, but also by the vicissitudes of the struggle that began after the death of Lenin in the leadership of the party. Among the obvious heirs of the leader, the remnants of the former reverence have completely disappeared. Zinoviev and Kamenev did not want the fiery and gifted commissar of defense Leon Trotsky to inherit the Leninist mantle. By supporting Stalin, they hoped to get themselves an ally in the fight against a rival. Whether the hostile reaction on the part of the Central Committee and the Congress after reading Lenin's letter could have removed Stalin's post remains open, but there is no doubt that the decision to ignore Lenin's last request gave Stalin a happy political reprieve, which he took full advantage of. Twelve years later, Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed by firing squad in the first big Stalinist show trial.

In the same spring of 1924 in Germany, at a court hearing held in a nondescript red-brick infantry school classroom on the outskirts of Munich, Adolf Hitler awaited his fate after the previous November's failed mutiny against the Bavarian government. The putsch on November 9 was to be the prelude to the grandiose "march on Berlin" with the aim of overthrowing the republic and seizing state power. The coup attempt was crushed by a hail of police bullets. The next day, hiding in a house, Hitler threatened to shoot himself, but was disarmed by the mistress of the house, who had recently learned the techniques of jiu-jitsu 7 . He was captured on the same day and a few weeks later, along with other leaders of his small National Socialist Party, among whom was Erich Ludendorff, an army veteran who relentlessly marched with Hitler towards the police cordon and the ranks of soldiers that stood in their way, even after they opened fire, and his comrades fled from the battlefield, they were charged with treason. High treason was considered a serious crime, which included the possibility of receiving twenty years of hard labor. Threatening to start a hunger strike, Hitler decided to use this process to promote his idea of ​​revolutionary nationalism. He was lucky to be tried at the Munich People's Court, which, along with other emergency courts set up immediately after the war, was due to close at the end of March 1924. One and a half months were allotted for what later became known as "Hitler's trial" and was to take place in Bavaria and not in Berlin. The trial lasted twenty-five days, from 25 February until the final verdict on 1 April. The temporary courtroom was surrounded by guards, consisting of armed troops stationed behind barricades of barbed wire. Most of the courtroom had three blocks of seats set aside for the press, who came to cover the unusual political spectacle that was unfolding in Room 9.

Hitler was allowed to speak in his defense indefinitely. He presented himself and his accomplices as honest German patriots, eager to save Germany from the "parliamentary slavery" to which she was treacherously sentenced at the end of the war in 1918 by those who accepted the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Presiding judge Georg Neidhardt, openly sympathetic to the right-wing nationalists in Bavaria, did not limit the manifestations of Hitler's oratorical talent, rushing to the surface. On the last morning of the hearing, Hitler felt like a real hero in court. The meeting opened only after 9 o'clock and closed at 11.17. And although five more clients were to speak, Hitler's closing speech took up almost two-thirds of the entire morning session. He concluded it with a rhetorical and florid statement of historical redemption: “Even if you say ‘guilty’ a thousand times, the eternal goddess [history] of eternal judgment will tear apart the Attorney General’s petition with laughter, and so will the decision of the court, because the goddess declares : we are free!" 10 Hitler's speech convinced even the accuser that before him was a man whose calling was "to become the savior of Germany." Neidhardt sentenced him to five years in prison (three years less than the prosecutor demanded) and a fine of 200 gold marks. He would also have to demand the deportation of Hitler, since he was still an Austrian citizen, not a German one. Even a five-year sentence Hitler received could have ended his political career, but given the favorable review of his exemplary behavior in the Landsberg prison (where he was simply inundated with food, drink and flowers by his well-wishers, he refused to participate in sporting events - "The leader does not can afford to be beaten in games,” and dictated “Mein Kampf”). December 20, 1924 11 he was released. Subsequently, Neidhardt was rewarded more generously than Zinoviev and Kamenev: after the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, he received the presidency of the Bavarian high court, and at the celebration on the occasion of his retirement in 1937, a letter from Hitler was read, glorifying the unwavering patriotism of the judge , which he demonstrated throughout his career 12 .

* * *

There is no doubt that the personalities of Stalin and Hitler were very different. Between them, however, there is also a superficial similarity, so the conclusions made on the basis of random coincidences of individual facts of their biographies require a very cautious approach. Both were thought to have experienced ruthless abuse from their despotic fathers, Stalin the negligent, often drunk shoemaker, Hitler the petty-bourgeois martinet. Both were strongly attached to their mothers. Both opposed early religious education; both were social and ethnic outsiders, being in a Russian and German environment, since Stalin was a Georgian and Hitler was an Austrian. Both retained a very strong accent, immediately distinguishing them from the bulk. Both began careers in the political underground as terrorists, Stalin in the Russian Social Democratic Party before 1914, and Hitler in the dubious radical nationalist milieu in Germany after 1918. Each went through jail time for their political beliefs. But none of these comparisons is anything out of the ordinary, much less unique. Hundreds of Europeans at the turn of the century were imprisoned for their beliefs; many of them were outsiders, whether on the right or left of the main stream. Most Europeans had some sort of religious education; few boys in Europe at the end of the 19th century had the good fortune to avoid being beaten, but the regular and brutal abuse experienced by future despots, Stalin and Hitler, was not so widespread. With regard to most other personal qualities, daily habits and other routines, both characters differed greatly.

Stalin's biographers have to overcome two obstacles: on the one hand, there is a great discrepancy between the real history of Stalin's revolutionary activities and the false history of his life, constructed during the period of unbridled glorification of the 1930s; on the other hand, the surviving information about Stalin’s personality fluctuates greatly between the image of a ruthless and cruel despot, devoid of everything human, and the idea of ​​​​a quiet, unpretentious, kind person, similar to the one on whose knees, as the American envoy Joseph Davis noted, “I would like to sit a child " fourteen . Stalin had many faces, and these faces changed over time. To catch the "true" Stalin means to understand that the marked features in his image in reality were formed under the influence of time and circumstances that had developed by the time these features were noticed. The quiet, stubborn, wary Stalin, as many contemporaries of his political youth characterize him, evolved into the patronizing, secretive, and capricious statesman of the 1940s. The details of his early life are well known. Born on December 21, 1879 in the small Georgian town of Gori, a remote outskirts of the Russian Empire, in the family of a shoemaker and a laundress, that is, the origin of Stalin was surprisingly unimpressive for a man who, fifty years later, climbed to the pinnacle of power. He began life as a lumpen proletarian, flawed, truly a social outcast. Starting to attend a local school, he struck his teachers with a remarkable memory so that they decided that this was quite enough to send him to a seminary school in the Georgian capital Tiflis. Here, a narrow-faced young man with strongly visible traces of smallpox on his face, which disfigured him in early childhood, slightly bow-legged, with his left arm four centimeters shorter than his right, thin due to a stomach ulcer that was draining him, first encountered the Russian Social Democratic movement 15.

At the age of eighteen, he joined the revolutionary movement, after which he was expelled from the seminary. The young Stalin was captivated by the uncompromising revolutionary outlook of Russian Marxism and the simple lessons of class struggle. After entering the underground life, he had to live the next seventeen years in dimly lit and dangerous dungeons. Here he learned to survive by leveling his own personality; the name Iosif Dzhugashvili, which he was given at birth, turned first into "Koba", then at times into "David", "Nizhevadze", "Chizhikov", "Ivanovich", until, finally, according to some sources, shortly before the start of the war in 1914 , he took the Russian word "steel" and became "Stalin". He was engrossed in wrestling, read a lot, wrote more than his later detractors could read, and took part in bank robberies to finance his business. He was arrested at least four times before finally being sent to Siberia. He fled, which in the case of royal exile meant little more than getting on a train bound for the west. He was delegated several times to party conferences abroad, but decisive for his further upward movement was his decision to side with the Bolshevik faction, or "majority", when the Social Democratic Party split over revolutionary tactics in 1904. Stalin sided with a party group led by a young lawyer, Vladimir Ulyanov, whose revolutionary pseudonym was Lenin. In 1912, while imprisoned, Stalin was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks, the leading body of the party, and remained in it, apart from a brief break during the World War, for the next forty years. In 1913, his four-year exile began in Turukhansk, where he was given a state salary of 15 rubles a month; Here he spent much of his time hunting and fishing. His colleague in exile recalled in 1916 a thirty-six-year-old but already experienced veteran of the youth revolutionary struggle: “Growing fat, of medium height, drooping mustache, thick hair, narrow forehead, rather short legs ... his speech was boring and dry ... a limited, fanatical person.” Stalin was arrogant and taciturn, his attitude towards others was "rude, provocative and cynical" 16 . The then personal qualities of Stalin are well recognizable in the future dictator.

The revolution of 1917 created Stalin. He returned from Siberia to Petrograd and entered a cohort of seasoned activists who hoped to use the fall of the Russian monarchy as a stepping stone to a socialist revolution. The heroic version of Stalin's contribution to the cause of the revolution, written in the 1930s, puts Stalin's name everywhere, always in the midst of a crisis. He became Lenin's closest associate and worked tirelessly to prepare for the seizure of power in October 1917 17 . However, the real circumstances were somewhat different, although Stalin was not so modest in the year of the revolution, as later revisionists of the role of Stalin tried to present. He supported Lenin's strategic line, announced by him in April 1917, to prevent compromise with the Provisional Government. His articles and speeches testify to a tireless, uncompromising revolutionary who exposes the threat of counter-revolution from less committed or opportunistic socialists and calls on the party and the entire population to seize power and transfer it to the Russian working people. The narrowness of his views on the unity of the party ranks and a single party line, characteristic of the 1930s, was fully outlined during the period of ideological and organizational confusion between the two revolutions. In May, in the newspaper Soldatskaya Pravda, he called for "unity of views", "one common goal", "one common path" 18 . It was Stalin who drew up the report of the Central Committee in July 1917, which called for a break with other socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries who supported the "bourgeois" government. His speeches of that time testify to a clear understanding of the political situation and a firm revolutionary course. At the moment of the last crisis of the Provisional Government in October 1917, Stalin, like most of the other members of the committee, voted for the coup. His speeches, recorded in brief protocols, ended with the following statements: "We must firmly and resolutely set the course for an armed uprising" 19 .

There is a possibility that a certain amount of this revolutionary enthusiasm was introduced later, when selected works of Stalin were published in 1934; the uprising, when it began, did not need Stalin at all in order to succeed, but there is no doubt that Stalin, being at the very center of big politics, felt like a fish in water. No one has ever questioned the fact that he was a devoted revolutionary who, throughout 1917, saw the revolution as nothing more than the transfer of power to the common people and the complete destruction of the society of the privileged who exploited them. It was his job, the meaning of his life. When the first Bolshevik government was formed on October 26, 1917, Stalin was offered the Commissariat for Nationalities. In the context of the disintegration tendencies that emerged in the multinational state, this was an important post, and Stalin used it to prevent the attempts of the non-Russian fringes of the former empire, including his native Georgia, to separate from the new revolutionary community. In 1921, his policy led to a serious conflict with Lenin, which contributed to the unflattering review of Stalin in Lenin's "testament". Stalin became one of about a dozen associates who formed the Bolshevik leadership. In October 1917, he was elected one of the seven members of the Politburo of the Central Committee, the forerunner of the formal Politburo established in 1919, of which Stalin would also become a member. In November, he is named one of the four leaders of the party, along with Lenin, Trotsky and Yakov Sverdlov, who had the authority to decide urgent issues without asking for majority support. Stalin's office was next to Lenin's office. Stalin became the head of the political administration of the Bolshevik leadership during the most critical period of the beginning of the Bolshevik regime, facing civil war and economic collapse. In 1919, he was appointed to the additional post of commissar for "workers and peasants" (Rabkrin), who was supposed to ensure the efficient functioning of the apparatus and quickly respond to complaints from ordinary people. It is not surprising that he, who performed these numerous duties, was chosen when, in April 1922, it was decided to strengthen the apparatus serving the Central Committee, and the post of General Secretary was established. There are many conflicting opinions about the early period of Stalin's political career, but most of them agree that he was a nonentity or an insignificant person. The emergence of this murderous judgment is due to the memoirs of the socialist Nikolai Sukhanov, published in 1922. As is well known, he characterized Stalin as "dullness", which was later finally enshrined in Trotsky's caustic definition of Stalin as the "outstanding mediocrity" of the party 21 . The opinion that Stalin was a colorless and clearly unremarkable person with limited mental abilities was widely held. In exile in Siberia, where they were together during the war, Kamenev dismissed what Stalin said with "short, almost contemptuous remarks" 22 . There is an opinion that Lenin approved the appointment of Stalin as a member of the government in October 1917, because this post "did not require special intelligence"; Stalin's name was last on Lenin's list of twelve recommended people's commissars. The image of a boring bureaucrat who sat out time was reflected in one of Stalin's first nicknames: "comrade filling the office", "comrade Kartotekov" 24 . Stalin's personal behavior and the nature of his personality strengthened this image. He was outwardly modest and unassuming, lacking the passion and intellectual purpose of many of his colleagues. His voice, according to the recollections of many of his associates, was colorless, inexpressive; he did not differ in oratory skills, spoke indistinctly, usually read the printed text slowly, pausing and stammering from time to time, and, following stereotypes, brightened up his speech only with strong intonation in order to emphasize the right places in the text. His critics later discovered that he spoke in a manner similar to yesterday's editorial in Pravda, which he probably read 25 . At meetings, he was often seen sitting on one side of the hall, he spoke little or was silent, smoked cigarettes or a pipe stuffed with strong-smelling tobacco, while he was all attention and always on his guard.

Now it is easy to understand why many of his associates underestimated him, hiding under the mask of a clumsy, modest official and an intellectual dwarf. Stalin was a great master of simulation. Where some saw a lack of intelligence, there was a sharp, well-informed, cautious and brilliantly organized intellect. Stalin was not stupid. He read voraciously and critically, putting question marks in the books, making notes, underlining the right places. In the 1930s, his library numbered 40,000 books 26 . In addition, he wrote extensively and intensively, both before 1917 and in the 1920s, and his works and speeches, when published, amounted to a total of thirteen volumes. His vision of Marxism was well thought out and supported by an apparently clear, logically consistent, balanced argument. His prose, later elevated to the rank of a model of socialist directness and clarity, was boring and did not strike the imagination, although in places it was flavored with eye-catching metaphor for spice, especially since the background surrounding it was pompous passages. He favored what in 1917 was defined as "creative Marxism," and his own complex of political convictions testifies to his desire to adapt Marx to the existing reality in the same way that Lenin did 27 . At the same time, he did not depart for a second from the idea of ​​building a communist society. His view of communism was "unidirectional" rather than "limited". At the beginning of his political career, he treated communism as a historical necessity, even when real life contradicted the ideas of the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, making the idea of ​​communism a complete utopia.

If Stalin was not stupid, then he was not an intellectual either, "smartness", in his opinion, was tantamount to almost a crime. The nature of his personality in the 1920s seemed, especially against the background of Lenin and Trotsky, clearly plebeian. He was rough; often used foul language, even to Lenin's wife, which gave rise to an appendix to the latter's "testament". The habit of swearing isolated the lower classes of the communist movement from the educated and noble Bolshevik intelligentsia, which became rare among the new ruling elite that Stalin surrounded himself with in the 1930s. Unable to maintain a good tone, devoid of social gloss (at a dinner in honor of the Allies in 1943, he was forced to ask embarrassedly how to use the numerous devices that surrounded his plate), possessing a small body size, Stalin stepped aside instead of responding with rudeness, albeit in an autocratic manner 28 . Unassuming to those he wished to mislead, he allowed himself to be short-tempered, vulgar, aloof, or overbearing towards his subordinates and ruthlessly cruel to those whom he regarded as his personal enemies. Obviously, due to his nature, Stalin was vindictive and felt insecure; and the culture of vendetta may have been borrowed by him from his native Georgia; Stalin, according to Kamenev's memoirs, read and reread Machiavelli during his Siberian exile; however, practically nothing is known for certain about Stalin's views on political relations. Meanwhile, as a politician, he brought the art of manipulating people and using them for his own purposes to perfection.

There is a running anecdote, perhaps embellished because it was written by Trotsky, that one afternoon in 1924, Stalin, Kamenev, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the security service, argued with each other about what each of them liked best. Stalin chose the following: "The greatest pleasure in life is to mark the victim, carefully prepare the attack, deliver a powerful blow, and then go to bed and sleep peacefully" 30 . Like it or not, this story reveals a central element of Stalin's political complex. His views on other people were characterized by absolute cynicism and opportunism: he pandered to people who were useful to him in every possible way, because he needed them, and only if they did not stand in his way or if he had opportunities to outwit them. His methods of spying on people resembled the habits of a predator who knows his prey well. Secretive and intolerant, Stalin, however, knew how to gain confidence even in those whom he tried to topple. “Watch Stalin carefully,” they say, repeated Lenin. “He is always ready to betray you.”31 Stalin had few close friends, although he could, when he wanted to, be sociable, cheerful and friendly. Throughout his career, he was heavily burdened with a distrust of other people that later bordered on pathology. And as a result, his instincts were capricious and vindictive, even if his public image, promoted by posters and portraits of the 1930s, was, in the words of one of the many foreign visitors fascinated by Stalin, "the image of a pleasant, respected aging man" 32 .

Undoubtedly, Stalin was the product of twenty years of underground political life, in which there was no place for trust, where police spies and provocateurs hid everywhere. Secrecy and the need to rely only on oneself have become second nature, and the danger of betrayal has become the harsh truth of life. He absorbed the ethics of the underground world and, having polished it in the crucible of the civil war, transferred it to the practice of high politics. In the 1930s and 1940s, as the dictator of the entire Soviet Union, he behaved as if infiltration, disguise, betrayal, and harsh, party-dividing arguments on ideological and tactical issues, which are the realities of underground life, were still alive. and operate in a mature one-party state. And yet, Stalin of the later period was a more effective and balanced personality compared to the embittered youth hiding in the underground. He took full advantage of the shortcomings of his personality. His sullenness turned into equanimity, his clumsy timidity became unfeigned modesty, his stilted high-flown manner of speech transformed into a slow, well-thought-out, mocking performance that could last for three or four hours. From the expression on his face, it was impossible to understand his true thoughts hidden in his head. And only yellowish-brown eyes, habitually darting from side to side, as if in search of vulnerabilities in his interlocutor, betrayed to the guest the anxiety hiding behind his outward calmness 33 .

Along with the evolution of his personality, the manner of working also changed. He was never the soft-hearted employee that arose from the myths spread about him, a kind of bureaucrat turned dictator. Nikolai Bukharin, the editor of Pravda in the 1920s and the main victim of Stalin's subsequent repressions, noted "laziness" as Stalin's main feature, which does not fit with the image of a tireless employee who freed his rivals from the hardships of administrative work 34 . Stalin was indeed indefatigable, but his job was politics. He neglected the duties of people's commissar to such an extent that Lenin was forced to publicly reprimand him for his failure to turn the Workers' and Peasants' Committee into an effective institution. Stalin did not like bureaucratic work, and in 1924 he left both commissariats. The routine work of the secretariat was entrusted to a huge team of employees and assistants recruited by Stalin after 1922. Stalin was an activist and a revolutionary and remained so for as long as possible. His personal routine in the 1930s often contrasted with that of Hitler, but there were similarities. He got up late and went to bed late; meetings were scheduled almost every day, and work with correspondence took place every day, but he could also be absent, having gone to his dacha, and in the 1930s he began to take long vacations. In the evenings, he was sometimes busy with dinner, which could be followed by a film in the Kremlin cinema, after which discussions sometimes began, which sometimes dragged on until late. He drank little, usually light Georgian wine, but liked to watch his guests get drunk. He loved the company of women with whom he could be charming to the point of gallantry. However, as a rule, Stalin dined modestly in a simply furnished three-room apartment specially equipped for him in the Kremlin. He married twice, but after his second wife's suicide in 1931, which had a profound effect on him, Stalin remained single throughout his dictatorship, although not celibate 35 . He never flaunted his power and disliked and ridiculed when others did. His hatred of privilege has not disappeared, however, being the highest government official and a world-class politician in the post-1945 period, he dressed more formally and displayed much more respectability than he had as a party politician in the 1930s.

Any mention of Stalin's life inevitably raises the question of what motives moved him forward. According to his first Russian biographer of the glasnost period, Dmitry Volkogonov, and which is quite consistent with common sense, it was power: “The more power he concentrated in his hands, the more power he craved” 36 . As Robert Tucker noted in his classic biography of the dictator, Stalin craved not only power, but also glory: "Glory ... remained his goal" 37 . According to Bukharin and Trotsky, Stalin was driven by deep-seated vices of his personality: envy, jealousy, petty ambitions. Meanwhile, there are almost no notes that could shed light on the motives that moved Stalin. Once, during the civil war, when the city of Tsaritsyn, located on the Volga, was being successfully defended, Stalin remarked that he would willingly sacrifice forty-nine percent of the people if it "save the remaining fifty-one percent, because it would mean saving the revolution." It is possible that envy of the more successful and ambitious people around him pushed him to eliminate them, but it is also possible that he was simply flattered by the applause of the masses (many, however, testified that he objected to the most extravagant forms of praise of his person) , but the only thread that connected all his actions and deeds was the idea of ​​​​saving the revolution and protecting the first socialist state. Power for Stalin, apparently, was not an end in itself, rather, he needed this power to preserve and develop the revolution and the state, which he personified. The goal of preserving the revolution became a personal matter for Stalin, because at some point in the 1920s, perhaps after the death of Lenin, he began to see himself as the leader of the Bolsheviks, who alone was able to pave the way for the revolution with sufficient rigidity and determination. His instinct for self-preservation, the complete insensitivity with which he destroyed his party comrades, the Makevialist policy - all this evidence is not that Stalin was a completely self-absorbed personality, perverted by sadistic inclinations, but rather that this man used the means available to him to the fullest to achievement of the main goal, devotion to which he maintained throughout his life, starting from adolescence. For Soviet society, such a purposefulness cost huge losses and had far-reaching consequences, but to Stalin such a position, obviously, seemed justified by the highest goal of building communism.

Hitler's biography has been studied much better. All the details of his personal and public life are better illuminated, and Hitler's views on a variety of issues are reflected in his works and outlined conversations. The legend about Hitler, which was formed in the 1930s, is much closer to the truth compared to the official version of Stalin's past. And yet, the thoughts hidden in the deepest corners of consciousness, which could come out in diaries and regular personal correspondence, remain with seven seals, both Hitler and Stalin. Understanding Hitler's personality is an extremely difficult task. The gulf that lies between the clumsy, unremarkable, reclusive individual and the public politician Hitler, demagogue and prophet, seems completely insurmountable, and, on the contrary, Stalin's personal traits were fully manifested in his public career. This contrast in Hitler's character seemed so striking that many suspected him of possessing some rare, incomprehensible physical and psychological gift that helped him to enchant and hypnotize both those who were in his immediate vicinity and the distant crowd that he became proselytizing since the early 1920s. But they saw the reason not only in the supernatural. So, once in Berlin in 1934, sitting in the stadium literally a foot from Hitler behind his back, two British guests of the Hitler congress watched how he fascinated the audience with his already familiar growing passion and harsh voice. “Then something incredible happened,” they noted. “[We] both saw a flash of blue lightning emanating from Hitler’s back… One could only be surprised that none of us who stood very close to him were killed to death.” These people subsequently tried to understand whether Hitler was at some point in the power of the devil, and the answer was: "Yes, we came to the conclusion that this was the case" 40 .

Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in the small Austrian town of Braunau an der Inn as his father's fourth child from his third marriage, although his three older siblings died in infancy. His father was a customs officer, and the family was quite petty-bourgeois. Hitler's father died in 1900, and his mother Clara died in 1907. He attended a local school, where he showed some ability, however, when he moved to a secondary school in Linz, the young Hitler lost interest in his studies. Like Stalin, Hitler had an exceptionally good memory. When he was sixteen he left Linz and moved to Vienna, where he hoped to train as a painter or architect. He then lived, contrary to his later statements, not in poverty, but on a rather large inheritance, as well as on funds received from the sale of his paintings - mainly urban landscapes, which were shown in local galleries. In 1907 he was refused admission to the Vienna Academy of Arts. He spent his days in the company of young loitering people with little to do, and in the evenings he attended theaters and concerts, where he was attracted by the music of his favorite composer, Gustav Mahler. Five youthful years spent in Vienna provide few clues pointing to the future of a politician; he was interested in current events, was fond of pan-German nationalism, but there is no clear evidence that during these years his nationalism was clearly anti-Semitic in nature. And yet, in the shy, polite, socially passive youth, who at times could be openly self-confident, wandering, self-centered and indifferent to his friends, one could recognize the split personality of the 1930s.

In May 1913, Hitler fled from Vienna to Munich to avoid military service in the Austrian army. the Austrian authorities contacted him, but he managed to avoid deportation for almost a year, until in February 1914 the twenty-four-year-old artist was returned to Salzburg, where a medical board declared him "unfit for military or auxiliary service" 42 . In August of the same year, standing on the Odeonplatz in Munich, he heard about the beginning of the First World War. Two days later he went to fight as a volunteer in the German army, which found him quite fit for military service. After a brief two-month training, Hitler was sent to the front in Belgium and France. Like thousands of other young Europeans who rushed to the front, Hitler admitted that he was "extremely excited" 43 . The war created Hitler, just as the revolution created Stalin. A month later, Hitler was promoted to corporal and awarded the Iron Cross Second Class (“Happiest day of my life,” Hitler wrote to his Munich landlord). He finally received the Iron Cross First Class in August 1918. In the extreme conditions of the war, requiring every soldier to exert all his strength, he showed personal courage and was always cheerful: “risk his life every day, look death in the eye” 44 . The fact that after all four years of the war he remained alive, while thousands of his comrades remained lying on the battlefield, was a mere accident. The war had a much stronger effect on him than the years of life in Vienna. In his book "Mein Kampf", recalling this time, he writes that it was "the most unforgettable time of my entire earthly life" 45 . He was psychologically completely immersed in the struggle; Hitler accustomed himself, by his own admission, to a paralyzing fear of death. There is no doubt that for a young soldier who experienced all the horrors of war, being in the harsh, anomalous conditions of the front, it was unbearable to admit defeat. Hitler may have embellished his story by recalling the night of the Armistice, when he developed an all-consuming hatred for those who had led Germany to defeat before the Allies, but throughout his subsequent career, the nature of his policies indicated that he was simply unable to separate his own psychological state from the historical reality he was trying to confront. He took the defeat of his country as his own humiliation. Since then, Hitler carried within himself an unbridled thirst for revenge, at times bordering on sheer insanity.

Hitler began his post-war life as an army agitator who was supposed to inform demobilized soldiers about the dangers posed by Marxism and the Jews. In September 1919 he joined a small political party in Munich formed by the watchmaker Anton Drexler, a member of the Fatherland Party, founded in 1917 at a joint meeting of radical nationalists and pan-German politicians united in support of the war. He became the 55th member of the German Workers' Party; in November 1919 he was appointed leader of the propagandists. In February 1920, the party changed its name to the National Socialist Workers' Party, at the same time its program was published. The following year, Hitler was elected chairman of the party, and in this capacity he organized the putsch that later became famous, but as a result of the failure of this putsch, in 1924 he was imprisoned in the Landsberg Fortress, after which he suddenly became a political figure on a national scale. The outlook of the young politician at this time fluctuates widely. Those who heard him or who were involved in his inner circle, when characterizing Hitler, turned to terms that were more applicable to a preacher with the gift of revelation. Yet much of this evidence suggests that Hitler was still perceived as a failure; his appearance and behavior, when he was not in public, were unremarkable and of little interest, and his attempts to make himself a tribune and defender of a people who had been betrayed were simply ridiculous. A textbook sloppy cloak, a narrow dark mustache, bangs hanging from the forehead, a pale, slightly puffy face, and even bluish-gray eyes and at times an absent, insensitive look, made Hitler easily recognizable, but no less impartial for this. In his revelatory memoir of meeting Hitler in 1920 at his Munich villa, the composer Clemens von Frankenstein emphasized a distinct mixture of social insecurity and bombastic demagogy. Hitler arrived accompanied by other guests, consisting of theatrical figures and artists. He wore gaiters and a soft hat, and in his hand he held a riding-whip, although he did not know how to ride a horse and used it to periodically whip his boots with it. He had his dog with him. He looked like a "stereotypical goof"; sat down with an awkward reservation in the presence of his aristocratic guests. At the end, seizing on some cue, he began his political monologue in the style that he maintained throughout his political life. “He addressed us like an army chaplain,” recalls another guest. “I got the impression that he was just dumb” 47 . He was not interrupted, and he, leaving the tone of the preacher, switched to shouting. The servants rushed to defend their master. When Hitler left the meeting, the guests sat, as the memoir says, as if they were passengers in a railway compartment who suddenly realized that they were "in the company of a psychopath" 48 . The feeling of extreme embarrassment or embarrassment that Hitler could cause in everyone, not noted in this performance, made it difficult to try to calm him down if he had already begun to orate. He learned to use this circumstance as a way to avoid conflicts and objections, seeking the submission of his interlocutor. Hermann Rauschning, head of the party branch in Danzig, later in 1933 noted that Hitler's tirades were a kind of "competition in suppression", which explained "how important shouting and feverish pace were to his eloquence" 49 .

Hitler somehow succeeded in the 1920s in turning unattractive personal rhetoric into triumphant oratory to the masses, which became the most striking feature of his personality as a party leader, and later as a dictator. He was aware of the impression he made on people, but he had too little sense of humor to endure criticism, inattention or laughter. In the words of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's photographer, who was never allowed to photograph him in glasses or a bathing suit, "Hitler had a fear of being ridiculous." All his speeches were carefully choreographed and rehearsed. At first he wrote everything himself, and then, like Stalin, he began to dictate. He usually delivered his speech the way he wanted the public to hear it and waited for his secretaries to reproduce it as he delivered it, without notes. Hitler's speech, dedicated to the tenth anniversary of his power, was written in this way. His secretary tensed from the moment he began dictating slowly and quietly, pacing back and forth across the room. By the end of his speech, he was already shouting at the wall, his back turned to the room, but in such a way that he could be heard quite distinctly. He went over his speech many times until he was sure of the impression it made. From the very beginning of his career, he realized the power of his thick, raspy voice with a strong Austrian accent, now measured and even slow, the next moment sharp, noisy, indignant, and sometimes, but for a very brief moment, hysterical. He believed that in politics, the spoken word always outperforms the written text: “From time immemorial, the spoken word has been the force that unleashed the greatest religious and political avalanches in history,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. Only "a fiery word thrown at the masses" 52 is capable of kindling the flame of political passions.

Among the many historical excursions into Hitler's history, it is widely believed that the content of speeches mattered less to him than how they were delivered. His ideas and views are reputedly secondary and ill-conceived, a consequence of his laziness and amateurish tastes. His "Mein Kampf" is seen by most scholars as a combination of a self-serving and false biography with pompous ideas and views, rather than his own, but heavily borrowed from various sources. As wrote former minister economy in 1945: “Hitler was the type of semi-literate person. He read a huge number of books, but interpreted everything he read in the light of his own ideas ... without expanding his knowledge. But this is only half the truth. He read to find support for his own ideas; his surviving library shows that he read extensively in the fields of modern popular philosophy, political science, and economics, took notes in the margins, and carefully underlined passages he liked or disliked. Among the books he read are books by Lenin; he read Paul de Lagarde, 19th century educator, author of The Leadership Principle, a book by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, perhaps the most widely known of the generation of racial theorists of the late 19th century. However, it is also true that, on the basis of all these numerous sources, he developed his own worldview and his own views on real politics and behavior. Taken together, all this became his fixed idea and determined his further political career, just as creative Marxism influenced Stalin. The fact that Hitler was limited and selective, deaf to rational and objective criticism, intellectually naive or banal, does not diminish the importance of his ideas as historical sources that provide insight into how he rose first to power and then to the top of dictatorship. "Mein Kampf" remains an invaluable source for anyone who wants to understand through the prism of what ideas Hitler viewed the world.

Views of the world were drawn very soon. Their contours were fixed for life, although the details were constantly changing. Hitler believed that he was witnessing one of the periods of the rise of world history caused by the French Revolution and the era of unfettered individualism and economic selfishness that followed. The division of society into classes serves the interests of the bourgeoisie, breeds class envy and worship of money, cuts off the working classes from the nation, and encourages the emergence of revolutionary internationalism that threatens to undermine European civilization. The key to survival lies in recognizing that historical progress lies not through class struggle but through racial struggle, and that a true understanding of the importance of race (or nation) is the key to moving from an era of classes to ushering in a national revolution. First of all, the racial and cultural-social institutions born of racial communities must be preserved. This, according to Hitler, is the central task of politics. His radical nationalism went far beyond the mere assertion of national interests common to nationalists of all kinds. Hitler wanted the nation to represent a special type of community, not with classes, but with "fellow races", an economy run for the sake of the people, a community of blood as the basis for expressing allegiance; a kind of conglomerate covered by the term National Socialism, owing its birth as much to Hitler's Austrian origins as to the atmosphere of radical nationalism in Germany. The enemies opposed to these aspirations were mainly Jews. At some point towards the end of the war, Hitler seized on the popular anti-Semitic thesis that the Jews were responsible for the defeat of Germany: either as Marxists preaching the ideology of social disintegration, or as capitalists in whose hands all threads of the world market are concentrated, or as a biological challenge, threatening the purity of the blood. Jews and Jewry became a historical metaphor for Hitler to explain the crisis in Germany 57 .

His views on political life were cynic and manipulative. The crowd, driven by his rhetoric, mattered to him only to the extent that it could give a revolutionary impetus to a political movement. Hermann Rauschning recalled a conversation with Hitler about the secret of his success with the crowd: “The masses are like animals that obey instincts. They are incapable of drawing conclusions through logical reasoning... At a mass rally, thinking is turned off” 58 . Hitler viewed human relationships as a struggle between individuals: "Domination always means the transfer of a stronger will to a weaker one", which, he believed, lies "somewhere in the nature of physical or biological processes" 59 . His racist views were extremely narrow-minded, rejecting any unselected human material. "Everyone in the world who does not belong to a good race," he wrote in Mein Kampf, "is a scum." Contempt for most of humanity was mixed in him with a deep hatred for all whom he considered enemies. Hitler's lexicon has always been spiced with expressions that reflect the absolute quality of this obsessive malice: "extirpate", "destroy", "destroy". Anyone who crossed his path became an outcast; like Stalin, he had a long vindictive memory. In politics, as Hitler believed, other people must either be corrupted and subjugated, or exiled and destroyed.

Such was the ideological baggage of Hitler during the period when he was being transformed from a radical nationalist agitator to the head of state, and then a dictator. As a mature politician, he showed more decorum and awareness of his authority, but the outbursts of rage did not stop. He began to use them as a political tool, deliberately turning them on and off and knowing what effect they had during negotiations, although Hitler still retained the ability to completely let go of control over himself, and he managed to do this in a completely natural way. At times he displayed the greatest tension of his entire nervous system, which was reflected in numerous medical conditions, both real and ostentatious. Despite the fact that he himself considered decisiveness the great virtue of a politician, he was often observed in a state of indecision and obvious self-doubt. He was equally capable of suddenly gaining confidence and "iron determination", descending on him suddenly after a series of days of being in a state of hesitation or caused by a pulse of energy, but in both cases becoming clearly visible in manifestation. The ability to create the impression that he has an extraordinary ability for intuitive judgment, Hitler used as one of the methods to strengthen his image of the German messiah in the eyes of the people. In his daily conversation, Hitler played on the contrast between his outward mediocrity and his claims to the exceptional nature of the individual. By dressing modestly but elegantly, Hitler could disarm his guests and visitors with obvious and serene mediocrity. A smiley greeting and then a handshake - "arm extended straight and slightly down" - was followed by a silence that was as unexpected as it was disconcerting. At this moment, Hitler fixed his gaze on the counterpart, not taking his eyes off him, as if trying to penetrate into the depths of his thoughts. His gaze could have a hypnotic effect, as in the case of a rabbit caught in the grip of a snake. According to one of his interpreters, Hitler stubbornly “keeps his eyes on his victim, and those who pass the test are accepted, and those who lose their presence of mind or remain indifferent are rejected 62.

The gap between the messianic pretensions of the dictator and the banal nature of his persona grew wider over time. The Hitler who proved capable of breaking the Treaty of Versailles, resurrecting Germany's military might, declaring war on half of humanity, and exterminating millions of people, was incomprehensibly different from that dim-witted moralizer and petty-bourgeois Hitler whose favorite meal was daily afternoon tea. The typical Hitler was a fussy and fastidious bourgeois with limited and insecure artistic tastes, who observed a measured and ascetic regime. And this character deepened even more during the war. After 1933, Hitler led a life of banal routine. He went into even greater isolation, and his lifestyle became familiar and carefully, and sometimes obsessively, controlled. After the suicide in 1931 of his niece Geli Raubal, to whom he had a strong affection, he began to avoid women. The difference from the more earthly, rough and sociable Stalin is simply amazing. Hitler was not prone to smoking, Stalin smoked all his life. In both residences of Hitler, the office in Berlin and the Alpine villa in the Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden, two separate rooms were allocated - for smokers and non-smokers, intended for afternoon relaxation. No one dared to smoke freely in his presence. He was almost a teetotaler (he allowed himself to drink a little brandy with milk to sleep, and was seen with a glass of champagne on the morning when Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor); during meals he preferred mineral water, at other times he liked to drink an infusion of chamomile or an infusion of lime flowers 63 . Hitler was a vegetarian who hated hunting animals; Stalin ate huge amounts of meat, drank wine and vodka, and was said to be in the most peaceful state of mind when he held a hunting rifle or fishing rod in his hand. Hitler could be polite to the point of servility, a gentleman in front of the opposite sex, and swore so rarely that his secretary, which he sent to the Italians for capitulating to the Allies in September 1943, continued to be remembered even in post-war memoirs 65 . Although Hitler saw himself as an artist turned political overnight, his tastes were by no means bohemian. His favorite opera, besides Wagner, was Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow; he enjoyed reading stories about the Wild West by the German author Karl May; among Hitler's art supplies hidden in a salt mine in 1945 was the song "I'm a captain sailing in my bath" 66 .

In order to understand the huge gulf that separated the mediocre personality with petty-bourgeois tastes, which Hitler was alone with himself, and the demanding public life in the very thick of world history, which he consciously chose, it is necessary to understand the motives that prompted him to struggle for power. For Hitler, as for Stalin, power was not an end in itself. The outward trappings of power seemed to mean little to him; his fragile nature apparently found some psychological support in power after years of hurtful defeats, but it was power for an exclusive purpose. Hitler considered the power entrusted to him as a gift of Providence to the people of Germany to save her from a state of impotence and disgrace. “It is a true miracle of our time,” he said at the party congress in November 1937, “that you found me, found me among millions of other people. And I came to you. This is a great success for Germany. Hitler saw himself as the savior of Germany; his personal power was that given to him by world history, his humble origins and modest life are only a reminder that Hitler "was chosen by Providence to carry out his mission" from a great mass of other people. Shortly after the crisis that culminated in the Storm Trooper Putsch led by Ernst Röhm in June 1934, he made the following pretentious statement to the Reichstag: "At this hour I take responsibility for the fate of the German nation..." 68 . Hitler was obsessed with the idea of ​​saving the German nation, just as Stalin was fixated on the idea of ​​saving the revolution. He came to the conclusion that he was the chosen one of history, sent down to fulfill his mission, just as Stalin was convinced of his indispensability in the cause of building communism. This deep conviction of his destiny is consistent with Hitler's entire political career from the very first years of the post-war period, when his speeches and articles were aimed at deceiving the simple-minded but extraordinary followers, contrary to the lessons of world history, until his dying will, dictated in 1945 , in which he marks his place in history: “I have sown good seeds. I have helped the German people to realize the significance of the struggle they are waging for their very survival...” 69 .

Neither Hitler nor Stalin can be attributed to the category of the norm. As far as the data on them allow us to judge this, it can be argued that they were mentally inadequate, in the broadest clinical sense of the word, individuals. However great the temptation to suggest that monstrous deeds go hand in hand with madness, they were people endowed with exceptional personal qualities and great political energy. They were driven by unshakable devotion to one idea, and they, each in their own way and for different reasons, saw themselves as an instrument of history chosen to achieve this goal. Awareness of their fate led to the fact that each of them developed excessive vulnerability, a painful complex formed. Stalin was tormented by the fear of death, and as he grew older, his concern grew that his death would mean the end of the cause of the revolution, which he had defended all his life.

Hitler, too, was consumed by the fear of imminent death. “Depressed by the thought of the transience of time,” as Albert Krebs, the leader of the party in Hamburg, noted, “he wanted to compress the events of a whole century into two decades” 70 . Each of them was ruthless, opportunistic, prone to change tactics. The political life of both was uncompromisingly focused on their own survival. Both were underestimated by their colleagues and opponents, who failed to recognize in the unremarkable modest personalities future despots with far-reaching plans, politically merciless, freed themselves from all moral restrictions and, when it came to politics, full of disregard for other people. Both were absorbed in the daily struggle with the difficulties of political life; both only through their own efforts paved their way to dictatorial power, overcoming obstacles and resistance. The unity of purpose and the iron will shown by each of them in the 1920s did not immediately lead them to the unlimited power they enjoyed in the 1930s. None of them envisaged the establishment of a dictatorship. It remains unclear when Stalin came up with the idea that his autocracy could be a surer way to defend the revolution than collective leadership. Hitler's attempt, at first hesitant, to identify himself as a figure sent down by Providence to save Germany, was first made by him during his brief stay in prison in 1924. However, the evolution of this image took time, moreover, it was necessary to convince wide circles of this both within the party and among the population. The first task for both Stalin and Hitler was to become the head of the leadership of their parties before declaring their broader ambitions.

* * *

“We are against the decision of one person to decide the leadership of the party,” Nikolai Bukharin wrote in 1929. “We are opposed to the collective leadership of the Party being replaced by the leadership of one person…” 71 . In the 1920s, after the death of Lenin, the Bolshevik Party was to become a party led by its Central Committee. For the first time after 1924, none of the leaders of the party dared to lay claim to leadership. In the meantime, the Stalinist secretariat, for two years after its formation in 1922, was an organization with greater authority and more procedural power than was originally supposed when this small service department was created in 1919. Decisions on political issues were made after their discussion at the Central Committee of the Party. Stalin's voice was one of many others. The core leadership of the party consisted of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Trotsky, and Aleksey Rykov, appointed to lead the Council of People's Commissars and inherit this post previously held by Lenin. But, in spite of everything, by 1930 they were all removed from their highest posts, and Stalin began to be considered by the majority of its members as the "master", the only and most significant figure in the leadership of the party. “When he enters,” as noted in one of his early biographies, published in 1931, “everyone instantly straightens their backs, everyone turns into attention itself – the audience sees a great leader ...” 72 .

The five-year period between 1924 and 1929 was decisive for Stalin's career. During this time, he succeeded, using his powers as General Secretary, to remove or alienate his colleagues in the leadership of the party. First of all, he needed to take possession of the legacy of the deceased Lenin. In October 1923, Stalin suggested that other party leaders embalm the body of the leader after his death, but was ridiculed by Trotsky, and Bukharin, rejecting this idea, reprimanded him, noting that "this would be an insult to his memory" 73 . By the time of Lenin's death, Stalin had secured a majority of the Politburo's support for his idea, which in the spring of 1924 was the responsibility of Stalin's supporter Felix Dzerzhinsky. Stalin was one of the two main people who were supposed to carry Lenin's coffin at his funeral. Three months later, at a party at the Communist University. Sverdlov, he read a series of lectures on Lenin's contribution to the theory of Marxism. Published under the title The Foundations of Leninism, this series of lectures gave a definite direction to Lenin's thoughts and portrayed Stalin as one of the leaders of the party who studied them most deeply and correctly. The book was addressed to the new generation of young communists who joined the party after the victorious revolution, for whom a single clear guide to the fundamentals of Lenin's theory of the revolutionary state was extremely important. Stalin was celebrating his victory by achieving the identification of his personality in the people's minds as the only and true fighter for the realization of the revolutionary theory 74 .

Stalin needed the name of Lenin in order to emphasize the special importance of party unity and party leadership. To this end, he began to attack factionalists and splitters, thus solving the key task for himself of ensuring his leadership in the party leadership. In his speech at the Congress of Soviets, held just two days after Lenin's death, Stalin gave priority to maintaining a spirit of uncompromising solidarity: "After leaving us, Comrade Lenin bequeathed us to cherish the unity of the Party as the apple of our eye." In his Fundamentals of Leninism, Stalin invariably referred to Lenin's resolution adopted at the 10th Party Congress in 1921, "On the Unity of the Party", while at the same time his own writings during the period of the revolution were full of calls for a single party line. The party needs "unity of will" and "absolute unity of action"; this, as Stalin wrote, "will prevent any factional struggle and division of power in the party" 76 . Stalin, which can be said with almost complete certainty, himself believed that this was the cornerstone of political strategy, but there is no doubt that such an approach was fully in line with his own political interests, his desire to position himself as the guarantor of this unity. All leaders whose authority and power in the party had been undermined by Stalin in the 1920s were accused of factional struggle. This accusation, deliberately included by Stalin in all his speeches and articles, was used by him in order to isolate his rivals and destroy the basis of their resistance.

Stalin primarily sought to associate himself with the broader interests of the rank and file of the party. Stalin had the advantage of his true plebeian origin. He always called the party an organization of workers and poor peasants, despite the fact that a significant part of his leadership consisted of representatives of the educated intelligentsia. His speech at Lenin's funeral began with the statement: "We are communists - people of a special temper", but at the same time he continued to characterize the ideal members of the party as "sons of the working class, sons of the needy and struggling, sons of those who have experienced incredible need ... "77. In his lectures dedicated to the memory of Sverdlov, he put forward the thesis that intellectuals and other petty-bourgeois elements who have infiltrated the party as opportunists prone to ideological decay should be expelled from the party by true proletarians with the help of a "merciless struggle", that is, that strategy which he followed and ruthlessly implemented all subsequent years, destroying the intellectual elite of the party 78 . Stalin was able to carry out the "proletarianization" of the party, partly as a result of his increased control over personal appointments in the party apparatus. Stalin's supporters were given key positions in the Central Committee and the Secretariat, responsible for appointing and selecting candidates for top positions. Stalin did not miss a single detail, maintaining the balance of power in committees or meetings, at the same time, the degree of his control over the party machine was greatly exaggerated, since many officials in the apparatus were, although formally, appointed not by Stalin, but by the Central Committee. The key to his success among recruits in the party ranks was the ability to appear as the only leader who always put the interests of the party above personal ambitions. Working on committees, he developed an effective tactic for himself, which allowed him to have the last word in all cases, while giving the impression that he was just the mouthpiece of the party line. “While attending meetings, Stalin never took part in the discussion until it was over,” reported Boris Bazhanov, who worked with Stalin in the Kremlin. “Then, when everyone had already spoken, he got up from his seat and summarized in a few words what was the opinion of the majority” 79 . At the larger congresses he presented himself as the voice of party common sense, and with undisguised pleasure parodied, ridiculed and attacked any hint of deviation from the party line, which in fact, at the right moment, could be useful to him. Stalin ensured that in the minds of the majority of party members he established himself as the most devoted spokesman for the party line and the most reliable bulwark of the unity of the party ranks.

Nevertheless, there were still issues of revolutionary strategy on which the opinion of the party leadership was divided. Long before Lenin's death, Trotsky commanded the troops of the Soviets in civil war, being People's Commissar for Military Affairs. He became associated with a political position that placed him aloof from the Leninist general line. He stood adamantly for the ideas of party democracy and considered it necessary to hold open debates on questions of party strategy; Trotsky opposed the New Economic Policy, adopted in 1921 as a way to restore a market economy in agriculture and small retail trade, considered it necessary to strengthen socialization in the food production system, advocated accelerating the country's large-scale industrialization; and finally, Trotsky believed in the international mission of the revolutionary movement (“to give impetus to the world revolution”) and considered it an important factor in building socialism in the Soviet Union, which would otherwise become a “temporary” phenomenon 80 .

Trotsky, being a highly ambitious adherent of the party, began to distance himself from Leninism starting in 1924, trying to belittle Lenin's role in the events of 1917, and this happened at the very time when Stalin was strengthening his image of an unshakable Leninist with all his might. Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had supported Stalin in the announcement of Lenin's will, began to shift towards opposition to the man they realized could undermine their own claim to leadership. By the end of 1924, Stalin felt that his position was strong enough to launch an open and merciless attack. In his lecture on "Trotskyism or Leninism?" he accused Trotsky of having grouped around himself "non-proletarian elements" aiming at the destruction of the proletarian revolution. A month later, Stalin published in the newspaper Pravda a letter written by Trotsky in 1913, found in old police archives. In a letter addressed to a Georgian Menshevik, Trotsky spoke contemptuously of Lenin: "The whole system of views of Leninism today is built on lies and falsification..." 82 . The letter dealt a heavy blow to Trotsky's moral authority in the party, and in January he was ordered to resign as People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs.

In the next two years, Stalin continued his brutal persecution of both Trotsky and his former allies, Zinoviev and Kamenev, whom Stalin and his supporters in the party dubbed the United Opposition, seeking to split the party ranks by excessively accelerating the pace of economic transformation and denying the possibility of building socialism in one country. Stalin's tactical prowess consisted of close attention to detail and persistent, calculated exaggeration of their significance in order to discredit his victims. In 1924, for example, he organized a campaign to stop naming towns, villages or factories after Trotsky. He issued an order to remove Trotsky's name from instructions, pamphlets and textbooks on political education in the army, in which he was characterized as an outstanding commander of the Red Army 83 . Anonymous rumors and slanderous fabrications circulated among the population, playing on the fact that Trotsky had been a Menshevik for most of his political career and had only joined the party in 1917. Stalin used the same tactics against Zinoviev and Kamenev - the fact that they did not support the party's call for an uprising in 1917 was presented by Stalin as an example of sabotaging the revolution. By the time the Fourteenth Party Congress opened in December 1925, Stalin's rivals were already forced to defend themselves by going into opposition, significantly weakened by the fact that the retaliatory attacks on Stalin by each of the three were purely personal, while Stalin always attacked them. by manipulating abstract notions of their threat to the cause of the revolution. When Kamenev began his speech condemning Stalin as the leader of the party, the congress delegates drowned out his speech with shouts and exclamations, chanting: “Stalin! Stalin! 84 In a speech delivered a year later, Stalin noted with a disarming note that he would "avoid personal elements in the polemic" as best he could, and immediately launched a ruthless attack on his opponents using those very personal elements. Stalin used a very simple but effective rhetorical arsenal so that his demagogy did not seem like an ordinary squabble between quarreling pretenders to the throne of Lenin. He often spoke of himself in the third person, to further smooth out this very "personal element".

Later, the opposition made another desperate attempt to remove Stalin, although this was hardly the "watershed in history" as Trotsky later wrote in his autobiography. In October 1927, the Central Committee, meeting at its plenum, expelled from its ranks Trotsky and Zinoviev, already expelled from the Politburo and deprived of all government posts. Trotsky took the opportunity to circulate a long letter on the history of the party, in which he highlighted those parts of Lenin's testament that condemned Stalin and called for his removal. Copies of the letter were copied and distributed secretly. October 23, 1927 was the last act of a dramatic confrontation that took place within the framework of the plenum of the Central Committee. Trotsky stood up and spoke, with all his passion, denouncing Stalin as the real threat to the party, the absolute bureaucratic tyrant from whom the revolutionary movement must get rid of, as Lenin demanded. Some began to interrupt him with incessant cries of "Slander!", "Schismatic!", Others listened without much attention. Stalin, enraged and forced to defend himself, and knowing that uncomfortable questions were already being raised as to why Lenin's will was not communicated to all party members, responded by demonstrating, contrary to Trotsky's accusations, that he was simply unable to express his thoughts or articulate arguments, extraordinary oratorical skills and well-controlled indignation, brilliantly reflecting Trotsky's latest attack. He agreed with the arguments against him, remarking, addressing the delegates: “I think it would be strange and insulting if the opposition, which is striving to destroy the party, would begin to praise Stalin, who defends the fundamental principles of the Leninist party” 87 . He unreservedly agreed with Lenin's accusation that he was "too rude", but, turning everything on its head, declared: "Yes, comrades, I am rude, but only with those who treacherously destroy the unity of the party." Stalin persuaded the plenum to pass a resolution approving "rudeness" as an essential attribute of the party members, and not their fault. He called for the expulsion of all those who condemned him, and then turned to the plenum with a request to reprimand him for not being rude enough with them. Under enthusiastic cries: “That's right, we are reprimanding you!” and thunderous applause Stalin triumphed, having won a complete victory. The opposition was expelled from the Central Committee, and in the following months from the party. In January 1928, Trotsky was exiled to Central Asia, and a year later to Turkey.

Throughout much of the struggle against the so-called "Left Opposition," Stalin enjoyed the support of the Politburo and Central Committee from a cohort of leaders who had coalesced around Nikolai Bukharin, a party economist and Pravda editor. This was a very popular figure in the party, completely different from Stalin. Calm, sociable, wide-eyed, polite, with red hair, a neat mustache and a goatee that set him apart, he was distinguished by an extraordinary mind and encyclopedic knowledge. As the son of a teacher, he studied economics at Moscow University, joined the party in 1906, fled abroad in 1910, and returned to Russia after the revolution. Taking radical positions in 1917 and during the Civil War, and being a supporter of the spread of revolutionary struggle and communism in Europe, as well as a supporter of violent economic mobilization, he went over to the side of the more moderate part of the party in 1922-1923, began to advocate the New Economic Policy and more moderate rates of industrial development, which made it possible to develop small-scale trade and agriculture, providing the necessary balance when "the city did not plunder the countryside" 89 . Bukharin was an ill-suited figure for political activity and was distinguished by unusual simplicity, but in the 1920s he was recognized by many as the most prominent thinker in the new, Soviet system and was considered as the likely heir to Lenin. He was on friendly terms with Stalin, but at the same time he was Trotsky's close intellectual partner. The circle of people close to him included Nikolai Uglanov, head of the Moscow City Party Committee, Mikhail Tomsky, leader of the Soviet trade unions, and Alexei Rykov, chairman of the government. It was not a clearly organized faction or platform, but only a group of people who shared a common position, who advocated a more balanced course of economic development and the idea of ​​a more stable post-revolutionary society that would present the world with a more acceptable image of Russian communism and a more preferable alternative to Stalin's despotism 90 .

It is quite possible that Stalin always sought to overthrow Bukharin, seeing in him a threat to his own position and wary of him as a guardian of the Leninist mantle and a popular, endearing potential head of state, but the problem that separated them was not only questions of doctrine, but also personal relationships.

Stalin never liked the implied change in the direction of economic development that followed from the program adopted in 1921. In a long conversation with Bukharin in 1925 about the prospects for the Russian economy, Stalin emphasized that the New Economic Policy would "crush the socialist elements and restore capitalism." Stalin stood for accelerated industrialization in order to build a truly proletarian state, but in a dispute with the ideas of Trotsky, who advocated "super-industrialization", he took an intermediate position. In the winter of 1927/28, when the United Opposition had already been crushed, Stalin was able to move towards the idea of ​​accelerated industrialization, which he had always secretly cherished. And this inevitably meant taking away a huge share of the surplus production from the peasants; In the spring of 1928, Stalin finally launched the emergency measures to confiscate grain, which became the first stage of the revolution in the countryside, with which the name of Stalin is inevitably associated. This action was an irresistible bone of contention in his dispute with Bukharin, so in the end the latter was destroyed, and with him the remnants of the national leaders who had previously grouped around him were crushed.

As a rule, having outlined a victim, Stalin began to play political chess with her. He began by regularly including hints in his speeches indicating that a new faction of oppositionists who did not accept the economic revolution was being formed. Lacking broad support and the ability to appeal to the more proletarian elements in the movement, Bukharin and his supporters found themselves isolated. In Moscow, where Bukharin had support, Stalin, through manipulation in the elections to the city council, achieved a majority, and the head of the city, Uglanov, had already been overthrown in November of that year. In January 1929, Stalin finally openly called Bukharin the representative of a platform that stood in "opposition to the policy of the party" 92 . It was during this month that Bukharin made the grave mistake of once again reminding Stalin of Lenin's assessment of him. In an article in Pravda entitled "Lenin's Political Testament", Bukharin explained what he saw as genuine Leninism and accused Stalin of undermining the Leninist principle of party democracy. In his letter, published on January 30, Bukharin openly, without fear, declared that "the Stalinist regime is no longer tolerated in our party." Stalin succeeded in winning the support of the majority in the Central Committee, after which he crushed the last remnants of resistance. At the plenum of the Central Committee in April, Bukharin's supporters attacked Stalin, condemning his unprincipled career in the party. To each personal accusation, Stalin threw: “this is trivial,” but, having waited for the end, he went on the attack, quoting the passage in Lenin’s will where he accused Bukharin of having a scholastic and not quite Marxist Marxism. The committee voted to remove representatives of the "right opposition" from their posts. In November 1929, Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo and lost his post as editor of the Pravda newspaper. Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were forced to write a letter of repentance, where they confessed their mistakes. In December 1930, Tomsky lost his post as head of the trade unions, and Stalin appointed his close ally, Vyacheslav Molotov, in his place. In fact, the "right opposition", united by a single platform, was largely a fiction. At the same time, differences in political strategy were real. Stalin did not believe that Bukharin really understood what the driving forces and fundamental ideas of Leninism. In the heat of an argument on the eve of Bukharin's expulsion, when they exchanged angry accusations, Stalin growled at him: “You are all not Marxists, you are sorcerers. None of you understand Lenin!” 94 In December 1929, the whole country celebrated Stalin's fiftieth birthday; the list of Politburo members, always in alphabetical order and indicative of the collective nature of party leadership, was changed to emphasize that Stalin was "Lenin's first disciple and leader of the party." This was the first and most important step towards the establishment of autocracy in the 1930s 95 .

Hitler's rise to the top of the party took place in a completely different context. The question of whether he is ready to tolerate "collective leadership" in any sense of the word has never been raised. When he was released from Landsberg prison in December 1924, his first task was to restore himself to the role of undisputed leader of the party, which he had lost during his time in prison. Unlike Stalin, Hitler had to lead a rather noisy party with no prospects of being in power, while Stalin was one of the top leaders of the ruling party. Being in prison put Hitler in a very difficult position. His party was banned in all German regions, with the exception of Thuringia 96 . In July 1924 he completely retired from political activity until his release. Outside the small groups, the National Socialists broke into different factions, some of them united under the roof of the Radical Nationalists in Northern Germany, others entered into association with small pan-German alliances in Bavaria. In the absence of Hitler to replace him, the first of these groups, the National Socialist Freedom Party, placed the aged General Ludendorff in charge, but the Bavarian wing of the party did not accept the appointment. The movement that welcomed Hitler's return to politics in 1925 was very small and fragmented; the party publishing house in Munich, Echer-Verlag, had only three staff members. Hitler reorganized the party mainly on the principle of loyalty to his person. His first public speaking February 27, 1925 took place in the same beer cellar in Munich, where the putsch he led began. On that day, thousands of his supporters filled the hall, most of them had to listen standing up, as there were not enough places to sit. Hitler called for allegiance to him as the sole leader of the party. The leaders of the local nationalists, grouped around Hitler, "achieved reconciliation" at the end of his speech, completely surrendering themselves to his "indisputable" authority, 98 as one of the witnesses wrote.

The next two years were a turning point in Hitler's career. His new ascent began from the most unpromising foot to the pinnacle of power in the party. The radical nationalist wing of German politics was insignificant and fragmented. Hitler could count on support only from a heterogeneous handful of several thousand Bavarian nationalists; the organization in northern Germany was in the hands of revolutionary nationalists, who were much less enthusiastic about Hitler's authoritarian rule; Ludendorff was still a significant figure on the fringes of the movement; also on the horizon was the vague outline of the young, ambitious pharmacist Gregor Strasser, who, in Hitler's absence, began to act as a "confidant" of the imprisoned Fuhrer. Strasser was to Hitler what Bukharin was to Stalin. Despite the fact that Strasser is often called the representative of the "northern" wing of the party, in reality he was a Bavarian, born in 1892 in the family of a devout Catholic. His father was a small civil servant. Like Hitler, Strasser went through the entire war, was also awarded the Iron Cross first and second class; like Hitler, he considered the war the most important test of his life. Strasser's personality was in many ways the antithesis of Hitler. He was naturally sociable, cheerful, open, with a great sense of humor; his large figure and strong voice, smile and charm of unconstrained authority naturally made him a leader and a popular figure both inside and outside the party. His political views were formed in the trenches: a powerful revolutionary nationalism that completely rejected the old imperial order in favor of a natural community based not on class and privilege, but on the common desire of all to work in the name of the nation. "We became nationalists in the trenches," he told an assembly in 1924, "so we could not help but become socialists." The Hitlerite movement became a natural refuge for Strasser. He joined the party in 1922, and in March 1923 became the head of a Bavarian regiment in the party's paramilitary organization, the Assault Troops (SA). During Hitler's time in prison, Strasser became one of the leading members of the bloc of radical nationalists fighting for victory in the elections, in the absence of the banned National Socialist Party, and in December 1924 he was elected to the Reichstag. Unlike some prominent right-wing radicals, in February 1925 Strasser decided to join Hitler, not as a "follower", but as an equal "colleague" 100 .

Hitler accepted Strasser's offer to cooperate in the revival of the dying party, but he remained adamant about leading it, believing that he alone was capable of leading it to future victories. This conviction deepened Hitler's months in prison, and it was also fueled by the obsequious attention given to him by his secretary and his other self, Rudolf Hess, who was in prison with his leader, whom he called "tribune." After the meeting, which began the revival of the party, Hess noted the "unshakable faith" of his ruler "in his fate" 101 . Hitler's views on the organization of the party ruled out any kind of party democracy that some party leaders wanted to introduce; his conception of the movement was entirely based on the fact that he was the potential savior of Germany and that his ideas and political moves could not be influenced by the ideas and advice of others. On February 14, 1926, Hitler called the entire senior leadership of the party to a conference in the city of Bamberg in northern Bavaria. Among the leaders were also party radicals who preferred the revolutionary path to power. They were a loosely organized working group founded last July by Strasser to coordinate party strategy outside of Bavaria; he also drew up a modified version of the party program adopted in 1920, which he hoped would be approved. Hitler talked tirelessly for five hours. He argued that the party's program was unshakable ("the basis of our religion, our ideology"); he swept aside the revolutionary path of struggle in favor of moving to power through victory in parliamentary elections; but first of all he clearly expressed the idea that he himself was indispensable and that only he could lead the party to victory. Five months later, at the first party congress after the revival, convened on July 4 in Weimar, Hitler's personal leadership in the party was recognized by a majority, and his position in the party as Führer (a title officially approved in Weimar) was from that moment unshakable.

There is no doubt that Hitler used his appeal and personal charisma to ruthlessly kill those who stood in his way, as well as to simplify the process of developing the strategy of the party. And yet there were real differences in basic questions of doctrine and tactics. Thus, Strasser represented those circles in the party leadership who advocated emphatically "Germanic" socialism. "We socialists are enemies, mortal enemies of the existing capitalist economic system," he wrote in 1926 in a pamphlet listing the tasks of the movement in the future. Other party leaders were more hostile to the fact that the party should concentrate all its efforts to become a nationalist representative of the urban working class. These differences reflected existing disagreements on issues of tactics: the "socialist" wing proposed a more uncompromising and hostile stance towards parliament, the moderates advocated legal forms of struggle for power. Here it is tempting to compare Hitler's approach to arguments with Stalin's tactics in the debate on the industrialization of the country. Both rejected radical ways of resolving issues, as they were associated with party circles that posed a threat to their personal political positions. Hitler largely shared and continued to promote in the 1930s the views of Strasser, who argued that the old economic order was bankrupt and unjust, and therefore should be replaced by an economic system based on "achievements" for the nation 104 . But Hitler was aware that uncompromising revolutionism would alienate the voters and, in the end, could also sweep him away.

The strength of the opposition, as well as its cohesion that Hitler faced, may have been greatly exaggerated. There was no real "united opposition" because the party leaders concluded that without Hitler the party would be indistinguishable from other small radical nationalist factions competing with each other for survival. The diversity of political perspectives and ideologies was a consequence of the heterogeneity of many nationalist groups and associations that united into a single party. Only unconditional loyalty to Hitler could overcome a possible split and unite them, just as the no less spread of political views and ideas in the CPSU (b) in the 1920s was overcome, in the end, only as a result of uniting around the Stalinist party line. Both parties were not monolithic organizations and consisted of a variety of ideological, political and social associations.

Much of his political energy in the period up to 1933 Hitler devoted to leading the party, ironing out differences, ridding the party of dissidents, uniting local party leaders through regular conciliatory visits, face-to-face meetings and pep talks. But the opposition to the constructed myth of a German messiah on whom the Party must rely was still alive. Arthur Dinter, a consistent opponent of the idea of ​​unifying the movement around Hitler and the leader of the party in Thuringia, at the conference of the majority of the party on organizational reform in August 1928, introduced a resolution suggesting the limitation of Hitler's power by appointing a party senate. In the subsequent vote, Dinter was the only one who supported her. In October, he was expelled from the party, and Hitler sent letters to all party leaders, so that they, by signing them, confirmed their rejection of the idea of ​​\u200b\u200blimiting his powers. All letters were returned signed 105 .

Another serious danger came from the revolutionary wing of the movement, which grew stronger after the 1928 elections to the Reichstag showed how little success the legitimate path to power promises. The National Socialists won only twelve seats in the Reichstag, and they were supported by fewer voters than those who voted for the Nationalist bloc in 1924. Party politics shifted from fighting for the votes of non-Marxist workers to seeking support among the small landowners and the small town petty bourgeoisie. The urban strategy was not abandoned, but socialism became less accentuated. However, other problems arose in connection with the paramilitary wing of the movement, since the CA included mainly urban elements, they also had a significant number of manual laborers in their ranks. This wing was re-established after the party's revival in late 1926 under the leadership of former Freikorps Franz von Pfeiffer, who became head of the SA, an organization independent of the party's central apparatus that shared the concern of many SA leaders at the excessive personal power imposed by Hitler on their movement. In 1930, the cup of patience overflowed and discontent resulted in an open gap. In July 1930, Gregor Strasser's brother, Otto, with a small group of uncompromising, anti-capitalist revolutionaries, broke away from the party, declaring openly that "the socialists are leaving the NSDAP" 107 . In August, von Pfeiffer resigned in protest at the party's unwillingness to support the SA's aspirations to become a proto-army force alternative to regular troops. Hitler overcame the ensuing crisis by declaring that he himself would lead the SA and offered a number of minor concessions. But the following spring, a full-scale revolt broke out among the East German members of the SA, led by Walter Stennes, who on April 1, with a swift blow, overthrew the leadership in Berlin and announced that the SA was taken under his control, but was overthrown after Hitler's impassioned appeal for the absolute need to remain loyal to him. . The purge that followed led to the suspension of those members of the SA who were to be politically tested. Hitler took control of all appointments at SA headquarters and required all SA leaders to swear allegiance to him personally. Eventually the SA was led by another former Freikorps leader, Ernst Röhm, who had been a senior officer in 1919 and had been tried with Hitler in 1924 108 .

Before he was offered the post of chancellor in January 1933, Hitler faced another difficulty. Although Gregor Strasser never denied his personal loyalty to Hitler, he remained his comrade rather than assistant. In 1928 he was appointed organizational leader of the party. While in this post, he had to deal with organizational issues arising from the sharp increase in the number of new party members after the crisis of 1929. Strasser was a popular and widely respected politician and the most effective and prominent parliamentary figure in the party. Starting in 1930, he began to shift in his views from socialist positions towards the realization of the need for real political power. In his activities, he used connections with other political parties and their representatives, unlike Hitler, who did not recognize any compromises with other political forces, which did not deprive him of the opportunity to get the post of chancellor. Strasser feared that Hitler's stubbornness would deprive the party of any possibility of attaining power, either as a single party or in coalition with other political forces. In the summer of 1932, defeat seemed as likely as success, and Strasser grew impatient. In October, he advocated a bloc with trade unions and other nationalist parties: "All who are with us along the way, join" 109 . He negotiated with the Catholic Center Party; negotiated with army commanders and eventually became an ally of Kurt von Schleicher, the Minister of Defense, who advocated the idea of ​​a broad National Socialist alliance, in which other political leaders besides Strasser would be involved. After the complete failure of the elections in November 1932, Strasser went on an open break with Hitler in the hope that he himself could bring important elements to the party or be able to convince Hitler to accept the idea of ​​​​building coalitions and collective leadership. On December 3, Schleicher offered Strasser the post of Vice-Chancellor in the coalition government; for the latter, after ten years in opposition, such an offer was very tempting. Hitler, who was in a personal violent confrontation with Strasser, while in the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin, ordered him to stop further negotiations, and instead of separating from the party and joining the government, Strasser unexpectedly resigned on December 8 and left almost all political posts, showing at the last moment the inability to deny the importance of Hitler in the national revolution, which he so aspired to 110 .

As a result, Strasser, like Bukharin, began to be seen as a genuine historical alternative to the dictators who managed to push them to the sidelines. Had Strasser succeeded in reducing Hitler's powers or taking his place in the national coalition in early 1933, Hitler's personal dictatorship might have become impossible; if Bukharin had been able to take advantage of his position as "the favorite of the party", as Lenin said in his "testament", by succeeding in promoting his version of the revolution, perhaps Stalin would have been removed or forced to accept the conditions of collective leadership. There can be no doubt that the histories of both states, Germany and the Soviet Union, would have taken a completely different path if the two had gained the confidence of the parties. However, it is important to note here that the alternatives suggested above cannot be seen as the more acceptable face of communism or National Socialism, a faint shadow of fanatical reality. Strasser was an ardent anti-Semite, an adamant opponent of Marxism, a revisionist in matters of international politics and an opponent of parliamentarism. Bukharin began his career in the Soviet system as an ultra-revolutionary, and his commitment to moderate economic policies did not make him a great democrat; as a member of the Politburo, he supported all authoritarian decisions made in the 1920s. In this respect, both of them went not far from Hitler and Stalin.

In the end, neither Bukharin nor Strasser proved to be strong enough personalities to overcome the immeasurable weakness of the entire opposition opposing the future dictators. Both were straightforward and uncomplicated personalities, whose straightforwardness was a serious drawback in the secret and sophisticated political game that Stalin and Hitler played with them, who enjoyed the art of politics and were completely ruthless and unscrupulous personalities. Neither Bukharin nor Strasser had the ambition, nor the determination or will power to take over the leadership of the party, as was made abundantly clear by their clumsy response to confrontation in the late 1920s. Their doctrinal differences from their main rivals have been greatly exaggerated by historians seeking to highlight other options for emerging from the crises of the 1920s 112 . Among other things, not one of them was able to convince either the party masses or the wider population, since he could not successfully convey his promises to their consciousness. Both Hitler and Stalin appealed over the heads of other party leaders to the rank and file, who eventually began to see them as indispensable figures for the future of the party. Yet both Strasser and Bukharin received a terrible sentence for being in true opposition to the style of leadership that had been established in both parties by Hitler and Stalin. Strasser was arrested at his home on June 30, 1934 under the pretext that he was preparing a coup d'état, and a few hours later he was shot by an SS captain in the basement of the headquarters of the secret police. Bukharin continued to cling to a limited role in the party, enduring humiliation at the hands of Stalin for eight years, until in March 1938 he was charged with counter-revolutionary activities and terrorism. Sentenced to death, on the night of the execution on March 15, 1938, he wrote a short letter to Stalin in which he asked: “Koba, why do you need my death?” 113

The desire to take over the party does not provide an exhaustive explanation of why the dictatorship was imminent, although this was an important prerequisite. The best explanation for the impending dictatorships was two major socio-political crises, one in Germany, the other in the Soviet Union. Both had a historically clearly expressed revolutionary character. In the period since 1928, the population of the Soviet Union has experienced tremendous social upheaval: the beginning of collectivization, the launch of the five-year plans, and the incessant attacks on culture, ideas and attitudes considered "bourgeois", which initially in the 1920s seemed to the regime tolerant and usable. The so-called “second revolution” returned to a radical trajectory and revived the social conflicts that were characteristic of the first post-revolutionary years of the civil war, the goal of the transformation was to accelerate the construction of socialism. In Germany, the socio-political crisis, which reached exceptional severity, was provoked by a recession in the economy in 1929. It spawned a nationalist revolution that completely rejected the political system, culture and social values ​​of the republic and set as its goal the choice of a "truly German" model of national unification. The revolution swept aside all "bourgeois" values ​​that were seen as Western, cosmopolitan and sowing discord. The revival of the nation was interpreted as a return to the trajectory of self-affirmation interrupted by the war and subsequent defeat.

Hitler and Stalin arose in the crucible of the internal party struggle of the 1920s as the most prominent representatives of the two revolutions and those sections of the population of both countries that supported and participated in them. Neither of these upheavals was caused by a wave of the hand of either Stalin or Hitler, although both played an important role in aggravating the situation and took full advantage of the political opportunities that presented themselves. Both revolutions were the product of certain social forces and circumstances, difficult to predict and not always manageable, and were accompanied by widespread violence and political conflicts. In the conditions of instability of both communities, agonizing at the epicenter of the deepest crisis, there was a desire to find a charismatic political figure capable of overcoming chaos, while maintaining the achievements of the revolution. On their way to absolute power, both Stalin and Hitler relied on the support of the broad masses, they were supported by the widespread opinion even among those who were not eager to convert to another faith that it was the leader who could become the guarantor of political stability and revolutionary order. None of them had the opportunity to usurp power through a direct coup or other non-parliamentary means. The establishment of both dictatorships was the result of a historical confluence of circumstances, when the ambitions of the two leaders merged into a single stream with the aspirations of those they wanted to represent.

The "second revolution" in the Soviet Union was the result of an apparent paradox at the heart of the revolutionary transformation in 1921, after Lenin laid the foundation for the New Economic Policy. The decision to allow private property in agriculture and commerce caused an immediate response in a society where four-fifths of the total population were employed on the land, and most of the "workers" were artisans and small traders. The decision taken that same year to end the factional struggle and liquidate all alternative political currents led to the fact that a predominantly urban revolutionary party remained in the political arena, formally setting the goal of building a modern workers' state and creating a powerful industry, a party that was to lead a community that was difficult to succumb to implementation of modernized socialism. This contradiction came to the surface immediately after the majority of the party was faced with the indisputable fact that revolutions were not planned anywhere else in Europe in the 1920s. The conclusions that flowed from the realization of this reality became an irresistible bone of contention between Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky represented that narrow circle of party members who were of the opinion that the revolution would finally perish if it was not spread. Stalin, on the other hand, spoke on behalf of the rest of the party members, who believed that the building of socialism in only one country - the Soviet Union - could become an inspiring prelude to the revolutions that would break out around the world. The victory over Trotsky forced the party to face the logic of its own position. If the Soviet Union was to go through this path alone and show the rest of the world an exemplary model of a socialist society, it was necessary to make rapid and radical socio-economic changes. In a speech to industry leaders in February 1931, echoing his own explanation given to the Central Committee in November 1929, Stalin called economic transformation a fundamental factor in the survival of the revolution: “We are fifty or a hundred years behind developed countries. We need to overcome this gap in ten years. We'll do it or we'll just go under." 114 . Stalin once again reminded the audience that the transformation of the Soviet Union would become a model for the proletariat of the whole world, who, looking at the achievements of a modernized country, would exclaim: “There is our vanguard, shock brigade, the power of the state of the working class, my fatherland!” 115

But in reality, the construction of an exemplary socialist state was accompanied by brutal violence, was rather destructive, and often managed chaotically, which led to negative social consequences. The critical moment came in 1927 and 1928. During the winter of 1927, the supply of grain to the cities dropped sharply. In November and December they dropped to half the level of 1926 116 . The grain crisis was partly caused by the inability of industry to produce enough commodities; peasants held grain to raise their stakes when bargaining with the state. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the state economic authorities at the same time adopted what became the first five-year plan, according to which the general level of industrial production was to rise sharply, primarily in heavy industry. The grain crisis that broke out led to the compromise of the industrialization plan; the government found that market forces, in the midst of the New Economic Policy, began to shift the balance of Soviet society towards a huge segment of the population employed in small-scale trade and private production. By the spring of 1928, a wave of protests against speculators and kulaks arose in the party in favor of accelerating the growth of industrial production. In January 1928, emergency measures were taken - article 107 of the Criminal Code was introduced, directed against speculators and setting the task of seizing more grain from the peasants and punishing those who held it. In 1928, the Five Year Plan was launched and the focus was on heavy industry, thousands of party agents dispersed to the villages in order to reduce the threat of hiding grain by peasants who resented the lack of necessary commodities. “We cannot allow,” Stalin declared at the beginning of 1928, “that industry should depend on the caprice of the kulak.”117

These measures marked the end of cooperation between the two social strata and finally buried the concept of the moderate economy of the 1920s. In rural areas, party activists, outraged that the peasants could demand a ransom from the revolution, imposed a real class war on those they branded as capitalists, often on very shaky grounds. All the poorest peasantry and rural workers were mobilized to carry out the social revolution in the countryside. The traditional meetings of the village population, the gatherings, were used as a tool to isolate the "wealthy" peasants and those who resisted state policy and refused to increase the quota of grain given to the state to a level that deprived them of their competitiveness. As a result, they were encouraged traditional methods and rituals of humiliation of the kulaks, consisting in the fact that they were led through the village streets with collars smeared with tar around their necks or subjected to public beatings 118 . The strategy of using the peasants themselves to put into practice what the party wanted, namely the implementation of the "Ural-Siberian method", named by Stalin himself after the region where this method was first applied, led to the emergence of a truly revolutionary a situation that in 1929 turned into an open class war, and by the end of that year became the starting point of the official policy of "dekulakization". In just one year, the party made the transition to a policy of collectivization of agriculture, the creation of large state agricultural associations that replaced small private farms, and the complete destruction of the independent market for agricultural products. Mass collectivization began in October, but a month later, Stalin solemnly announced what he called the "great turn" 119 . To top it all off, on December 27, 1929, Stalin issued an uncompromising demand to "destroy the kulaks as a class." The spirit of merciless class struggle, which permeated Stalin's entire policy towards the peasantry, spread through all the villages and villages of the vast country.

The revolutionary class struggle, inspired by those party leaders who, like Stalin, feared that the New Economic Policy era would lead to the gradual restoration of capitalism, resumed with renewed vigor on other fronts. In March 1929, the Supreme Soviet adopted the most ambitious plan for the development of industry, marking the beginning of a program that physically changed the face of the Soviet Union and led to a mass exodus of people from rural areas and their movement to new industrial centers. The party took advantage of the social shift that had taken place to launch an aggressive policy of the proletarianization of Soviet society. A campaign was launched in all factories and factories to attract hundreds of thousands of new members to the party, and this mass of recruits completely eroded the old guard of pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks. Culture was under tight control, so that the possibility of the emergence of new, experimental forms of creative expression was simply excluded, and everything new was characterized as formalistic and bourgeois, while everything truly proletarian was encouraged and supported in every possible way. The Cultural Revolution was only a small part of the ongoing war against the remnants of the bourgeois class and bourgeois values, which was marked in March 1928 by the show trial of coal mine engineers in the city of Shakhty in southern Russia. Fifty-three engineers were accused of carefully planned sabotage and destructive counter-revolutionary activities. Most were found guilty, and five were executed. The process marked the end of the period when the so-called bourgeois specialists were invited to cooperate. In April 1928, Stalin declared that this process helped to reveal a new form of counter-revolutionary struggle of the bourgeoisie "against the dictatorship of the proletariat." The fear of renewed "attacks on Soviet power" by hidden capitalist elements caused massive violations of human rights, arrests, imprisonment and executions of thousands of representatives of the old intelligentsia who worked in industry, government, including a number of the most prominent economists and workers in the statistical department, who made possible adoption of an industrial development plan at the end of the 1920s 120 .

In the short term, the results of the resumption of the revolutionary class struggle turned out to be the most deplorable. The old specialists were everywhere replaced by hastily trained proletarian workers. The industry expanded, but this happened in an atmosphere of constant incompleteness of projects, non-fulfillment of quotas and low quality of products, which in turn provoked endless persecutions and trials for sabotage and violations of the laws. The most devastating consequences of this policy were in the countryside, where millions of peasants continued to resist the sudden violent change in their world order, so that part of the rural population of the Soviet Union found itself in a state of undeclared civil war with the state. Peasants broke working equipment, destroyed and burned houses and outbuildings. They were more ready to destroy their livestock than to give it into the hands of the state: between 1928 and 1933, the number of cattle in the countryside decreased by 44 percent, the number of sheep by 65 percent, the number of horses vital for agriculture in century, when tractors were not yet common, by more than half. Grain production dropped sharply, while the centralized purchase of grain increased, thus leaving a huge part of the rural population without an adequate supply of food 121 . The resistance of the peasantry provoked a new spiral of violence, when members of the Communist Party, managers and policemen, leaving the cities, dispersed throughout the country to stop acts of sabotage by the peasants. The number of violent clashes and terrorist attacks rose from just over 1,000 in 1928 to 13,794 by 1930. That year, there were 1,198 murders and 5,720 attempted murders and serious offenses, most of which were directed against party activists and peasants who voluntarily joined the collective farms. The number of riots and demonstrations also increased, reaching over 13,000 in 1930, and they involved, according to official statistics, a total of more than 2.4 million peasants. In this situation, the authorities were powerless, and in March 1930, Stalin announced a temporary respite, accusing the communist activists of "dizzy with success." And, as a consequence of this respite, by October of that year the number of collective farms in Russia had dropped from 59% to 22% 123 . Then the regime changed its policy tactics, and the collectivization of the next year was carried out with the use of force: more than 2,000,000 peasants were deported to labor camps in the north of the country, and 2,000,000 were displaced within their regions 124 .

Eventually, as a result of the crisis, a mass famine began in 1932. It has been established that during the winter of 1932/33, in a vast expanse of territory from Kazakhstan, through the North Caucasus to Ukraine, as a result of excessive seizures of grain, loss of labor and horses, demoralization of peasants and their resistance, 4,000 people died from malnutrition and diseases caused by hunger. 000 people. In that year, the crisis that arose as a result of the “second revolution” reached its maximum. Industrial production declined, inflation rose. In April, a strike broke out among industrial workers in Moscow in response to food cuts. In the Ukraine, where the Party insisted on a maximum quota of expropriations as a punishment for the resistance of the peasants, the situation was so desperate that Stalin was forced to remark in his urgent letter written in August 1932: "We may lose the Ukraine", although this, as it has become common, could mean an instruction to intensify repressive measures against saboteurs and criminals 125 . In March 1932, a group of communists united around Martemyan Ryutin, a candidate for the Central Committee of the party, circulated a 200-page document entitled "Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship", which gave a detailed analysis of the failure of the "second revolution". In September, the so-called Ryutin platform circulated among the members of the Central Committee the “Letter of Eighteen”, which called on all members of the party to lead the country out of the crisis and impasse by “eliminating the dictatorship of Stalin and his clique” 126 . As a result, they were all expelled from the party, however, when Stalin demanded that Ryutin be shot, the Politburo did not support him. Stalin was forced to back down and agreed with Ryutin's imprisonment.

The regime was able to maintain control over the “second revolution” throughout the crisis period partly due to the fact that it enjoyed the support of the broad masses of the population, who perceived everything that was happening as a real attempt to finally return the revolution to its true socialist ideals. Therefore, mass resistance to the authorities in rural areas was side by side with great enthusiasm of the poorest and landless part of the rural workers, who readily cooperated with the authorities, helping them to overthrow those who were branded with fists. The basis of the revolutionary “shock labor” brigades in factories and detachments that traveled around the countryside with the good revolutionary news was new party cadres of more proletarian origin, who were eager to realize the benefits promised to the working class, and did not receive special benefits from the introduction of the New Economic Policy. Molotov, who became Prime Minister in 1930, hailed the "liberation of the revolutionary forces of the working class and the middle peasantry" 127 . But the main beneficiary of this movement was still Stalin himself, who prudently staked on new wave class struggle. He succeeded in the fact that in the decisive period of the revolutionary reorganization of society, he began to be perceived as an indispensable figure in the party and the state. “It so happened,” Bukharin complained in 1936, “that he became a kind of symbol of the party and its grassroots members, the workers, people believe in him…” 128 . Even those who did not like what was behind Stalin at all were inspired by the revolutionary spirit emanating from him and gave him all kinds of support. “I can’t stand idleness,” wrote Ivan Smirnov, a former supporter of Trotsky, “I must build!” 129 . Stalin achieved tremendous success in consolidating his position at the pinnacle of power, becoming a symbol of permanence in an ever-changing world. Even in 1932, at the peak of the crisis, this sense of his indispensability proved stronger than Ryutin's assertions that this was not the case at all. “Loyalty to Stalin,” Alexander Barmin wrote that year, “was based mainly on the conviction that there was no one who could take his place ... to stop now or retreat would mean losing everything” 130 . The first revolution was associated with Lenin; the second, which represented a broad movement forward to complete the process begun by the first revolution, became eventually identified as the Stalinist revolution, whose claim to supreme power increased as the crisis deepened.

Since in Germany everything eventually ended with the dictatorship of Hitler, the "national revolution" became associated by everyone with Hitler and National Socialism. For this reason, attempts to identify all the factors of the party's success in the elections and to determine the social affiliation of those to whom he appealed are seen as the key to understanding how he rose to power. In fact, Hitler was the representative of a much broader nationalist movement that had emerged long before the National Socialist Party had gained sufficient weight to participate and claim victory in elections, and continued to cooperate with National Socialism when this party became mass. A significant number of Germans who did not belong to the committed members of the party and did not vote for it, welcomed the end of the Weimar Republic; the early phase of Hitler's reign was a period of nationalist coalition. Hitler came to power only because a group of conservative nationalists, united around the aging president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who was chosen as the symbol of the nation in 1925, considered, albeit reluctantly, Hitler a figure powerful enough to lead a broad national revolution to its successful conclusion. . The crisis years that followed 1929 were used by the National Socialists much more effectively than any other nationalist movement, but this success was based mainly on the ability of the party to speak the language of social revival and national self-affirmation, which caused a wide resonance among the masses. Ultimately, Hitler's political career depended entirely on how broadly his appeals received.

The course of the crisis can only be approximated by the broken curve of the graph, with its sharp ups and downs. During a four-year period of crisis, the second largest industrial power in the world experienced a halving of trade, unemployment engulfed two-fifths of the working population, the rest had only short-term jobs or experienced wage cuts, shopkeepers and small traders became impoverished, and the state itself was on the verge of bankruptcy 131 . Most Germans experienced economic and income growth for only two or three years, during which their incomes reached pre-war levels, but a sudden economic collapse interrupted development, causing a deep social upheaval, then a political crisis. The coalition in the Reichstag, consisting of liberals and social democrats, fell apart in 1930 due to disagreements on the issue of social payments, and from that time until 1933 the government governed the country on the basis of emergency presidential decrees and administrative decrees of the chancellor. The elections to the Reichstag in 1930 and the summer of 1932 were marked by a serious outflow of voters from moderate parties and an increase in the popularity of parties committed, on the one hand, to an anti-parliamentary and, on the other hand, to an excessively parliamentary form of government: the total share of votes cast by the National Socialist and The German Communist Party for the period between the two elections to the Reichstag, rose from 31 to 52%. The resurgence of communism reminded the population of the post-war revolution in Germany; The economic crisis has given rise to widespread fears about the prospect that the end of capitalism could mean social disintegration and civil war. “It was painfully familiar,” wrote one of the witnesses of that time, “we smelled the smell of 1919 or 1920” 132 . Politics was seen by all as a fundamental problem for the future of Germany, and the political violence that became the sign of the times after 1929 was a symptom of a deep national crisis. In 1932 alone, 155 people were killed in political clashes, including 55 National Socialists and 54 Communists. Thousands of others were injured or threatened with violence. Gregor Strasser was suspended from parliament for insulting a fellow MP. The police fought violators in every possible way, trying to contain the violence. Weapons were constantly used to resolve disputes. At times, Hitler himself carried a loaded pistol. Political sentiment degenerated into a feeling of deep resentment and unbridled hatred.

The nationalist forces in Germany increasingly spoke of the need for a revolution. Hitler himself often referred to this word when he spoke about the destruction of the existing order of things and about the Party's plans for the construction of a new Germany. Nationalist politicians were divided as early as the 1920s, not only by personalities, but also by differences in understanding of the nation. Up until 1929, the National Socialists were a small party of the nationalist political establishment, not trusted by other nationalists. “Most people looked at us as immature daredevils, wasting time and money for the sake of an impossible dream,” recalled one of the members of the SA in his essay written in 1934 for the researcher Theodor Abel 135 . Hitler, as another eyewitness recalled, "was still perceived by many as a kind of figure with oddities and a sinister past" 136 . The nationalist electorate included the German Nationalist People's Party, led by Alfred Hugenberg, the German People's Party, and a number of other, smaller fringe parties that shared many of the views of the German nationalists. There were also paramilitary groups and veterans' organizations with millions of citizens in their ranks, the oldest of which was the Stahlhelm or Steel Helmet organization, led by Franz Seldte. There were also professional associations and unions, like the great Merchants' Union, which held broadly nationalistic views. There was also an influential radical nationalist intelligentsia whose leaders cherished hopes for national revival and social reform. One of the few among them were the National Socialists. These numerous groups were united by hostility towards republican politicians, authoritarian views, militaristic thinking, a desire to revise the terms of the Versailles peace treaty, and, in some cases, although by no means in all, a desire to establish a new social order. It was a mixture of diverse nationalist forces seeking a post-1930 political solution that could rid the country of the prospect of a return to parliamentary government, protect the nation from communism, revive the German economy and restore its military strength. During 1930 and 1931, the National Socialists were busy looking for ways to unite all these disparate forces and the numerous smaller movements that merged with them. In addition, they were busy calling on their members to vote for National Socialist candidates. By 1932, effective and well-organized propaganda work yielded results and National Socialism became the most numerous detachment of the nationalist movement. The central slogan of the party was based on the presentation of Hitler as a person needed by Germany. In November 1932, their election posters contained the call: "Hitler is our last hope." The fall in the number of votes cast for the National Socialists in these elections was not necessarily due to a decrease in enthusiasm for the idea of ​​​​national revival, but was due only to Hitler's inability to convey this idea to the masses. He was saved by a growing fear of street violence among conservative nationalists and by the movement's populist slogans that the unresolved problems of the political crisis of 1932 could open the way for communism and civil war. On January 30, 1933, Hitler was asked to form a "cabinet of national unity", in which the National Socialists were to receive only three seats. His appointment did not yet open the way to dictatorship, but it was already a signal that the national revolutionary movement was becoming a real force. For the next year and a half, the so-called “coordination” process took place throughout Germany; thousands of people were removed from their posts because they did not participate in the national revolutionary struggle, thousands more ended up in prisons and camps, victims of unrestricted cruelty and intimidation. In keeping with the spirit of the civil war, the dividing line was drawn not between the National Socialists and other political forces, but between the Nationalists and others, and the frightening violence characteristic of the first months of the regime was directed primarily against the supposed enemies of the nation, mainly the Socialists, the Jews. and Christians who actively opposed the National Socialist movement. The driving force of the national revolution was a coalition of nationalist forces, which, however, in the summer of 1933 began to crystallize into a clearly national socialist version of the revolution, eliminating all other political parties. Even in 1934, the coalition with the conservative nationalists still continued to exist. The banker Hjalmar Schacht of the Nationalist Party remained in the very important post of Minister of Economics, Seldte became Minister of Labor, and the post of Minister of Finance continued to be held by a career bureaucrat. None of them was a member of the National Socialist Party.

Hitler was the clear beneficiary of the nationalist revolution. The development of a mass movement that supported the party essentially legitimized its claim to personify the revolution. The support of one-third of the popular vote in the 1932 elections gave Hitler a stronger claim to political leadership than other leaders of the movement. Strasser's lack of firmness when he challenged Hitler in 1932 was the result of his personal prejudice that a possible split in the party might threaten the future of Germany. Like Stalin, Hitler played on his fears of class struggle to expand his ambitions. The more Hitler ranted about the threat of communism, following the tactics he brought to a climax in the spring of 1933, when he got his hands on legal opportunities to suppress the communist movement, the more he appeared in the eyes of the people as the savior of Germany. The crisis did him a great service in this. In 1929, Strasser was fully aware of the prevailing reality when he said: "We want a catastrophe ... because only a catastrophe ... can clear the way for us to solve the problems that we, the National Socialists, set" 137 . Even figures who did not trust Hitler, such as Franz von Papen, who served as an intermediary and persuaded the president to appoint Hitler as Chancellor, believed that Hitler held the keys to rallying disparate nationalist groups in 1933. In the elections in March 1933, the nationalists received more than the required majority - 52% of the vote. Many nationalists remained distrustful of the social radicalism and racial hatred of Hitler's followers, but few of them wanted Germany to return to the economic chaos and political civil war that it experienced in the early 1930s. In this sense, the ever-increasing role of Hitler in political life, just as it happened with Stalin, was based on an assessment of the situation, which had both positive and negative sides. Among those who approved the dictatorship, there were those who went for it with enthusiasm, others - reluctantly, but with deliberate calculation, out of fear that an alternative choice could throw back the system and all the gains of the “second revolution”, and with them hopes. for the salvation of the nation will be lost. The crisis that lasted for a long time was inseparable from this process; in both cases, the ambition or sense of destiny that drove Hitler and Stalin allowed them, at a critical moment, to present themselves as the representative of all those who yearn for change, provided that stability is maintained. Without these crises, it is unlikely that both politicians would have been able to transform into larger political figures of dictators.

At what point did they feel like dictators? History does not yet provide a clear answer to this question. It is generally accepted that Stalin's dictatorship begins from that moment in December 1929, when his birthday was pompously celebrated on the pages of Pravda. This event definitely indicated that from that moment on he became the full owner of the party machine. In the eyes of the public, Stalin was still one of the party figures, perhaps the first among equals, but by no means the absolute tyrant of the late 1930s. When in 1929 one of the watchmen in the building of Moscow University was asked who he had in mind when he spoke of the "new tsar", he named the aged Soviet president Mikhail Kalinin 139 . The idea of ​​Stalin as a figure aimed at building a new socialist society began to take shape during the "second revolution", but no one, except for his detractors, ever called him a "dictator". Hitler's dictatorship, by contrast, had a more solid foundation. His appointment as Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, is often taken as the starting point of Hitler's dictatorship, although he was still only chancellor in a cabinet composed mostly of Nationalists, not of National Socialists, headed by a president who retained extraordinary the power to cancel his appointment to the post of chancellor or to dissolve parliament for serious reasons. Under the March Act of 1933, the Hitler government was granted emergency powers to legislate, but it was not entirely clear whether Hitler could legislate alone or only with the consent of the government as a collective body 140 . Hitler's unrestricted personal power, which he had long exercised within his own party, also arose and was strengthened during the national revolution. When deciding on the starting point of both dictatorships, the dispute of historians revolves around different dates, but in the cases of both dictators, the choice is based on the assumption that there was some starting point for the establishment of autocracy.

There are many reasons to believe that 1934 was the turning point. Ten years after the crisis, during which their political careers could have ended, Stalin and Hitler already dominated the congresses of their parties. Everyone took advantage of the respective congress as an opportunity to take stock of the recent revolutionary past. At the 17th Party Congress, the “Congress of the Victors,” which met in Moscow in January 1934, Stalin announced that anti-Leninism had been defeated: “There is nothing left that requires proof, and, apparently, there is no one left to fight. Everyone can see that the party line has triumphed. Continuing to play his sinister game, Stalin allowed his former enemies, including Zinoviev and Bukharin, to deliver speeches filled with obsequious praise (“our leader and commander,” Kamenev claimed) 142 . In September 1934, the National Socialists held a "unification congress, a congress of power." Hitler's triumphant speech to an excited crowd gathered on the Zeppelin field in Nuremberg was read by the party boss from Bavaria, Adolf Wagner. “The German way of life,” Wagner said, “should triumph over the next thousand years. For us, the turbulent 19th century has finally come to an end.

Meanwhile, it was not these two congresses in 1934 that signaled the advent of personal dictatorships, but two murders committed during this period. The first was the assassination of Ernst Röhm, head of the SA, who was shot on Hitler's orders in the basement of the Stadelheim prison in Munich on the afternoon of July 1, 1934. The second was the murder of the popular secretary of the Leningrad organization of the Communist Party, Sergei Kirov, on December 1, 1934, when he was on his way to his office in Smolny. In both cases, both Stalin and Hitler used these assassinations to demonstrate that they were now above the law; this expression of unlimited personal power was the most important element in characterizing these two characters as dictators. The appointment of Röhm as head of the SA in 1930 was due to Hitler's desire to reward the old party fighter and put an end to the rebellious elements in the ranks of the SA. The result was just the opposite. Röhm formed a much larger and better armed organization and saw himself, like Strasser, not as an ordinary lieutenant, but rather as a colleague of Hitler. In 1933, the SA became involved in a series of violent clashes, official and unofficial, with opponents of their movement. The members of the SA hoped that the national revolution would reward them with an office or a job, but in reality many of them remained unemployed; there was talk that the SA intended to take over the functions of the police, and perhaps even the role of the German army, which, numbering only 100,000 people - the number allowed under the Treaty of Versailles, was only one-twentieth of the entire party militia. Hitler hesitated as to whether he should remove his conservative allies in the national coalition and in the summer of 1933 laid siege to their aspirations. But the next year, Remus' ambitions and his desire to expand the national revolution intensified. He openly cherished the idea of ​​creating an SA army and an SA air force to take over the defense of the Reich; members of the SA began to praise the cult of their own leader more often than the cult of Hitler. At the beginning of the summer of 1934, the mood of most of the members of the SA was characterized by indignant radicalism.

Hitler was faced with a difficult choice, as the SA grew in strength along with a movement that became a symbol of his long and bloody struggle for power. Threats from army commanders in June 1934 to take action if Hitler did nothing forced him, albeit reluctantly, to accept that Röhm should be eliminated. The secret police had a large dossier on the fiery homosexual leader of the SA and numerous data on Rem's connections with von Schleicher, a conspirator who tried to lure Strasser into the government in December 1932. Supported by other party leaders, Hitler planned a coup for the end of June 1934 under the pretext that Röhm intended to overthrow the government and hand over Germany to foreign powers (an accusation worthy of the Stalinist trials during the purge years). On June 30, against the backdrop of extremely dramatic events in Berlin, Munich and other German cities, the massacre of the leaders of the SA began: they were dragged into prisons and shot there by people from the security detachments (SS) - Hitler's guards dressed in black. On the same day, Schleicher, Strasser, and a handful of other prominent critics and opponents of Hitler were shot on charges of being part of the conspiracy. A total of eighty-five murders were recorded, but the figure was almost certainly higher, as party leaders settled all old scores.

Kirov's assassination may have been ordered by Stalin, but the evidence to date suggests that he was the victim of a lone assassin. The significance of Kirov's death, like the death of Rem, is that he represented the last possible barrier on the way to Stalin's unlimited autocracy. The son of a minor official, Sergei Kostrikov, who chose the surname Kirov as his Bolshevik pseudonym, was not much younger than Stalin and had a long and reverent revolutionary biography that led him in February 1926 to the post of head of the Leningrad Party Committee as a Stalinist emissary, designed to eradicate the left opposition. He was an inspired leader who lived a very busy life (he suffered from alcoholism), energetic, with a pleasant appearance, a broad, youthful face, and an outstanding orator who, according to those who happened to hear him in the first days of his work in Leningrad, was , "passionate, compelling and inspiring" 150 . In the 1930s, he was considered a loyal supporter of Stalin and, like Röhm, at times extravagantly demonstrated this loyalty in public. His personal views were far more critical. It is said that on the eve of the "congress of the victors" a group of old Bolsheviks tried to persuade him to make an attempt to take Stalin's place, but he turned down the offer. At the congress itself, however, he did not take a seat on the stage, which allowed his position in the party, but sat next to the Leningrad delegation. His speech at the congress, diluted with traditional hyperbole about Stalin, was calm, unemotional and impersonal, where Stalin was firm and impassive. Kirov's speech was greeted standing, rewarding her with a storm of applause. When the elections to the Central Committee were held, Stalin received 1056 of the votes counted, and Kirov 1055. But later evidence suggests that, apparently, as many as 289 ballots, on which Stalin's name was crossed out, were simply destroyed. If not for this circumstance, Kirov would have become a clear winner, and Stalin's power was greatly shaken, although he would hardly have been removed.

Stalin never nominated himself in the election of the General Secretary, and since that time there is no reference or mention of this position in any party or state document.

Throughout 1934, Stalin became increasingly suspicious of Kirov. The applause with which he was greeted at the congress was normally due only to Stalin himself. A few weeks later, Stalin invited Kirov to Moscow to work in the Secretariat of the Central Committee, which allowed for stricter supervision of him. Kirov, having shown courage, refused, and in this he was supported by other members of the Politburo. Apparently, Kirov did not have much fear of Stalin. In 1932, he came to Ryutin's defense when Stalin demanded his execution. At times he expressed disagreement with the decisions of the Politburo. It also happened that Kirov made incautious remarks about Stalin. Throughout the year, Kirov was overloaded with tasks from Moscow. Stalin insisted on regular meetings with him, and in August, contrary to his intentions, Kirov was forced to accompany Stalin on his long vacation, which he spent at his dacha in Sochi. Kirov's health was deteriorating. When he returned from a trip to Kazakhstan, where he checked the progress of the harvest in October 1934, he found that his office, which had previously been on the third floor of the Smolny Institute, was urgently moved without his consent from the main corridor around the corner, to the end of a long passage, next to a small side staircase 153 . It was here that on December 1, at 4:30 p.m., Kirov was shot in the neck at close range by Leonid Nikolaev, an unemployed party member with an unfavorable background, whose family suffered from hunger and who unsuccessfully tried to convince Kirov to take him back to work. He was a pitiful murderer in a desperate situation, whose diary entries showed that he constantly toyed with the idea of ​​attempted murder in the spirit of Dostoevsky. We may never know the truth, but the fact remains that there is still no evidence of a direct link between Stalin and Kirov's assassination. Stalin took the train to Leningrad that same evening and the next day took the unusual step of interrogating Nikolayev personally under the pretext of wanting to force him to name his accomplices. Three weeks later Nikolaev was shot 154 .

Stalin took advantage of Kirov's assassination to issue a remarkable decree. On the same day, without the usual discussion in the Politburo and without the signature of President Kalinin, as required by the constitution, Stalin prepared and signed a law allowing the secret police to arrest suspected terrorists, secretly torture them and conduct investigations in absentia, without the participation of the defense and without the right to appeal and carry out sentences without delay 155 . The so-called "Kirov Law", like the law adopted under pressure from Hitler two days after the assassination of Röhm, was used by Stalin to securely consolidate his position as a man above the law, and also as a tool for the destruction of thousands of party members branded "enemies of the people", which took place over the next three years. More than 1,100 delegates who applauded Kirov with such imprudent enthusiasm at the "congress of victors" were shot or imprisoned four years later. Already languishing in prison by that time, Ryutin was shot in 1938. One of Stalin's close associates subsequently recalled his reaction at a meeting of the Politburo to the news that reached Moscow about the purge of Rem: “Hitler, what a fine fellow! This is how one should act against one's political opponents.

The path to dictatorship traversed by both characters was unpredictable and not predetermined. Both were driven by a special desire to take what they considered their place in history, but this ruthless will was intertwined with an obsession with the tactical details of political struggle, inhuman cruelty to anyone who compromised or stood in the way of their political ambitions, and an unprincipled desire for public recognition. It was truly a monstrous conglomeration of base motives. It is easy to complain about the weakness of the oppositions that opposed them, but it is impossible not to recognize the whole difficulty and impracticability of the task of finding in that situation a way to block their way up, to outplay people who were moving forward with the feeling that they were carrying human history on their shoulders, they were going, sweeping away everything in its path does not hesitate to destroy people and change circumstances.

And yet, despite the coincidence of circumstances and frank gifts of fate that played an important role in their personal destinies, Stalin and Hitler were not accidental dictators.

the site continues a series of publications under the heading "Price of Victory". Today, the guest of the eponymous program on the radio station "Echo of Moscow" historian, writer Elena Syanova talks about the "sympathy" between Stalin and Hitler. The broadcast was conducted by Vitaly Dymarsky and Dmitry Zakharov. You can read and listen to the original interview in full here. link

In fact, neither Hitler, nor Goebbels, nor Hess, except for official documents, use the name Stalin anywhere. If they exchange some letters, notes, some developments, not already in the final version, but at the stage of work, Dzhugashvili is everywhere. Just imagine how easy it is to write the name Stalin in German letters and how difficult it is to write Dzhugashvili.

Let us recall a small piece from the memoirs of Berezhkov, Stalin's interpreter, who tells how he, together with Molotov, was at Hitler's reception in November 1940 during the negotiations on the Soviet-German pact. And so, at the end of the conversation, before parting, Hitler, shaking Molotov's hand, said: “I consider Stalin an outstanding historical figure, and I myself vanquish myself with the thought that I will go down in history. And, of course, that two politicians like us should meet. I ask you, Mr. Molotov, to convey to Mr. Stalin my greetings and my proposal for such a meeting in the near future.

Hitler: "I consider Stalin an outstanding historical figure..."

One gets the impression that Hitler thought quite a lot about Stalin, but spoke rather sparingly (well, or few of his statements have come down to us). For example, in 1932 (Hess's retelling) another trouble occurred in the Mussolini family, and Hitler noted that his (Mussolini) family would destroy him, as Bonaparte had once destroyed. But as for Stalin, he stressed, here is a politician, a leader who is not influenced by his family, not influenced by relatives, although he has many of them, and, accordingly, draw conclusions. Exactly which ones, one can only guess.

Then 1933. In general, we did not have such a position as Stalin's deputy, but in Germany we did. Hitler's deputy was Rudolf Hess, who had the so-called Hess Bureau - a structure that duplicated a lot of different structures: state, party and others. And there was such an interesting department that studied the personalities of European politicians: their physical characteristics, addictions, weaknesses, shortcomings, families.

And from the very beginning, as soon as this bureau created such a department, some such discrepancy between employees began. Some of the employees argued that after the death of Lenin, Russia, under the leadership of Stalin, took the path of eastern despotism, that is, by the mid-1930s, it had accumulated the features of eastern despotism, precisely based on the personality of Stalin. The second part of the staff said that Stalin was not subject to any national characteristics: he was an internationalist, and Russia was following an international path, having no national coloring. I wonder which of these groups still had a greater influence on Hess? For some reason I think it's the second one. For Hess, Stalin was more of an internationalist, but it's hard to say how much he was able to convey or prove to Hitler.

1937-1938 years. There are quite a few "supposedly" statements by Hitler about Stalin's general purges. Why "supposedly"? Because they are not direct (well, someone wrote down from someone else's words). But nevertheless, the essence of these statements is that Hitler approved of such a "coolness" of this showdown, the will of Stalin. From this, he concluded that in the next 15 years, Russia will not fight.

Let's go back three years. 1934 Hitler destroys his colleague Ernst Röhm and other commanders of the SA assault squads. And as Mikoyan said, again, in the arrangement of Berezhkov, at the very first meeting of the Politburo after the murder of Ryom, Stalin said: “Did you hear what happened in Germany? What a good guy Hitler! That's how to deal with political opponents." So, it is difficult to establish who took an example from whom. Hitler, by the way, was very sorry in 1945 that he had once dealt with Ryom, and not with the generals, following the example of Stalin. It was like that.

March 14, 1939. Hess writes to his friend Albrecht Haushofer: “After Munich, the Führer considers all active Western politicians to be worms that crawled out after the rain, and Stalin is a tank, which, if he moves and goes ...”.

Hitler liked to call Stalin an oriental despot

But about the "Asian breed". 1939 Probably, the mise-en-scene was as follows: Hitler and his entourage in the cinema were watching some, perhaps a Soviet film, where Stalin was. And Bormann writes as follows: “During the viewing, the Fuhrer noticed that the Soviet dictator reminded him of a strong beast of an Asian breed. The Fuhrer expressed regret that this breed was poorly studied by him.

Again 1939. The situation was as follows: Hitler was preparing a keynote speech in the Reichstag with accusations of Poland and a response to Roosevelt on his message of April 14th. In this message, Roosevelt offered himself as a "good intermediary between Germany and Europe" and attached a list of 30 countries that Germany should not attack in the next fifteen or twenty-five years. And if, again, to believe Hess, then Hitler over this message and over this proposal to the United States as an intermediary quite ironically, laughed. Hess himself says this about this: “This colonialist (about Roosevelt) would like to drive the Germans into the reservations, like his Redskins. Us Germans! Us, a great nation! And his united garbage heap dares to dictate to us, the great nation. These pig-faced democrats will only forget Versailles when you (Hitler) embrace Stalin.” That is, there are already some motives for future rapprochement.

And Bormann, by the way, talks about the same thing briefly and to the point. It's in one of his notebooks, which were found in 1945. Here is the entry: “There was talk about a possible contact with the Kremlin. The Fuhrer expressed his unwillingness to go to a personal meeting with Stalin. The Führer, however, agreed that the forthcoming speech to the Reichstag would not contain criticism of the Kremlin and the Soviet system.

Joachim von Ribbentrop and Joseph Stalin at the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact in the Kremlin, August 23, 1939

Note that it was mutual, that is, swearing in both directions stopped. But here, of course, there are no more personal relations between Hitler and Stalin, but pragmatists, diplomacy, geopolitics. This is a period when everyone is screaming about peace, but everyone already understands the need for military blocs, and this groping is going on: who is with whom. Indeed, at the same time, in the summer, negotiations are underway in Moscow: Russia, England, France. Negotiations go on, go on, and Hitler is terribly nervous, because for him the union of Russia with England and France was like death. He himself refuses to go to Moscow, but he constantly has intentions to push someone there. First he tries to send Hess. Why? Hess was brought up in Alexandria, in such an international city, and Hitler believed that Hess would better understand, as he writes, "the primitive pathos logic of an Asian." This, by the way, is also a feature.

Then he starts pushing through the head of the United Trade Union or the Labor Front, Ley. Telegram from the ambassador in Moscow, Schulenburg, to Hitler: “At 11 o’clock, I received Molotov’s consent for an unofficial visit by Dr. Ley. The minister made it clear that Stalin would receive him for a friendly conversation on the day of his arrival. It's August 21st.

But on the same day, negotiations end. And between two and three o'clock Hitler sends Stalin a telegram composed by Hess. The telegram reads as follows: “The tension between Germany and Poland has become unbearable ... a crisis may break out any day ... I believe that if there are intentions of both states to enter into new relations with each other, it seems advisable not to waste time ... I would be glad to receive from you prompt reply. Adolf Gitler".

In 1939, Stalin and Hitler were supposed to meet, but it did not work out.

An interesting thing: during the war, already after June 22, 1941, Hitler, according to various German sources, spoke out quite often about Stalin, and, moreover, he owns such a quote that after the victory over Russia, it would be best to entrust control country to Stalin (of course, under German hegemony), since he is better than anyone else able to deal with the Russians. That is, if you believe this quote from the Fuhrer, he counted on Stalin as a vassal, a manager whom Germany would put in charge of the enslaved Soviet Union.

In the diaries of Goebbels dated March 4, 1945, that is, when the position of Nazi Germany was already hopeless and Hitler sought to negotiate with Moscow, there is this entry: “The Fuhrer is right when he says that it is easiest for Stalin to make a sharp turn, since he does not need to take into account public opinion ... In recent days, Hitler felt even greater closeness to Stalin, praising him as a man of genius, deserving boundless respect. Comparing himself with Stalin, the Fuhrer did not hide his feelings of admiration, repeatedly repeating that the greatness and steadfastness inherent in both of them know in their essence neither the vacillation nor the pliability characteristic of bourgeois politicians.

Telegram from Hitler to Stalin, August 1939

An interesting detail: throughout the war, not a single statement (trustworthy) of Hitler about Stalin as a commander, strategist, tactician was recorded. That is, he never appreciated it from this point of view. But we note that Hitler valued Stalin more than Western politicians: Churchill, Roosevelt, and so on.

With Roosevelt, in general, it is more difficult. This was the second politician that Hitler did not understand. He somehow did not have enough time to figure it out. The first was Stalin. Hitler considered him an opaque person, just like an Asian who is absolutely inadequate in general to common sense from the point of view of Hitler, who can behave absolutely unpredictably. By the way, he believed that some of Stalin's decisions were just dictated by this Asian unpredictability, this illogicality.

Hitler valued Stalin more than Churchill and Roosevelt

And finally, a quote from Rudolf Hess, who, sitting in Spandau, describes this cowardly, nervous behavior of Hitler on the eve of Ribbentrop's arrival: “Two wedges gathered their courage before knocking each other out. However, as it became clear after the defeat, the Fuhrer was the only one who fully felt then, in the 39th, the demonic power of the Eastern despot, which we all underestimated, and, in the end, turned out to be right.

This refusal, in fact, left no room for the Soviet government to doubt whether or not there would be a war with Germany in the very near future. The only thing it could still hope for was the "normal diplomatic procedure" of its announcement and that it would be able to buy time, but not a year or half a year, but at least a few weeks.

On June 19, 1941, the command of the Red Army, in agreement with the political leadership, gave the order to withdraw the administrations of the western border districts, transforming them into front-line administrations, into field command posts, mask airfields, military units, parks, warehouses, bases and disperse aircraft at airfields. The command of the Red Army, according to Army General M.I. Kazakov, who headed the headquarters of the Central Asian Military District on the eve of the war and was in Moscow in those days, by June 18, 1941 already clearly understood that war with Germany could not be avoided in the very near future, but expected to win another 15-20 days needed to concentrate and deployment of units in accordance with the developed plan of warfare.

On June 21, 1941, the Soviet government once again tried to achieve a dialogue with the German leadership. At 21.00 Molotov invited Schulenburg to the Kremlin and asked him to explain the reasons for the dissatisfaction of the German leadership with the government of the USSR and the rumors about the impending war. The Soviet government, Molotov declared, could not understand the reasons for German discontent and would be grateful if it were told what caused the current state of Soviet-German relations and why there was no reaction from the German government to the TASS report of June 13, 1941. However, Schulenburg evaded answering these questions, citing the fact that he did not have the necessary information.

At the same time, in Berlin, Dekanozov, under the pretext of delivering a verbal note about the continued violations of the USSR border by German planes, made futile attempts to get a meeting with Ribbentrop in order "on behalf of the Soviet government to ask several questions that ... need to be clarified" . Messages about this meeting were eagerly awaited in Moscow. But Ribbentrop "was not in Berlin" and Dekanozov was eventually accepted by Weizsäcker. He accepted a note from Dekanozov, but when he tried to put "a few questions," he curtailed the conversation, noting that now it was better not to delve into any questions. “The answer will be given later,” he ended the conversation.

In less than a few hours, the answer was actually given - the German army, treacherously violating the non-aggression pact, invaded the territory of the Soviet Union.

The German attack on the USSR was perceived differently by contemporaries. For some, this step of Hitler caused outright jubilation. Sober-minded politicians unequivocally regarded it as an adventure and a death sentence, which the Third Reich signed for itself. But no matter what feelings certain circles of the world community had for the USSR, no one at that time had the idea that Stalin was preparing an attack, and Hitler only got ahead of him with a strike. The realities did not give not only grounds, but also the slightest reason for such conclusions. It was clear to everyone that the Nazis' statements about a "preemptive strike", about a "preventive war" were just a propaganda trick with which they hoped to justify another act of aggression.

Above, we tried, relying on both long-known and new documents, to consider the political and military aspects of the origin of the war between Nazi Germany and the USSR, to analyze the intentions, plans and calculations of the parties, to reconstruct the diplomatic background of June 22, 1941, and also to what extent it was possible to look behind the scenes of official politics. Of course, many issues need further study with the involvement of additional materials. But it is quite obvious and not subject to doubt, it would seem, a long-proven truth, which, unfortunately, has to be proved again and again that the aggression of Nazi Germany against the USSR was not “preventive”, but was an expression in practice of Hitler’s fundamental program installation - the conquest " new living space" for the German nation in the East of Europe and the destruction of the Soviet Union as a national-state formation and social system.

The Soviet Union was preparing for war with Germany. Hitler's long-term strategic plans, the measures of the German army in preparation for the invasion were not a secret for the Soviet leadership. It would be criminal frivolity not to react to them, not to take retaliatory measures. But the USSR did not intend to attack Germany. Peace with her was in every way more beneficial to him than facing unpredictable consequences. In the spring and early summer of 1941, the government of the USSR, as we have tried to show above, did its best to keep Germany from a military action, and began to deploy the Red Army only after the situation became critical. But even pushing troops to the border, it continued to look for ways to overcome the crisis by peaceful means.

Talk that the USSR could have attacked Germany in 1942 or later is speculation without documentary evidence. The General Staff of the Red Army did not have time to develop plans for strategic deployment for this period, the leadership of the USSR did not make any policy statements on this matter, and one can only speculate about how the situation could develop in the future if Germany did not attack the Soviet Union. Yes, in 1942 the USSR would have felt stronger militarily than in 1940 or 1941. But this does not mean at all that it would certainly attack the “Third Reich”. The power of the Red Army could simply become the factor that would exclude the possibility of a military action by Germany against the Soviet Union.

The funds of the Political Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany contain a number of reports received in May-June 1941 from Moscow to Berlin through the German intelligence center in Prague "Informationshtelle III" and through other channels, which speak of alleged serious disagreements and even confrontation in the highest echelons of state power of the USSR on the question of how to further build relations with Germany. From these reports it follows that the top political leadership of the USSR, headed by I.V. Stalin, on the one hand, the command of the Red Army, headed by People's Commissar of Defense Marshal of the Soviet Union S.K. Timoshenko, his deputy Marshal of the Soviet Union S.M. Budyonny, People's Commissar of the Navy Admiral N.G. Kuznetsov, supported by the grassroots organizations of the CPSU(b), on the other hand, they allegedly assessed the prospects for the further development of Soviet-German relations in different ways. Stalin and his inner circle, according to German agents, allegedly sought at any cost, even through far-reaching military-political and territorial concessions (surrendering Ukraine to the Germans), to prevent a German-Soviet conflict, fearing that the USSR would lose the war, and the latter itself would itself will lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of socialism as a social system.

The forces opposed to the Kremlin opposed concessions to the Germans, demanding a tougher course towards Berlin. The reports stated that some of the commanders of the Red Army even harbored the hope that the war with Germany would lead to the fall of the Stalinist regime. Moreover, it was argued that military activities in the western border districts of the USSR in the spring and early summer of 1941 were carried out against the will of the Kremlin under strong pressure from the military.

In Russian, the publishing house "Azbuka-Atticus" published the book "Stalin and his henchmen." Well-known British historian and literary critic, bestselling author of Georgia. Crossroads of Empires" and "The Life of Anton Chekhov" offer a detailed analysis of the historical era and the personalities responsible for numerous crimes. Not only Joseph Stalin, but also Dzerzhinsky, Menzhinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria are the heroes of this book. publishes a piece of text.

Western historians are often tempted by the parallels between Stalin and Hitler as psychopathic dictators. In fact, Stalin is as different from Hitler as both of them are from a normal person. They are similar to each other only in their desire to take over the globe, their impatience with any contradiction, their lack of conscience or attachment. In every other respect they are different. Hitler, for his purposes, left the social, legal and economic structure of Germany as intact as possible; he developed an ideology, anti-Semitism, which was to the liking of almost all German classes, not to mention Christian churches and those European powers that Germany will conquer. Hitler's main weapons were rhetoric and military force.

Despite differences and mutual hostility for ten years, from 1932 to 1941, Stalin and Hitler shared common interests. In the 1920s, Germany and the USSR, excluded from the European community by the Treaty of Versailles, agreed among themselves, and not only in matters of diplomacy and trade. When Hitler came to power with a ferocious anti-communist program, Stalin had to look for new allies. For a while, Hitler played the role of a useful scarecrow. From 1932 to 1939, the USSR and the Comintern, under the leadership of the Stalinists Kuusinen and Bela Kun, assured the whole world that Nazi Germany was such a danger that all progressive people in all countries should turn a blind eye to the shortcomings of Soviet reality, because the USSR has now become the only defender of peace , Jews and workers. This policy mirrors that of Hitler, who portrayed the Bolsheviks as the world's devils and, along with the Jews, the source of all evil.

This antagonism, however, masked mutual respect. True, at first Hitler seemed to Stalin, as well as to Western politicians, just a malleable buffoon. Stalin thought he could influence Hitler, and so he and the Comintern forbade the German Communists from allying with the Social Democrats to prevent Hitler from winning the election. Thus, Hitler came to power with the help of Stalin, just as Stalin, persecuting all other leftist parties, would later help General Franco to win in Spain.

Hitler's first steps seemed to be in imitation of Stalin: he created a system of concentration camps, banned homosexuality and "degenerate" art. Stalin abolished Lenin's sexual tolerance by reviewing Yagoda's report on December 19, 1933:

“Having recently liquidated associations of pederasts in Moscow and Leningrad, the OGPU established the existence of salons and brothels where orgies were held. Pederasts were engaged in recruiting and corrupting perfectly healthy youth, Red Army, Red Navy and individual university students.

Hitler made a strong impression on Stalin when he set fire to the Reichstag in the summer of 1933, which he later accused. Hitler imitated the show trials of Menzhinsky, although he had not yet managed to subjugate the German judges to such an extent that this fabrication was successful (the accused Dimitrov was acquitted and deported to the USSR). Stalin sent two Soviet journalists as observers to Hitler's trial. People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Litvinov was driving through Berlin and announced that he would not refuse to talk to Hitler if he wished, and that "we are ready to do everything necessary to restore the former relations."

When Hitler staged a "night of long knives" on 30 June 1934, killing stormtrooper leader Ernst Röhm and hundreds of his supporters, thereby ridding himself of his own leftist bias, Stalin is said to have exclaimed: "Clever girl, this is how to deal with the opposition, cut with one blow!" Stalin's predictions were quite cold-blooded, he said: “The events in Germany do not at all indicate the imminent collapse of Nazism. On the contrary, they should lead to the consolidation of the regime and the strengthening of the power of Hitler himself. No doubt Stalin drew similar conclusions about the consolidation of his own regime. At the Nuremberg congresses in the summer of 1935, Goebbels and Rosenberg scolded the Soviet Union, but Stalin did not allow Kaganovich and Molotov to respond in the same tone:

“My advice is not to make hysterical noise in our press and not to succumb in general to the hysteria of our newspapermen. Nuremberg is the answer to the CI congress. The Nazis cannot but swear, if we bear in mind that the CI congress poured slop over them and mixed them with mud. Let Pravda criticize them in principle and politically, but without swearing in the streets.”

In Hitler's anti-Soviet speech, Stalin saw no "grounds for protest."

The fundamental difference between Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's Leninist socialism boils down to Hitler's statement: "My socialism is not class struggle, but order." Stalin's socialism, however, approached Hitler's socialism in that it also became national. After 1933, Stalin stopped scolding Russian chauvinism and began to hint that, in terms of their politics and culture, the Russian people stood higher, like an older brother, in relation to other peoples of the USSR and other Slavs, just as the Germans considered themselves the highest race among the Aryans. True, Stalin's anti-Semitism was restrained and unstable, but Hitler and Stalin differed mainly in temperament.

Realizing that Hitler would remain in power, Stalin began to seek a softening of relations with France and England, but the termination of economic ties with Germany was not in the interests of the USSR. Some in Hitler's entourage, such as Goering, were of the same opinion about German interests. Both countries still had some common political goals, in particular the destruction of Poland, which for both Hitler and Stalin was an impostor and territory alienated from them. Both the USSR and Germany felt offended by the Treaty of Versailles and Genoa, which deprived the former German and Russian empires of vast territories and international rights. Until now, they were united by the Treaty of Rapallo against England and France. Stalin calculated that Germany, when she had succeeded in arming herself, would ignite a war that would destroy Western Europe and lead to a world proletarian revolution. Therefore, Hitler's loud hostility to the Bolsheviks, as Tukhachevsky declared in 1935, seemed only "a convenient screen for covering revanchist plans in the west (Belgium, France) and in the south (Poznan, Czechoslovakia, Anschluss)."

Photo: Russian Look / Globallookpress.com

Hitler, however, was consistent in his anti-Bolshevism, although some of his ministers believed that Stalin killed the most hated people in his circle, especially the Jews. Karl Radek, the most respected of all the Bolsheviks in Germany, where he spent many years in exile or in secret negotiations with the government and with the revolutionary forces, joked rather thoughtfully when he announced that the difference between Moses and Stalin was that Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, and Stalin takes the Jews out of the Politburo. In fact, Stalin took the Jews out of both the NKVD and the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, and soon only two Jews remained in his entourage - who was hiding in the shadows, and Kaganovich, who, as Joachim von Ribbentrop noted with relief, "in his personality did not has nothing Jewish." The fact that Stalin was even more vigorously repressing the Soviet Germans did not bother Goebbels and Ribbentrop at all.

By the end of the 1920s, the main core of the German-Soviet alliance was military cooperation. The Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany to modernize the armed forces, so the Germans acquired in the Soviet Union not only a harbor for the fleet, but also three training grounds: in Lipetsk they tested aircraft, in Kazan - tanks, and in Tomka ( Saratov region) - chemical weapon.

Cooperation was hard to come by. The first Soviet agents negotiated with the government during the day for the purchase of ships for the fleet, and at night they incited the Hamburg workers to stage the "Red October" of 1923 against the same government. By 1926, however, the professional secret police took matters into their own hands. Joseph (Josef) Unshlikht, Dzerzhinsky's deputy, went to Germany and established good relations with Admiral Canaris, the future head of the Abwehr, Hitler's counterintelligence. When the time came, the Abwehr and the NKVD realized that they could work together without a hitch.

Russian and German generals often exchanged visits. Under the leadership of Tukhachevsky, the Red Army, together with the Germans, developed the tactics of tank blitzkrieg. In exchange for training grounds and bases for the Germans, Russia received access to technology to produce high-quality steel, tanks, and aircraft. The Soviet military were trained at the German training grounds in Kazan and Lipetsk; the Germans also promised to supply aviation equipment to the USSR. Stalin was annoyed by the low quality of Soviet aircraft - accidents and disasters happened very often (only from June 5 to June 20, 1932, 11 aircraft crashed and 30 people died), and Soviet aircraft were considered so dangerous that all party cadres, except for pilots, were forbidden to fly, and Stalin himself refused to fly until 1943, when it turned out that another safe way there was no way to get to Tehran. Stalin even pretended to be concerned about human losses when he wrote to Voroshilov on June 24, 1932:

“The most alarming thing is the accidents and deaths of our pilots. The death of aircraft is not so terrible (to hell with them!), As the death of living people, pilots. Living people are the most valuable and most important thing in all our business, especially in aviation.”

Nevertheless, Stalin did not hesitate to send any pilot who complained that he had to fly in "flying coffins" to be shot.

The help that Germany offered, France could not give. True, after Hitler came to power, Soviet imports from Germany fell by 90% - in 1932, Stalin exchanged Soviet grain for steel, but already in 1934 the Soviet Union was spending 64 million marks on military equipment and equipment. In the autumn of 1934, the Soviet trade representative in Berlin used the Nazis' permission to visit all factories and factories delivering materials to the Soviet Union. A year later, Hitler actually stopped German participation in the Lipetsk and Tomka training grounds, but under the pretext not of ideology, but of cost savings. In any case, by 1936, Stalin was already importing twice as much German equipment.

From 1934 to 1937, Stalin used the services of a secret personal emissary, David Kandelaki, whom he had met thirty years earlier at Svanidze. Kandelaki was educated in Germany and was allegedly the head of the Soviet trade mission in Germany and Scandinavia. But he did not answer either to the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs or to the NKVD, and his competence was not limited to trade.

The two Nazis looked east. Göring's cousin Herbert wanted to cooperate with the Soviet Union against France and England. Hjalmar Schacht, the finance minister, offered Stalin a loan of 500 million marks in exchange for oil for the German military. “Give my regards to Comrade Kandelaki,” Stalin wrote to Kaganovich on September 8, 1935, just when Germany and the Soviet Union proclaimed their mutual hatred to the whole world, “and tell him to insist on receiving from the Germans everything that we need for military affairs and dyes.

How much Stalin believed in a long peaceful coexistence with Hitler is difficult to say; with great enthusiasm he provoked a rivalry between Germany and France for the support of the Soviet Union. In cipher on September 2, 1935, he explained to Molotov and Kaganovich his double-dealing (and, from a Western point of view, erroneous) policy:

“The old Entente is no more. Instead, two ententes are formed: the entente of Italy and France, on the one hand, and the entente of England and Germany, on the other. The stronger the fight between them, the better for the USSR. It is not at all profitable for us that one of them immediately smashed the other, it is beneficial for us that their fight be as long as possible, but without an early victory of one over the other.

Stalin treated social democracy or Trotskyism much worse than he did fascism. In September 1933, he and Mussolini reinforced their non-aggression pact with new articles on neutrality and friendship, and in 1936 the Italian official press enthusiastically greeted the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev as proof that Stalin had adopted political views compatible with Mussolini's philosophy.

By 1937, Stalin was so convinced of the strength of Hitler and the weakness of France and England that he instructed Kandelaki to prepare a draft non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. Kandelaki was awarded the Order of Lenin, but he was shot a year before the signing of this treaty.