Somewhere, in the ever-popular "parallel lives" genre, a study of Franklin D Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler surely must exist. Both ruled their great countries over (more or less) the same period. One was a vegetarian, the other a cripple. One put the Japanese in concentration camps, the other locked up the Jews. Both harnessed the arts to their cause, promoting social realism and evoking the life and history of the common man in painting, photography and fiction. One took control over America's traditional sphere in Latin America, while the other moved decisively into Germany's obvious heartland in eastern Europe. So how come these startling parallels have been largely ignored by historians and publishers?
To be fair to Richard Overy, who has long been a student of the dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin, his splendid new book is not so easy to caricature. He is at pains to point out that he is not following in the steps of the late Alan Bullock, who did indeed produce a dual biography of the monsters of the 20th century. Overy's volume is rather different. He contrasts and compares the dictatorships, but does so without falling into the trap of moral equivalence. He points to the futility of making them appear more similar by examining their violence and criminality, and refuses to use statistics to discover which was the more murderous. Indeed, he downsizes the figures that are often bandied about by writers who should know better.
By doing so, he goes some way to disarming those who have reservations about this kind of project. Attempts to force the Nazi and Communist regimes into the same descriptive box all too easily leave the reader with the impression that there was not much to choose between them, and that these were the only dictatorships existing at the time. This is not Overy's intention, and it was certainly not the prevailing view in the 1930s. Had it been so, the Second World War would have been a limited conflict between Germany and Russia, with all other countries quietly applauding from the sidelines.
Overy is not an advocate of the "what if" school of history, and he does his best to keep his conclusions dispassionate. He has the sense to see that most people, for most of the time, are quite happy with their dictatorship - whether in Germany, the Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Terror plays its part, but intelligent dictators, anxious to survive, provide their populations with what they want. That usually means security. Overy points out that "what is now defined as state terror was viewed by Hitler and Stalin as state protection against the enemies of the people". The dictators' battles against their opponents generally won widespread approval from an anxious citizenry.
Overy examines the working of the two systems rather than describing the lives of the dictators themselves, though pertinent elements of biography creep in. His method is to take a dozen topics and see how the dictators shape up. He reviews their roads to power, their governing systems and their control of wartime strategy. He writes illuminating essays on the cult of personality and the harnessing of culture for political ends. He compares the concentration camps with the Gulag, and contrasts the differing experiences of dissenters. All this is relatively straightforward stuff, and will be familiar to those who have kept up with recent research. Overy's skill is to produce an overarching work of synthesis that is judiciously presented, and a delight to read.
Unusually, and with considerable creative insight, he takes seriously the moral universe within which the dictators oper-ated, perceiving it as "a battleground bet-ween differing interpretations of justice and moral certainty". He examines the legal systems erected by Andrei Vyshinsky and Carl Schmitt which created a form of "peoples' justice", in which individual rights were subordinated to the interests of the collective. He also writes about the dictators' efforts in the field of culture and reflects on the often-ignored fact that the cultural output of both regimes was often well received. Although their focus was narrow, "the bulk of the plays, films and books were accepted by viewers and readers as their own culture, and were in many cases widely popular".
This excellent volume puts Overy in the very first rank of historians of the 20th century. Yet I remain to be convinced that comparisons between these two regimes is a helpful approach to our understand-ing of the past. Many attributes of these "totalitarian" societies were shared by other countries, sometimes designated as "democratic". Social realism, urban development, the use of technology - all these were common to the advanced societies of the west in the 20th century. Nor were the two dictators unique in their use of terror; only its scale was unusual.
Overy argues that Hitler and Stalin "are popularly regarded as the twin demons of the 20th century", and assumes that it is the duty of the historian to address this popular concern. Yet other demons were also at work and, it must be said, this is a very Eurocentric history. While Hitler and Stalin dominated the European land mass, other societies were fighting their way into the 20th century. Mao Zedong and Hideki Tojo form a part of the story of that century, as does Lord Halifax, the seemingly benign British politician who visited Hitler in 1937 and had previously been the dictator of Britain's Indian Raj.
Richard Gott's new history of Cuba will be published this autumn by Yale University Press
