Word: stalins
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...Stalin -- rough, conspiratorial, despising authority -- was a natural Marxist revolutionary. While studying at a Russian Orthodox seminary in his native Georgia, he became a convert to Marx and never changed course. His career contrasted with Hitler's because his movement already had a leader, Lenin. Unlike Hitler's public portrayal of himself as a man of destiny, Stalin's style was stealthy, behind the scenes...
...General Secretary of the Communist Party, Stalin appeared, calculatedly, to be simply an organization man. But he was far more than that because he had perfected the technique of using the details of organization to amass political power. Once he became the vozhd, the master, he ruthlessly annihilated all those who once were loyal to Lenin and all who might consider questioning his authority...
Both despots believed utterly in themselves and were indifferent to the ^ suffering and destruction they caused to achieve their ends. Hard as it is to realize it, Bullock writes, "the key to understanding both Stalin and Hitler is . . . that they were entirely serious about their historic roles." In private they were boring and boorish. The mistake their political enemies and would-be partners repeatedly made was to underestimate the men and the extremes to which they would...
Hitler had nothing like the domestic program of development and collectivization Stalin rammed through at the cost of millions of lives. He was really interested only in foreign conquests, and one in particular: an Aryan empire in Eastern Europe. Hitler was driven by a slogan-ridden ideology that he formed as a youth, reading cheap pamphlets in Vienna, and never changed. He had, Bullock finds, no capacity whatever for critical thinking. He believed the German "master race" had three enemies: Slavs, Marxists and Jews...
...deported or kept as slaves, educated only enough "to understand our highway signs." In 1941 Hitler actually began to carry out that program and in going to war with the Soviet Union also put into effect his "final solution to the Jewish problem," the extermination of European Jewry. While Stalin had more people put to death than Hitler did, Bullock maintains the Nazi Holocaust is unique because "mass murder became not an instrument but an end in itself...