Word: stalins
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Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, the two most powerful personifications of evil in this century, are still impossible to explain fully. They shouldered their way into politics as resentful, hate-filled egoists, but so did thousands of their contemporaries. To anyone scrutinizing the young Hitler or Stalin, writes Alan Bullock, the Oxford University historian, "a suggestion that he would play a major role in twentieth-century history would have appeared incredible." At 30, Hitler was a street-corner speechmaker in Munich, and Stalin was in prison for plotting an oil workers' strike in Baku...
...something no one else has done. Bullock is the author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952), the first great postwar biography of the dictator. "I'm a narrative historian, and in the course of the narrative," he says, "it comes clear" precisely how Hitler and Stalin rose to supreme power in Germany and Russia...
Though Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (Knopf; 1,081 pages; $35) runs a densely written thousand pages, detailing the two lives stage by stage, not everything comes clear. Most readers willing to take the long journey will hope that Bullock's exhaustive analysis of the biographical literature and newly opened archives might somehow explain what caused Hitler and Stalin. There was something inhumanly dark and cold in both leaders that made them willing to do literally anything to fulfill what they felt was their mission...
Unfortunately, as Bullock writes, "the process by which these convictions took possession of their minds remains a mystery." He generally avoids psychohistory, but observes matter-of-factly that both Hitler and Stalin were paranoid and insensitive to humanity -- that is, unable to accept that other people were as real as they. Both were, in fact, incapable of normal relationships. One word Bullock does not use is "monster," because he sees horror in the fact that they were human...
...many audience members clearly disagreedwith her as well. Assistant Professor ofComparative Literature and of History andLiterature Svetlana Boym said that one of Paglia'sstatements--that "you need to break the eggs inorder to make an omelette"--sounded like somethingJoseph Stalin would have said