Hitler and Stalin; Parallel Lives
Tara Heinemann (author's photograph) New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. First American Edition [stated]. May be Book Club as no price on DJ. Hardcover. xviii, 1081, [3] pages. 71 photographs. 18 maps. Footnotes. Note to the Reader. Notes. Abbreviations and Glossary. Selected Bibliography. Index. DJ has some wear, soiling, and small tears. Heavy book with some binding weakness. A dual biography told in the context of Berlin-Moscow relations tells how the two similar men temporarily took total command of the historical forces swirling around them. This was a History Book Club main selection. Alan Louis Charles Bullock, Baron Bullock, FBA (13 December 1914 – 2 February 2004) was a British historian. He is best known for his book Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952), the first comprehensive biography of Adolf Hitler, which influenced many other Hitler biographies. After graduating in 1938, he worked as a research assistant for Winston Churchill, who was writing his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1940.[3] During World War II, Bullock worked for the European Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). After the war, he returned to Oxford as a history fellow at New College. Bullock's Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives was an influential work which he described as "essentially a political biography, set against the background of the times in which they lived". He showed how the careers of Hitler and Joseph Stalin fed off each other. Bullock comes to a thesis that Stalin's ability to consolidate power in his home country and, unlike Hitler, not to over-extend himself enabled him to retain power longer than Hitler. It was awarded the 1992 Wolfson History Prize. Derived from a Kirkus review: A masterpiece that covers some of the most devastating events—as well as two of the most terrible personalities—of our century with breathtaking analytical power and narrative sweep. One of the most fruitful aspects of this dual biography is to reveal, for all the differences between Hitler and Stalin, how much they had in common. The differences were mainly in personality: Stalin the great calculator, Hitler the gambler; Stalin the master of bureaucracy, Hitler the artist-politician, hating routine; Stalin the sly, political Houdini, Hitler the charismatic leader. But their similarities were perhaps more significant. Both were guilty of crimes against humanity on a scale unprecedented in history: Like the Jews in Germany, peasant farmers in the Soviet Union were members of an outlawed class denied all human rights. The corruption in the heart of Nazism, according to Bullock, lay in its ends; in Communism, in its means. Neither Hitler nor Stalin, he believes, was mad. Both were entirely serious about their historic roles, the author says; skeptical about the motives of others, their cynicism stopped short of their own. But Hitler, at the end, was close to insanity; and Stalin had all the symptoms associated with paranoia—chronic suspicion, self-absorption, jealousy, hypersensitivity, and megalomania. Both men brought unprecedented suffering on their own people; the difference, Bullock notes, is that defeat exacted a terrible price from the German people, but at least spared them the continuation of Nazism, while victory cost the Russian people even more—but did not liberate them. A magnificent history, accessible and often moving. Bullock's mastery of research sources, his judgment, and his analytic powers prove him one of the great historians of our time. Condition: Good / Good.
Keywords: Nazi, Soviet Union, Bukharin, Collectivization, Communism, Rearmament, Goering, Industrialization, Jews, Lenin, Bolshevik, Molotov, Purges, Ribbentrop, Trotsky, Second World War, Russian-German War, Great Patriotic War, Zinoviev Zhukhov
ISBN: 0394586018
[Book #85246]
Price: $45.00