Dictators: Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia

Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia ( eng. The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia ) is a 2004 book by British historian Richard Overy . According to Australian historian Stephen Welch, “this is primarily a systematic and extremely detailed comparative analysis of the two most notorious, archetypal dictatorships of the past century” ^[1] .

In each of the 14 chapters of the book, Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union are compared according to a certain criterion: the ideology of two regimes, the degree and nature of popular support, the centers of confrontation and resistance, the path to power of each dictator and the process of formation of their personality cult, the structure of government, the establishment of a one-party system and the role of the party in governing the country, etc. Overy dwells in detail on comparing Hitler’s concentration camps and the Stalinist Gulag , reaching the conclusion that, despite the cruelty of both systems, their essence was different: the German camps were essentially extermination camps, while the Soviet camps were more oriented towards economic efficiency, which, according to Overy, explains that mortality in the German camps reached 40%, and in Soviet camps was about 14%.

Overy defines Stalin and Hitler personally as “outstanding rulers who exercised direct power, built not on the law, but on customary power, on the basis of the broadest popular support and approval, unprecedented in the history of both countries both before and after them.”

According to renowned historian Robert Service , Overy's book skillfully summarizes the last two decades of studying Germany and Russia between the world wars . As the Service indicates:

This work is based on mountains of re-read (especially in English and German), so footnotes and bibliography occupy a good quarter of the pages. It is amazingly modern and presents the material in an accessible literary language. This is a book to be read ^[2] .