Russia and Germany--Parallels and Contrasts
I
SOVIET RUSSIA and Nazi Germany are usually thought of as complete antipodes. The type of mind that sympathizes with Hitler’s régime almost invariably views Communism with utter aversion; the radical who is inclined to justify or at least to condone arbitrary arrests and executions in Russia habitually professes horror and indignation when the same methods of administration are applied in the Third Reich.
But a detached observer who, like the present writer, has lived for fairly long periods of time under both régimes can scarcely fail to see the numerous parallels, as well as the striking contrasts, between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. The similarities are most vivid and most obvious in such matters as political technique, administrative practice, and ruling-class psychology. The contrasts are most pronounced as regards theoretical philosophy, ultimate goals, and sources of class support.
One of the most important points of similarity is that both Russia and Germany are ruled by dictatorial parties, which avowedly tolerate no other political organizations. The Germans, in their methodical way, made this very clear in a law of July 14, 1933, the first paragraph of which reads as follows: ’There is only one political party in Germany, and that is the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.’
The Soviet Constitution is less specific; it does not formally prohibit the formation of different parties. But Lenin once gave expression to an unfailing maxim of Soviet administrative practice when he said that there might be any number of parties in Russia — provided that the Communist Party were in power, and all the other parties in jail. Side by side with the rule of the single party over the country goes an absolute dictatorship of the party leadership over the rank and file. Any dissident group of critically-minded or disillusioned Communists or Nazis receives short shrift. It is declared ‘counterrevolutionary’ (a cant term of abuse, both in Russia and in Germany, for anything that contravenes the will of the ruling group) and its members are punished by expulsion from the party, by exile or imprisonment, or by execution, depending on the seriousness of their offense and the urgency of the situation.
At the head of the two tightly disciplined parties one finds leaders whose authority is absolute and whose decisions are accepted as infallible. Indeed, such an absolute and infallible leader is an indispensable element in a system that provides for no democracy in the ruling party, much less, in the country as a whole.
Stalin wields more power than the Tsars who ruled Russia before him, just as Hitler’s authority is more farreaching than that of any Kaiser. But there is nothing traditional or hereditary about the backgrounds of these two men who have been placed in supreme charge of the destinies of the Russian and German peoples. Neither Stalin, the son of a Caucasian shoemaker, nor Hitler, whose father was an obscure Austrian minor official, enjoyed any advantage of aristocratic birth, wealth, or superior education. And neither has any prospect of handing down his unique power to a dynasty of descendants. Stalin’s children are better known to American newspaper readers than to Russians. Hitler has no children, and, if he had, there is little likelihood that they would be regarded as candidates for the succession. In Germany, as in Russia, it is taken for granted that the place of the present dictator will be taken by the strongest man among his immediate associates. How this ‘strongest man’ will identify himself is a problem for the future.
It is my impression that Hitler possesses a larger measure of intimate personal devotion than falls to the lot of Stalin. Here it is not merely a question of individual temperament and character, of personal magnetism. It must be remembered that Hitler built his movement up from the first beginnings and necessarily came into direct contact with large masses of the people whom he was winning over to his cause. He has spoken to audiences in cities, towns, and villages from the Rhineland to East Prussia, from the Baltic to the Bavarian Alps. Stalin, on the other hand, took over a very strong weapon of power—the organized Communist Party — which had already been forged by Lenin. It is only within recent years that he has caused the spotlight of publicity to be turned on him with full force. Until he had consolidated his power by adroitly playing off his main rivals, Trotzky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, against each other, he preferred to remain in the background. The great majority of Russian Communists have never heard him speak, have never even seen him.
The infallible leader is not the only common feature of Communist and National Socialist Party organization. Both parties have found themselves confronted and perplexed by the problem of the careerist, of the man who wishes to join for the sake of the loaves and fishes that are associated with the possession of dictatorial power. And Nazi and Communist leaders alike, with varying degrees of success, have endeavored to preserve idealism within the ranks by means of periodic purges of unworthy members, by erecting bars against a too hasty and indiscriminate admission of new ‘ party comrades,’ by giving preference to the party ‘old guard ’ in appointments to posts of responsibility. A member of the Russian old guard is a Communist with a record of revolutionary activity under Tsarism; Hitler’s old guard consists of the men who supported him in the unsuccessful Munich Putsch of 1923, who joined his movement in the first years after the war, when it required strong faith to believe in ultimate victory. The Bolshevik old guard has been steeled and hardened by exile and imprisonment under the Tsarist régime, followed by the ordeal of the battlefields of the Russian civil war; the corresponding type in the Hitler movement is usually a World War veteran who subsequently fought in some of the numerous obscure skirmishes which marked the suppression of extremist revolts in Germany in 1919 and 1920. The ‘old Bolshevik’ has many psychological traits in common with the ‘old Nazi’: fanatical faith in his cause, willingness to kill or be killed for it, personal sincerity combined with great ruthlessness when the supposed interests of the party demand it.
II
To one who comes, as I did, to Berlin with a background of Moscow experience, many features og life in the German capital seem strikingly, even boringly familiar. It is not novel or surprising, for instance, to find that Germans with even the mildest taint of political oppositionism are often unwilling to come into contact with foreigners, and are always naturally and pathetically eager to be certain that their views will not be quoted. A casual social evening with a few Germans of the educated class and of the pre-war generation was strongly reminiscent of Moscow. Conversation flowed along distinctly critical lines, in regard to the existing régime, until a young man who displayed a Hakenkreuz in his buttonhole entered the room. Thereupon the former free exchange of views promptly ceased and a distinctly chilly atmosphere was perceptible. It all suggested very much the behavior of a group of Russian professors upon the appearance of a Young Communist, a graduate of the Institute of Red Professors.
The anomalous situation that arose when Germans were dependent on foreign newspapers for information about important events in their own country — such as the shootings of June 30 and subsequent days and the Church controversy, which could not be reported with any freedom or accuracy in the German press — also inspired recollections of Moscow. It may be said, however, that the Germans possess at least one advantage over the Russians in being able to buy foreign newspapers freely. Even Swiss newspapers, printed in the German language, are available on German news stands and are eagerly bought, for obvious reasons.
The Russian, on the other hand, must either read the Soviet newspapers or go without. In general the Soviet system of regimentation is more complete than the German. This is partly because the Soviet régime has endured for a much longer period of time, and partly because Russia is much more outside the main stream of European life and travel. Consequently it is easier to isolate Russians from ‘dangerous thoughts,’ emanating from foreign countries, than it is to cut Germans off entirely from news which comes from non-Nazi sources.
Both in the new Russia and in the new Germany one finds much more genuine and unquestioning enthusiasm for the new order among the young than among the middle-aged. Russia now has a young generation that has grown up under the Soviet régime, that has been subjected to an unremitting stream of propaganda on its behalf since the cradle, and that naturally, with some unavoidable exceptions, sings Communist songs, thinks along Communist lines, repeats Communist phrases and slogans. The Hitler régime has not had time to train a similar generation in Germany, although it is taking vigorous steps in this direction by training the young teachers along one-hundred-per-cent National Socialist lines. But in Germany the youth was mostly caught up with the frenzy of nationalist faith that swept Hitler into power; and there are unmistakably more genuine Nazi enthusiasts under thirty than over that age.
Both in Germany and in Russia one is struck by the number of young men in high positions. The youthful German recruits for the Arbeitsdienst, or labor service on such public works as roadbuilding, land reclamation, and so forth, are the unconscious counterparts of the Russian Young Communists, who are often mobilized for ‘shock work’ in timber camps, mines, and new construction enterprises. Both the Communist and the Nazi organizers of this labor are adepts in the psychological methods which Tom Sawyer found so useful in persuading the other boys to pay him for the privilege of whitewashing his aunt’s back fence.
A moving-picture film which would show in quick succession a group of Young Communists being sent off to grub in the peat fields near Moscow and a band of young Nazis leaving Berlin to dig potatoes in East Prussia would certainly reveal amusing similarities. Both groups would be told that it was their high mission to work for the upbuilding of their country; the chief difference in the speeches of exhortation would be that the Soviet spokesman would throw in a few lines about the sovereign rôle of the proletariat, while the Nazi agitator would emphasize the brotherhood of all Germans in race and blood.
There is more similarity than is generally realized between the social measures of the two régimes. Both have done excellent work in promoting sport, outdoor life, and organized recreation. The German Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organization performs many of the functions of Soviet trade-unions by organizing cheap or free vacation trips for workers and more poorly paid employees and by making it possible for the poorer classes to attend operas, concerts, and theatres at reduced prices.
Both Communism and National Socialism possess many psychological traits of fanatical religious faith, notably the reassuring conviction that the end justifies the means and the firm will to believe in spite of the most convincing evidence to the contrary. They are often eminently successful in communicating these traits to foreign admirers. The admiring tourist in Russia who spends two days in Leningrad, four days in Moscow, and comes away convinced that all stories of hunger and forced labor are lies, has a worthy companion in the occasional pilgrim to Germany who sees that the German towns are clean and orderly, that the German countryside is well kept and smiling, and uncritically infers that all tales of ugly happenings in concentration camps, general poverty, and espionage are mere inventions of non-Aryan malice.
Propaganda is a very important element in cementing the structure of both the Russian and the German dictatorial régimes. And the organization of propaganda in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov, in Berlin, Cologne, and Munich, falls into very familiar and very similar patterns. With all critical opposition effectively gagged, it is a simple matter for the Communist or the Nazi agitator to magnify successes, to gloss over failures, to exaggerate the distresses of countries under other systems, to stir up mob hatred against minorities which are large enough to be identified and too small to defend themselves, such as the Jews in Germany and the more loosely defined ‘kulaks’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ in Russia. Propaganda is most effective when administered in wholesale rather than in retail doses. Talk quietly in his home to any individual German or Russian who has been shouting with enthusiasm at a mass meeting and, in nine cases out of ten, you will find that the temperature of his enthusiasm has cooled by many degrees. There is a saying in Germany that expresses this unmistakable psychological fact quite clearly. It runs as follows: —
‘One German, two Germans, three Germans — complaints and grumbling. Fifty Germans, a hundred Germans — the Nazi salute and Heil Hitler.’
The technique of repression in the two countries is so similar that one is tempted to wonder whether the Nazis have been taking lessons from the Communists, or vice versa. The entire setup of the mysterious Reichstag Fire Case, especially Goering’s assertion that it was to be the signal for a general Communist uprising, no sign of which ever materialized, was in the best tradition of the notorious Soviet sabotage trials, where, on at least one occasion, two men who had been dead several years were solemnly mentioned in a bill of indictment as participants in a formidable conspiracy against the Soviet régime. The killings in Russia after the assassination of Kirov last December, which, according to official statements, took 117 lives, were a remarkably faithful imitation of the June 30 ‘purge’ in Germany. The procedure in the two cases was virtually identical: summary wholesale executions without open trial, followed by ambiguously worded official and semi-official statements accusing of all sorts of terrorist schemes, and of treasonable association with the agents of hostile foreign powers, the persons who had already been conveniently put out of the way. To cap this particular parallel, it may be noted that an American liberal editor who used language of approximately equal vigor in condemning both sets of killings received two large batches of protesting letters, one from Communists, the other from Nazis, all employing remarkably similar arguments and phrases in attacking him.
A skeptically-minded German in Moscow once discovered the diversion of reading to a limited circle of trusted acquaintances citations which, in their cocksureness and dogmatic violence, sounded as if they came from the leading Soviet newspapers, Izvestia and Pravda. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he would name the newspaper in the new Germany from which they were taken. In somewhat the same fashion I cite the following passage, in a book about National Socialism, which would apply, with even more emphasis, to the Soviet Union: —
‘The National Socialist state of the future rests upon general poverty, relieved by enthusiasm and maintained by terrorization.’
III
All these elements, poverty, enthusiasm, terrorization, are most characteristic of Russia under the Soviets. Contrary, perhaps, to a general impression abroad, the degree of terrorism is far greater in Russia than it is in Germany. While individual cases of outrage and torture in Germany have doubtless been as bad as anything that occurred in Russia since the Revolution, there can be no comparison between the numbers of sufferers from governmental terrorism under the two systems.
In the summer of 1933 the Soviet Government, in an unusual burst of frankness, stated that 71,000 prisoners employed on the construction of the canal between the Baltic and White Seas had received complete or partial amnesty. At the worst period of terrorism in Germany, I do not think there were as many as 71,000 persons in all the German concentration camps; the figure is now certainly much smaller. And the beneficiaries of the complete or partial amnesty constituted only part, probably the smaller part, of the prisoners in one of many Soviet concentration camps.
It is difficult to verify with certainty allegations about inhuman treatment in concentration camps. The Soviet Government has never permitted an independent foreign observer to visit one of the camps under the control of the Gay-Pay-Oo, and impressions derived from brief conducted tours of German concentration camps cannot inspire much confidence. But one thing is certain: the better-known Soviet places of exile and forced labor — the Solovotzky Islands, the Narim Territory, the Baltic-White Sea Canal, during its period of construction — inspired as much terror in Russians as the Nazi concentration camps with the worst reputations — Oranienburg, Sonneberg, Dachau — excited in Germans. And the Soviet camps held vastly more inmates.
One may also, in this connection, compare the experiences of two groups which fared worst as a result of the upheavals: the Jews in Germany and the kulaks, or formerly well-to-do peasants, in Russia. The Jews were certainly dealt with very cruelly. Numbers of highly trained and educated men, as a result of the rigorous application of National Socialist racial dogmas, were abruptly deprived of the opportunity to practise professions, were expelled from posts in science, art, music, journalism, teaching, and the civil service. There were cases of murder and gross maltreatment of individual Jews; tens of thousands of Jews emigrated or fled from Germany.
Ruthless as this record is, it pales by comparison with the treatment which the Soviet Government meted out to the kulaks, who, with their individualist psychology, stood in the way of the general establishment of collective farming. A law promulgated during the winter of 1929-1930 authorized the ‘liquidation’ — that is, expulsion from their homes, with confiscation of property and deportation to forced labor — of all kulaks in regions where collective farming had been generally instituted. This would now refer to every part of Russia. There are about twenty-five million peasant families in the Soviet Union; of these about a million fell under the kulak category. Making every allowance for loopholes and means of escape in individual cases, therefore, it seems certain that hundreds of thousands of these unfortunate families were uprooted and driven from their homes, being subsequently herded in timber and construction camps, where food and housing conditions were often revoltingly bad.
No one who is well acquainted with the circumstances of the two cases would be likely to deny that the kulaks — men, women, and children alike — fared even worse than the German Jews. That the plight of the latter has aroused far wider international attention and protest is attributable partly to the greater severity of the Soviet censorship and still more to the fact that Jews in other countries protested vigorously against the treatment of their co-racialists in Germany. The kulaks had few relatives or friends in other lands. Moreover, the German Government, apart from a few exceptions dictated by political considerations, made no effort to prevent Jews from leaving the country, whereas the luckless kulak had to run a formidable gauntlet of barbed wire, armed frontier guards, and police dogs if he endeavored to quit the Soviet Union. Consequently very few of the kulaks escaped to tell what had happened to their fellows.
Another bond of kinship between Moscow and Berlin to-day is the widespread circulation of ‘anecdotes,’ or satirical stories—the sole consolation of the critics of the existing régimes who possess no other means of expressing their feelings. The following two anecdotes, one of which I heard in Moscow, the other in Berlin, could easily have been interchanged.
The Gay-Pay-Oo and the ‘confessions’ which it always contrives to produce in sabotage trials are neatly hit off in the Russian anecdote, which represents an old professor of music as complaining to a Gay-Pay-Oo official that not one of his students knew who wrote Tchaikovsky’s famous opera, Eugen Onegin. The official promises to look into the matter and comes to the professor a few weeks later, beaming with enthusiasm and observing: ‘We settled that case satisfactorily, Professor. We arrested the whole class, and, after we had held them in prison for a few weeks, four or five of the students signed confessions that they had written Eugen Onegin themselves.’
The German fable tells of a Jew who writes to relatives abroad as follows: ‘Germany is enjoying unheard-of prosperity under the Third Reich. Not a hair of a Jew’s head has been touched. Uncle Moritz, who expressed a contrary opinion, has just been buried.’
These stories are similar enough; but some anecdotes are actually common to both dictatorships. I have heard the following imaginary story told both of Stalin and of Hitler. The dictator proposes to inspect a lunatic asylum. The inmates are marshaled for the occasion and cheer with all the requisite animation. One of the dictator’s guards notices one member of the audience who has not joined in the cheering and walks over to ask the reason for his abstention. The nonparticipant replies: ‘Oh, that’s simple enough. I am one of the warders, not one of the inmates.’
IV
Where the element of parallel and the element of contrast begin to blend is in the attitude of the Russian and German régimes toward the unlucky groups which are singled out for discrimination and persecution. Such groups exist, both in Russia and in Germany. But the basis of selection is different, although the treatment, in some respects, is strikingly similar. Russia is dominated by class fanaticism, Germany by race fanaticism. Those Jews who came off worst under the Hitler dispensation are in much the same position of social ostracism, personal insecurity, and deprivation of almost all means of making a living as were the class victims of the Soviet system — priests and ministers of religion, former aristocrats and merchants, kulaks, and the like. If, as press reports foreshadow, Germany disfranchises the Jews and forbids them to serve in the army, she will be copying exactly the Soviet method of discriminating against Russia’s pariah classes.
The idea of a kulak being appointed to manage a state farm in Russia would arouse in good Communists just the same automatic reaction of horror that the discovery of a Jew in a responsible state post would excite in good Nazis. The question of the personal qualifications of the kulak or of the Jew simply would not enter into consideration.
A shelf of the nonsensical books which have been written in Russia since the Revolution seeking to interpret literature, art, philosophy, even science and mathematics, on a ‘class basis’ could be usefully placed side by side with a shelf of equally nonsensical books which have appeared in Germany since 1933, seeking to impart an Aryan certificate to every manifestation of German culture. Russia boasts of its ‘class justice,’ as Germany boasts of its ‘race justice’; an outsider often finds it uncommonly difficult to discover any cause for pride in either.
There are significant differences, as well as ironical and important similarities, between the Bolshevik and National Socialist systems. The most significant of these differences is the attitude toward private ownership of property. Amid all its changes, shifts, and modifications of policy, there is one economic principle to which Bolshevism, up to the present time, has been faithful: the abolition of private ownership of factories and mines, banks and railroads, shops, and, more recently, even of small peasant land holdings, and the consequent elimination of the motive of private profit (although not of private material reward) from economic life.
Hitler, on the other hand, has never been a socialist, in the scientific sense of the term. His socialism boils down to moral generalities about the dignity of labor, the desirability of breaking down class lines among Germans, and so forth. As early as 1922, long before there was any question of the restraining influence of office, Hitler offered the following extremely original definition of what constitutes a socialist: —
‘Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation, whoever, in addition, has understood our great national anthem, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land, land and people — that man is a socialist.’
By this definition the richest landowner or manufacturer, if he were a public-spirited nationalist, could also be a socialist; and Hitler has always found adherents among the wealthy classes. There have been strong undercurrents of social radicalism in his movement, which have found expression in the pronouncements of individual subordinate leaders and in some of the Twenty-five Points, drawn up by Gottfried Feder, which for a time were regarded as the authoritative Nazi programme on social and economic questions. But Hitler has never committed himself to any programme of general expropriation, and, especially since the sanguinary ‘purge’ of the more extreme elements among the Storm Troopers last summer, the economic trend has been toward the right. Detailed regulation of many aspects of business life, especially in the field of foreign trade, has indeed been developing in Germany ever since the beginning of the severe financial crisis in 1931. But, if this can be called socialism at all, it is socialism dictated by economic necessity, not socialism in pursuit of a conscious plan.
Largely because of its more tolerant attitude toward the private ownership of property, the National Socialist upheaval has uprooted vastly fewer individual existences than the Bolshevik Revolution. A German under Hitler is far more likely than a Russian under Stalin to be going about his prerevolutionary trade, profession, or business. This is especially true in the country districts, where life in Germany flows along in very much the old channels. In Russia, on the other hand, what with collectivization, liquidation of the kulaks, wholesale destruction of livestock, and the introduction of new machines and working methods, the life of the peasants has been turned completely topsy-turvy, and large numbers of them have been physically eliminated by exile or famine.
There is a pronounced contrast between the classes which, in the main, support Hitler and those which are most loyal to the Soviets. Both régimes, to be sure, have entrenched themselves to a considerable extent among the younger generations, irrespective of class. But the typical rank-and-file Communist in Russia is a manual worker in a factory, while the typical rank-and-file Nazi is apt to belong to the middle class, especially the poorer middle class, or to the peasantry. Enthusiasm for the new régime in Germany strikes an observer as more general, more genuine, more unforced in the country districts and in the small towns than in the large cities. This situation is precisely reversed in Russia.
V
On some points the ideals of the two systems are diametrically opposed. National Socialism wishes to put woman back in the home; Bolshevism tries to push her into factory or office. National Socialism exalts Old Germany as unreasonably and as extravagantly as Bolshevism denounces Old Russia. Bolshevism is militantly atheistic; National Socialism started out by professing allegiance to ‘positive Christianity,’ although the recent fostering of a kind of romantic paganism in Germany and the sharp conflicts which have arisen between the state and representatives of both of the major Christian communions may raise some doubt as to the substance of this ‘positive Christianity.’ The extreme claims of any totalitarian state, whether it be Communist or Fascist in character, tend to come into conflict with those of any religion that lays stress on individual conscience and judgment.
Bolshevism is theoretically international (although in practice it is becoming increasingly nationalist), while the first article in the creed of the National Socialist is passionate, exclusive German nationalism. Yet it is a paradox of contemporary world politics that National Socialism is a more explosive, more revolutionary, more disturbing influence in international affairs to-day than is Bolshevism. This is because the emotional appeal of National Socialism is far more compelling to Germans outside of Germany — in Austria and Czechoslovakia and Memel, for instance — than is the appeal of Bolshevism to workers outside of Russia. The Communist International is visibly in eclipse; only a few of the more unimaginative and uninformed die-hard reactionaries and die-hard radicals still take it seriously. The swastika, on the other hand, maintains its hold as a rallying symbol for Germans whom the peace treaties placed under alien sovereignty.
A second paradox looms up if one attempts to foresee the future of these two most significant modern dictatorships. Bolshevism began with the wholesale spoliation and expropriation of the well-to-do classes and quite recently destroyed peasant small proprietorship with measures of extreme ruthlessness. National Socialism set out as a crusade against Marxism, a banner of hope to a middle class that violently resented the prospect of being proletarianized.
But to-day Stalin sees himself forced not only to permit but even to encourage widespread inequality of wages and salaries, which in time seems bound to lead to the emergence in Russia of new classes, with markedly different standards of living. The retreat from the pure doctrine of Leninism is equally visible in the international field. Stalin seeks security for the Soviet Union against hostile attack, not in the mythical ‘solidarity of the world proletariat,’ but in hard-and-fast military alliances with France and other ‘capitalist’ states. A minor sign of changing times in Russia was the recent statement of the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, Mr. Troyanovsky, to the effect that the advice of ‘broadminded business men’ would be ‘useful and available’ in ‘working out practical plans for the economic rehabilitation of the world, and especially for Europe.’ This might well have aroused applause at a convention of the Rotary International, but it was calculated to arouse Lenin from the embalmed repose of his mausoleum in indignant protest. It was not in the advice of ‘broadminded business men’ that Lenin saw the cure for what he regarded as the incurable malady of the world capitalist system.
While Bolshevism is thus rapidly shedding its international revolutionary skin and evolving into something that might reasonably be called Red Fascism, it is conceivable, although not certain, that Germany will go through a reverse process. Hitler’s socialism of economic necessity, backed up by a dictatorial state, may in time become a nationalist socialism of definite policy. The experience of Italy, where Fascism has run a longer course, is far from encouraging to the rugged individualist who believes that government should keep its hands off business. Mussolini has a very dominant voice in the direction of Italy’s business; and the recalcitrant employer who endeavored to resist or sabotage any of Il Duce’s imperious measures would probably find himself occupying a cell next to that of an underground Communist agitator.
So, while it seems almost certain that the new Russian ruling class of state bureaucrats who manage the country’s industrial and commercial enterprises will gain increasing rewards and privileges, it is possible that private capitalists in the Third Reich may gradually lose some of the traditional attributes of private ownership and become little more than state managers of their undertakings. Possible, but not certain; for there are strong ties with the past in Germany, and any pronounced tendency in the direction of political appeasement and economic recovery might cause a relaxation of many existing restrictions and a restoration of essentially old-fashioned economic relations within the political framework of the Third Reich.
The establishment of one-party dictatorships, which rule without benefit of parliamentarism and civil liberties and attempt to knock the heads of labor and capital together, is a world-wide trend. One sees it not only in many European countries, of which Russia, Germany, and Italy are outstanding examples, but also in American and Asiatic lands, such as Mexico and China. On the other hand, it is significant that all the shocks of the World War and the recent economic crisis have not unseated democracy in a single country where it was firmly established before the war.
In weighing the balance of striking contrasts and equally striking parallels between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, one feels that the contrasts are largely rooted in fundamental differences of Russian and German national characters and temperaments. The parallels, on the other hand, are often attributable to the common element of revolutionary fanaticism, which almost instinctively generates the method of governing by a mixture of red-hot propaganda and merciless repression. And it would seem that there is more psychological kinship under the skin between the two systems than a devout Russian Communist or an equally devout German Nazi would like to admit or recognize.