Totalitarian Traditions
SETON-WATSON, HUGH
Totalitarian! Traditions RUSSIA AND GERMANY: A CENTURY OF CONFLICT By Walter Z. Laqueur Little, Brown. 367 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by HUGH SETON-WATSON Author, "From Lenin to...
...Yet Hitler derived his views not only from these men but also from his own Austrian upbringing...
...The anti-Semitic mass movement which developed in Rumania in the 1930s...
...But greater knowledge and future events are likely only to increase amazement that such things were possible...
...These three facts affected the Nazi movement at all stages of its development...
...Hitler and his gang were destroyed, Stalin is dead and his regime has greatly changed...
...and to a lesser extent those in Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, more closely resembled the Russian movement than did the Nazi party...
...Of the two ideologies which dominated recent generations, he has little to tell us about Communism, a subject now widely known and widely misunderstood...
...There is a full discussion of the Right-wing anti-Semitic movements in Russia in the last decades of Tsardom...
...Reviewed by HUGH SETON-WATSON Author, "From Lenin to Khrushchev" THERE IS a vast literature on the relations between the Russian and German governments in the last hundred years...
...At the end of this book one is left with an overwhelming impression of the similarity of the two totalitarian monsters...
...The only important gap in Laqueur's book is the absence of the Austrian factor...
...Austria, of course, would have no place in a study of German-Russian state relations...
...But Laqueur is concerned with ideas and public opinion...
...These were prototypes of National Socialism, not only in their anti-Semitic doctrines but also in thei r social demagogy and their mobilization of mass discontent...
...The German Nazis operated in a highly industrialized and educated society, while the Russian "Black Hundreds" dealt with illiterate Ukrainian peasants and unskilled workers in the new towns which grew out of the first stage of Russia's industrial revolution...
...The identification of Marxism with Jews in the minds of many leading Nazis was so complete as to mislead them disastrously about the Soviet Union, while the stereotypes favored by the Communists, identifying Fascism with monopoly capitalism, were no more helpful...
...This book offers insights helpful to all who wish to understand 20th-century totalitarianism...
...It is true that the individual experts on Russian affairs who had personal contact with Hitler were mainly from the Baltics or persons in touch with Russian exiles...
...Austria was the center of the strongest antiSemitic movement in the Germanspeaking world well before 1914...
...One of the most interesting points made by Laqueur is the extraordinary fact that to this day no serious study either of Fascism as a movement or of the Third Reich as a political and social sys- tern has been published in the Soviet Union...
...He believes that the diplomats had a rather small role to play and that more attention should be paid to the ideologues on both sides, and to the wider political class in each country which iney influenced...
...There is the same ignorance, the same fanaticism and the same ability to make willing slaves of great nations...
...The comparative study of Fascist revolutionary movements, still absurdly neglected, is substantially advanced by Laqueur's book...
...These set a fashion in conspiracy theories of history which extended well beyond Germany...
...the gifted and civilized German and Russian nations remain...
...Both Germans from Russia's former Baltic provinces and Russian Rightwing exiles living in Germany had important contacts with Hitler and his intimate circle at the beginning of his political career...
...The image of Russia in the German written or spoken word cannot be clearly seen without its Austrian component...
...With Laqueur's view of the relative unimportance of diplomatic history I am in complete agreement...
...The fact that it leaves one's curiosity unsatisfied is a measure of its achievement...
...His main concern is with Fascism, not only in its German form but in the incomplete prototype which existed in Russia before 1917, and in the image of Fascism as seen in the Soviet Union...
...Much has still to be learned about the past, and the future will certainly be different...
...It was also from Russia that the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" originated...
...At the level of ideology Laqueur has some interesting comments about the genuine inability of Nazis to understand Marxism, and of Soviet Communists to understand Fascism...
...He is concerned with "the meta politics of RussianGerman relations...
...But the subject which Walter Z. Laqueur examines in this book is different...
...These are explained at considerable length, and some fantastic characters are portrayed...
...Traditions RUSSIA AND GERMANY: A CENTURY OF CONFLICT By Walter Z. Laqueur Little, Brown...
...But there is an undoubted family relationship between them all...
...The contribution of Russians to German Fascism has other aspects...
...An interesting appendix deals with the vogue of such theories in Britain-from the Morning Post to John Buchan's The Three Hostages...
...The technique of organizing a revol utionary movement behind a reac tionary ideology was developed to a far higher level by Hitler...
...One should also not forget the many Austrians who played a part in the Third Reich from 1933, and still more from 1938, and who left their mark on Russia after 1941...
...Hitler himself was Austrian born and bred...
...I also think that the task he set himself is much more difficult than writing diplomatic history, and he has performed it very well...
...There was an Austrian state tradition in regard to Russia which was the opposite of the Prussian state tradition: Prussia collaborated with Russia to suppress the Poles, Austria conflicted with Russia because of the Balkans...
...The book begins with the love hate relationship between Germans and Russians in the 19th century: I have seen no better treatment compressed into so short a space...
...fhe story of alliances and conflicts, wars and military occupations is so widely known (though often wrongly understood) that it is as likely to provoke boredom as horror or enthusiasm...
Vol. 48 • November 1965 • No. 22
