Stalin gave a first impression of a humble man, a loner, who talked in practical terms, and who lived a simple life. Yet, he could not have attracted to him loyal associates if he lacked social skills. After he achieved absolute power, he could afford to drop his polite approach to his associates, but he could still attract devoted followers. His influence on his ill-fated NKVD head, Nikolai Ezhov, became "total, unlimited, almost hypnotic.”12 Hitler possessed many of the same characteristics. He had excellent manners, lived a simple life, and had the power to charm and attract associates. Like Stalin, he alternated between reasonable discourse and ranting. Hitler truly hated the Jews and "inferior” Slavic races. Stalin truly hated enemies of socialism, which he defined as anyone opposed to him.
Hitler may have resembled Lenin more than Stalin in the fact that he was an armchair executioner. Lenin, while demanding the killing of enemies of Bolshevik power, never pulled the trigger himself. He turned such matters over to fervent subordinates. Lenin was even known as an easy touch for relatives petitioning to commute death sentences. Stalin, on the other hand, personally orchestrated executions and made sure that they went according to his directions. Even when his health did not allow him to actively direct the state and the economy, Stalin continued to read and direct interrogations of political enemies.
What was unique about Stalin and Hitler is that no one anticipated the extent to which they were prepared to carry their brutality. Stalin's decision to liquidate the richer peasants as a class in 1929 brought gasps from the assembled party elite. No one could have known that he would physically annihilate the party elite in the wake of the mysterious assassination of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov in December of 1934. Most Germans and many German Jews assumed that Hitler's rhetoric about the Jewish problem was simply words. Stalin took the apparatus of terror created under Lenin, and refined and modified it, but the basic principles of political repression were already in place under Lenin. Stalin's innovation was to apply repression on a scale unimaginable to the first Bolsheviks, which is illustrated in the following Soviet joke, an imagined conversation between Lenin and Stalin:
Lenin: Comrade Stalin, would you sacrifice 10,000 for the Socialist Revolution?
Stalin: Yes, without hesitation.
Lenin: I would as well.
Lenin: Comrade Stalin, would you sacrifice 500,000 for the Socialist Revolution?
Stalin: Yes, without hesitation.
Lenin: I would as well.
Lenin: Comrade Stalin, would you sacrifice ten million for the Socialist Revolution?
Stalin: Yes, without hesitation.
Lenin: You see, Comrade Stalin, in such matters you and I are quite different.
World History
