Nazis and Stalinists: Mutual Interaction Or Tandem Development?(Review Forum: Totalitarianism--the Comparative Dimension) ('Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazista Compared') (Book Review‪)‬

Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazista Compared. 536 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN-13 978-0521897969, $90.00 (cloth); 978-0521723978, $27.99 (paper). After the controversy surrounding Ernst Nolte and the debate on the singularity of the Holocaust that started in the mid-1980s, it has taken German historians and historians of Germany a long time to reconsider a comparison of the National Socialist and Soviet dictatorships. The older debate over the Sonderweg focused exclusively on comparing developments in Germany and Western Europe (plus the United States). The East went, for the most part, unmentioned. If it was at all included in such comparisons, then it appeared only with regard to issues of economic or social history and primarily within the framework of the theory of modernization or the so-called "world system." Such studies mostly described the history of Eastern Europe as one of deficiency or of "semi-colonial" dependency. (1) Today these views themselves have become part of history, and Russia is widely accepted as a participant in the process of European modernization. (2) Issues of transfer and transnationality have begun to interest historians only in recent years. Particularly the fourth and last part of this collection of essays investigates the mutual entanglements between Germany and Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1945.