(12:48 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Hitler and Stalin

A secret biography of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler commissioned by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin is to be published later this month, the book's British publisher says.

Stalin's "Hitler Book" was presented to the Soviet dictator in December 1949, in a limited edition of one, and was put in his personal archive before being discovered by German historian Matthias Uhl in 2004.

If we compare Russian communism with the National Socialism of ten years ago, quite calmly, we shall see that at any rate the Christian church has no cause to repeat itself quite so simply as is so much desired, in its attitude to the Russian communist East. One can have much on one's heart and say much too against the East on account of its totalitarianism and its methods. All that Asiatic despotism, cunning and ruthlessness of the Near and Far East, and especially in Russia, has been and has meant from time immemorial, has certainly become abominably and horrifyingly aggressive today in the guise of Russian communism, and we are terribly conscious of it. In the past we have probably not taken sufficient notice of the fact that that kind of thing has always been active -- even without communism -- in that part of the world. Our memory of the atrocities of the French Revolution (on the "achievements" of which, incidentally, our whole Western system is based) and of the atrocities of the preceding allegedly Christian era in Europe (including certain outrages committed by the old Swiss!) is also not as lively as it might be. Those atrocities are no excuse for the disgusting methods of the East today. We are right to be indignant. But if we have learned to discriminate by taking a glance at the French Revolution and at our so-called "Christian era," if, as I hope, we do not condemn the Asiatic world outright simply because some form or other of despotism has always been, and very largely still is, the accepted form of public life, then it is pertinent not to omit to discriminate in our view of contemporary communism between its totalitarian atrocities as such and the positive intention behind them. And if one tries to do that, one cannot say of communism what one was forced to say of Nazism ten years ago--that what it intends is pure unreason, the product of madness and crime. It would be quite absurd to mention in the same breath the philosophy of Marxism and the "ideology" of the Third Reich, to mention a man of the stature of Joseph Stalin in the same breath as such charlatans as Hitler, Goering, Hess, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Streicher, etc. What has been tackled in Soviet Russia--albeit with dirty and bloody hands and in a way that rightly shocks us--is, after all, a constructive idea, the solution of a problem which is a serious and burning problem for us as well, and which we with our clean hands have not yet tackled anything like energetically enough: the social problem.

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