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The deluge of books about Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler apparently knows no end. In addition to those here under review, dozens of others have appeared in the past two or three years alone, and many more are sure to come. By contrast, scholarly study of Stalinism and the gulag is relatively neglected. As Anne Applebaum observes in Gulag, although "some eighteen million people passed through this massive system," we pay far less attention to Stalin's victims than we do to Hitler's. Many of the millions killed during the Stalin era were simply "driven to a forest at night, lined up, shot in the skull, and buried in mass graves before they ever got near a concentration camp—a form of murder no less 'industrialized' and anonymous than that used by the Nazis." But no archival film-footage records these scenes that played out behind the Iron Curtain, no harrowing photos comparable to those that followed the liberation of the Nazi camps. Stalin's victims "haven't caught Hollywood's imagination in the same way. Highbrow culture hasn't been much more open to the subject."
Why is it, Applebaum wonders, that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger "has been deeply damaged by his brief, overt support of Nazism which developed before Hitler had committed his major atrocities," yet "the reputation of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has not suffered in the least from his aggressive support of Stalinism throughout the postwar years, when plentiful evidence of Stalin's atrocities was available to anyone interested." Her answer is that the literary Left, many of whom were enchanted by the Soviet experiment, did not want to broach the subject. Indeed, this has been so much the case that decades after Stalin's death, it was still possible "for an American academic to publish a book suggesting that the purges of the 1930s were useful because they promoted upward mobility. … It is possible—still—for a British literary editor to reject an article because it is 'too anti-Soviet.'" It is impossible to imagine a literary editor rejecting a piece for being "too anti-Nazi." The terror famine of the 1930s killed more Ukrainians than Hitler murdered Jews. Why so little attention? Literary and academic bias is one answer, the tendency of a "small part of the Western Left ... to explain and sometimes to excuse the camps" is another, but neither fully suffices.
Perhaps, Applebaum muses, because the Soviets talked about a classless society and a utopian world without division, they seem more attractive to us. "Perhaps this helps explain why eyewitness reports of the Gulag were, from the very beginning, often dismissed and belittled by the very same people who would never have thought to question the validity of Holocaust testimony written by Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel." So the subject is repressed. Then too, "no one wants to think that we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another." Better not to acknowledge that in the talks that ended World War II and decisively shaped the postwar world, the Western allies gave their blessing to Stalin's stranglehold over Central and Eastern Europe.
And yet, even after this accumulation of explanations, we are still left with something of a mystery. Why is Nazism in general, and Hitler in particular, so much more interesting to us than is Stalinism in general, and Stalin in particular? Frederic Spotts' unsettling book—perhaps the most disturbing of all those under review—may aid us in coming closer to an answer. Nazism combined elements of a "will to power" and a compelling aesthetic sensibility. Hitler specialized in staging spectacular "visuals" and generating an aura of palpable power. Is it possible that something of the original appeal of the Nazi imagination remains potent, seducing even those who genuinely deplore Nazism's monstrous crimes?
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