Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives

by Alan Bullock

Overview

Forty years after his Hitler: A Study in Tyranny set a standard for scholarship of the Nazi era, Lord Alan Bullock gives readers a breathtakingly accomplished dual biography that places Adolf Hitler's origins, personality, career, and legacy alongside those of Joseph Stalin--his implacable antagonist and moral mirror image.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593082324
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/11/2019
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1152
Sales rank:	364,875
File size:	75 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Alan Bullock was knighted in 1972, becoming Sir Alan Bullock and in 1976 was made a life peer as Baron Bullock, of Leafield in the County of Oxfordshire. Born in 1914, he studied at Oxford University and served as a research assistant to Winston Churchill while the prime minister was writing his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Bullock was a history fellow at New College, Oxford and helped found St Catherine's College, Oxford. He is best known for his book Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952) which was the first comprehensive biography of Adolf Hitler and influenced many other major biographies of Hitler. Bullock died in 2004.

Editorial Reviews

The lives of, arguably, the 20th century's most evil dictators unfold in tandem in this continually absorbing masterpiece of historical exposition and the biographer's art, a History Book Club main selection in cloth. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is a huge and masterful dual biography of two of the most monstrous personalities of this century. Bullock, whose Hitler: A Study in Tyranny ( LJ 2/15/64) truly deserves its designation as a classic, has produced a smoothly written study of how these two lives ran parallel and how they intertwined to affect the lives of millions in the first half of this century. One would expect Bullock to know Hitler, but his grasp of Stalin and his times is also impressive. In chapters alternately dealing with Hitler and then Stalin, Bullock analyzes how each man achieved and then used power for his own twisted goals. It is chilling to realize that both men rose within legitimate institutions, each ``playing the game'' by the established rules. Hitler's evil empire collapsed with his death, Stalin's would live on to haunt the Soviet Union for decades. Essential for anyone seeking to understand the history of the West in this century. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/91.-- Ed Goedeken, Purdue Univ. Libs., West Lafayette, Ind.

Library Journal

A masterpiece by Bullock (Ernest Bevin, 1984, etc.) that covers some of the most devastating events—as well as two of the most terrible personalities—of our century with breathtaking analytical power and narrative sweep. One of the most fruitful aspects of this dual biography is to reveal, for all the differences between Hitler and Stalin, how much they had in common. The differences were mainly in personality: Stalin the great calculator, Hitler the gambler; Stalin the master of bureaucracy, Hitler the artist-politician, hating routine; Stalin the sly, political Houdini, Hitler the charismatic leader. But their similarities were perhaps more significant. Both were guilty of crimes against humanity on a scale unprecedented in history: Like the Jews in Germany, peasant farmers in the Soviet Union were members of an outlawed class denied all human rights. The corruption in the heart of Nazism, according to Bullock, lay in its ends; in Communism, in its means. Neither Hitler nor Stalin, he believes, was mad. Both were entirely serious about their historic roles, the author says; skeptical about the motives of others, their cynicism stopped short of their own. But Hitler, at the end, was close to insanity; and Stalin had all the symptoms associated with paranoia—chronic suspicion, self-absorption, jealousy, hypersensitivity, and megalomania. Both men brought unprecedented suffering on their own people; the difference, Bullock notes, is that defeat exacted a terrible price from the German people, but at least spared them the continuation of Nazism, while victory cost the Russian people even more—but did not liberate them. A magnificent history, accessible andoften moving. Bullock's mastery of research sources, his judgment, and his analytic powers prove him one of the great historians of our time. (Seventy-one photographs and 18 maps—not seen.)

Kirkus Reviews

" A monumental and completely absorbing volume that creates vivid portraits of...two tyrants, while illuminating the first half of this blood-stained century."— The New York Times

From the Publisher