Putting the Communist and National Socialist dictatorships side by side as twin models of twentieth-century dystopia has always raised awkward questions about comparability and moral equivalence. The editors and contributors in this fine volume are all too aware of the intellectual challenges involved in equating or comparing the two systems and have provided here a sophisticated and nuanced assessment of ... Read moretheir entanglement, not only at the level of historical experience but in terms of the meaning now ascribed to them in historical memory. This is an important milestone in developing a fuller understanding of the special place Communism/National Socialism occupies in contemporary historical culture.
Richard Overy, University of Exeter The essays in this volume explore the thorny issues arising in comparative studies of Soviet Communism and German National Socialism. The authors steer a refreshingly independent course that deftly avoids the usual pitfalls in such work, where in the West scholars tend to privilege Hitler and the Holocaust, while most accounts from Eastern Europe highlight the evils of Stalinism. The book’s micro-studies are uniformly excellent, up-to-date, and highly stimulating, and they provide innovative new approaches that should attract a wide readership in academia.
Robert Gellately, Florida State University, author of Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War Klas-Göran Karlsson and his Lund University colleagues have edited an important contribution to the growing literature on the intersection between Nazi and Stalinist history and historiography. The volume provides both a state-of-the-art assessment of where this young field is today, as well as fascinating additions to its empirical study.
Norman Naimark, Stanford University Show Less