Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia (Book Review)

Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia. 848 pp. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. ISBN 0393020304. $35.00 (cloth). 849 pp. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. ISBN 0393327973. $21.95 (paper). Hitlerism and Stalinism are "comparable" in the banal way that all things can be put next to one another and studied. The question is what we can learn by comparing the two dictatorships. Richard Overy does not explicitly respond to this question but rather names "two purposes" for his massive study: "to supply an empirical foundation on which to construct any discussion of what made the two systems either similar or different" and "to write a comparative 'operational' history of the two systems in order to answer the large historical question about how personal dictatorship actually worked" (xxxiii-xxxiv). (1)