Stalin полностью

Frequently, though, Hitler was absent from Berlin, seeking refuge at his Bavarian alpine retreat, the Berghof, where he relished holding forth on race and global conquest in table talks. Like Stalin, Hitler fretted about being alone. (“Hitler needs to have people around him,” Goebbels had observed early on. “Otherwise he broods too much.”)²¹ But unlike Stalin, the Führer was unwilling or incapable of submitting to routine. Nazi Germany was a scrum of divergent interests—party, army, bureaucratic fiefdoms, private industry—with a proliferation of ad hoc agencies and plenipotentiaries.²² Hitler refused to chair committees or agencies, and often went lengthy periods without summoning officials.²³ After February 5, 1938, the infrequent cabinet meetings had ceased altogether. Hitler’s diligence went into preparing the texts for his speeches, which he rewrote with fountain pen after dictating a first draft, and into military affairs. But he awoke late and appeared at work well after noon, glancing through clippings assembled by the Reich press chief, then repairing to “breakfast” and avoiding his own officials. (“I asked myself often: when did he really work?” recalled Speer.)²⁴ His desk was empty, and he almost never worked at it. (“For him, desks were mere pieces of decoration,” the head of the Hitler Youth recalled.) Reports went unread. “He disliked reading files,” recalled Fritz Wiedemann, who in the 1930s served as Hitler’s adjutant. “I got decisions out of him, even on very important matters, without his ever asking me for the relevant papers. He took the view that many things sorted themselves out if they were left alone.”²⁵

Stalin’s regime, too, was beset by improvisation, but the despot devoured documents and, even when away from Moscow down south, used the telephone, telegraph, and field couriers assiduously.²⁶ One comes away flabbergasted not by learning what went on without Stalin’s involvement, but by the quantity of information he managed to command and the number of spheres in which he intervened. He had terminated the increasingly infrequent formal meetings of the politburo, but he was as obsessively hands-on as Hitler was sometimes disengaged. Stalin read and affixed written directives; Hitler conducted state affairs mostly by talking, and his interlocutors—sometimes an oddly assembled bunch—would piece together decisions from the ramblings or try to get him to confirm them later. For all that, no small degree of coordination took place through the Chancellery and the Führer conferences. He hesitated to intervene in bureaucratic struggles to avoid being caught up in unpopular decisions and festering resentments.²⁷ On the issues of greatest importance to Hitler, from foreign affairs to the Jewish question, he encouraged the involvement of multiple agencies. He would sometimes set the players against one another, in “a carefully balanced system of mutual enmity,” as Speer would note. Oscillating between freneticism and lethargy, Hitler tended to postpone the most difficult decisions, biting his fingernails while others waited and waited. “Sometimes,” one secretary recalled, “he would stop and stare silently at Lenbach’s portrait of Bismarck, lost in thought and collecting himself before he started to wander around again.”²⁸

Stalin sometimes took the wives of his top officials hostage and arrested and executed their aides; Hitler allowed pre-1933 comrades—Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, a few others—to build power centers within the state.²⁹ Hitler showed awareness of the need to indulge the preferences of elites and powerful bodies. Supposedly, his style of rule incited minions to forge ahead with initiatives in the hope of anticipating his wishes and earning favor, in what has been called “working toward the Führer,” but that was possible only in certain spheres, and when Hitler became cognizant of underlings’ efforts to take such initiatives, he often intervened to stop them.³⁰ Stalin’s micromanagement and flashes of anger largely precluded proactive risk taking in the first place. Local officials almost always awaited explicit instructions, which, however, often turned out to be impossible to fulfill, so they began a process not of “working toward the vozhd,” but cat and mouse (circumventions, prevarications, concealment), which drove Stalin’s desire to clamp down further. The Soviet political machine often suffered paralysis not from Hitler-style ostensible aloofness but from extreme centralization and dependency on a single person who just could not do everything. In the end, whether at the Little Corner or the Near or Sochi dacha, the Chancellery or the Berghof mountain hideaway, everything revolved around the Person. Every functionary’s dream was to serve as Hitler’s or Stalin’s personal representative—the authority for a designated sphere of activity.

BERIA’S TAKEOVER