This chapter is based, to a large extent, on one of the insights that comparative history can offer: helping oneself to the rich historiography of Germany and to a much better knowledge about Hitler and his regime, in the hope of generating new ideas and questions about the less-known Stalin and his regime. The exercise consists then, in a sense, in holding the German mirror to Russia's face – or rather to its history. In this case, we limit ourselves only to the two dictatorships – although the same method could be applied to other periods and areas too. The reader will realise that our aim here is to learn more about Stalin, not to try to contribute to the knowledge of Hitler.

It is also quite revealing that many students of Germany use interpretative constructs, specifically concepts that can be or are already being usefully employed in interpreting the Russian historical processes at different periods. Ideas like ‘Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen’ (E. Bloch) or ‘combined development’ (Trotsky), ‘legacy of the pre-capitalist past’ (Wehler), ‘crisis of modernity’ (Peukert), are ‘strategic’ ones in the battle of interpretations concerning the dictatorships in question.

Stalin's cult-autocracy

The making of Stalin's autocracy, amidst an enormous construction effort, was permeated by destructive policies: abundance of terror, magic and rituals testified to and covered up for a deep cultural and political regression and a mighty cultural counter-revolution, as destructive as the other aspects of Stalinism.