The Dictators

Half a century after their deaths, the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler still cast a long and terrible shadow over the modern world. They were the most destructive and lethal regimes in history, murdering millions. They fought the largest and costliest war in all history. Yet millions of Germans and Russians enthusiastically supported them and the values they stood for. In this first major study of the two dictatorships side-by-side Richard Overy sets out to answer the question: How was dictatorship possible? How did they function? What was the bond that tied dictator and people so powerfully together? He paints a remarkable and vivid account of the different ways in which Stalin and Hitler rose to power, and abused and dominated their people. It is a chilling analysis of powerful ideals corrupted by the vanity of ambitious and unscrupulous men.

A groundbreaking new theory of the real rules of politics: leaders do whatever keeps them in power, regardless of the national interest. As featured on the viral video Rules for Rulers, which has been viewed over 3 million times. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith's canonical book on political science turned conventional wisdom on its head. They started from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don't care about the "national interest"-or even their subjects-unless they have to. This clever and accessible book shows that democracy is essentially just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching. The size of this group determines almost everything about politics: what leaders can get away with, and the quality of life or misery under them. The picture the authors paint is not pretty. But it just may be the truth, which is a good starting point for anyone seeking to improve human governance.

This book explores the changing evolution of memory debates on places intimately linked to the lives and deaths of different fascist, para-fascist and communist dictators in a truly transnational and comparative way. During the second decade of the twenty-first century, a number of parallel debates arose in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Albania, Austria and other European countries regarding the public management by democratic regimes of those sites of memory that were directly linked to the personal biographies of their former dictators. The ways in which each democracy deals with the dead bodies, mausoleums and birthplaces of the dictators vary considerably, although common questions occur, such as whether oblivion or re-signification is better, the risk of a posthumous cult of personality being established and the extent to which the shadow of the authoritarian past endures in these sites of memory. Using the concept of "sites of the dictators", the author explains why it is so difficult to deal with some sites of memory linked to dead autocrats, as those places contribute directly or indirectly to humanizing them, making their remembrance more acceptable for the present and future generations, and discusses the potential of the "Europeanization" of these "dark" memories of the past. Exploring the imperatives of memory politics and how these are reconciled with local actors interested in exploiting the dictator’s remembrance, this book will be useful reading for students and scholars of history, politics and memory studies.

"A book of great importance; it surpasses all others in breadth and depth."--Commentary If the past century will be remembered for its tragic pairing of civilized achievement and organized destruction, at the heart of darkness may be found Hitler, Stalin, and the systems of domination they forged. Their lethal regimes murdered millions and fought a massive, deadly war. Yet their dictatorships took shape within formal constitutional structures and drew the support of the German and Russian people. In the first major historical work to analyze the two dictatorships together in depth, Richard Overy gives us an absorbing study of Hitler and Stalin, ranging from their private and public selves, their ascents to power and consolidation of absolute rule, to their waging of massive war and creation of far-flung empires of camps and prisons. The Nazi extermination camps and the vast Soviet Gulag represent the two dictatorships in their most inhuman form. Overy shows us the human and historical roots of these evils.

The Age of the Dictators presents a comprehensive survey of the origins and interrelationship of the European dictatorships. All the regimes are addressed, with ample coverage of the period 1939-45, and analysis of the Soviet government up to Stalin’s death in 1953. Exploring their ideological and political roots, and the role of the First World War in their rise to power, David Williams identifies the dictatorships as products of their time. He examines the Soviet, Italian Fascist and Nazi dictatorships, as well as the authoritarian regimes in Spain, Portugal, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, providing an analysis of each as an entity, of how they evolved and related to one another, and to what extent they were a common response to life after the First World War. Mindful of historiographical issues, the textbook attends to the arguments of key historians, and includes a list of relevant sources to assist students in their study of the period. Combining an accessible, succinct writing style with a broad historical scope, The Age of the Dictators is an illuminating and thorough account of a fascinating period in world history.

This author's analytical approach will be appreciated by historians as well as film buffs. He examines Hollywood's response to the rise of fascism and the beginning of the Second World War. Welky traces the shifting motivations and arguments of the film industry, politicians, and the public as they negotiated how or whether the silver screen would portray certain wartime attributes.

From the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of China After Mao, a sweeping and timely study of twentieth century dictators and the development of the modern cult of personality.

Until the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, Mackenzie King prided himself on never publicly saying anything derogatory about Hitler or Mussolini, unequivocally supporting the appeasement policies of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and regarding Hitler as a benign fellow mystic. In Mackenzie King in the Age of the Dictators Roy MacLaren leads readers through the political labyrinth that led to Canada's involvement in the Second World War and its awakening as a forceful nation on the world stage. Prime Minister King's fascination with foreign affairs extended from helping President Theodore Roosevelt exclude “little yellow men” from North America in 1908 to his conviction that appeasement of Hitler and Mussolini should be the cornerstone of Canada's foreign and imperial policies in the 1930s. If war could be avoided, King thought, national unity could be preserved. MacLaren draws extensively from King's diaries and letters and contemporary sources from Britain, the United States, and Canada to describe how King strove to reconcile French Canadian isolationism with English Canadians' commitment to the British Commonwealth. King, MacLaren explains, was convinced by the controversies of the First World War that another such conflagration would be disruptive to Canada. When King finally had to recognize that the Liberals' electoral fortunes depended on English Canada having greater voting power than French Canada, he did not reflect on whether a higher morality and intellectual integrity should transcend his anxieties about national unity. A focused view of an important period in Canadian history, replete with insightful stories, vignettes, and anecdotes, Mackenzie King in the Age of the Dictators shows Canada flexing its foreign policy under King's cautious eye and ultimately ineffective guiding hand.