es, fed as it was by competing ideologies, resulted in political extremism in Europe, but it is undoubtedly true that the murderous leadership of both Hitler and Stalin was exemplary of such extremism.
The extremism can be identified as a feature of the personalities of Stalin and Hitler, who were exact contemporaries (Hitler was born in 1889, Stalin in 1879). Although the entire state apparatus and many functionaries therein were enlisted in overseeing and carrying out state-sponsored murders in Germany and Russia, the main guilt has been laid at the door of Stalin and Hitler as individuals. As Bullock puts it:
[R]esponsibility Hitler and Stalin bore for conceiving of deportation, imprisonment, torture, and killing on such a scale . . . is different in kind from that born by anyone else (Bullock 971)
Under these two heads of state in the first half of the 20th century, Europe was bequeathed two political and social legacies that "combined to weigh heavily on Europe in the succeeding decades" (Bullock 966). To be sure, they differed: Hitler was defeated and Stalin triumphant. Neither man has been placed at the scene of even one actual murder. But murder was for both an instrument of state policy on a massive scale.
Stalin's murderous regime was installed a few years before Hitler's and survived a few years after it. It was marked by Stalin's political ambition from his earliest days as a revolutionary. Whereas Lenin prepared, in Germany, to assume power, Stalin He rose through the revolutionary ranks because of a definite plan and built an effective political machine in the Bolshevik state. By the time he succeeded Lenin, who appears to have been suspicious of his thirst for power, Stalin had become a master of political intrigue and intraparty politics (Bullock 173) while cultivating the image of the plain-spoken common man. He drove more moderate revolutionaries such as Trotsky out of the party and out of the country while...