Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism
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POPULAR OPINION IN TOTALITARIAN REGIMES This page intentionally left blank Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism Edited by PAUL CORNER 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York The Several Contributors 2009 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Popular opinion in totalitarian regimes / edited by Paul Corner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–956652–5 (hardback) 1. Totalitarianism—History—20th century. 2. Public opinion—Europe—History—20th century. 3. Fascism—Italy—History. 4. Communism—Europe, Eastern—History. 5. Communism—Soviet Union—History. 6. National socialism—History. 7. Europe—Politics and government—20th century. I. Corner, Paul. JC480.P68 2009 303.3809409041—dc22 2009022965 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–956652–5 13579108642 Acknowledgements This book is the outcome of a small workshop held at the Charterhouse of Pontignano (University of Siena) in June 2006. There were just twelve participants, very literally from all round the world. We spent two and a half days in the beautiful surroundings of the monastery enjoying wide-ranging and largely unstructured discussion. In the end we agreed that the whole event had been very productive and merited a joint volume. My first thanks must go, therefore, to Andrea Machetti and his staff at the Certosa for feeding us, making us comfortable while we talked, and helping us survive the remarkably unseasonable cold weather. The workshop was very much a collaborative venture and I have a debt of gratitude to a large number of people. My thanks are obviously due to all who made the often very great effort to take part. In particular I am grateful to Richard Bosworth, Ian Kershaw, and Jochen Hellbeck for suggesting other names to me at the outset. For the same reason I also have to thank some of those who in the end could not make it, espe- cially Robert Gellately and Alf Ludtke.¨ For a wide variety of motives not all the participants have contributed chapters: nonetheless I wish to thank Marco Palla, Istvan` Rev,´ Richard Bosworth and Jan Culik for their contri- butions to our discussions. And not all the contributors present here were present in Pontignano. Subsequently Otto Dov Kulka generously agreed to share the results of his recent research on popular opinion in Nazi Ger- many and Marcin Kula has provided a chapter on the state of research in Poland. Among others, Temma Kaplan helped me more than she probably realizes, and I benefited greatly from the advice of Marta Petrusewicz, who not only illuminated me on ‘People’s Poland’ but was of invaluable assis- tance in identifying possible contributors from what we used to call Eastern Europe. The workshop was financed through research grants from the Italian Ministry of the University (PRIN 2005) and from the University of Siena (PAR 2005). Neither grant would have been obtained without the help of the university Research Office and my thanks go to Roberta Pellegrini and Roberto Ricci for their guidance in making applications. This is also an opportunity to thank the Administrative Director of my department in Siena, who looked after the financial side of the operation. Without Marina Borgogni’s extraordinary competence we would not have gone very far. vi Acknowledgements Finally I should like to thank Christopher Wheeler and Matthew Cotton at Oxford University Press for their constant courtesy and attention—and the three anonymous readers of the original manuscript for their many useful comments and criticisms. PC Siena December 2008 Contents Notes on the Contributors ix Abbreviations x 1. Introduction 1 Paul Corner PART 1. TWO OVERVIEWS 2. Popular Opinion in Russia Under Pre-war Stalinism 17 Sheila Fitzpatrick 3. Consensus, Coercion and Popular Opinion in the Third Reich: Some Reflections 33 Ian Kershaw PART 2. THE FIRST DICTATORSHIPS 4. Liberation from Autonomy: Mapping Self-Understandings in Stalin’s Time 49 Jochen Hellbeck 5. Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism 64 Jan Plamper 6. Popular Opinion in Nazi Germany as a Factor in the Policy of the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’: The Nuremberg Laws and the Reichskristallnacht 81 Otto Dov Kulka 7. Popular Opinion in Nazi Germany: Mobilization, Experience, Perceptions: The View from the Wurttemberg¨ Countryside 107 Jill Stephenson 8. Fascist Italy in the 1930s: Popular Opinion in the Provinces 122 Paul Corner PART 3. DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1945 9. Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice 149 Marcin Kula viii Contents 10. Consent in the Communist GDR or How to Interpret Lion Feuchtwanger’s Blindness in Moscow 1937 168 Martin Sabrow 11. Demography, Opportunity or Ideological Conversion? Reflections on the Role of the ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’, or ‘1929ers’, in the GDR 184 Mary Fulbrook 12. Tacit Minimal Consensus: The Always Precarious East German Dictatorship 208 Thomas Lindenberger Select Bibiliography 223 Index 227 Notes on the Contributors P C teaches European History at the University of Siena. S F is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago. M F is Professor of History at University College London. J H is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Jersey. I K has recently retired from his position as Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. M K is Professor of History at Warsaw University. O D K teaches history at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. T L is director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres in Vienna, Austria, and teaches Modern History at Potsdam University, Germany. J P is a Dilthey Fellow in the ‘History of Emotions’ group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. M S is Director of the Zentrum fur¨ Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam. J S is Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh. Abbreviations ACS Central state archive, Rome b. busta (folder) BA Bundesarchiv (German Federal archives) CSSR Republic of Czechoslovakia DGPS Direzione Generale Pubblica Sicurezza (police department) GDR German Democratic Republic GUF fascist university organization HstAS State archive, Stuttgart IMT International Military Tribunal KGB Soviet Committee for State Security (secret police), post- 1954 KOR Polish Workers’ Defence Committee KPD German communist party MI Ministry of the Interior MVSN fascist paramilitary militia NEP New economic policy NKVD Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (includ- ing secret police) NSDAP German Nazi party OGPU Soviet secret police service, pre-1934 PNF Italian fascist party PRL Polish People’s Republic PZPR Polish United Workers’ Party RGASPI Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History RGBI Reich Law Registry Abbreviations xi RNS Reichsnahrstand¨ (Reich Food Estate) SA Sturmabteilung (storm troops) SD Sicherheitsdienst (security service) SED Socialist Unity Party (East Germany) SOPADE Exiled German Socialist Party (SPD) executive SPD Social Democratic Party of Germany SPEP Situazione provinciale economica politica StAL State archive, Ludwigsburg Stimmungsberichte reports on public mood TsGA IPD St Petersburg’s Central State Archive of Historico-Political Documentation USHMM United States Holocaust Memorial Museum VEB Volkseigener Betrieb (state-controlled factory) VfZ Vierteljahreshefte f¨urZeitgeschichte YVS Yad Vashem Studies This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction Paul Corner What did ‘ordinary’ people think about the totalitarian regimes they lived in? How did they relate to those regimes? Did the Soviet people always resent and resist Stalinism? Was there really a mass consensus for fascism among Italians? Did the immense torchlight rallies of the 1930s represent a genuinely spontaneous expression of enthusiasm of the German people for Nazism? And does Ostalgie reflect a real sense of loss among former East Germans, still convinced of the superiority of the ‘workers’ and peasants’’ state? These are just some of the questions this volume seeks to answer. Rather surprisingly they are questions which, in the main, have not received the attention they deserve. Totalitarian regimes of one sort or another have been one of the distinguishing features of the twentieth century, yet a thorough analysis of popular opinion in these regimes—its characteristics, its changes over time—has been lacking until relatively recently. It is not difficult to find an explanation for this; at least in part the questions were not asked simply because we thought we already knew the answers. The rhetoric of the Cold War provided us with ready-made schemes that left little room for further investigation.