The Russian Roots of National Socialism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945 by Michael s> Kellogg (review)

Abstract

358 SEER, 85, 2, 2007 Kostyrchenkohas interestingclaims to make about the notorious Doctors' Plot. He believes it to have grown out of Stalin's long-standing concern about his health and the belief that medical advice for him to cut down on his work load was actuallypart of a plot to undermine his authority.These fears merged with broader concerns about state security, into which his minions dragged the Jews. While Stalin certainly allowed the case to go forward, Kostyrchenkoclaims that the impact of the Doctors' Plot, and the antisemitic hysteriawhich it generated,was alreadybeing muted on ordersfrom the top when Stalin sufferedhis fatalstrokein March of I953.This was because Stalin recognized that the releaseof untrammelledinter-ethnichostilitywould wreck the Soviet system which at least theoretically stood for the 'friendship of peoples'. He also feared that such naked chauvinism would discredit the Soviet Union in the eyes of 'progressivecircles' abroad. These claims, while very interesting,demand more evidence than Kostyrchenkopresentshere. He is on firmergroundwhen he arguesagainstthe assumption,widely-held both at the time and since, that the frenzy surroundingthe Doctors' Plot was being manipulated by the NKVD to provoke anti-Jewishpogroms. These planned disorderswould have been used as an excuse to resettle the Jewish populationsof large cities such as Moscow or Leningradin Siberiaor Central Asia. Kostyrchenkosupportshis claim by noting the absence in the archives of the lists that would have been necessaryto identify and removeJews. The mere resortto the notorious article5 of the passportwould not have sufficed, given the high rate of Jewish assimilation,exemplified by mixed marriages, whose offspringcould hide theirJewish origins. Kostyrchenko's work is essential reading for an understanding of t.he policies of late Stalinism,and notjust in the realm of SovietJewry. As regards the latter, he has unearthed an enormous amount of material about the way in which anti-Jewishprejudices were integrated into the broadler Soviet worldview, ironically against one of the most 'Soviet' sections of t-he population. He does a superbjob of putting it into a wider context. Department ofHebrew andJewishStudies JOHN D. KLIER University College London Kellogg, Michael. TheRussianRootsofNationalSocialism: W'hite Emigres andthe MakingofNationalSocialism, I9I7-I945. New Studiesin European History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2005. xiii + 327 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. f48.oo: $8o.oo. MICHAEL KELLOGG was clearly 'onto something' when he chose to write his PhD on the role of the German-Whiteemigre organization'Aufbau'.'Reconstruction :Economic-PoliticalOrganizationfor the East', to give it its full title, flourishedin the formativestage of Nazism's developmentboth as an ideology and as a revolutionary nationalist organization between I9I7 and 1923. Its neglect by scholars hitherto is curious given that it hosted virulent forms of anti-Bolshevismand antisemitism, actively pursued the policy of destroying and occupying Soviet Russia, and one of its members, Alfred Rosenberg, REVIEWS 359 became, after Goebbels and Hitler, the most prominent Nazi ideologue and self-styledexpert on culturalpolicy. Kellogg's reconstruction of the historical background to Aufbau provides valuable insights into the maelstrom of counter-revolutionaryultranationalismand racismstirredup by the Russian Revolution, and the organizational history has been carried out with impressive scholarly verve. The resultinganalysissuccessfullyfillsthe lacuna pointed out by WalterLaqueurin his RussiaandGermany: A Centu?y of Conflict (Boston, MA, I965) when he commented on the lack of works assessingthe 'tangibleand substantialimpact of refugees from Russia' on the origins of National Socialism. Any Slavonicist whose research concerns the inter-warperiod and the complex relationship between Nazism and Soviet Russia will have to take this book into account. Nevertheless, it betraysa weaknesstypical of monographsbased on PhDs, the most notorious example of which is William Goldhagen's Hitler'sWilling Executioners (London, I996). This is to overestimatethe importanceof the topic under investigation within the greater scheme of things to the point where it becomes the 'key' to a phenomenon which is in fact multifaceted and complex. Occultist schools of 'alternative'Nazi theory habituallycommit the same error. For example, Kellogg drastically overstates his case when he argues that Aufbau played 'a pivotal role in guiding National Socialistsand White emigres in a joint anti-Entente,anti-WeimarRepublic, anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Semitic struggle' (p. 6). Whatever role Aufbau propaganda and members might have had in crystallizingHitler's policy towards Russia, his imperialism,racialtheory of the...