The Russian Roots of National Socialism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism,1917-1945 by Michael KelloggReview by: Roger GriffinThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Apr., 2007), pp. 358-360Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4214453 .

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358 SEER, 85, 2, 2007

Kostyrchenko has interesting claims 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 actually part 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, Kostyrchenko claims that the impact of the Doctors' Plot, and the antisemitic hysteria which it generated, was already being muted on orders from the top when Stalin suffered his fatal stroke in March of I953. This was because Stalin recognized that the release of untrammelled inter-ethnic hostility would 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 'progressive circles' abroad. These claims, while very interesting, demand more evidence than Kostyrchenko presents here.

He is on firmer ground when he argues against the assumption, widely-held both at the time and since, that the frenzy surrounding the Doctors' Plot was being manipulated by the NKVD to provoke anti-Jewish pogroms. These planned disorders would have been used as an excuse to resettle the Jewish populations of large cities such as Moscow or Leningrad in Siberia or Central Asia. Kostyrchenko supports his claim by noting the absence in the archives of the lists that would have been necessary to identify and remove Jews. The mere resort to the notorious article 5 of the passport would not have sufficed, given the high rate of Jewish assimilation, exemplified by mixed marriages, whose offspring could hide their Jewish origins.

Kostyrchenko's work is essential reading for an understanding of t.he policies of late Stalinism, and not just in the realm of Soviet Jewry. As regards the latter, he has unearthed an enormous amount of material about the way in which anti-Jewish prejudices were integrated into the broadler Soviet worldview, ironically against one of the most 'Soviet' sections of t-he population. He does a superb job of putting it into a wider context.

Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies JOHN D. KLIER

University College London

Kellogg, Michael. The Russian Roots of National Socialism: W'hite Emigres and the Making of National Socialism, I9I7-I945. New Studies in 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-White emigre organization 'Aufbau'. 'Recon- struction: Economic-Political Organization for the East', to give it its full title, flourished in the formative stage of Nazism's development both 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-Bolshevism and antisemitism, actively pursued the policy of destroying and occupying Soviet Russia, and one of its members, Alfred Rosenberg,

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REVIEWS 359

became, after Goebbels and Hitler, the most prominent Nazi ideologue and self-styled expert on cultural policy.

Kellogg's reconstruction of the historical background to Aufbau provides valuable insights into the maelstrom of counter-revolutionary ultra- nationalism and racism stirred up by the Russian Revolution, and the organi- zational history has been carried out with impressive scholarly verve. The resulting analysis successfully fills the lacuna pointed out by Walter Laqueur in his Russia and Germany: A Centu?y of Conflict (Boston, MA, I965) when he com- mented on the lack of works assessing the 'tangible and substantial impact of refugees from Russia' on the origins of National Socialism. Any Slavonicist whose research concerns the inter-war period and the complex relationship between Nazism and Soviet Russia will have to take this book into account.

Nevertheless, it betrays a weakness typical of monographs based on PhDs, the most notorious example of which is William Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (London, I996). This is to overestimate the importance of 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 habitually commit the same error. For example, Kellogg drastically overstates his case when he argues that Aufbau played 'a pivotal role in guiding National Socialists and White emigres in a joint anti-Entente, anti-Weimar Republic, anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Semitic struggle' (p. 6). Whatever role Aufbau propaganda and members might have had in crystallizing Hitler's policy towards Russia, his imperialism, racial theory of the nation, antisemitism, and 'apocalyptic' vision of history had far deeper roots than this book implies.

Thus, while Rosenberg's Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Jewish- World Politics undoubtedly lent weight to the NSDAP's anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, it was only one document among many which shaped its antisemitic policies. In fact, with Walter Darre, Rosenberg was probably one of the least effectual and influential of the Nazi leaders in practical terms. To talk of 'collaboration' between volkisch Germans and vengeful White emigres implies linkages between two separate entities, which fudges the fact that the nationalism of the emigres had itself been shaped by the virulence of pre-19I4 volkisch racism. It also implies some sort of 'alliance' with Nazism, thereby misrepresenting a situation in which Aufbau members were absorbed into and subsumed within Nazism.

It was the NSDAP that arose from the ashes after Hitler's release from the Landsberg, not Aufbau. Hitler's equation of Judaism and Bolshevism may have been corroborated by its thinkers, but it was a topos of antisemitic thought long before their organization was formed and on which they themselves drew. Moreover, as Ian Kershaw has shown in his two-volume biography (London, I998 and 2000), the basic tenets of Hitler's worldview had developed before the Russian Revolution. Nor can the roots of the genocide of theJews be sought in the virulence of Aufbau antisemitism, since this would imply an 'intentionalism' belied by the facts so scrupulously assembled by Christopher Browning about the complex causality which led to the Final Solution. The Wannsee conference took place nearly twenty years after the Aufbau had ceased to exist, by which time Rosenberg, though head of the

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360 SEER, 85, 2, 2007

Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, was eclipsed as a policy maker on racial issues (he was represented at Wannsee by Alfred Mayer).

In short, Nazism was not driven primarily or even secondarily by the will to implement emigres' fantasies of destroying the Russian Revolution and eradicating Jewish Bolshevism. These goals had multiple origins and were only one aspect of an overriding goal of national rebirth, cultural, racial and imperial, that assumed different permutations in every sphere of society. Even within the Nazi hierarchy there were major differences of policy within the broad consensus on the need for Germany to be reborn and its Volkskdrper to be purged, a vision rooted in the quest for a new modernity to resolve the plural dysfunctions of Weimar Germany and not in the persuasiveness of any one pressure group.

Nazism was a hydra, whose different heads incarnated fantasies of rural regeneration, of blood and soil, of the awakening of occult Aryan energies, of the emergence of a 'New Religion' of German Christianity, of technocratic mastery of Eastern Europe, of a healthy mass society fully coordinated in work and leisure with the immortality of the Volk, of the eugenic creation of a master race, of cultural renaissance, of an urban civilization emulating Rome but celebrating Nordic supremacy not Romanita. Though Kellogg distances himself from Ernst Nolte's perverse portrait of the Second World War as a 'European Civil War' his exclusive focus on the Aufbau and overestimation of its impact comes close to duplicating Nolte's distorted perspective. Fortunately Kellogg cannot be of apologetic, revisionist intentions, and his scholarship has bequeathed considerable data about a neglected aspect of Nazism's convoluted history, even if its neglect is not as unwarranted as he likes to think.

School of Arts and Humanities ROGER GRIFFIN Oxford Brookes University

Tikka, Marko. Valkoisen hamdrdn maa? Suojeluskuntalaiset, virkavalta ja kansa I9I8-I92I. Historiallisia Tutkimuksia, 230. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuudlen Seura, Helsinki, 2006. 260 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. E32.oo.

THE period I9I8-21 in Finland, which is considered in Marko Tikka's book, was a time of instability. The Whites, who had won the Civil War of early I9I8, feared a new Red insurrection, and there was a strong sense of alienation from the state on the part of the defeated working class. Political intrigue and lawlessness flourished in a country awash with firearms during the years when a new constitution and democratic government were estab- lished and an effective police force and army were formed. Tikka considers the relationship between the Civil Guards, the authorities and the people during these troubled formative years of post-revolutionary Finland.

Originally set up to maintain order in the chaos which followed the Russian Revolution and Finland's declaration of independence, the Civil Guards became government troops during the Finnish Civil War and played a key

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