What are the similarities and differences between Nazis and Bolsheviks?

Question

I'm starting to read some books on WWII and I'm not clear on all the differences between terms like Nazis, Bolsheviks, facists vs. communists, etc.

Answer 1

Many of these terms have multiple meanings and associations, so there will not be one firm definition for each to distinguish it from all others.

All of these - Nazism, Bolshevism, fascism and communism - are forms of "collectivism." They are belief systems in which the community (national, race, religion, etc.) is more important than the individual. Whatever their outward differences, they hold this in common. The opposite of collectivism is individualism.

COMMUNISM is the oldest of these ideologies.

Communism (not the Soviet government but the idea) was an outgrowth of the 18th and 19th century reformist philosophers, especially in England, but also other parts of industrializing Europe. Many of these "Utopian Socialists" were social reformers, and the term "socialism" is often applied to their way of thinking.

Basically, many of them decided that the emerging competitive, capitalist-industrial system was too harsh. They wanted a softening of the conditions of life for ordinary people. Jeremy Bentham was an English factory owner who put some of these ideas into practice, providing a decent lifestyle for workers he employed, contrary to the practices of most English factory owners of his day.

The Utopian Socialists inspired many other thinkers. I recall, but may be mistaken, that some of their work lay behind the 1848 Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It is in this time period, if not in the Manifest itself, that the term "Communist" became associated with a particular position on economics and governments of the day.

Marx and Engels felt that all of history was moving toward the abolition of governments and the assumption of economic control by industrial workers. This "withering away of the state" was the stage they called "communism."

BOLSHEVISM

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia ended czarist rule. Actually, that's not quite right. A coalition of anti-czarists ended czarist rule, and the majority among them were called, "The Majority," or Bolshevik. (The minority were called Menshevik.)

Bolshevism is best understood as the program of V.I. Lenin after the Revolution. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks faced a large resistance movement, and Russia had its own civil war. To deal with the aftereffects of World War I and the ongoing Civil War, Lenin - formerly inspired by the Communist ideal of Marx & Engels - promoted "state socialism" as a way of battling the Bolsheviks' enemies, theoretically on the path toward the withering away of the state.

The state in question only withered away in 1991, after much suffering and loss of life.

FASCISM
Mussolini's intellectual backers described fascism as the communism of the 20th century. It was a collective system that emphasized nationality (whereas, in the context of the "withering away of the state" in communism, there would be no more nations) and business/industry.

Industrial capitalists controlled the workforce through "corporations," organizations which organized the workers within the limits that the emloyers could accept - i.e. not like independent unions.

Fascism became associated with militant nationalism in Italy, which in the 1930s occupied Ethiopia, so as not to be left behind in the European colonization of Africa. (Italy had tried before and failed in 1898 - in the 1930s, it held Ethiopia for about 5 years.)

The fascist ideology was kind of an oxymoron. The idea was that fascism was not about ideas, but about action. It was, in part, a reaction against the woefully ineffective legislature of Italy in the early decades of the 20th century. Tired of a divided government, declining economic opportunities, and a tarnished national pride, many Italians supported Mussolini and the fascists.

NAZISM

Inspired in part by Mussolini and the fascists, and in part acting out of despair with the similarly failed democratic government and declining economy of Germany in the 1920s and '30s, Hitler collaborated in the founding of the German National Socialist Party.

The Nazis focused on culture and national pride as the outward answer to Germany's problems. They blamed the state of the world on communists (associated with foreigners and non-ethnic Germans) and Jews - and whoever else was handy, but mainly on those two groups.

Like the tyrants of old, Hitler and the Nazis practiced "bread and circuses" along with their hateful beliefs. It's shallow but not inaccurate to think of the appeal of Nazism as an advertising slogan - "Come for the beer; stay for the genocide." Ordinary Germans, fed up with their hopeless economy and frustrated in their country's post-WWI humiliation, reacted by helping to exterminate 10 million Europeans whose survival offended them.

They believed their efforts would bring a resurgence of the Roman Empire - the Third Reich (1st - Rome, 2nd - Holy Roman Empire) or "Thousand-Year Reich" (Reich=reign or government).

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I don't want to leave out STALINISM.

Stalin was a contemporary of Lenin who ruled the Soviet Union after Lenin's death, from 1924 to 1956. Under Stalin, not only did about 10 million Soviet citizens die defending against the Nazis, but another approximately 20 million died in internal purges. I'm fuzzier on Stalin's thinking, but I understand it as a real merge between the supposedly short-term "state socialist" accomodations of Lenin and the Bolsheviks and the horrific, global ambitions of the Nazis.

Answer 2

Nazi (or National Socialists) are generally ruled by a single dictator, with additional limited power delegated to underlings.

The Bolsheviks were Marxist communists. Communism teaches that everyone in the society is equal, equal shares of the workloads, the governing and the benefits to be shared equally.

Answer 3

Nazis = WW2 Germans under Hitler, generally believing that Aryans are the superior race.
Communists = Generally speaking, those who believe that property and production belongs to the people in 'common.'
Bolsheviks = The Russians who rebelled against Czarist Russia, and generally became Communists
Fascists = Mostly in the vein of Mussolini in Italy, starting prior to WW2

Answer 4

"Fascists differed from Communists in that they had to a large extent thought out what they would do, and they then proceeded to do it, whereas Communists were like hypnotic subjects, doing one thing and rationalizing it in terms of a completely different and altogether impossible thing.

Fascists preached the accelerated development of a backward country. Communists continued to employ the Marxist rhetoric of world socialist revolution in the most advanced countries, but this was all a ritual incantation to consecrate their attempt to accelerate the development of a backward country. Fascists deliberately turned to nationalism as a potent myth. Communists defended Russian nationalism and imperialism while protesting that their sacred motherland was an internationalist workers state. Fascists proclaimed the end of democracy. Communists abolished democracy and called their dictatorship democracy. Fascists argued that equality was impossible and hierarchy ineluctable. Communists imposed a new hierarchy, shot anyone who advocated actual equality, but never ceased to babble on about the equalitarian future they were "building". Fascists did with their eyes open what Communists did with their eyes shut. This is the truth concealed in the conventional formula that Communists were well-intentioned and Fascists evil-intentioned."

http://www.la-articles.org.uk/fascism.htm

Answer 5

Nazism, a branch of Facism, emphasized the glorification of the past and the promotion of a specific race or other defined group.

Comunism (Bolsheviks) villanizes the past, and tries to destroy the existing society in order to found a country prepared for the glorious future unhindered by the chains of history.

In practice they amounted to the same thing. Government sponsered murder, scape goats, the corruption of actual history and science. Both used muder to scilence their opposition.

Answer 6

Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were Fascist! All fascism means is a police state: totalitarianism! All communist countries are totalitarian, which is fascist.

Answer 7

Communism as a theory of government and social reform may be said, in a limited sense, to have begun with the ancient Greek idea of the Golden Age, a concept of a world of communal bliss and harmony without the institution of private property. Plato, in his Republic, outlined a society with communal holding of property; his concept of a hierarchical social system including slavery has by some been called "aristocratic communism."
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/communism;_ylt=ApLy09v2UUyELEikIzEdzc1Vt8wF

Bolshevism:
1. The strategy developed by the Bolsheviks between 1903 and 1917 with a view to seizing state power and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat.
2. Soviet Communism.
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/Bolshevism;_ylt=Ap4ou5ugcnKkndt.PRDMsIWugMMF

Fascism has found adherents in all countries. Its essentially vague and emotional nature facilitates the development of unique national varieties, whose leaders often deny indignantly that they are fascists at all. In its dictatorial methods and in its use of brutal intimidation of the opposition by the militia and the secret police, fascism does not greatly distinguish itself from other despotic and totalitarian regimes. There are particular similarities with the Communist regime in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. However, unlike Communism, fascism abhors the idea of a classless society and sees desirable order only in a state in which each class has its distinct place and function. Representation by classes (i.e., capital, labor, farmers, and professionals) is substituted for representation by parties, and the corporative state is a part of fascist dogma.
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/fascism;_ylt=Auk1dSBr3J0G8HGOZ2ibWrkZvskF

National Socialism:
Vague and mystical, it was not a system of well-defined principles but rather a glorification of prejudice and myth with elements of nihilism. Its mainstays were the doctrines of racial inequality and of adherence to the leader, or Führer; its constant theme was nationalist expansion.

According to Nazi dogma, races could be scientifically classified as superior and inferior. The highest racial type was the Nordic, or Germanic, type of the "Aryan" race, while blacks and Jews were at the bottom of the racial ladder. Intermarriage contributed to the deterioration of the superior race, and the Jews, knowing this, had furthered prostitution and seduction to defile the Germans. Consequently only small islands of the pure remained, but it was their destiny to govern their inferiors and, through scientific breeding, to extend the "master race" and limit inferior races.

The Nazis accused Jews of obstructing the conquering path of the "master race." Marxism, international finance, and Freemasonry were all said to be Jewish devices created to dominate the world. Even Christianity was denounced by Rosenberg as a Jewish creation, but Hitler hedged on this point. International Jewry was blamed for the humiliation of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles (1919), and German Jewry was accused of betraying Germany in World War I.
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/NatlSoci;_ylt=AskPuuZ22EuiUzncCl9q.tRTt8wF