About the Book
The Three Editions of European Dictatorships
European Dictatorships was first published in 1987. Since then it has appeared in a second edition in 2000 and a third edition in 2008; each of these has expanded the text throughout and has included revised interpretations to reflect the most recent research.
Some features have remained consistent between the three editions. The main focus has always been on Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Other regimes have also been covered, but to a lesser extent: Spain, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Albania, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. In addition, the three editions have all provided a preliminary chapter on the Setting for dictatorship and one on Dictatorships compared.
There have, however, been changes. These have increased the length of the third edition over the second by 68 pages.
- Chapter 1: The Setting for dictatorship — has been expanded to reflect current writing on the comparative importance of the pre-1914 period and the First Word War; it has also added a section on another recent emphasis — the ‘crisis’ of modernity as a factor in the emergence and development of the ideologies associated with dictatorship.
- The third edition considers in more detail the controversy over the use of the word ‘dictatorship’ as well as the historiography of terms like ‘authoritarian’, ‘totalitarian’, ‘fascist’ and ‘communist’. These are now covered in a new Chapter 2: Types of dictatorship.
- The main difference between the first and second editions concerned Chapter 3: Dictatorship in Russia. The first edition, published in 1987 reflected the standard approach at the time. Fascist Italy had long been regarded as an imperfect totalitarian dictatorship, with considerable weaknesses. Nazi Germany, too, had recently been exposed by German historians as an inefficient regime with structural flaws. Both were contrasted with the tighter system in Stalinist Russia which was the most completely totalitarian of the three regimes. The second edition (2000) included more recent research conducted after the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 (four years after the publication of the first edition). Revisionist historians now saw the Soviet system also as ramshackle, with events often spiralling out of Stalin's control as they had out of Hitler's and Mussolini's. The third edition, published in 2008, has shown that this view has been pulled back a little by some post-revisionists, to the extent that Stalin's control has been partially restored, even if the system itself remained flawed. There has also been a great deal of recent work on the fundamental importance of race to Nazism (given greater emphasis in the third edition) and on the complexity of Fascist ideology — as opposed to the banalities of Mussolinianism; the third edition has provided an overall balance in new sections at the end of the chapters on Italy and Germany.
- Some issues have expanded rapidly in importance and are therefore given increased coverage in the third edition. This applies especially to the Holocaust, on which there has been a huge outpouring of publications of all kinds — about 300 books a year in English alone. Chapter 5 considers some of the theories which have been advanced about the involvement of Nazi Germany — and other regimes.
- The chapter on Dictatorships compared has been expanded in the third edition to include more detailed analysis of leadership and the cult of personality; state, party and army; social control; and security and terror. There is also a new section on the impact of war.
- The chapter on Dictatorships elsewhere has added a section on Turkey, the experience of which was essentially different to that of other states in the area.