Getting an Education — Hitler, Stalin and Mao Today, Part III

Seeds of Fire Celebrates Forty Years

法日斯

 

In this chapter of Seeds of Fire: China Heritage Annual 2026 we continue our series on Hitler and Stalin Today, a lecture program devised and coordinated by Timothy D. Snyder, historian and author in 2016 of the book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, for The Munk School, University of Toronto.

On 4 July 2026, we marked the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence with Professor  Snyder whose work formed an earlier chapter of Contra Trump titled Twenty Lessons for a Nation Sleepwalking into Autocracy.

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Hitler and Stalin Today is an open-access lecture series and we are reproducing it China Heritage as part of Seeds of Fire, our 2026 Annual, in four parts:

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Although the term ‘Leninism’ enjoys renewed currency among some international China watchers when they describe Xi Jinping’s brand of Marxist nationalism, when discussing the ideological underpinnings of post-1949 China, here at China Heritage we have long preferred the term ‘Stalino-Maoism’. It remains salient today.

Since 2019, we have also employed Professor Xu Zhangrun’s shorthand expression for the ideological matrix of the Xi Jinping era (2012-): ‘Legalistic-Fascist-Stalinism’ 法日斯 Fǎ-Rì-Sī. Xu observed that Xi Jinping Thought is essentially cobbled together from elements of traditional harsh Chinese Legalist thought (法 fǎ, or 中式法家思想) and an admix of the Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist interpretation of Marxism (斯 sī, as in 斯大林主義) along with the Germano-Aryan form of fascism (日 rì, as in 日耳曼法西斯主義). (See Xu Zhangrun, Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear.)

In 2022, the first chapter of Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium featured a discussion of the Stalino-Fascist-Maoist legacy in contemporary China. See We Need to Talk About Totalitarianism, Again. Since then, we have frequently returned to the topic, in particular in Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium, a series devoted to the authoritarian turn in American politics and its resonances with Xi-era China.

In many respects, China is a mature fascist army-party-state. Taking into account its reformist decades and mercantilist strategy, we have also described it as a Semi-Feudal, Quasi-Capitalist Party-State.

We would suggest that the lecture series Hitler and Stalin Today could easily be expanded to include the living legacy of Mao Zedong, its global relevance and its looming threat. To that end, we will suggest readings drawn from China Heritage, which marks its tenth anniversary this year.

On 9 September 2026, the Chinese state will commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Mao’s death and, on 26 December, popular celebrations will mark Mao’s birthday. For a selection of our own lessons on Mao’s legacy, see:

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The rubric of this chapter in Seeds of Fire is 法日斯. It is also included in the two series Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium and Contra Trump.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
20 July 2026

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Related Material:

 

Hitler, Stalin & Us

Democracy is an attitude toward the future that demands a reckoning with the past.

In Hitler and Stalin Today, Timothy Snyder examines the Nazi and Soviet responses to the new globalized world they shared. The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now. Their ideologies are described as worldviews and as practical politics, with an emphasis on the reasons for their appeal. Attention to their policies of mass killing, essential events of twentieth-century history, instruct us about how “it” can happen here. The study of dissident thought helps us to see connections between historical predicaments and our own, and instructs us about possible reactions as individuals and as citizens. The course asks what we have learned from the twentieth century, and what we should.

— Hitler and Stalin Today, The Munk School, University of Toronto

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Class 5: What is Ukraine?

Ukraine has to be at the center of a class on Hitler and Stalin, because it was at the center of both men’s mental worlds. Each of them saw Ukraine as the key to a global transformation: be it the Stalinist plan to collectivize agriculture and build industry, or the Hitlerian plan to treat Ukraine as a breadbasket. In both cases, hugely ambitious ideologies found their axial point in a certain place; and in both cases, the attempt to transform Ukraine led to mass death. Between 1933 and 1945, the most dangerous place in the world was Ukraine. All this, as I seek to show in the lecture, was the latest stage in an ancient history. Ukraine has been less a crossroads and more a source of human innovation for centuries and millennia and indeed tens of thousands of years. Ancient history associated with Mesopotamia, Greece, or Rome very often only makes sense in connection with lands that are now Ukraine. With the globalization associated with modern history, Ukraine became for the first time an object rather than a subject of history, as its special position at the connection of steppe and salt water became less important, and as empires with global reach sought to base their power in its resources.

Readings:

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Class 6: Why was Communism appealing?

Guest Lecturer: Marci Shore

For much of the twentieth century the appeal of communism was simply a sociological fact; by now it is something that needs to be explained. Communism promised a future that was far better than the present and offered a way to achieve it; it presented a world full of darkness that could be broken by small circles of people who could see the light; and it provided those oppressed around the world with a beacon for their imaginations and hopes. The story of the appeal of communism is a reflection of the reality of suffering and atrocity; it is also one of betrayal, trauma, mass murder, and rethinking.

Readings:

  • Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, 2012, ix-xvii, 75-105.

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Class 7: How was mass killing possible?

At the center of the history of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were their policies of mass killing. The Soviets began first with terror during and after the revolution, the construction of a huge system of concentration camps, and then mass starvation. An organized political terror followed in the late 1930s. The Germans, after Hitler came to power in 1933, were most able to repress and then murder people defined as enemies, Jews above all, after they destroyed the states around them. Their greatest crime was the Holocaust, the deliberate murder of almost six million Jews; they also starved about three million Soviet prisoners of war to death, killed around a million people in “anti-partisan” operations, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma and perhaps a quarter of a million people deemed to be disabled. These crimes were committed by human beings, often at very close range, so they raise questions about the political conditions that are necessary for mass atrocity, but also about how people did and can react to those conditions.

Readings:

  • Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin,New York: Basic Books, 2022 (2010) vii-118.
  • Stalin to Kaganovich, 11 August 1932, in Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence.

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Source:

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史 shǐ, ‘to record, a person who makes a record, history’, in various hands