Hitler's aesthetics - only for history lovers.

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This essay originated in a surprising little discovery I just made. Like everyone else who is interested in modern history, I knew that the Nazis had a marching song called the Horstwessellied, from an early militant who had died in a street riot. Recently I became curious to hear it

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and continued....

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Stalin stood out among the Bolsheviks. His oratory, according to early witnesses, savoured of the Orthodox seminary in which he had been educated, and his manners were much worse than those of his cosmopolitan colleagues. And he was raising a new generation not only of party members but more importantly of party apparatchiks, in his own image. Just as Hitler influenced the aesthetic and spiritual climate of his country not only by official statements but through the dozens of unofficial channels opened by the fact that he was the man who hired and fired, who chose people and gave them direction, the same was true for Stalin. The ignorance and arrogance of the "truly proletarian" commissars that he promoted started becoming a factor long before the Terror. 1927 is the defining year: the year in which Theramin left and Mayakovsky's magazine Lef was restarted as Novy Lef, "with an emphasis on documentary fact" - that is, along an already proto-Stalinist line. This is long before the purges and the Terror; Mayakovsky's own suicide, which is the declaration of failure and surrender of the whole modernist-Bolshevik generation of intellectuals, takes place in 1930, four years before the murder of Kirov. Nevertheless, it is important - for a proper appreciation not only of Russian history but of the history of modern art and culture too - never to forget that for a good eight to ten years, Lenin's murderous government had been identified, and not wrongly, with the best in red-hot intellectual modernity.