The best laid plans sometimes don't exist.

Why didn't the Bolsheviks have a plan, or indeed any idea about what to do after they took power in 1917? Why didn't Hitler have anything more than broad policy objectives and rhetoric when he took power in 1933?

A month before the October Revolution, Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev told a meeting of the Military Revolutionary Committee that whilst it would be comparatively easy to take power, holding on to it and wielding it would be next to impossible. Leon Trotsky, in the same month announced that the role of the Bolsheviks would be to issue decrees on the abolition of the Czarist State, private property and to end the war, and also to publish the secret communiques of the Czar and the Provisional Government to the Allies, discrediting both parties permanently. After that, he famously stated, the Bolsheviks could 'shut up shop'. This seemed to fit in with the line that Marx had taken in Das Kapital, the notion that the bourgeois state would cease to exist after a socialist revolution. A brief period of the dictatorship of the prolateriat would allow for all state mechanisms to be dismantled, and something much closer to anarchism would represent the ultimate form of social organisation. One can hardly be surprised at the Bolsheviks antipathy to the idea of the state, as far as active revolutionaries were concerned, the state was something to hate and fear, an organisation that either imprisoned, exiled or censored them. Kamenev and Zinoviev were perhaps more circumspect than Trotsky, who's arrogance and faith in doctrine allowed him to make a number of assumptions and mistakes throughout the revolutionary and civil war period.
Both of them realised that running Russia even in the short term, post 1917 would be difficult because of the shattered economy, food shortages, failing transport infrastructure and continuing war against the Germans. Lenin seems to have been in no doubt how to deal with post revolutionary Russia, while he ommitted to mention it in speeches he had long envisioned a revolutionary terror and desired a civil war in order to legitimise that terror. Lenin's ability to abandon doctrine when it suits him and to adopt the most pragmatic and brutal methods in order to safeguard the revolution were qualities that were present later on in Hitler in the 1930s.

Like Lenin, Hitler believed that he was appointed by history in order to drive forward some version of historic destiny, Lenin's change had been social, Hitler's would be racial. It is curious how two atheists endorsed beliefs which were bordering on mysticism. The notion of having been chosen by powerful invisible forces to bring history to its logical conclusion, in one instance a worker's utopia, and in the other a 1,000 Year Reich, seems ill at ease with the powerful rationalist (or irrationalist) ideas both espoused. Hitler was pragmatic in his anti democratic, anti socialist, anti semitic acts, acting where opportunity presented itself and backing off when presented with sufficient opposition. He, like the Bolsheviks, seems to have been gifted only with some very hazy notions of how a future Reich should be run, prefering to focus on rhetoric and speech making, watching films and dreaming about the size and shape of his future capital Germania. Hitler had little interest in day to day administration and yet he also looked upon civil servants who did the work he felt was beneath him with an undisguised contempt. In the manner of many autocrats before and since, he thought that a civil service was an effective block between him and the German people, a spiritual barrier. One of the things that is most curious about popular perceptions of Hitler today is the notion that whilst he was capable of unspeakable cruelty, he was, in essence, a brilliant organiser. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was not lacking plans for the same reasons as Trotsky, because he had based his beliefs about society rather naievely on a theory that was as yet untested, no Hitler's disorganisation has more banal roots, and roots that are deeply personal to him.
Firstly Hitler seemed to reject every change in the policy of government since the end of the middle ages, with Der Fuhrerprincip, or leadership principal. He felt that societies would operate as they should simply through blind obedience to the right 'visionary' leader ie him. Hitler was sure that any failings in a democracy existed because it was a democracy, and that the German people had a higher perpose, that perpose could only be achieved if he led them. Hitler once said that he would never have children because they would only turn out to be dissapointments to him, none could be the genius that he clearly was. The source of this delusional megalomaniacal thinking is probably deeply embeded in childhood, a violent father and an overly protective, smothering mother, a life of acute failure and disappointment, rejection and self loathing. The results of this megalomania for Germany was catastrophic. Hitler ruled like a feudal lord, playing off Nazi party bosses against one another, duplicating offices, tasks and positions and watching as they fought amongst themselves for his favour. Access to Hitler was also very difficult and often his personal secretary would convey whether or not the Fuhrer approved of a policy or not.

It seems that both Bolshevik and Nazi Leaders viewed their plans to get into power as being extraordinarily important, and their plans on what to do when in power as rather trivial. Both viewed parliamentary democracy as an anathema, and neither seem to have had any sort of relationship with their civil servants, other than one of mutual antagonism. Perhaps the route cause of their thinking is their confidence in differing kinds of utopian visions, and the notion that once power was siezed and a workers or aryan utopia was commenced, nothing else would matter. For our times, with the resergance of a far right that still admires Hitler, any claims they might have to some sort of visionary leadership on his part must be exposed as the myths they are. Hitler may well go down as the laziest dictator in history, spending half the day in bed or watching hollywood movies. Similarly on the left, who still fete Trostsky, and to some extent Lenin as visionary heroes, not the men who encouraged a civil war that killed nearly 10 million people (these are the same people who are quick enough to damn Bush and Blair for starting a war that killed 1 million) the myth of their competence must also be exposed.