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Alfred J. Rieber

Stal in’s repu tation as a wartime leader continu es to be cont roversi al at hom e and abr oad because of the deep inconsi stencies an d parad oxes of his behaviour. He had anticipated war for at least a decade before it came, prepared for it, yet was taken by surprise when the Germans invaded in June 1941. As he mobilised the country for war in the 1930s, he weakened the institutions that might have served him best in fighting it: the army command, the diplomatic corps, the federal structure, the Comintern, even the armament industries. He failed to predict the breakdown of the wartime alliance with the USA and Great Britain, although he harboured deep suspicions over the behaviour of his allies during most of the conflict.

A Marxist-Leninist who believed in the inevitability of war as long as capitalism survived, Stalin misconstrued the basic character of the Second World War, and the Soviet Union suffered terrible consequences as a result. He survived his mistakes, but his was a pyrrhic victory. The aim of this chapter is to explore the sources of these paradoxes as a way of shedding light on Stalin as a statesman and wartime leader who did his best to keep the Soviet Union out of both a hot and a cold war, but who failed on both accounts.

For Stalin, war rather than revolution was the major catalyst of social change. In 1917 he was conspicuously absent from the centre of the planning and execution of the October Revolution. During the Central Committee debates about a separate peace with Germany in the winter of 1917–18, he expressed his scepticism over an imminent European revolution: ‘there is no revolutionary movement in the West, nothing existed, only a potential.’¹

The research for this chapter was made possible by a grant from the Research Board of the Central European University.

1 The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Minutes of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), August 1917–February 1918 (London: Pluto, 1974), pp. 177–8; for Stalin’s absence Robert Slusser, Stalin in October: The Man Who Missed the Revolution (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1987).

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During the Civil War and intervention he regarded the Red Army as the main instrument of spreading the Bolshevik Revolution into the border-lands of the former tsarist empire. He pursued this policy with vigour in Ukraine, and most aggressively in Georgia where he not only convinced a reluctant Lenin to support an intervention by the Red Army, but ignored the local Bolsheviks in the campaign to overthrow the Menshevik govern-ment. He was, however, sceptical of the ability of the Red Army to carry the Revolution on its bayonets into Poland where ‘class conflicts have not reached such a pitch as to undermine the sense of national unity’.²For Stalin, war was a necessary but not sufficient basis for radical change;

domestic class relations also mattered. Instead of advancing on Warsaw he favoured defeating Wrangel in the Crimea, securing the rear of the Red Army, and then driving on to Lwow (L’viv) in order to complete the unification of Ukraine by incorporating East Galicia.³

Stalin favoured direct action by the centre over spontaneous fusion in reunifying the Great Russian core with the national borderlands of the old empire. As early as the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918 he stated that ‘the roots of all conflicts between the periphery and central Russia lie in the question of power’.⁴According to his analysis, the socio-economic backwardness of the periphery enabled local nationalists, espe-cially his beˆtes noires the Georgian Mensheviks, to promote separation from the centre, weakening Soviet power. This in turn created ‘a zone of foreign intervention and occupation’ that further threatened the proletarian heartland.⁵Stalin’s obsession with the vulnerability of Soviet frontiers to foreign intervention in support of internal opposition shaped his interwar policies toward the republics of Belorussia, Ukraine, and the neighbour-ing states of Poland and Romania, the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, his war aims, and his concept of post-war security.

The danger of external attack receded with the end of the Russian Civil War, intervention, and the Russo–Polish War. But these events were never far from Stalin’s mind. He incorporated them, as he had done in the past and would do in the future, into his ongoing revision of Marxism-Leninism. Embedded in his concepts of the inevitability of war, socialism in one country, and capitalist encirclement was the implicit belief that the external world represented not so much an opportunity to launch further

2 I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, 13 vols. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1946–52), IV, p. 336.

3 I. V. Mikhutina, Pol’sko-Sovetskaia voina, 1919–1920gg. (Moscow: RAN Institut slavianovedeniia i balkanistiki, 1994), pp. 182–3. For a severe indictment of Stalin’s behaviour during the campaign that does not mention the national question see Thomas C. Fiddick, Russia’s Retreat from Poland, 1920: From Permanent Revolution to Peaceful Coexistence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), ch. 12.

4 Stalin, Sochineniia, IV, p. 31. ⁵ Ibid., pp. 162, 237, 372.

revo lutionary offensive s as a p otential threat to the territori al integr ity, ind eed the survi val of the Soviet state. He was prep ared to exaggera te and man ipulate the dange r in order to confoun d his internal enemi es and advan ce his own agend a. Yet it is no easy matte r for the outside obs erver to draw a clear distin ction, if one eve r existed, among reality, fan tasy, and inve ntion in St alin’s perce ption of the extern al worl d.

A case in point is the war sc are of the late 1920s . A serie s of inter-nation al inciden ts during these years arou sed fears within the Soviet lead ership and the publ ic that war was imm inent. It is now cl ear that the se fears were not only gro undless but were manipu lated by Stalin in his campa ign to destroy the Ri ght Oppositi on.⁶ St alin was , none theless , convin ced tha t unreliab le element s among the pop ulations of the west ern peri phery could prove troublesome in the event of a major conflict with Poland and Romani a. OGP U report s streng thene d his conv iction.

Peas ant resistanc e to collecti visation in the borde rlands confirm ed it.

Stal in’s recurre nt nightma re was the prospect of Po lish interve ntion in Ukrai ne in support of domestic unrest. He responded by taking charac-teristically contradictory measu res, depor ting Polish villagers suspect ed of nation alis t opposit ion, and at the same time creatin g a Polis h nation al regi on along the Belo russia frontier in ord er to fight ‘cha uvinism’. ⁷

Despi te these ‘alarms and excurs ions’ St alin only began in earnest to buil d a m odern army and defence ind ustry with the inaugu ration of the Secon d Five-Y ear Plan. ⁸ He reacte d belat edly to the real dange r signalled by the Japanese occ upati on of Manc huria and Hitler’s coming to powe r in Ge rmany. At the Se venteent h Party Congr ess in 1934, in his on ly maj or forei gn polic y address duri ng the cru cial deca de of the thirties devote d to the nature of wars, he pred icted ‘an imperialist war’, wh ich h e blamed on

‘extr eme na tionalis m’ without nam ing the most likely aggressor. He sketc hed ou t four scen arios for war without ind icating which was the more likely to occ ur. In every case war woul d pro mote revolu tion. But Stal in stopped short of desc ribing the kin d of regim es that might emerg e from tho se revo lutions , an omi ssion which should be kep t in mind wh en

6 L. N. Nezhinskii, ‘Byla li voennaia ugroza SSSR v kontse 20-x -nachale 30-x godov?’, Istoriia SSSR 6 (1990), 14–30.

7 O. N. Ken and A. I. Rupasov, Politbiuro TsK VKP (b) i otnosheniia SSSR s zapadnymi sosednimi gosudarstvami (konets 20–30-kh gg.). Problemy. Dokumenty. Opyt kommenariia, pt 1, 1928–1934 (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii Dom, 2000), pp. 484–5, 491, 497. A special commission of the Politburo for studying the security of the frontier zone had been established as early as 1925. Ibid ., p. 486.

8 The share of defence in the total budget expenditure rose in the following pattern:

1933–3.4%; 1934–9.1%; 1935–11.1%; 1936–16.1%; 1937–16.5%; 1938–18.7%;

1939–25.6%; 1940–32.6%. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 230.

considering his policies in the borderlands during and after the Second World War.⁹

Thus, on the eve of the momentous shift in both Soviet foreign policy towards collective security and Comintern policy toward a popular front, Stalin’s message fell short of a clarion call to resist fascism. The speech was vintage Stalinism. He met uncertainty with ambiguity. He staked out the middle ground without indicating the direction in which he might move.

Events would dictate. Having exhausted all the possible combinations that might lead to war, he could never be proven wrong. The point was not to commit himself prematurely to a course of action that he might later regret, or that might be used against him by whichever internal enemies might emerge in a moment of political confusion and uncertainty. The one certainty remained his belief, rooted in Leninism, of the inevitability of war.

The ambiguity of Stalin’s tactical moves from the Seventeenth Congress to the Nazi–Soviet Pact has given rise to conflicting views about his intentions. Did Stalin’s genuine commitment to collective security and the Popular Front erode under the cumulative effect of Anglo-French actions during the Spanish Civil War, at Munich, and in their abortive negotiations in Moscow in the summer of 1939?¹⁰Or did Stalin plan all along to cut a deal with Hitler?¹¹ The problem of inter-pretation arises from the fact that Stalin prepared for war along two parallel lines, one internal, the other external. Internally he completed the process, begun for other reasons, of eliminating any potential opposition that in the event of a war might invoke what Trotsky had called the Clemenceau option of overturning a government in order to pursue the war effort more effectively. This explains in part the accusations of treason that Stalin levelled against suspected opponents among high-ranking party, army, defence, industrial, and Comintern personnel from 1936–9.

The precise proportions of political calculation and psychological derangement that drove Stalin to these extreme measures will always be

9 Stalin, Sochineniia, XIII, pp. 267–69.

10 Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–39 (London: Macmillan, 1984) and Teddy Uldricks, ‘Debating the Role of Russia in the Origins of the Second World War’, in G. Martel (ed.), The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered (London: Routledge, 1999). Both Haslam and Ulricks generally take this position.

11 Jiri Hochman, The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, 1934–1938 (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1984) and R. C Raack, Stalin’s Drive to the West, 1938–1945:

The Origins of the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) share this view.

Haslam has recently reviewed one aspect of the debate in ‘Soviet-German Relations and the Origins of the Second World War: The Jury Is Still Out’, Journal of Modern History 4 (1997), 785–97.

a matter of speculation. But their effect cut two ways. When the Germans invaded there was no alternative to his leadership even though he had led the country to the brink of disaster. But in order to secure this position he destroyed what was arguably the most talented group of general staff officers in the world, and decimated the international communist move-ment including Party leaders in the front-line Soviet republics exposed to foreign invasion.

In his external relations, Stalin’s attitude toward the Popular Front also displayed contradictions that were not, it must be admitted, entirely of his own making.¹²These showed up most dramatically in Spain and China, where the Soviet Union backed up its endorsement of a Popular Front with military aid and volunteers. Stalin even expanded on Dimitrov’s definition with a public endorsement in the form of a letter to Largo Caballero that a Popular Front government could make the transition to socialism by parliamentary means.¹³ Simultaneously, he pressed the Chinese Communists to enter a coalition government with the Kuomintang. He had adumbrated the idea of a transitional stage between bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1928 during his first speech to the Comintern when he revived and revised the formula Lenin first mentioned in 1905 and then discarded of a

‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’.¹⁴Clearly, his policy was aimed at maintaining the broadest possible coalition of anti-fascist forces at both the international diplomatic level and at the local fighting fronts in wars far distant from the Soviet borders. Standing in the shadows of these pragmatic concerns was Stalin’s fear of an autonomous, spontaneous revolutionary movement outside his control that could claim equal status with the Soviet Union by virtue of making its own October.

Local conditions in Spain and China proved far too complex for Stalin to manage by remote control. In China during the battle for Wuhan, Chiang Kai-shek rejected the advice of his Soviet advisors to commit his armoured forces consisting of Soviet tanks to a major offensive against the

12 There was much uncertainty and disagreement within the Comintern over the Popular Front and little coordination between the new policy and the negotiation of the Franco-Soviet and Czech-Franco-Soviet treaties of mutual assistance. Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France. Defending Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 26–41.

13 E. H. Carr, The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 86–7.

14 Referring to such predominantly peasant societies such as Poland and Romania, Stalin had raised the possibility of intermediate stages such as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’, dropping Lenin’s modifier of ‘democratic’. Stalin, Sochineniia, XI, pp. 155–6.

Japanese. At the same time Chiang resisted the urging of the Chinese Communists to arm the workers and conduct a revolutionary war against the Japanese.¹⁵Yet Stalin continued to urge the communists to cooperate with the Kuomintang. In Spain, disagreements among Comintern repre-sentatives, the activities of the NKVD, and the communist repression of the anarchists in the name of unity fatally weakened the republic. Yet Stalin permitted the defeated and exiled Spanish communists to defend their leftist policies.¹⁶It was becoming increasingly evident to him that each country presented a set of specific conditions that defied a uniform policy. As early as 1940, he had considered abolishing the Comintern and substituting bilateral relations with local communist parties. Yet despite the Spanish de´baˆcle and the impotence of the Popular Front in China he continued to believe in the idea of a transitional stage; only henceforth it would have to conform to local circumstances as he interpreted them.

The Czech crisis of 1938 together with the crumbling of the Popular Front in Spain and China revealed to Stalin the weakness of the policy of collective security. The major stumbling-block to invoking the Franco–Soviet alliance in defence of Czechoslovakia proved to be the refusal of Poland and Romania to grant the Red Army transit rights in the event of war with Germany. Soviet military plans envisaged a campaign fought outside the western frontier of the Soviet Union. This would prevent a battleground in the borderlands, where strong resistance to collectivisation combined with nationalist ferment.¹⁷

Stalin reacted to the complexities of the international situation in the late thirties by permitting different voices within the Soviet elite to engage in a muted debate over an ideological question that masked real policy options. Was there a real distinction within the capitalist camp between

‘peace-loving’ and ‘aggressive’ powers that could be best exploited in the interests of security by a Soviet alignment with the former? This was the main assumption of Litvinov and his supporters. Or were all the imperialist powers, although antagonistic to one another, also equally hostile to the Soviet Union, in which case a policy of withdrawal or isolation would be in order, leaving the imperialists to fight it out until the propitious

15 A. I. Cherepanov, Zapiski voennogo sovetnika v Kitae, 2nd edn. (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), pp. 323–32; A. Ia. Kaliagin, Po neznakomym dorogam. Zapiski voennogo sovetnika v Kitae, 2nd edn. (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), pp. 92n, 282.

16 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (henceforth RGASPI) f. 495, op. 10a, d. 2521, ll. 17–50.

17 Hugh Ragsdale, The Soviets, the Munich Crisis and the Coming of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); R. Savushkin, ‘K voprosu o zarozhde-nii teorii posledovatel’nykh nastupatel’nykh operatsii’, Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal 5 (1983), 78–82.

moment arrived for a direct Soviet intervention? Such was the thinking of Zhdanov and Molotov.¹⁸In neither case was the idea abandoned that war was the harbinger of revolution, although Stalin had left open the nature of the regimes that would be established as a result.

In the parallel negotiations with the Anglo-French and the Germans during the summer of 1939, Stalin’s dual aim was to avoid being drawn into a war that he believed inevitable, and to ensure that if and when he became involved it would be under the most favourable political and military circumstances. What he sought from the Anglo-French was an iron-clad mutual assistance pact embracing Poland and Romania as well as the three signatory powers, guarantees against ‘indirect aggression’

through a fascist coup in the Baltic states, and safe passage of Soviet troops through Polish and Romanian territory in case of a German attack on those two states or the Soviet Union.¹⁹If concluded, such a pact would have encircled Hitler with a powerful military alliance and confronted him with the certainty of fighting a three-front war in the event of his aggression. Would this deterrent guarantee the peace?

If not, then at least the Red Army would be fighting on foreign soil;

its presence as an ally on Polish and Romanian territory might well foster the kind of political changes in those countries that had not been possible in Spain or China. When the Anglo-French negotiators were unable to guarantee transit rights, Voroshilov suspended and effectively ended the talks.²⁰

The Nazi–Soviet Pact did not, by contrast, involve a military alliance, and Stalin refused to conclude one with Germany over the following months. Its main advantages in Stalin’s mind were to keep the Soviet Union out of the coming ‘imperialist war’ and to strengthen its strategic position by a division of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Given his assumption that the war in the West would be prolonged, the Soviet Union would also be in a position to advance its frontiers by annexing territories assigned to its sphere without German interference and to make additional demands on Hitler, especially in the Balkans, while German forces were tied up in a western campaign. Operating on the

18 Silvio Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 1936–1941 (London: Frank Cass, 2002) presents the most sophisticated analysis of policy differences among the Soviet elite but concludes that ‘Litvinov never managed to present a forceful alternative to this dogmatic view [combining a revival of 1914 and 1918] that dominated Stalinist thinking on foreign policy’, p. 119.

19 Soviet Peace Efforts on the Eve of World War II (September 1938–August 1939), 2 vols.

(Moscow: Novosti, 1973), II, pp. 202–10. The Soviet war plans were presented in detail

(Moscow: Novosti, 1973), II, pp. 202–10. The Soviet war plans were presented in detail