Stalin

By inclination, Stalin was a Russian nationalist in the imperial sense, and anti-Western, the core impulse of long-standing Russian-Eurasian political culture. Initially, the ambitious Soviet version of the quest to match the West in order to preserve Russia’s anti-Western identity had increased the country’s dependency on the superior West. But after wholesale technology transfer, Stalin’s regime went on, at high cost and low efficiency, to develop sophisticated military and related industry to a degree unprecedented for even a military-first country. Geopolitically, however, whereas tsarist Russia had concluded foreign alliances for its security, the Soviet Union sought or could manage only nonaggression pacts. The country’s self-isolation became ever more extreme. One flanking power, Japan, had spurred Stalin’s no-holds-barred militarization, and after years of timid responses, he had finally decided to rebuff the challenge of this island power by flaunting the USSR’s better-armed and better-commanded land forces in a border war. The other flanking power, Germany, presented an incalculably greater challenge, given the geography, Germany’s military strength on land, and the special qualities of its ruler. Stalin insisted on calling fascism “reactionary,” a supposed way for the bourgeoisie to preserve the old world.⁹¹ But Hitler turned out to be someone neither Marx nor Lenin had prepared Stalin for.

A lifelong Germanophile, Stalin appears to have been mesmerized by the might and daring of Germany’s parallel totalitarian regime. For a time, he recovered his personal and political equilibrium in his miraculous Pact with Hitler, which deflected the German war machine, delivered a bounty of German machine tools, enabled the reconquest and Sovietization of tsarist borderlands, and reinserted the USSR into the role of arbitrating world affairs. Hitler had whetted and, reluctantly, abetted Stalin’s own appetites. But far earlier than the despot imagined, his ability to extract profit from the immense danger posed by Hitler to Europe and beyond had run its course. This generated unbearable tension in Stalin’s life and rule, yet he stubbornly refused to come to grips with the new realities, and not solely out of greed for German technology. Despite his insight into the human psyche, and demonic shrewdness, Stalin was blinkered by ideology and idées fixes. Churchill controlled not a single division on the Soviet frontier, yet Stalin remained absolutely obsessed with British imperialism, railing against the Versailles order long after Hitler had shredded it. He also obsessed over supposed secret British negotiations behind his back with Hitler.⁹²

For Hitler, the 1939 Pact with the USSR was nothing more than what the 1918 Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany had been for Lenin: a distasteful necessity, which, with luck, would not endure very long. Lenin’s luck had been delivered by imperial Germany’s idiotic precipitation of American entry into the First World War; Hitler’s came from his own audacity and the mistakes of his slow-to-react, divided foreign adversaries. The alliance system had not caused the First World War, but the absence of alliances helped cause the Second. A debate continues over the possibility of a genuine Western-Soviet military alliance to deter and, if necessary, defeat Germany in the 1930s, including the logistical difficulties for any combined military action posed by recalcitrant Poland and Romania. But logistics can always be managed when the will is there. Sir Stafford Cripps, the maladroit, well-intentioned British ambassador, grasped that German-Soviet relations were precarious, but he could bring neither his own government nor the Soviet Union anywhere near a British-Soviet rapprochement. Given the profundity of mutual distrust between London and Moscow, only an unequivocal perception by both of the urgency of state survival could have made a bilateral alliance possible, and even then, only for a time. Of course, survival was precisely what was at stake.

Hitler’s racial, Social Darwinist, zero-sum understanding of geopolitics meant that both the USSR and Great Britain would have to be annihilated in order for Germany to realize its master race destiny. To be sure, in the immediate term, he thought in terms of domination of the European continent (Grossmacht), which required Lebensraum in the east. But in the longer term, he foresaw domination of the world (Weltmacht), which would require a blue-water fleet, bases rimming the Atlantic, and a colonial empire in the tropics for raw materials. That was incompatible with the continued existence of the British empire, at least in its present form. Hitler thus put himself in front of a stark choice of either agreeing to deepen the Pact with Stalin, to take on Britain now, which meant conceding at least a partial Soviet sphere in the Balkans and on the Black Sea—on top of the Soviet sphere in the Baltics—or, alternately, freeing himself from the infuriating dependency on Moscow to take on Britain later. In the end, military circumstances helped determine the sequencing: Hitler did not possess the air or naval capabilities or the depth of resources to prevail militarily over island Britain; he did command the land-based wherewithal to attempt to smash the USSR.

A commitment to a prolonged contest for supremacy with Britain, which Hitler expected to be aided more and more by the vast resources of the United States, made quick annihilation of the Soviet Union an absolutely necessary prelude.⁹³ Moreover, even though Hitler and the German high command knew the Soviet Union was not poised to attack, the invasion amounted to a preventive war all the same in his logic, for the Soviet Union was only getting stronger, and might itself attack at a time it deemed more advantageous. And so, while pushing Japan to attack British positions in East Asia, he had offered the British government a version of the pact he had concluded with Stalin, in order to violate the latter, and he seemed dumbfounded that the British government did not accept.⁹⁴ The Nazi leader had grasped his foe’s imperial mind-set, and he was sincere when promising that, in exchange for a free hand on the continent, he would keep Britain’s empire intact for now (its destruction, in any case, would redound to others besides Germany in the short term). He continued to hold out hope that Britain, patently weak militarily on land and therefore unable to defeat him, would see “reason.” But Hitler had failed to grasp Britain’s long-standing preference for a balance of power on the continent.⁹⁵ He did, however, perceive far more common interest between London and Moscow than either of them saw themselves.

During the all-out preparations for blitzkrieg against the USSR, Hitler continued to order that resources be devoted to preparing for a long naval and air war against the UK and the United States. May–June 1941 was the blackest period yet for Britain: its ships were being sunk and its cities bombed, while its position in the Balkans had been lost to Nazi domination. After German paratroopers had captured Crete, in late May 1941, the British position seemed grievously imperiled. Eleven days before the scheduled launch of the Soviet invasion, Hitler had dictated a draft of Directive No. 32, “Preparations for the Time After Barbarossa.” It envisioned subdivision and exploitation of Soviet territories, as well as a pincer movement against the Suez Canal and British Near East positions via Bulgaria-Turkey, the Caucasus, and Iran-Iraq-Syria; the conquest of Gibraltar, northwest Africa, and the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic islands, to eliminate the British in the Mediterranean; the building of coastal bases in West and possibly East Africa; and the creation of a German base in Afghanistan for seizing British India.⁹⁶ Had Hitler thrown all his might into this “peripheral strategy” rather than invading the USSR, Britain might not have survived.⁹⁷ The war with the Soviet Union would have gone ahead at some point, but with Britain knocked out of the picture. There would have been no British beachhead to assist an eventual U.S.-led Allied landing in Western Europe.⁹⁸

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HITLER, ONE SCHOLAR HAS REMINDED US, cannot be explained in terms of his social origins or his early life and influences, a point that is no less applicable to Stalin.⁹⁹ The greatest shaper of Stalin’s being was the building and running of a dictatorship, whereby he assumed responsibility for Russia’s power in the world. In the name of socialism, Stalin, pacing in his Kremlin office, had grown accustomed to moving millions of peasants, workers—whole nations—across a sixth of the earth, on his own initiative, often consulting no one. But his world had become intensely constricted. Hitler had cornered the Soviet despot in his own Little Corner.

Stalin’s dealings with Hitler differed from British appeasement in that he tried significant deterrence as well as accommodation, and he took as much as he gave. But Stalin’s policy resembled British appeasement in that he was driven by a blinding desire to avoid war at all costs. He displayed strength of capabilities but not of will. Neither his fearsome resolve nor his supreme cunning—which had enabled him to vanquish his rivals and spiritually crush his inner circle—were in evidence in 1941. He shrank from trying to preempt Hitler militarily and failed to preempt him diplomatically.¹⁰⁰ In the end, however, the question of who most miscalculated is not a simple one. “Of all the men who can lay claim to having paved the way to the new Reich,” meaning his Reich, Hitler liked to say, “one figure stands in awe-inspiring solitude: Bismarck.”¹⁰¹ Bismarck, of course, had built his chancellorship on avoiding conflict with Russia. When the bust of Bismarck was transferred from the old German Chancellery to Hitler’s new Nazi Chancellery, it had broken off at the neck. A replica was hastily made, aged by soaking in cold tea. The omen of Bismarck’s broken neck was kept from the Führer.¹⁰²