Stalin's Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941

3 The Soviets’ Pro-German Posture

It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist, but Bolshevism will become a sort of National Socialism. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us. There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling.

—Adolf Hitler

The Soviet Government, with an eye on its internal situation in Russia and fearing a war on two fronts, must hold aloof from military enterprises [related to enforcing collective security with the Western powers]. [It] is hardly likely to march in defense of a bourgeois state [such as Czechoslovakia].

—German Ambassador to the USSR Count

Friedrich Werner von Schulenburg

In striving to secure safe external conditions for undertaking the remodeling of Russia along lines drawn by her rulers, Soviet foreign policy’s primary goal was to prevent the formation of a hostile combination of foreign powers, and to keep the Soviet Union out of international conflicts before such time as she would be strong enough to enter them without risk.

The Soviet-German Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918 followed by the Treaty of Berlin (1926) were harbingers of future, significant bilateral cooperation between the two “loser” states. Brest-Litovsk became the symbol of Soviet diplomatic flexibility forced under dire circumstances on the emergent revolutionary state. It became a classic precedent in which the Soviets had struck a temporary deal “in league with the devil” in order to enhance Soviet Russia’s own national interests and external security—at others’ expense—regardless of “appearances.” Ironically, Germany in 1939 again became such a devil when Stalin made a second Brest-Litovsk-like deal with the leader of the Nazi German state (see chapter 4), including discussion of an even broader pact with the German-led Axis to divide up the world between the other totalitarian states—Germany Italy, and Japan—together with the USSR.

The Brest-Litovsk deal was struck with Germany, the birthplace of Hegel, Lenin’s favorite philosopher, and of Marx and Engels, the holy ghosts of Leninism-Stalinism. It was the country Lenin most admired for, among other things, its socialist-like wartime economy designed by General Erich von Ludendorff. The latter, incidentally, was the author of the influential military writing Notes on Offensive Battles, a work doubtlessly familiar to Lenin, a zealous reader of military theory (e.g., as per his deep reading of Carl von Clausewitz).

Lenin was a dedicated Germanophile. Germany was the Central European country that he considered to be the linchpin of pan-European revolution. “When you see a Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in Berlin,” Lenin remarked in 1918, “you will know that the proletarian world revolution has been born.” It was the same Germany, then under Kaiser rule, that had recognized Lenin’s notoriety and influence in world politics. Berlin provided the funds to Lenin and his Bolshevik cohorts to take the famous “sealed train” (a misnomer) from Switzerland safely through the battlefields of Germany, thence by ship and rail to Sweden and Finland, and finally on to St. Petersburg, Russia, in April 1917. This was perpetrated just a month following the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II. The kaiser wanted Russia out of the war as well as embroiled in internal strife to keep it paralyzed and out of the fight.

It was a shrewd and effective game played by the German leaders. Regarded as a useful “bacillus,” as German officials called him, Lenin was utilized by Berlin as an agitator who would help “neutralize” Russia. Lenin had been bitterly opposed to Russian participation in the “imperialist war” then reaching a climax across Europe—a story told effectively as historical fiction in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin in Zurich.

Dispatching millions of Reichsmarks to Russia, the Germans continued after April 1917 to subsidize the subversive bacillus Lenin as well as his subsequent Bolshevik regime from late 1917 into 1918. The details of the large funding and the way the money was “laundered” and reached Lenin and his comrades in Petrograd (to fund Bolshevik newspapers, propaganda, demonstrations, etc. throughout 1917) were disclosed as Communist archives began to be opened in Moscow under “glasnost” and to a much greater degree after 1991. The post-Soviet weekly Argumenty i Fakty, under the headline “Reichsmarks for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” was among the first large-circulation publication in Russia to provide complete evidence on the German funding of Lenin and Bolshevism. ¹ The paper notes the dates, locations, and amounts of the bank deposits made in Russia and includes photostats of Soviet memoranda concerning the depositing of the subsidies. Along with this article Argumenty i Fakty published a photo montage depicting Lenin in a German World War I helmet replete with Pickelhaube (ice-pick point). (Accusations that Lenin was a German spy, however, are doubtful and have never been confirmed.)

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) became another milestone in Soviet-German relations. By the treaty, seventy German divisions, which had been fighting against Russia on the Eastern Front in the Great War, were transferred to the West European front. Had America not entered the war and sent the American Expeditionary Force to Europe to fight alongside the Allies, it is quite possible Germany would have won the war or at least it might have dragged on interminably. At one point, the German Army had driven within 35 miles of Paris.

With Lenin’s encouragement and initiative, post-World War I Weimar Germany in 1922 eagerly became the first major country to have entirely normal relations with the young Soviet Republic (although a modest Anglo-Soviet trade deal, later abrogated by London, was concluded the year before). In his earliest diaries of the mid-1920s, Josef Goebbels, who was to become Hitler’s propaganda minister some eight years later, relished the advent of German-Soviet cooperation. Goebbels in Germany was about to pen his encomium to both Hitler and Lenin under the title Lenin oder Hitler?

Russian-German cooperation began in tsarist times. It is a long story that goes back to the eighteenth century when Peter the Great encouraged close relations with Prussia. The Russian Army began copying Prussian uniforms and drills and adopted the goosestep (which the Red Army also adopted).

With German unification after 1871, Russia again closed ranks with Germany. Under the German chancellor, Bismarck, a “Reinsurance Treaty” was concluded with Russia that protected Germany’s rear in the case of trouble with France and Britain, which were being alienated by Bismarckian expansionist ambitions. After Bismarck was dismissed in 1890, Kaiser Wilhelm let the reinsurance deal with Russia flounder. This decision paved the way toward World War I, in which Austria united with Germany against Russia and the Western Allies.

As a follow-up from the Genoa Conference (1922) came fruitful diplomatic negotiations and the resultant treaty, including its secret clauses, signed between the Soviets and Germans at Rapallo in 1922. An era of close, active collaboration between the two states then opened. In fact, this process of Soviet-German collaboration never really ceased—with the exception of a few ups and downs for a while after Hitler consolidated his power in 1933—until June 22, 1941.

Lenin and Stalin were always attracted to Soviet-German friendship, those “natural allies,” Germany and Russia, who confronted a “common enemy.” As in the Hitler period, the two Soviet dictators relished the fact that Germany was a have-not capitalist state that was bent on revenge against the capitalist-imperialist victors of World War I. Moscow fully concurred with Berlin that German lands had been “extorted” from a “defenseless” Germany by what Lenin called the Versailles Treaty “robbers with knives in their hands.”

RED ARMY-GERMAN ARMY COLLABORATION

Always in awe of German efficiency, German industriousness, and the Prussian military, Lenin closed ranks with Weimar Germany on several levels and with several purposes in mind. Among other actions, he invited German military (Reichswehr) officers to come to Soviet Russia, despite Versailles Treaty prohibitions, to practice their arts of war on the broad plains of European Russia, which they proceeded to do beginning in 1924. This cooperation was based on a secret follow-up of the Rapallo Treaty that had been signed on April 16, 1922. The names of the officer-participants on both sides later became famous in World War II. The Soviet officers cooperating with the Germans were among those purged in Stalin’s bloodbath of Red Army General Staff and line commanders in 1938.

On the German side in this early Soviet–German military collaboration were noted generals, marshals, chiefs-of-staff, and Nazi Army commanders-to-be. These men included Brauchitsch, Guderian, Blomberg, Marx, Model, Horn, Manstein, Kestring, and others. Figuring in the collaboration on the Soviet side were Tukhachevsky, Triandafillov, Blyukher, Yakir, Svechin, Frunze, Voroshilov, Kork, Alksnis, Budyenny, Shaposhnikov, and others. Directly supporting this “strictly secret” (sovershenno sekretno or strovo sekretno, the highest degree of Russian secrecy—in American parlance, “top-secret”) Soviet-German military collaboration from the Communist Party and civilian-administrative side were Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Radek, Rozengoltz, Krestinsky, and so forth. Their names appear on documents disclosed in archives opened since the demise of Communism in Russia in 1991.

A decade-long period of bilateral cooperation ensued during which the Red Army together with the German Reichswehr pioneered development of the tactics of what was later to become mobile “blitzkrieg” warfare or, as the Red Army called its own form of it, rapid “deep-battle operations.” These were based on air-ground support tactical aircraft, mechanized infantry (the Germans called them “panzers”), tanks, and airborne paratrooper formations.

The Russians had laid out a large, underdeveloped airfield at Lipetsk just south of Moscow especially for this purpose. Under the secret agreement, this spacious area was transformed into a modern airbase replete with hangars, repair shops, and stands and rigs for testing aircraft engines. Other facilities on the several hundred acres of grounds included dispensaries, barracks, and administrative buildings. The whole area, surrounded with barbed wire, was designated off-limits and guarded around the clock. Neighboring Soviet citizens in the town could only guess what was going on.

Military collaboration proceeded apace for years. In 1923 General Paul Haase purchased 100 Fokker D-XIII aircraft from Holland and flew them to Russia. The German aircraft industry, already famous from World War I, built new experimental craft. These were secretly flown to Russia from a secluded airbase at Rechlin, Germany, although their military character could no longer be camouflaged to elude Versailles inspectors.

By the mid-1920s some sixty German pilots and flight instructors were attached to Lipetsk, Russia. In the summer the contingent of German airmen reached 100. Trainees were replaced every six months by others who had graduated from basic training schools in Germany. The entire German unit was masqueraded as the “Fourth Squadron of the Red Air Force.” Out of this came 120 outstanding German fighter pilots and 450 flight personnel—all thoroughly trained at Lipetsk. Later in the Hitler years these personnel served as the core of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Who knows how many of the Lipetsk cadre later found themselves behind the controls of German military aircraft—fighters, dive-bombers, and medium bombers—engaged in combat with Russians in the skies over the USSR during the Great Fatherland War?

Moreover, thanks to Lipetsk, Germany’s aircraft industry—despite the “watchful eyes” of the Versailles powers—was able to draw up and test designs that otherwise could not have been developed until the time when Hitler, after 1935, began openly rearming. According to Luftwaffe General Helm Speidel, who worked in the administrative sector of the so-called Zentrale Moskau, the most lasting contribution made by Lipetsk to Hitler’s air force was “the conceptual foundation laid up for the future Luftwaffe in actual flying practice.”²

The famous Junkers Stuka dive-bomber (Ju-87) was actually first produced in a Soviet factory. Poison-gas warfare was tested in the German-Soviet war games fought on the Russian steppe. Joint military ventures were undertaken, and airfields and aircraft factories were built at Lipetsk. Tank and flying schools and defense-production facilities were constructed. Soviet–German collaboration also involved both navies. Out of this cooperation came the German “pocket battleships.”

The Soviet-German relationship in these years was mutually beneficial: The Soviets tested their mobile, mechanized-corps tactics under the rubrics of “deep-battle” operations aimed at rapid destruction of the enemy forces on their own territory—that is, blitzkrieg. (This term was coined by Time magazine; it was not used by either the Russians or the Germans in those years.) Soviet military officers also underwent studies in Germany—all conducted in utmost secrecy, of course, lest the terms of the Versailles Treaty be openly violated and Soviet Russia’s much touted “peaceful intentions” be sullied by public knowledge of such illegal activities of war preparation.

Ironically, this was the time when Lenin first unfurled the Soviet concept of “peaceful coexistence” or, as it was then called in the 1920s, “peaceful cohabitation.” It was the earliest form of a Soviet “peace offensive.” The talented people’s commissar of foreign affairs of this earliest period, Georgi V. Chicherin, was Lenin’s conduit in this respect.

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George later got wind of the Soviet–German collaboration. He wrote in his memoirs in the 1930s: “The greatest threat at present consists, to my mind, in the fact that Germany can bind its destiny with Bolsheviks and may place all its material and intellectual resources, all its huge organizational talent at the service of revolutionary fanatics, whose dream is conquest of the world by force of weapon for Bolsheviks. Such a threat is not chimera.”³

The salient feature of the weapons development and the war games in Russia, as first developed in theory by Red Army senior officers Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Vladimir Triandafillov, was seen in the employment of tactics of surprise in massive use of tank-based motorized units together with air-ground offensives and paratroop drops against an overwhelmed enemy.⁴ The Soviets applied these methods for the first time on a large scale in real war against the Japanese in the armed skirmishes bordering Mongolia in the Far East throughout 1939. The smaller Japanese forces in Japanese-occupied Kwantung Province in Mongolia were overwhelmed and decimated, especially once Red Army General Georgi K. Zhukov took command of the Soviet forces there in mid-1939.

SOVIET–FASCIST TOTALITARIAN KINSHIP

After he had outmaneuvered his political rivals among the Old Bolsheviks and took over the helm in the Kremlin by the late 1920s, Stalin embarked the country on a concerted program of building the USSR into a world-class power, especially in the military sense. It was to be “socialism in one country” but with “other countries” kept definitely in mind, in the sense that Stalin intended for the USSR to outclass and overpower them, especially in the military sense as the “vanguard of world revolution.”

The ensuing Five-Year Plans after 1929 were geared, above all, to building a heavy-industry base. From this base, defense production would be given top priority while consumer goods would be relegated to what was designated as the lower “Category B.” The whole thrust of Stalin’s program of economic buildup was aimed in the long term at making the Soviet Union a major player on the world scene in both the political and the military senses or, as the Soviets called it, “politico-military” terms.

Some Western writers have suggested that the leader’s typical dictator’s megalomania was not the only thing motivating these ambitious policies. They allege that Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, who adopted the name “Stalin” (from the Russian word stal’, meaning “steel”), was a devout Russophile. For him, his Georgian roots were scarcely a source of pride. The trait of Russophilia in Stalin was noticed by a number of his comrades as early as 1912. Several writers and film producers in the 1930s flattered the dictator by comparing him—at his own prompting—with the Great Russian tsars, Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

Stalin became the first Hitler-like dictator on the world stage of the twentieth century. Later, Hitler himself acknowledged magnanimously that he and Stalin were the most impressive leaders in the modern world. In comparison to them, he said, Mussolini, Churchill, and Roosevelt all paled. During the Nazi–Soviet honeymoon of 1939–41 the vozhd’ (i.e., Supreme Leader) Stalin returned the compliment to Hitler by praising the Führer, the German form of vozhd’, for his leadership of the German people. He congratulated him in 1940 on his “splendid” military victories against the “plutocratic,” “warmongering” countries of France and England—common enemies, the Soviets said, of both Germany and the USSR.

By the time Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Stalin had set a number of enviable precedents for effective police-state totalitarianism, some of which drew praise from Hitler, Goebbels, and il Duce Mussolini. These were one-party dictatorship; the ubiquitous political police; punitive labor camps; an official ideology, or “world outlook,” upheld as exclusive and binding with its “world-historical,” world-girdling pretensions; one-man dictatorship and glorification of “the Leader”; etatization of the trade unions, press, schools, and all other social, political, and economic institutions; a rubberstamp “parliament”; ascendant militarism; and the singling out of a scapegoat, pariah class (as Hitler did with the Jews and Lenin did with the “bourgeoisie”), the bourgeoisie being forced by the Bolsheviks to wear yellow cards (Hitler used yellow stars) in their hats so that the public could recognize and condemn them.

The Soviets’ huge sports and military rallies and parades, reviewed by the top party leaders, likewise were copied by the Italian Fascists and German Nazis. Even the Soviet use of the color red on the banners and their utterly new (as a state symbol) hammer and sickle are praised by Hitler in Mein Kampf. These were emulated by the Nazis with the latter’s red, black, and white banners and their own reinvented symbol, the swastika (Lenin had once considered adopting the swastika). Mussolini adopted his own, particular symbol, the ancient Roman ax-with-fasces.

For good reason, Mussolini called Stalin a “crypto-Fascist,” whereas Hitler said, “We must learn from the Marxists,” recognizing the similarities between the two regimes’ philosophies. Making the best Nazi recruits in Germany, Hitler added, were ex-Communists. Speaking of Mussolini, Lenin found much to admire in Italian fascism—an early example of the affinities felt between totalitarian states. The “Black Shirts” were notorious in Lenin’s lifetime, and the Soviet Republic eagerly opened relations with Fascist Italy. Mussolini had made his triumphant march on Rome in 1923, just six years after Lenin seized power in Russia. Having passed through a phase of Bolshevik-like socialism in his pre–World War I political evolution, Mussolini later adopted a nationalistic platform. When he became Italy’s “Duce,” he developed a form of corporate-state socialism that was derived from his earlier prewar socialist, Marxist-Bolshevist views. In his system, dictatorship of the proletariat would be transmogrified into a centralized state running most affairs in the country from the center. Hence, Lenin’s admiration for the Italian regime.

Mussolini, like Goebbels in the 1920s, was impressed with Lenin’s one-man leadership. “The masses,” he once wrote in the fascist newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, “need a hero.” (In the early 1930s Molotov was to pen an identical observation concerning the need for a powerful leader like Stalin.) Moreover, like Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini had no use for “bourgeois liberalism” and “bourgeois democracy”: “[We] throw the noxious theories of so-called liberalism on the rubbish heap,” he said, “[along with] the more or less putrid body of the Goddess of Liberty.” Hitler agreed.

Whereas Lenin and Stalin created “Soviet Man,” Mussolini sought to create the “Fascist Man,” just as Hitler was later to create the new “Aryan Man.” In 1921, Mussolini declared in the Chamber of Deputies in Rome: “I recognize that between us and the Communists [there are] intellectual affinities.”⁵ Italian Fascist affinities with Leninism aside, the main point is as follows: The totalitarian affinities between the Germans and the Soviets, that is, the “Communazi”/“Red-Brown” kinship, definitely played a seminal role in the Soviet–German coming together in late 1939. At one point in the Ribbentrop negotiations with Stalin, the German foreign minister blurted out after a toast or two in the Kremlin on the night of August 22–23, 1939, during the signing of the first of several Nazi–Soviet agreements, that he felt comfortable in the camaraderie of his Soviet hosts. It was, he said, as if he were “among old party comrades.” At other times Soviet and German spokesmen let it be known that the two states and their regimes had more in common than not, despite verbal on-again/off-again propaganda wars between them.

There was much between them, in other words, by way of common interest and feeling that paved the way to that fateful day of August 23, when the Nazi–Soviet Nonaggression Pact was signed before a broadly smiling Stalin and a grateful Ribbentrop. It also marked the culmination of a long-brewing close relationship embracing many spheres.

RIDING THE CURRENTS OF EUROPE

In the interwar period, many conflicting tidal currents were flowing among the states of Europe, some of them new “Versailles”-born nation-states, such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and the three Baltic states, all newly established since World War I. One such ebbing current put Germany and the Soviet Union on the same side of the barricades. This stemmed from the fact that the Versailles Treaty had drawn the boundaries of several countries—among them France, Czechoslovakia, and Poland—in ways that disadvantaged, in the German and Russian perceptions at least, both Geimany and Soviet Russia, the so-called losers from the war.

In the west in the coal-rich Ruhr, Germany lost vital land and industrial assets to France. On its eastern borders, Germans had been “arbitrarily” included in the new, Czechoslovak-ruled territory of the Sudetenland. Former German territory and people were also packaged into an enlarged, postwar Poland when part of Silesia with its German population became Polish territory. Much to Germany’s dismay, the “Polish Corridor,” also created by the Paris settlement, “artificially” separated Prussia from the “cretanized,” postwar Germany.

On the Russian side, the enlarged Poland also “encroached” on Russian territory in the east, land that was formerly part of White (Byelo-) Russia. Also, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, former duchies of tsarist imperial Russia, were granted independence. Russia also lost Bessarabia to Rumania, another fledgling state created out of the old Ottoman Empire on the basis of the fuzzy Wilsonian concept of “self-determination.”

The Paris peace treaty had not only offended Germany and Russia, which, of course, were left out of the postwar territorial resettlements concluded at Versailles. It had likewise aggravated tensions among minority peoples everywhere, especially where new boundaries drawn under the Versailles regime put them unwillingly under “foreign” rule. It was inconceivable that the two large states of Germany and Soviet Russia would ever accept their position of inferiority as the result of the “bandits’” treaty of 1919. Not surprisingly, when both powers had regained their strength, nationalist-minded elements proclaimed in their countries that they would seek to rectify the “injustices” of the Versailles “victors.”

As a consequence, Europe became divided into states and political movements that included, on the one hand, territorial “revisionists” and, on the other, “antirevisionists.” As revisionist capitals, both Berlin and Moscow therefore sought to create a New Order for Europe that would replace the Versailles Treaty’s “artificial” one. It was against the backdrop of these tensions and common interests that Germany and Russia were driven together.

We will see in the discussion of the Nazi–Soviet agreements in autumn 1939 that the mutual interests of the two “deprived” states were reasserted in the Nazi–Soviet Friendship Pact concluded in September 1939. In the manner in which the pact’s secret protocols carved up Poland between Germany and the USSR (presaging Foreign Commissar Molotov’s announcement in fall 1939 that “the Polish state has ceased to exist”), long-standing German and Soviet interests dating from 1919 were well served.

FAR EAST WRINKLES

Not without relevance in the 1930s kaleidoscope is the Far Eastern picture. To Soviet Russia, affairs in this region looked particularly unfavorable to its national interests. Soviet foreign policy toward the East Asian nations of Japan and China thus displayed those same contradictions as it did toward the West. Perhaps these contradictions were unavoidable considering Moscow’s notorious “double track” of illegal export of revolution versus normal diplomatic intercourse.

Thus, in Asia (as later in Africa and South America in the postwar years) Leninist-Trotskyite strategy included the tactic of stirring up the colonial “rear” of the Western “imperialist” nations. This was another way of weakening and bringing down the industrialized capitalist countries, which relied on the natural resources they obtained from what later was called the “Third World.” The way to Paris and London, said Trotsky and Sultan Galiyev (who sought to create what he called a “Colonial Comintern”), lay via the West’s colonies—the metropolitan countries’ sources of raw materials and cheap labor as well as potential cauldrons of revolution.

Playing on anticolonialist discontent in, for instance, China in the 1920s—which had been undergoing a nationalist transformation before and after World War I—the Comintern under Stalin’s direction allied itself with the Chinese nationalist party, the Kuomintang. While they were allied with the Kuomintang and its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, the Soviets, via their emissary in China, Mikhail Borodin, built up and trained the Chinese nationalist army (the contemporary Taiwanese Army, of the Republic of China, still bears traces of this training) and developed the security police. Stalin’s plan was to embrace “anticolonial” nationalist forces in the largest East Asian country. Eventually they would facilitate Communist seizure of the reins of leadership over the mainland.

However, by the late 1920s this “United Front” tactic, an updating of Lenin’s similar tactic, as pursued by Stalin failed on the mainland. Chiang, sensing what the Soviets and their Chinese Communist Party comrades were up to, turned against his Soviet advisers. He began a bloody liquidation of the Communists in his midst. The failure signified that “the road to Paris and London” that lay through the Far East would not at this time, at least, be able to run westward from Kuomintang Nanking or Beijing.

Meanwhile, farther to the east, Japanese expansionist militarism came to power in Tokyo. This led in 1931–32 to Japanese seizure of Manchuria and parts of Mongolia—territory bordering directly on the Soviet Union (some three-quarters of Russian territory stretches eastward into Asia from the Ural Mountains). Relations between Japan and the Soviet Union steadily worsened as the two states soon got on a collision course.

Their interests directly clashed, for instance, in Outer Mongolia, which had become by 1921 a Soviet client-state, or “People’s Republic.” There, local, independently acting Japanese generals, ruling like mandarins in areas on the Chinese mainland that were remote from the Japanese islands, often made their own arbitrary decisions in spreading—on bayonet tips—Japanese control throughout China and Mongolia. However, when the local Japanese commander took on the Soviet “bear” aggressively in Kwantung Province by assaulting Soviet troops across the Mongolian border there in spring 1939, he and his over two-division-sized, primitively equipped forces of upward of 40,000 men met from the Russians what the Soviets proudly called a “firm rebuff.”

In fact, the Soviet-Japanese conflict on the Mongolian Khalkin-Gol River plain became the occasion for the Red Army to test, successfully, all those advanced tactics of the art of utilizing surprise in waging modern, mechanized warfare while employing “overwhelming force” that were so prized by the more offensist-oriented Red Army commanders. One of those commanders was then-General Georgi Zhukov, who earned his first laurels as an impressively effective, hard-driving commander at Khalkin-Gol in summer 1939. But, as we saw, the Soviets’ main focus remained on Europe—and in particular on Germany.

The German–Russian connection was a permanent fixture during periods of Lenin’s, Stalin’s, and their successors’ reigns. Going back to Peter the Great, Russians have always respected German efficiency and public administration. In the Soviet period this extended to appreciation of and exploitation of traditional German militarism via the German–Soviet military collaboration of the 1920s and beyond.

Toward Hitler’s Germany, Stalin was both cooperative and wary. As will be seen, there is little doubt that Stalin would have liked to get the better of Hitler by the terms of the Nazi–Soviet agreements of 1939–40 as well as by exploiting Germany’s own involvement in war with the Western Allies. He planned his own “stab in the back,” in other words, but Hitler himself executed one before Stalin could realize his own offensist plans. Stalin’s long-range planning, in fact, called for eventually trumping the Nazi dictator’s control of Europe—the continent that both Lenin and Stalin had long sought for themselves and the cause of world revolution.

With the fading of the German militarist tradition at the end of World War II and with the birth of a democratic Germany, Russian admiration of Germany has by no means ceased. It was already visible in the time of Brezhnev in the 1970s. In the present, post-Communist period in Russia, Moscow’s ties with Germany can be described as at least as strong as with any other Western state. Moreover, since the coming of power of Vladimir V. Putin in 2000, this new Russian leader, who once served as a KGB officer in East Germany and, like Lenin did, has voiced his admiration for this key Central European state, Russo-German amity has grown even tighter.

NOTES

The first epigraph is from Hermann Raushning, The Voice of Destruction (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949), p. 131.

The second is quoted in Jiri Hochman, The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, 1934–1938 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 152. Schulenburg, German ambassador to Russia, made this astute observation at the time of the German-Czech crisis in 1938. Hochman’s book, incidentally, provides a well-documented argument against those observers, such as Gabriel Gorodetsky, Alvin Rubenstein, Geoffrey Roberts, and so on, along with Soviet-period semiofficial authors of books and articles on the history of Soviet diplomacy in the interwar period, who take seriously Stalin’s alleged “determined” efforts to reach collective-security agreements with the West European powers. Such authors blame the Western governments for failing to agree with Moscow on establishing collective security, which, they say, was Stalin’s serious intention.

The third is from Hochman, The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, pp. 172–73.

1

“Reichsmarks for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” Argumenty i Fakty, no. 3 (1992), p. 4.

2

Gerald Freund, The Unholy Alliance (London: 1957), p. 208. See also F. L. Garsten, “The Reichswehr and the Red Army 1920–1933,” Survey (U.K.), nos. 44–45 (October 1962), p. 92ff.

3

Yuri Dyakov and Tatyana Bushuyeva, The Red Army and the Wehrmacht: How the Soviets Militarized Germany, 1922–1933, and Paved the Way for Fascism, from the Secret Archives of the Former Soviet Union (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 17. For an analysis of early Soviet-German friendship and Lenin’s motivations for it, see Stanley W. Page, The Geopolitics of Leninism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). The author reproduces a prophetic quote from Friedrich Engels, penned in 1882, with which Lenin, a punctilious reader of Engels, was doubtlessly familiar: “Four hundred years ago, Germany was the starting point of the first upheaval of the European middle class. As things stand now, is it outside the limits of possibility that Germany will be the scene, too, of the first great victory of the European proletariat?” When Leninist-communist forces in Germany set up “soviets” in several German cities in 1918, Engels’s prophecy seemed to be in the process of fulfillment. These bolshevized urban centers in Germany, however, were to be overturned when armed German nationalists, organized into the proto-Nazi Freikorps, overthrew them after only a few months’ of their reign. For additional details of Soviet-German military collaboration, see Fritz Becker, Stalins Blutspur durch Europa (Kiel: Arndt, 1995), pp. 179–81. Film footage of the collaboration may be found in Stalin and Hitler: Dangerous Liaisons. Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 3 vols. (Princeton, 1999).

4

Christopher Donnelly, Red Banner: The Soviet Military System in Peace and War (London: Jane’s Information Group Ltd, 1988), pp. 73–74.

5

Quoted in Domenico Settembrini, “Mussolini and Lenin,” Survey (U.K.) 23, no. 3 (1977–78).