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

Introduction

As long as capitalism exists and socialism exists, we cannot live in peace. In the end, one or the other will triumph. A funeral dirge will be sung either over the Soviet Republic or over capitalism.

—V. I. Lenin

Bolshevism cannot evade responsibility for perpetrating falsehoods unheard of in history . . . for fostering criminal ideas of force and violence, class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, revolution, [and] for the militarization of the country.

—A. N. Yakovlev, former Communist Party Secretary for Propaganda

[Revolution in Russia] did not lead to national harmony but to catastrophe and genocide. Anyone who forgets the past is destined to repeat it over and over.

—V. P. Ostrovskyi, post-Soviet Russian high school textbook author

The demise of communist rule in Russia in 1991 triggered intense discussion about depictions of the past as boilerplated in Communist Party–guided Soviet historiography. With the partial opening of archives of Soviet civilian, military, and security police authorities, the contents of the Orwellian Memory Hole, to which so many historical truths were committed in the Stalin period, began to be exhumed. As a result, wholesale revisionism has been sweeping through Russian historical science for the past ten years. In this process almost no stone has been left unturned. One of the great “white spots,” as Russians call intentional omissions in the Soviet historical record, concerns Josef Stalin’s and the Red Army General Staff’s intentions and plans during and after the signing of the crucial Nazi–Soviet agreements of August–September 1939. Included are secret protocols drawn up and signed by the governments of Berlin and Moscow sixty-two years ago, whose very existence was disingenuously denied by former Soviet authorities, including Mikhail Gorbachev. Since roughly 1994–95, even more revealing documents have surfaced as various Russian archival holdings are made available to working historians. Western historians have still not caught up with the new disclosures that date from 1996 to 2001.

A prevalent school of thought among Russian and Western historians hews to the conventional line that has dominated history books in the USSR and abroad up until only recently. Based largely on Soviet-controlled documents, this interpretation insists, namely, that Stalin’s military policy from 1939 until the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 22,1941, was largely defensist. That is, Stalin and the General Staff harbored no offensive or “preemptive,” military-oriented Grand Strategy vis-à-vis Germany or against any other prospective capitalist enemy. In the prewar years up to June 1941, Stalin intended merely to keep the USSR as long as possible out of a new world war—predicted by Marxism-Leninism as “inevitable.” In this way, it is argued, the Soviets would have time to build up their defenses in the expectation of a coming global conflict that sooner or later would likely engulf them as hapless victims like Hitler’s other dupes. Among such defensive moves, the “defensist” school maintains, were the Soviet territorial acquisitions of 1939–40. These annexations consisted of half of Poland, which included territory added to Soviet Ukraine and Byelorussia; all of the Baltics; part of Finland; and northern Bukovina and Bessarabia at Rumania’s expense. Termed a “buffer zone” by the defensists and Soviet-period apologists, these territories were not the fruit of a deliberate Soviet expansionist policy, they claim. Rather, the annexations and sovietizations added up to merely protective measures wisely taken by Stalin as insurance against the day of a German invasion. That these territories remained parts of the USSR after World War II is deemed by some historians, strange to say, as all but irrelevant. Interestingly, the defensist argument about Soviet Russia was also given out by orientation officers to U.S. soldiers in World War II.¹ These officers used such reference manuals as The USSR Institutions and People: A Brief Handbook for the Use of Officers of the Armed Forces of the United States. “The Nazi–Soviet Pact,” says the handbook,

was accepted by the Soviet people as an act of wisdom [gaining time] for them . . . in which to prepare for the Nazi attack which came in June 1941.... Soviet-advocated measures failed largely because the democratic powers mistrusted the Soviet Union. [The Soviet people felt] that the overtures made to the Soviet Union by Great Britain and France in the summer of 1939 lacked a basis for realistic and effective measures against Germany.

The same orientation pamphlet describes the USSR as a democracy and fatuously claims that Josef Stalin was the “elected” leader in the Western sense.

The invasion, an unforgivable “double cross” (вeроломcмво, or verolomstvo, in Russian), took Stalin by surprise precisely, it is alleged by this school, because he had been tricked into allowing Soviet Russia to become a “sitting duck,” a “dupe.” Foolishly, he had fully trusted his alliance with Hitler even as the latter so obviously deployed German invasion forces all along the Soviet western frontier by spring 1941. Stalin, moreover, blithely ignored the warnings of an attack proffered to him secretly by Roosevelt and Churchill (exploiting top-secret intelligence gleaned from Enigma Machine/Ultra decoding of German General Staff encrypted traffic) and by Stalin’s own best foreign agents. One of the latter even predicted the date of the invasion.

Stalin, in any case, distrusted the Western powers, those duplicitous “Munich appeasers.” The latter, it is alleged, had refused serious Soviet overtures to build collective-security guarantees against Axis expansionism. Yet, as we shall see, new documents indicate that Stalin preferred to strike a deal with Hitler than one with the scorned “Anglo-French bloc.” (For Stalin’s observations about this, which have been kept secret until recently, see appendix 3.)

The offensists, on the other hand, attempt to rebut the conventional image of Stalin’s alleged ignorance of Hitler’s plans. They claim that the Soviet dictator was well aware of Operation Barbarossa. But if he was aware and in what detail he was aware have yet to be fully supported by classified documents. (There are, after all, “white spots” within the released archival material itself. Many Russian researchers and historians complain that they have been given access only to a portion of the truth.) He erred in thinking Hitler would not get the jump on the Red Army, which had developed its own offensist plans.

Having earlier (mid-1930s) pursued a policy of joining the League of Nations and defining and touting the principles of nonaggression and collective security with England and France against Nazi Germany, Stalin—who at this stage thrust forward Maxim Litvinov to instrument this “peace-minded” policy—sought seriously, it is alleged in conventional as well as Soviet party-line histories, to curtail Hitler. He attempted by 1938–39, it is claimed, to align the USSR with the Western capitalist democracies.

However, recent research, as we will see, raises questions as to the sincerity of Stalin’s putative intentions concerning serious collective-security arrangements with the West European capitalist states. Incidentally, the same Litvinov, as Stalin’s commissar of foreign affairs in the early 1930s, who early on had changed his name from Vallach to Litvinov, was, ironically, instrumental himself in paving the way toward Nazi–Soviet rapprochement (see chapter 2).

Accordingly, at this time Stalin ordered Western Communist parties to adopt the Popular Front tactic. But the line was promoted always with the caveat that it was a means of enhancing communist opportunities for seizure of power in the given countries. Stalin, claims the defensist school, on the other hand, was frustrated in this putatively sincere endeavor to form a bloc against “fascism” (as Soviet ideology called Nazism and Italian Fascism). England and France, they claim, refused to cooperate in establishing collective security with the Soviets. The Anglo-French bloc was motivated, defensists say, by the hope that Germany and Russia would embroil themselves in war. As one defensist-minded American academic has written, the Western powers were blindsided by their hatred and fear of communism, even more than the Soviets were misled by their anticapitalist ideology. As he puts it, “Ideologically-derived perceptions [on the part of England and France] shaped the behavior of the Western leaders to a greater extent than they did Soviet policy.” ² Such perceptions, the historian alleges, frustrated Moscow’s proposals for collective security.

Because of Western suspicions, this writer continues, reflecting a consensus among many historians, the Franco-British Munich appeasement policy evolved into abandonment of the Soviet’s principal central European ally, Czechoslovakia. Out of frustration, Soviet pursuit of collective security, therefore, was given up by Stalin. Litvinov himself, a symbol of collective-security policy, was abandoned by Stalin in early 1939. He was demoted, significantly, well before Western envoys had given up coming to Moscow to try to work out a deal in the summer of that year.

The rigid, orthodox aide closest to Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, thereupon took over the reins of foreign affairs from the talented, trusted Jewish Old Bolshevik. The Soviets, it was then perceived by some, would now look out for themselves while pursuing bare-knuckled Realpolitik. Yet, it is claimed, for all that, Stalin’s policy remained one of defense, not offense. This defensive policy, it is alleged, remained in force right up to the German invasion of the USSR on June 22,1941.

In contrast to this line of argument, the second, or offensist, school presents fresh evidence that strongly indicates that Stalin all along was secretly plotting an offensive war of his own—above all against Germany but ultimately against all of “capitalist-imperialist” Europe. This second, secret—or “other”—war was to be waged after the capitalist countries had mutually destructed each other in a “big war,” as Stalin called it. This was Stalin’s “great dream,” says the Russian historian and biographer Edvard Radzinsky.³ As Molotov observes of “big wars” in his interviews with Felix Chuev in the 1980s, referring to Stalin’s view of the two world wars and a future world war: “Stalin looked at it this way. World War I has wrested one country from capitalist slavery. World War II has created a socialist system. A third world war will finish off imperialism forever.”⁴

Indeed, Stalin told a high Yugoslav Communist Party official, Milovan Djilas, just after World War II: “We will have another go at it,” meaning World War III. With this third “big war” would come further expansion of Sovietism worldwide. During the Korean War (1950–53), which was an attempt to hit at capitalism’s rear in the Far East, the Soviet representative to the UNO, Yakov Malik, was quoted on the front page of The New York Times on February 3, 1952, as stating with ideological sangfroid: “World War III has already begun.” War—in this case in Korea—and revolutionary expansion worldwide obviously were two sides of the same coin. Indeed, post-Soviet archival material shows that Stalin did in fact have global expansionist aims as far as the Korean War was concerned, as revealed in top-secret messages exchanged between Moscow and Beijing and Pyongyang in the winter of 1949–50. “The East Is Red” became more than a catchy title for a video documentary on the period.

Statements, secret or open, made by leading officials and the Soviets’ own military planning all point undeniably in the offensist direction, it is claimed by these historians. Such evidence includes Stalin’s secret speech to the military graduates and his remarks at their reception, May 5, 1941, which rattled offensive sabers (see appendix 1 for the full text of one of the key Stalin speeches at the ceremony); two successive, pre–June 1941 Red Army field manuals containing exclusively offensist principles of combat while all but totally ignoring defensive ones; and a significant military strategy paper, or memorandum, addressed to Stalin, May 15, 1941, by the Red Army’s topmost staff officers (Vasilievsky, Timoshenko, and Zhukov) that explicitly advocates preemptive war (see chapter 5 for discussion of the above as well as appendix 2, containing key sections of the memorandum). There are other clues as well.

The defensists counter that there is no proof Stalin ever saw the military document. But the new historians pointedly ask whether the three topmost Red Army generals would have dared to make such recommendations to Stalin if they did not think he agreed with them. Not long before, the dictator had bloodily purged the General Staff; no one dared thereafter to propose anything that would alienate the capricious Stalin. If offensist principles did not harmonize with Stalin’s own views, what professional staff senior officer would dare challenge Stalin on such a crucial matter? Obviously, the staff officers were certain that Stalin would accept their recommendations.

On their part, defensist authors, not having the latest documents in hand, have pointed out that even if Stalin did read the staff officers’ memorandum and even if its proposal did dovetail with Stalin’s offensist-oriented remarks of May 5, subsequent military orders and actual deployments along the western frontier facing German-held territory do not suggest a full-fledged offensist posture. This dubious claim is reiterated in a sweeping analysis that appeared recently in the pro-government Russian military press, Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozrenie (Independent Military Review), issue of April 28–May 11, 2000, on the fifty-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II. The analysis is written by the present Russian Federation chief of the General Staff and deputy minister of defense, General Anatoly V. Kvashnin, and the former Soviet deputy minister of defense and prominent military strategist, General Makhmut A. Gareyev. Their conventional observations, though reserved, are quite predictable. (Evidence that questions these writers’ line on pre-Barbarossa Red Army deployments is examined in chapter 5.)

On the ideological front, the revisionist offensists refer back to Lenin’s “Report on Peace,” November 8, 1917. The Soviet leader had then called on the Western “laboring and exploited masses” to end their nations’ participation in war (World War I). They were to follow the Soviet example, “emancipate” themselves “from all forms of slavery and exploitation.” The socialist “new order,” Lenin continues, “will not be bound by treaties.” We have “lit the torch of world revolution,” he writes in the draft of the first post-1917 program of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The Soviets will “carry the revolution into the most advanced countries and in general into all countries.” In a speech on March 7, 1918, Lenin declared: “History marches forward on the basis of liberation wars.”

Such was the impetus for the Red Army’s invasion of Poland in 1920 and earlier and later attempts in those years to sovietize Germany, Hungary, and other East European as well as Baltic states. Lenin said that the war against Poland in 1920 was intended to carry Bolshevik-style revolution and sovietization all the way to Berlin. With reference to that war, Russian historians of the offensist persuasion cite the recently published (in Russia) Lenin stenogram, under the title “Ya proshu zapisyvat’ men’she: eto ne dolzhno popadat’ v pechat’” (“I Intend to Write Less Lest It Fall into the Hands of the Press”). In it Lenin predicts in 1920 that with Poland sovietized, the Red Army would be deployed at Germany’s very borders. Thus positioned, it could then wage an “offensive war,” Lenin says, against the West, eventually carrying “liberation war” into the whole of Europe. “We will impress on the workers,” he declares, “that a new level of revolutionary activity has arrived.... We will exploit every opportunity [from our base in Poland] to go from defense to offense.... We will learn how to wage offensive war.”⁵

Such statements were often made by top Soviet officials right up to June 22, 1941. The question that is sometimes raised is whether such declarations constituted the actual underpinnings for concrete Red Army military strategy. It would appear that they were fundamental to military policy to judge by the writings in the 1920s of such Soviet military thinkers and commanders as Generals Triandafillov, Isserson, and Tukhachevsky. These officers not infrequently extolled export of revolution with the help of the Red Army.

Basic Leninist principles were never abandoned, claim the revisionist offensists. They note that with the establishment of the Comintern in 1919, Lenin’s long-nurtured dream of encouraging global sovietization began to be realized in practice with the founding of this “General Staff of World Revolution.” As a result, Soviet diplomacy began to run on “two tracks”: one appearing as formally, legalistically “diplomatic” and conventional; the other, unconventional, illegal, and subversive, serving Marxist-Leninist goals of revolutionary expansionism worldwide. Perhaps the best metaphor for expressing the twofold, duplicitous nature of Soviet foreign policy and behavior in the international arena is an iceberg. The visible portion consisted of “legalistic” diplomacy (especially when aimed at developing trade and aid favorable to the USSR) and talk of “peaceful cohabitation” (later phrased “peaceful coexistence”) for the purpose of gaining time (in Sovietese: a “breathing space”—peredyshka) while misleading the “deaf, dumb, and blind” enemy by “lulling him asleep.” The latter tactics were commended by a high Comintern official as well as by Lenin. In this way, Soviet power worldwide would be enhanced along with abetting the global, revolutionary cause of sovietization, the two working together. The larger, submerged portion of the iceberg consisted of global subversion via legal or illegal Communist parties organized within countries throughout the world. These fifth-column forces, infiltrated into all layers of society in the given capitalist or Third World countries, served, to use Stalin’s later phrase of 1952, as international “shock brigades.”

Trotsky once made an apt comment on the defensist appearance the Soviets should sport publicly in the form of propaganda: “The offensive . . . develops better the more it looks like self-defense.”⁶ Throughout most of Soviet history, this principle lay at the heart of the “operational art” of Kremlin-style diplomacy.

The defensist school recognizes the above but only to an extent. First, it supports a “realist” view toward ideology (see chapter 1). This view places ideological “posturing” outside the circle of day-to-day policy making. It describes the official ideology of Marxism-Leninism as virtually irrelevant. Second, it diminishes the importance of the Comintern. It regards this unique organization as little more than a toy pistol brandished by Stalin that, in any case, he dispensed with by the war year of 1943 after years of “neglect.” Yet, although ignored by those observers who question the importance of the Communist International, after the Comintern was disbanded, Comintern-like activities continued. They were taken over by the Central Committee’s Information and International Department (which later split in the 1970s into two departments, one for information, the other for sponsoring international expansionism). (The post-World War II “Cominform” also acquired some of the former Comintern’s tasks.) Ex-Communist International Executive Committee secretaries and officials were duly transferred to these departments in Moscow. Among them was Georgi Dimitrov, former general secretary of the Comintern, who after his death was followed by the well-known chief of the International Department during the Brezhnev era, Boris N. Ponomarev.

Post-1991 archive documents show that the investments in this “internationalist” enterprise cost the Soviets triple-digit billions of rubles during the seventy-plus years of such obviously serious, global subversive activity. It has been estimated that the Soviets spent on average some $1.5 billion per year on subsidizing foreign subversion and its accomplice, international guerrilla warfare and terrorism. As the armed components of Marxist-Leninist “internationalism,” they were tasked with preparing the way for Soviet-style socialism via guerrilla armed actions and armed seizures of power.

In the heyday of the Comintern, Soviet national expansionist interests would be abetted by Soviet peace-mongering propaganda. This was tasked to weaken Western defenses. “Both you and I,” Lenin reminded Commissar of Foreign Affairs Chicherin, “have fought against pacifism.... But where, when, and who denied the exploitation of pacifists by this party in order to demoralize the enemy?” Using Soviet Orwellian “newspeak,” the Theses of the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern (1928) put it this way—“dialectically”: “Revolutionary war by the proletarian dictatorship is but the continuation of a revolutionary peace policy.”⁷

Such activity was combined with outright sabotage within the given countries—for example, as against British, French, and the U.S. defense factories during the Nazi–Soviet “honeymoon” of 1939–41. As detailed in the Mitrokhin Archive, disclosed in 1999, the subversives likewise would serve as sleeper forces waiting to be called into action by Moscow Center in case of war in the name of socialism. In times of war or peace, they would prepare the ground for Soviet-style takeovers whether by countries or by regions.

The offensist historians, researching newly disclosed archive documents, further maintain that Stalin actually hoped for war, viewing it as he did as the “midwife” of revolution. In that way, revolution could be “exported on the tips of bayonets,” as Soviet spokespersons and military hawks openly declared in meetings of the Comintern in the 1920s and 1930s. In early 1940 the Soviet leader relished—indeed, encouraged—German expansionism against France, the Lowlands, Britain, and Norway. Shipments of war materiel through Brest-Litovsk on its way to Germany continued in gargantuan amounts right up to the Soviet–German war beginning in late June 1941. Moscow even broke off diplomatic relations with the governments of these West European countries out of respect for Hitler’s conquests.

Stalin stated openly to aides that he hoped to see all the “capitalist-imperialist” combatants self-destruct. In the Far East, Japan, Stalin said, would likewise become embroiled in a war with the United States, the advent of which would also serve Soviet interests by debilitating that distant capital-imperialist enemy. Stalin was informed by agents in Tokyo of plans for the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, but kept this information from the Americans, despite British and American Lend-Lease aid that had already begun to be shipped to the Soviets almost immediately after the German attack of June 22, 1941. Stalin still thought and spoke openly in this way at the end of World War II and up to the time he died in 1953.⁸

Some historians of this school present evidence for the fact that Stalin was planning to launch a preemptive war against Germany. It was to begin either by July 1941 (a minority view) or at the latest by mid-1942. Once it was fully supplied with modern weaponry, the Red Army would sweep clear through Europe, meeting the rebellious, war-fatigued masses in war-torn cities as it carried the red banner westward. Revisionist Russian historians note that in 1939 and in 1940–41 several of Stalin’s closest aides—Molotov, Zhdanov, Mekhlis, Shcherbakov, and so on—spoke explicitly and assuredly of “extending the frontiers of socialism” on the wings of the “inevitable,” coming war. It was as though war, deemed “inexorable” by Marxist-Leninist ideology and often reiterated by Soviet spokespersons, would become a self-fulfilling prophecy for the expansionist aims of the communist leadership. Indeed, five years before the start of World War II, Stalin predicted ominously:

War will surely unleash revolution and put in question the very existence of capitalism in a number of countries, as was the case of the first imperialist war.... Let not the bourgeoisie blame us if on the morrow of the outbreak of such a war they miss certain ones of the governments that are near and dear to them, and now are today happily ruling by the grace of God.

It can hardly be doubted that a second war against the USSR will lead to the complete defeat of the aggressors, to revolution in a series of countries of Europe and Asia. Victory in revolution never comes of itself. It must be prepared for and won.⁹

Although the revisionist interpretation is canvassed above, in the following chapters both arguments—defensist and offensist (or revisionist)—will be analyzed. This documented discussion—involving both Russian and Western historians in the post-1991 period to the present—will be viewed against the background of actual events and Soviet actions during the period. Readers can then draw their own conclusions from the arguments presented in these pages. In a concluding note, I will weigh both arguments as judiciously as possible on the basis of the latest available information.

NOTES

The first epigraph is from V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 7 (New York: International Publishers, 1943), p. 33. This and other Lenin, Stalin, et al. statements of this type may be found in Albert L. Weeks, Soviet and Communist Quotations (New York: Pergamon-Brassey’s Publishers, 1987), pp. 20–25.

The second is from A. N. Yakovlev, “Bol’shevizmu ne uiti ot otvetstvennnosti” (“Bolshevism Cannot Evade Responsibility”), Rossiiskiye Vesti (November 29, 1995), p. 1.

The third is from V. P. Ostrovskyi and A. I. Utkin, Istoriya Rossii XX vek (A History of Russia in the 20th Century) (school textbook) (Moscow: Drofa, 1997), p. 4. See appendix 4 for a review of some of the new Russian history textbooks.

1

The USSR Institutions and People: A Brief Handbook for the Use of Officers of the Armed Forces of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945), p. 64.

2

A. Z. Rubenstein, Soviet Foreign Policy since World War II: Imperial and Global, 2d ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1985), p. 19.

3

Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin (New York: Doubleday Publishing Co., 1996), p. 424. The respected poet and war veteran Bulat Okudzhava, after reading the offensist émigré-author Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun), who wrote the revisionist books Ice-Breaker and M-Day, remarked: “I have read Suvorov with interest.... It is hard for me to doubt that we [Soviets] likewise were preparing our own march of plunder. The Germans merely got the jump on us so that we were forced to resort to defense of our country” (interview in Literaturnaya Gazeta, May 11, 1994).

In an early 1941 entry in his diary, Chief of the German General Staff, General Franz Halder, disclosed the following about German awareness of Soviet offensism (emphasis added): “One cannot help admitting that their [Red Army] troop dispositions are such as to enable them to pass to the offensive on the shortest possible notice.”

4

Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Conversations with Felix Chuev (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), p. 63.

5

V. I. Lenin, “Ya proshu zapisyvat’ men’she: eto ne dolzhno popadat’ v pechat’” (“I Intend to Write Less Lest It Fall into the Hands of the Press”), Istoricheskyi Arkhiv, no. 1 (1992), pp. 12–27.

6

Quoted by Stefan T. Possony in “Lenin and Meta-Strategy,” chapter 16 in Bernard W. Eissenstat, ed., Lenin and Leninism (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1971), p. 269.

7

These and many other such statements may be found in Weeks, Soviet and Communist Quotations, under “Peaceful Coexistence and Detente,” pp. 201–02. Former Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko updated the concept as follows: “Peaceful coexistence creates the most favorable conditions for the mobilization of the masses in the struggle against imperialism” (quoted in Weeks, Soviet and Communist Quotations, p. 203).

8

Quoted in Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 278. Stalin remarked to the Yugoslavs in April 1945: “The war will soon be over. We shall recover in 15 or 20 years, and then we’ll have another go at it.” In his election speech in February 1946, Stalin again spoke of the inevitability of war, in this case between capitalist states. He repeated this thesis in his 1952 writing, The Problems of Socialism in the USSR, which was incorporated in the summation of the last Stalinite Party Congress, the Nineteenth, in October 1952. Soviet-sponsored international “shock brigades” (udarniye brigady) were referenced by Stalin at that time. Some say Stalin was anticipating World War III, fought at first between capitalist states.

9

J. V. Stalin, “Report to the 17th Party Conference, January 26, 1934,” in J. Stalin, Selected Works (Albania, n.d.), pp. 402–03.