Stalin's Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941 - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Weeks (ч. 8)

1 Soviet Expansionist Ideology: Propaganda or Blueprint?

Ideology not only contributes to the development of unlimited national objectives, but it also eventually creates states whose goal is to overthrow the existing international system.

—Henry Kissinger

If war is waged by the proletariat after it has conquered the bourgeoisie in its own country and is waged with the object of strengthening and extending socialism, such a war is legitimate and “holy.”

—V. I. Lenin

Present-day Soviet leaders have determined upon a program pointed towards imposing Communism on those countries under their control and, elsewhere, creating conditions favorable to the triumph of Communism in the war against Capitalism which they consider to be inevitable.... The growth of Moscow-controlled Communist parties throughout the world gives ample evidence that the international objective has never been neglected. World War II has resulted in long strides along the path that the Soviet leadership has chosen.

—General John R. Deane

It would be utterly simplistic to say that the Bolsheviks’ foreign-policy course was something consistent and unilinear.... In certain situations it was guided by ideological mythmaking, in others it was a case of practical interests, while in another it was guided by imperial ambitions.

—Alexander Yakovlev, successively former Soviet Communist Party

Central Committee Propaganda Department head, secretary, and

Politburo member under General Secretaries Brezhnev, Andropov,

Chernenko, and Gorbachev

Perennial disagreement among historians and Soviet specialists revolves about the role played by ideology in Soviet policy making, particularly toward foreign states. The argument is by no means academic. The dispute intersects with the main thrust of this book: Stalin’s strategy on the eve of World War II and whether it was of an offensist/preemptive or a defensist nature. The underpinning for the making of Soviet policy, after all, must play a major role in deciding this question. It has been argued by some that this fundamental underpinning is, in the last analysis, ideological.

A new book on Soviet propaganda, written by one of Russia’s young historian-specialists, makes this point about the ideological factor in Soviet policy making and military doctrine and strategy pegged to before and during World War II: “In the 1930’s and 1940’s . . . the Bolshevik leadership confronted itself with formidable foreign policy tasks, in the solution of which propaganda was used as a virtual ‘transmission belt’ between the governmental authorities and the population.”¹ V.A. Nevezhin, the Russian Academy of Science historian cited here, also suggests that ideology guided Stalin in the making of defense policy. It also served as a “mirror,” as he puts it, reflecting the decisions that the Soviet leader made in directives guiding indoctrination.

The question of the role played by ideology in the matters under study in this book must be addressed well ahead of the other factors that determine the thrust of Soviet military doctrine and strategy in 1939–41 and beyond. For if the direction taken by the Kremlin in its prewar as well as postwar relations with other states, not to mention its military doctrine, was guided by ideology, Marxism-Leninism then becomes as crucial as, say, Hitler’s chef d’oeuvre, Mein Kampf, or the Japanese pre-World War II “bible,” the Tanaka Memorial (or “Tanaka Plan”).

Some observers wonder whether Lenin, Stalin, and their cohorts and propagandists really believed or meant what they so often said about spreading Communism and the Soviet system worldwide. Were they serious when they declared that the “revolutionary base” of the USSR, the “first socialist country,” would be used in order to subvert “capitalist imperialism” and “colonialism”? Said Lenin: “We Marxists have always stood, and still stand, for a revolutionary war against counterrevolutionary nations. [We would be] in favor of an offensive revolutionary war against them.”² Stalin noted: “The victory of socialism in one country is not a self-sufficient task. [It is] the groundwork for world revolution.” The Soviet Union is prepared, Stalin declared, quoting Lenin, “to come out even with armed force against the exploiting classes and their states.” The program of the Communist International (Sixth Congress, 1928) puts it: “The USSR . . . raises revolts and inevitably becomes the base of the world movement of all oppressed classes.”³

As mentioned in the introduction, did the Soviet founding father, Lenin and his successors, Stalin, et al., seriously regard war as the “midwife” of revolution? Did they ever wage war with that in mind? In other words, was the ideological goal of fomenting world revolution according to the axioms of Marxism-Leninism mere vranyo (Russian equivalent of “verbal bravado”), so much mumbo jumbo?

Finally, this question arises: Was the forcible expansion of the borders of the young Soviet Republic immediately after 1918 and in the 1920s—into the borderlands of Ukraine, Byelorussia, Georgia, Armenia, Turkestan, and so on—basically nonideological? Was it merely the reflexive, nationalist assertion of long-standing Russian territorial expansionism into neighboring lands going back to the tsars?

On the other hand, if this Soviet borderland expansion—coupled to attempts to sovietize the independent Baltic states (after 1917) as well as the more distant countries of Hungary and Germany beginning in 1918 and then Poland in 1920—was inspired by the Soviet ideology of exporting the Soviet new “socialist order” and fomenting global revolution, then Marxist-Leninist doctrine, it would seem, becomes crucially determinant. It impinges significantly on the casting of both domestic and foreign policy. It therefore becomes necessary to view Soviet behavior to an important degree through the prism of the stated beliefs of the regime, its ideology, and its revolutionary program. And that includes, of course, the thrust of Soviet behavior in the immediate pre-World War II period, which is the central topic of this book.

Roughly two schools of thought have coalesced around the pair of opposing questions about the role of ideology in Soviet behavior. One school frames the question this way: Is ideology in general mere window dressing, an updated form of the ritualistic Indian rain dance as some political analysts such as Lewis Feuer have put it? Or, on the other hand, does ideology provide a realistic, practical “blueprint” for concrete policy making and action, a “lodestar” (the Soviet metaphor for Marxist-Leninist ideology) in order to guide the Russian ship of state in practical ways?

THE REALIST VIEW

The first side in this dispute—the so-called realist school—argues that ideology is mostly extravagant propaganda. At best, its function is to supply ballast and legitimation to a top-heavy, autocratic regime whose legitimacy otherwise is questionable. Ideology is crucial in order to justify or legitimize a regime’s authoritarian or dictatorial rule. The absolutist regime’s set of doctrines must be believed by the people and followed to the letter. How else can the autocratic state bind together the comrades in realizing the common cause, the practical goals of the regime? (Plato apparently had something like this in mind with his “useful lie” (ϰρήζιμοζ ψεύ∂οζ) taught to the citizens of his ideal republic—a mythic ideology implanted in the youth to guarantee obedience to the philosopher-kings.)

Yet these dogmas, or “myths,” it is alleged by the realist school, are at heart impractical and visionary—in either the short or long term. To the realists, this makes the dogmas all but irrelevant. Marxist-Leninist principles and goals are like hymns sung to the choir.

For instance, consider the catchphrase for the much touted millennial paradise of “full communism”—“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”—together with the anarchist-like dream in Communist ideology that prophesies the ultimate, total withering away of the state, the end of the division of labor and of differences between town and country, and so forth. These farfetched axioms of Marxism-Leninism are viewed by many Western observers as so much sugarcoating. They are at best rationalizations, they insist, in support of one-party rule. That anyone would believe such shibboleths, least of all take them literally as “blueprints” for the future, is almost like saying that American Indians performing a rain dance for tourists in New Mexico are to be taken seriously, as though truly endeavoring to produce rainfall.

In short, to the realist school, Marxism-Leninism is little more than advertising, boastful pontification. Realists might point out that in America clubs like Kiwanis, Rotarians, Masons, and so on likewise make vast boasts and millennial prognostications. But does such posturing and mumbo jumbo really mean anything? Does it affect their behavior in any concrete way? Or does it simply boost zealots’ spirits while rationalizing their very enterprise?

In its ideological formulations respecting foreign states and their societies, Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’s dogmas, realists claim, likewise should not have been taken seriously at any given time or place. Surely, they claim, Lenin, Stalin, and their cohorts could not have seriously entertained the idea of a future “Soviet of the Whole World” (Lenin’s phrase, which he often repeated). The Soviet epigones may have talked that way to cajole or bemuse the workers, peasants, and intellectuals or themselves or to boost party morale and strut “militancy.” But that the leaders were actually planning and working to attain such farfetched goals, especially “world revolution,” was and is regarded by realists as largely fatuous. One can safely say that most authors, latter-day Western Soviet specialists, and Moscow correspondents writing on the Soviet affairs have hewn to this approach, at the very least since the 1960s.⁴

If the realists are right, then the many Soviet ideological pronouncements of an expansionist nature in the pre–World War II period can be taken with a grain of salt or, in fact, ignored altogether. Such a view, of course, prompts a negative interpretation of, for example, the “Mr. X” essay by George F. Kennan, published in Foreign Affairs in 1949. The views stated in that article—in describing and analyzing Soviet ideology as a driving force of policy—were to underlie U.S. and Western “Cold War strategy” for the coming four decades. Mr. X’s views became cant as the verbal springboard for formulating and maintaining the long-term American view of vigilant “containment” toward Marxism-Leninism and Soviet expansionism. It was the subtext of the Cold War.

Even in Kennan’s earlier writings, for example, his “personal paper” drafted in Moscow in spring 1935, had a similar thrust. As he then wrote:

It is important to recall the fundamental peculiarity of Russian foreign relations.... The masters in the Kremlin are revolutionary communists . . . they themselves are leaders of the world proletariat. [The Russians can] tolerate ambiguities enough in practice but not in theory. [Their] conception of foreign relations has had a profound effect, not only on the character of diplomatic life in Moscow, but also on the entire development of Russia’s foreign relations.⁵

Kennan’s above observation—that there can be “ambiguities in practice” —ironically opens another realist front against the traditionalist view: Namely, if ideology is so binding—for example, as with the Soviet antifascist line in the Comintern from 1935 to late 1939—how was it that Stalin could conveniently discard this basic party line when he concluded his agreements with the Nazis in 1939 and 1940? So doing, he thereby suspended the antifascist line in Soviet media and official pronouncements. In this process, Stalin’s zigzag alienated many Communists and fellow travelers worldwide. Ideology was put through the wringer.

Put another way, fundamental Soviet national interests seemingly can cause contradictions between raison d’état and Moscow’s official ideology. This in turn suggests that ideology can be relegated to secondary importance in favor of other, larger national considerations in policy making, such as contingencies that arise that do not neatly fit ideological dogmas. This was the case—presumably—in August 1939 when the Soviet–Nazi alliance was taking shape. Yet even this maneuver, as we will see, had an ideological motivation.

Some authoritative Soviet military spokespeople, moreover, have insisted that diplomacy, not necessarily ideology alone, can provide the best “preparatory,” favorable conditions for later waging of war. To wit, General Makhmut Gareyev, in his volume M. V. Frunze—Military Theoretician, writes: “Skillful diplomacy [umelaya diplomatiya] not only creates favorable conditions for waging war, but can lead to the creation of a totally new politico-military situation in which armed struggle can be conducted.” ⁶ He thus suggests that through “forceful” diplomacy (e.g., in acquiring [annexing] Baltic and other territory in the 1940), Stalin had prepared the USSR for waging war—whether defensive or offensive (see chapter 5).

Nevertheless, ideology, though playing a subsidiary role at times, was exploited at least as rationalization for the sovietization of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in that year, just as the previous sovietizations of foreign lands had been. The old “bourgeois order” had to be overthrown (as in Poland in 1920 and September 1939). This was deemed “historically inevitable.”

In noting Stalin’s relegation of Communist International (Comintern) interests to a lower priority with the shift in the party line on Nazi Germany, the realists only seemingly make a good point. By making his pact with the class devil (fascism being the most “mature” form of capitalism) in August 1939, it is claimed, Stalin surely was prioritizing what he considered at least to be Soviet short-term, putatively nonideological “national” interests. He seemed to be placing the latter ahead of ideological principles. This, in turn, apparently makes the case that ideology can look irrelevant or expendable in certain crucial situations. As Soviet Charge d’Affaires Georgi Astakhov reassured German Foreign Office State Secretary Ernst Weizsaecker on May 30, 1939:

[Astakhov] explained how Russian relations with Italy . . . as well as other countries could be normal and even very good, although in those countries Communism was not favored at all. He strongly emphasized the possibility of a very clear distinction between maxims of domestic policy on the one hand and orientation of foreign policy on the other hand.... The ideological barrier between Moscow and Berlin [Astakhov said] was in reality erected by us.

Likewise, after the German attack on the USSR in June 1941, Stalin again executed a zigzag. It was a maneuver that seemed again to compromise the official ideology. For the Soviet leader lost no time closing ranks with those same “capitalist-imperialist” states of Britain and America, which the Soviets, particularly during the twenty-one-month Nazi–Soviet honeymoon from August 1939 to 1941, had singled out as “warmongers,” the “main instigators of war” (e.g., against the Soviet ally, Nazi Germany). Yet, by the next month of July, Stalin was addressing these same capitalist democracies in the friendliest of terms. He dubbed them fellow “democratic,” antifascist, war “coalition” members. They were no longer characterized as “plutocratic,” the Nazi-like epithet used in both Nazi and Soviet propaganda. Nor were they even described as “imperialist” states, the term used for them before July 1941 and restored again after the “two-camps” line of capitalist-imperialist versus socialist states developed in the Kremlin by 1946.

Forgotten, too, were those parallel “socialist” ideologies, Nazi and Soviet. Their compatibility had once prompted friendly statements in the German and Soviet press, 1939–41, that the two systems had much in common. Yet, the term allies—soyuzniki—was very seldom used to describe during the Soviet phase of World War II Stalin’s newfound, “friendly,” capitalist Western states that were later to compose the United Nations alliance along with the USSR. (Nor, for that matter, was soyuzniki used for Soviet–German ties during the Nazi–Soviet honeymoon.) Suspension of anti-Western, “anti-imperialist” ideology “for the duration” clearly had to be and was achieved for the sake of the common war effort. Disbandment of the Comintern in 1943 likewise fits in with this opportunistic tactic.

However, such ideological compromises and backtracking lasted only as long as the war did. And this is grist for the opposing, traditionalist mill. As referenced by Kennan in his 1949 Foreign Affairs essay, momentary twists and turns aside, Stalin and Co. never really renounced basic Marxist-Leninist ideology. The ideology, he suggests, still imparted thrust and guidance to Soviet behavior in the international arena during and after the war.

A case in point is the earlier promise in 1933 to suspend Soviet-sponsored Communist propaganda and subversion in the United States. This was the price for U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union. However, Soviet subversive activity, based on Marxist-Leninist principles and applied against the United States and other capitalist democracies, continued unabated in the postwar era as it had in a concealed way after recognition twelve years before. (Even in the heyday of Nazi–Soviet friendship the Germans complained of the same Soviet perfidy.)

In contrast to Kennan and other “cold warriors” of the postwar period, author Gabriel Gorodetsky, a writer of the realist persuasion especially when it comes to Soviet foreign policy, describes Stalin’s basic attitude toward Marxism-Leninism as follows: “Stalin was little affected by sentiment or ideology in the pursuit of foreign policy. His statesmanship was rooted in Russia’s tsarist legacy, and responded to imperatives deep within its history.... It is not surprising that in the execution of his foreign policy Machiavelli rather than Lenin was Stalin’s idol; here was a man who had The Prince especially translated for him.”⁷ Professor Andreas Hillgruber adds: “Stalin never made decisions of ‘grand policy’ on the basis of Bolshevist revolutionary ideology. He practiced above all a rationally calculated power politics with the aim of expanding the Soviet empire by exploiting the war that began in 1939 among the ‘imperialist’ powers. Social revolutionary transformation in newly-won territories was subordinated to strategic security.”⁸

THE TRADITIONALIST VIEW

Among the postwar milestones of unabated, ideological, “internationalist” activity subsidized by Moscow are the famous Duclos Letter (The Daily Worker [the United States], May 24, 1945) and Stalin’s February 1946 electoral speech. These along with other Soviet tracts at the time sounded traditional communist ideological notes as to the “inevitability” of the demise of capitalism, the reemergence of capitalist imperialism and war in the immediate future, and the inevitability of world revolution. With this in mind, Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech in June 1946 can be viewed as a reaction to Stalin’s postwar reassertion of the traditional tenets of Marxism-Leninism and Soviet expansionism from the Stettin to the Balkans and beyond that the ideology evidently inspired and endorsed.

By the 1970s upward, several dozen countries worldwide could be considered active members of the Soviet bloc or of the extended “socialist camp” of cooperative “client-states.” All were committed to enforcing the principles of Soviet foreign policy and expansionistic “internationalism.”

Citing such postwar facts as the above, the so-called traditionalist school rebuts the realists. These scholars take seriously ideological pronouncements like Mein Kampf, the Japanese Tanaka Memorial, and, correspondingly, Marxist-Leninist ideology as formulated in the writings of Lenin and Stalin and their aides and successors. Traditionalists produce numerous quotations from the speeches and writings of Soviet leaders as they set out to prove their point about Soviet ideology as a practical, guiding set of principles, if not an actual blueprint of expansionism.⁹ Such writers dovetail Moscow’s ideological formulations with actual Soviet policies. They demonstrate how the official ideology actually formed the basis for Soviet foreign policy. For example, Richard W. Harrison, author of the new study The Russian Way of War: Operational Art, 1904–1940, has written that “ideological absolutes and political controls imposed on [the Red Army] created an ethos not disposed to recognize limits, and which could hardly have failed to have an impact on the nature of its military operations. Consequently, the political-military belief that the Communist ideology represented the most dynamic historical forces naturally inclined the army toward offensive operations.”¹⁰

In assessing the intent of Soviet behavior on the foreign front, this school also emphasizes the practical importance of the global institution of the Third Communist International (Comintern). It also cites its postwar successor, the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). Far from regarding Marxist-Leninist ideology and the Comintern/Cominform as mere window dressing, this school claims that ideology and policy making work hand-in-glove in a practical way. Traditionalists might note that the Western realists habitually project onto the Soviet camp their own views. They write under the spell of the “end of ideology” in their part of the world.

An exploration of the validity of this point of view can start with an examination of the Mr. X (Kennan) analysis. if Mr. X’s presentation is convincing beyond reasonable doubt and Soviet ideology indeed functioned like the North Star to Kremlin policy making, then the argument that Stalin et al.’s militant, “offensist” ideological pronouncements on the eve of World War II would seem to have more than dubious validity. Ideological pronouncements thus become determinants of actual Soviet behavior toward Germany and its goals in World War II. They may even be seen to underlie the Nazi–Soviet agreements along with Stalin’s scuttling of effort to conclude collective-security arrangements with the Western capitalist democracies (chapter 2).

Do, in fact, Soviet ideological, expansionist statements prior to the German invasion on June 22, 1941, provide any clues of actual Soviet intentions and actions? Several post-Soviet Russian writers refer to various militant ideological statements made by high Soviet officials in the months just before June 1941. They claim that such statements could not have been made unless approved by Stalin. Furthermore, the declarations themselves, they insist, reflect above all “offensist” military planning that must have been endorsed by the dictator. For instance, in his chapter in the Afanas’iev volume, The Other War, V. L. Doroshenko, noting the discovery by another writer, T. S. Bushuyev, of a new, revealing document, a speech by Stalin to a secret meeting of the Politburo, August 19, 1939 (see appendix 3 for the text), writes:

Stalin needed the Second World War no less than Hitler. Stalin not only helped Hitler initiate it [in Poland], he entertained the same goal as did Hitler: seizure of power in Europe as well as the immediate aim of destroying Poland. Stalin calculated that the war, started by Germany, would lead to the downfall of the European order. Meantime, he would remain out of the [war] for a time entering the war at the most opportune moment. [Stalin’s plans] were not only to conquer eastern Europe but to help bring about a communist revolution in France by going at very least as far as the English Channel.

War, as viewed by Stalin and, before him, Lenin, suggests the writer, is the “midwife of the sovietization of the whole European Continent.” The Politburo speech by Stalin makes all this explicit. It states that “Communist revolutions inevitably will break out” there as the Soviet Army “liberates” Europe as a stage in the “development of world revolution.”¹¹

The classical expression of this goes back to Lenin. When in exile in Switzerland as World War I began in 1914, Lenin viewed the war as a great opportunity for overturning the capitalist order. The war, whose destruction he relished for its usefulness to The Cause, would unleash massive chaos. It would create the impetus for antiwar sentiment that in turn would become fuel for socialist revolution that would put an end to all war by liquidating capitalism and, with it, imperialism. This perspective remained fundamental to Marxism-Leninism right up to the fall of the Soviet order in December 1991.

In M. I. Mel’tyukhov’s contribution to the Afanas’iev volume, titled “Ideological Documents of May–June 1941,” first published in the Russian military journal Otechestvennaya Istoriya (no. 2 [1995]), the author reproduces a number of militant statements made by high Soviet officials. They strictly conform to Marxist-Leninist “revolutionist principles.” He claims that they amount to blueprints for waging offensive war in the near future. The Russian historian quotes such officials as the No. 2 man to Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov; Party Secretary Andrei Zhdanov; Aleksandr Shcherbakov, party secretary for ideology and a close aide of Stalin’s; Soviet president Mikhail Kalinin; and others.¹²

Several statements by the above illustrate Mel’tyukhov’s emphasis on ideology:

If you are Marxists, if you study the history of the party, then you understand that the basic concept of Marxist teaching is that under conditions of major conflicts within mankind, such conflicts provide maximum advantages to communism. (Kalinin, speech, May 20, 1941 )

War will come at the same moment when communism is to be expanded.... Leninism teaches that the country of socialism [USSR] must exploit any favorably-developing situation. In which it becomes incumbent on the USSR to resort on its own initiative to offensive military actions against the capitalist encirclement with the aim of extending the front of socialism. (Shcherbakov, speech, June 5, 1941)

When conditions are favorable, we will extend the front of socialism further to the west.... For this purpose we possess the necessary instrument: The Red Army, which as early as January 1941 was given the title, “army-liberator.” (Zhdanov, speech to a conference of film workers, May 15, 1941)

The overseer of political indoctrination of the Red Army, Lev Mekhlis, stated frankly at the Eighteenth Communist Party Congress (March 1939), referring to the views of Stalin in a manner similar to Molotov and Zhdanov (as quoted in the introduction): “If a second imperialist war turns its cutting edge against the world’s first socialist state, then it will be necessary for the Soviet Union to extend hostilities to the adversary’s territory and fulfill [the USSR’s] international responsibilities and increase the number of Soviet republics.”¹³

For Mr. X (Kennan), however, ideology is not everything; it does not cancel out other determiners of Soviet behavior. As he notes, “Soviet policy is highly flexible” and answers to real conditions beyond its borders, not exclusively to ideological dogmas. Moreover, he continues:

the Kremlin is under no ideological compulsion to accomplish its purposes in a hurry. Like the Church, it is dealing in ideological concepts which are of long-term validity, and it can afford to be patient. It has no right to risk the existing achievements of the revolution for the sake of vain baubles of the future. The very teachings of Lenin himself require great caution and flexibility in the pursuit of communist purposes.... Thus, the Kremlin has no compunction about retreating in the face of superior force. And being under the compulsion of no timetable, it does not get panicky under the necessity for such retreat. Its political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal.

Translating the above and adding elements from the rest of his Foreign Affairs essay, we might conclude that for Mr. X—who in his monumental essay is surely reflecting on past Soviet behavior as well as what he anticipated for the coming years of the post–World War II Cold War—the Soviets may be guided or inspired by their ideology. Yet they will act cautiously, not “fanatically.” They will not engage in reckless, offensive behavior. They will assert themselves aggressively only where a political vacuum appears. In all, their patience is “Oriental” (Kennan’s word). They do not work according to a rigid, world-revolutionary timetable or blueprint.

Applying realist-Kennan’s views retrospectively, it would seem that Stalin would never risk war, in the offensist sense of initiating hostilities out of the blue. He did not actively prepare for waging an offensist war against Germany or all of Europe in the 1940s, it is alleged. Rather, as Soviet propaganda also stipulated, if war were forced on him, he would have more than taken up the cudgels and “extended socialism” abroad on the tips of bayonets—but only if attacked and “given the chance.” This might be called a “piggyback” strategy by which an opportunity (war launched by “imperialists”) is exploited but not necessarily instigated by the side seeking to profit from it, that is, the Soviet Union.

It follows that Stalin, assuming he was a pupil of the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, might agree that the best victory is one that is obtained by a minimum of armed fighting or, in fact, by none at all. “Weapons are ominous tools,” Sun Tzu writes, “to be used only when there is no other alternative.” Stalin, after all, had won half of Poland, the Baltic states, part of Finland, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and other territory by virtue of his deal with Hitler and with a minimum of warfare, in some cases none at all.

However, this expansion was taking place when the Red Army was prepared to act merely as an intimidator or enforcer of sovietization. When it tried to be more than that—a latter-day Grand Armee in the expansionistic, Napoleonic tradition—it failed miserably (as in the aggressive war against Finland, begun in December 1939, or the attempted seizure of Poland in 1920).

Could it also be said that the Soviets’ massive, ongoing military buildup in 1939–41, accompanied as it was by threatening tones of militancy in its propaganda, was aimed mainly at scaring off any likely aggressor? Did the military buildup serve more as a deterrent than as real preparation for unilaterally initiating a “preventive” war?

Was Stalin so cautious that he was not about to risk what Kennan calls destruction of all the achievements of the Soviet Union—its factories and cities and the communist one-party rule and superstructure—in risky, untimely war making? As Stalin proclaimed in 1925: “If war is to break out, we won’t be able to stand by idly. We will have to enter the fray but we will be the last ones to do it in order to be the decisive weight on the scales, a weight that must tip the balance.”¹⁴

As we will see in the next chapter, nor was Stalin, as he put it in early 1939, about to “pull chestnuts out of the fire” for any other nation-states that got into trouble, such as in war or the threat of it—in Czechoslovakia’s case, invasion by the German Army in 1938. The Soviet Union would remain on the sidelines as destruction of other European countries was unleashed. It would be neither purely neutral nor directly involved. Until later....

Moreover, Stalin was coy in his negotiations (via Molotov) with Hitler and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in 1940 about just what kind of active cooperation he would be willing to give the tripartite coalition of states (the Axis)—assuming the Soviets joined it—which the USSR was invited to join and toward which a memorandum was prepared in Moscow, notably on the Soviets’ own initiative. Yet any concrete plans for forming such a broadened alliance or an expanded Axis that would include the Soviet Union as a full-fledged member were at best put on the back burner by Stalin and Molotov in that period. This is shown by close examination of the relevant texts of the negotiations during 1939–40.

Why such an expanded alliance was put on the back burner stems from the fact that Stalin evidently had another tactic in mind—an ideological subplot, as it were. It was a gambit that both he and Lenin had often mentioned in the context of war as the midwife of revolution: that is, encouragement of intra-imperialist discord. This tactical standby of the Kremlin will be explored later. Further, the former deputy chief of Soviet foreign intelligence of the NKVD at that time recalls the ideological-expansionist edge of Soviet foreign policy and of Soviet collaboration with Hitler, observing:

Once again for the Kremlin, the mission of Communism was primarily to consolidate the might of the Soviet state. Only military strength and domination of countries on our border could ensure us a superpower role. The idea of propagating world Communist revolution was an ideological screen to hide our desire for world domination. Although originally this concept was ideological in nature, it acquired the dimensions of realpolitik. This possibility arose for the Soviet Union only after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed. In secret protocols the Soviet Union’s geopolitical interests and natural desires for the enlargement of its frontiers were for the first time formally accepted by one of the leading powers of the world [Germany].¹⁵

Whatever position one may take on the influence of ideology on any regime’s policy making while assigning the priorities to ideology over or in conjunction with nonideological Realpolitik, the following must be kept in mind. The Soviet regime in particular put a very high premium on ideology, and not merely qua rationalization or propaganda. No doubt ideology, in terms of some of its particulars, would have to yield or be changed to suit new circumstances. But to conclude that ideology was readily disposable, meaningless, or otherwise irrelevant to Soviet policy making, especially as concerned the global arena and long-standing Leninist revolutionary goals, is unrealistic, unhistorical, and inapplicable. For the Soviet regime, its ideological underpinnings were fundamental. It is no exaggeration to say, one must think, that, to use the Soviet expression, ideology served as the Soviet regime’s “lodestar.”

NOTES

The first epigraph is from James E. Dougherty and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff Jr., Contending Theories of International Relations, 2d ed. (New York: Harper and Row), p. 114.

The second is from V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 7 (New York: International Publishers, 1943), p. 357. For many other similar statements by Lenin, Stalin, and other high Soviet officials, see Albert L. Weeks, Soviet and Communist Quotations (New York: Pergamon-Brassey’s Publishers, 1987), chapter 16. Lenin welcomed World War I, remarking that a “nice, little war” would provoke world revolution.

The third is from John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 319. General Deane was in charge of the $11 billion U.S. program of Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union. Oddly, earlier in his book (pp. 17-18) he opines that Stalin had abandoned the program of world revolution for an exclusively “nationalistic” policy. However, by the end of his book Deane concludes that Stalin had never neglected a policy of communist expansionism and fidelity to Marxism-Leninism in this respect. The book seems to have been written serially so that by the end of the general’s several-year experience with Stalin and his associates, such as Molotov and Vyshinsky, he had drawn new conclusions of the type reflected in the above quotation.

The fourth is from Aleksandr Yakovlev, Omut Pamyati (Swarm of Memories) (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000), p. 108.

V. A. Nevezhin, Sindrom nastupatel’noi voiny (Moscow: Airo-XX, 1997), pp. 252–53.

V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 221.

Weeks, Soviet and Communist Quotations, pp. 246–47.

For instance, in author David Glantz’s two excellent studies of Soviet prosecution of the Great Fatherland War—referencing its weapons and also its tactics and strategy—not a word is devoted to Marxist-Leninist ideology (Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998] and, with Jonathan House, When Titans Clash [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995]). Yet concerted indoctrination of Red Army servicemen in those principles was aimed at making them better soldiers. It would seem that commanders, up to and including the commander-in-chief, Stalin, likewise were guided by the principles of the official doctrine. That ideology and instilling morale and a sense of purpose in soldiers are one and the same was first proposed by Napoleon. Yet even in ancient times parallels may be found (e.g., Pericles’ propagandistic Funeral Oration extolling Athens). The point about the perennial uses of ideology in preparation for and waging war is strongly asserted in all editions of the Soviet Military Encyclopedia, including one article titled “Mythology.”

Jiri Hochman, The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, 1934–1938 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 176–77.

M. A. Gareyev, M. V. Frunze—Voyennyi teoretik (M. V. Frunze—Military Theoretician) (Moscow: Voyenizdat, 1986), p. 381.

Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 316–17.

Andreas Hillgruber, Germany and the Two World Wars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 82. The last sentence in the above quotation admittedly is puzzling. It is by no means clear how sovietization would be “subordinated” to strategic security. One would think they would work together. In any case expansion of the Soviet Empire is perfectly consonant with the world-revolutionary aims repeatedly asserted by Stalin as by Lenin before him. Compare NKVD foreign intelligence officer Sudoplatov’s observation concerning the dovetailing of Soviet Grand Strategy and revolutionary ideology.

Among the several books of this type published after 1945 in America is Blueprint for World Conquest (Washington, D.C.: Human Events, 1946), edited by William Henry Chamberlin. Chamberlin describes the excerpts from Comintern theses and programs reproduced in the book as follows: “These [are] authoritative blueprints of the communist scheme for world conquest.” He suggests that they are no less authentic and sincere than, say, Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Richard W. Harrison, The Russian Way of War: Operational Art, 1904–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), p. 272.

Yuri N. Afanas’iev, ed., Drugaya Voina (Moscow: Rossiisky Gosudarstvenny Universitet, 1996), pp. 60–75. The full text of Stalin’s speech is reproduced in this chapter.

Afanas’iev, Drugaya Voina, pp. 95, 97. Yet, in his book Upushchennyi Shans Stalina (Moscow: Veche, 2000), Mel’tyukhov is ready to admit that ideology can be all but irrelevant: “It is easy to see that attributing all sorts of sins to ideology as V. Suvorov does that such a notion has little substance. Take famous figures of world history like Tutmose III, Ramses II, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Attila, Charlemagne, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon, et al., none of them was a member of the Communist Party . . . yet this did not stop them from building an empire” (pp. 11–12). One might question the author’s examples. Some of these empire builders—especially Napoleon and Alexander the Great—surely did exploit ideology in making their conquests.

M. I. Semiryaga, “Sovetskyi Soyuz I vneshnyaya politika SSSR,” Voprosy istorii, no. 9 (1990), p. 61. Semiryaga is a respected doctor of historical sciences, State Prize laureate (USSR), and today a scholar in the Russian Academy of Sciences. A prolific researcher and writer, Dr. Semiryaga inclines toward the “offensist” school in interpreting Stalin’s policies and actions before June 1941. He is one of the contributors to the Afanas’iev book cited above.

Quoted in Ernst Topitsch, Stalin’s War: A Radical New Theory on the Origins of the Second World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 7.

Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994), p. 102.