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

2 Prewar Diplomacy and the Comintern

For [the Bolsheviks], diplomacy was part of the capitalist superstructure.... Soviet diplomats had the impossible task of serving two causes, two professions, two masters: One of [world] revolution, the other of diplomacy. Essentially, [Soviet diplomats] had to bridge the enormous gap between a revolutionary Soviet regime . . . and capitalist governments to which they were accredited whose values, indeed existence, they were committed ideologically to destroy.

—Zinoviev, later chairman of the Comintern

Words must have no relation to actions, otherwise what kind of diplomacy is it? Words are one thing, actions another. Nice words are a mask for concealment of bad deeds. Sincere diplomacy is no more possible than dry water of wooden iron.

—Josef Stalin

Round us are small countries which dream of great adventures or allow great adventurers to manipulate their territory. We are not afraid of these little countries, but if they do not mind their own business, we shall be compelled to use the Red Army on them.

—Andrei Zhdanov, close aide to Stalin

Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army has power to do so. It cannot be otherwise.

—Josef Stalin

When Lenin strode triumphantly down the center aisle of the Tavrida Palace in Petrograd (later Leningrad, now St. Petersburg) to open the first, post–November 7 Second Congress of Soviets, he announced that, in his words, a “New Order” had been established by the Bolshevik revolution. This was not ideological posturing. Lenin had explicitly set out profoundly to change his country root and branch and, with it, as he said, the world. The Russian and, in fact, pan-European ancien regime, as French revolutionaries called the departing system in France, was to be buried and with it many customary “bourgeois” institutions composing the capitalist “superstructure.” Among these institutions were diplomacy and the “old way” of doing things in world politics.

With several ensuing decrees and pronouncements during the weeks following the Communist seizure of power, Lenin and his associates let it be known that, like it or not, Soviet relations with foreign states would be cast in totally new, “militant” ways. Treaties would be torn up, and the tsarist diplomatic tradition would be repudiated. Out of the destruction of the Old Order worldwide would come socialist construction. “Much remains in the world that must be destroyed by fire and steel,” said Lenin during World War I, “in order that emancipation of the working class may be achieved.... Do not listen to sentimental whiners who are afraid of war”—or of world revolution. By war Lenin meant not only clashes between nation-states or, as he put it, between proletarian and bourgeois states, which he considered the wave of the future. Diplomacy, too, was regarded as a “weapon” for advancing The Cause worldwide.

EARLY DIPLOMACY

Lenin’s tactics called for advance and retreat or what he called taking “one step backward in order to make two steps forward.” By 1918 Lenin was prepared in certain circumstances to look at interstate relations in quite conventional ways as viewed from the parapets of the Kremlin, the Soviet government’s new home (as of March 11, 1918, when the regime was officially moved there from Petrograd). Despite their revolutionary rhetoric and the adoption of radical-sounding governmental titles like “commissar” (an invention of Trotsky’s), the leaders of the Soviet Republic began to confront traditional problems of Realpolitik along with their preoccupation with their much touted revolutionary messianism. As this mix was being recipied, the Third Communist International, significantly, was founded in the next year, 1919.

Of utmost immediate importance, however, was the defense of the Bolshevik revolution in the grimmest, most realistic terms. The regime was acquiring increasing numbers of domestic armed and unarmed enemies— especially within the restive working class. Lenin had prorogued the democratically elected Constituent Assembly that was allowed to meet for only one day on January 18. The Bolsheviks had won only about one-quarter of the seats. The oppressive Cheka police (from the Russian acronym for Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution) and its drumhead, firing-squad tribunals had already been set up in December. Civil war began to rage as domestic and foreign enemies harangued and fought against the “Revolution” and the Lenin dictatorship. By 1921, on Kronstadt Island in Petrograd, Lenin’s Red Army was mowing down workers and sailors, his staunchest, former Bolshevik supporters. Throughout the rest of the country the Red Army and the Cheka tribunals, liquidating “counterrevolution,” were brutally suppressing peasant revolts.

The later, halfhearted, short-term Allied intervention in the Civil War (1918) further complicated the Soviet Republic’s external security. The aim of the Allied intervention, to be carried out only while World War I was still raging, had been intended mainly to defend against Bolshevik seizures of the large Allied stores of weapons and ammunition bunkered at such Russian wharves and depots as those at Murmansk, Archangel, and Odessa as well as in the Far East. Bolshevik propaganda, often later echoed in the West, depicted this limited enterprise solely as a concerted effort by the Western powers to snuff out Communist rule. George V. Kennan, a witness to these events, has described such propaganda about the “counterrevolutionary intervention” as just that—propaganda.

In early January 1918 Russia was still formally engaged in hostilities against the Central Powers in World War I. Soldiers on both sides died in this interval following the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917. In this continued fighting on the Eastern Front, Germany was about to fully occupy Ukraine and with it to gain control over 40 percent of Russia’s total industry and 70 percent of her iron- and steel-producing capacity. The bulk of Russian-exported grain was produced in this “breadbasket.”

How to extract the Soviet state with its emerging Red Army from World War I with minimal damage to the integrity of the New Order became central to Soviet diplomacy. Ukraine was not yet totally in German hands. It was Berlin’s price for German withdrawal from Russia in exchange for Russian closure of the Eastern Front against the Germans. By a narrow margin of voting in the party’s Central Committee, in which Trotsky opposed Lenin, the latter’s plan to sacrifice the entire Ukraine to Germany was adopted. Trotsky and other officials of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs thereupon traveled in Western-style civilian clothes (but without top hats or striped pants) to Brest-Litovsk in German-occupied Poland to work out the deal with the German emissaries for closing down the Eastern Front. This agreement became the famous Brest-Litovsk Treaty of March 1918, abbreviated simply as “Brest-Litovsk,” an early example of Soviet willingness to compromise on the diplomatic front (though Lenin seemingly had no other choice) and in particular to strike a deal with the Germans.

It also signified winning what became known in Soviet tactics as a “breathing space,” that is, time to recoup in order to later resume the revolutionary offensive following the Brest-Litovsk “retreat.” Zigzagging was a well-known Bolshevik device, part of the “code of the Politburo.” Lenin said at the time: “If you are not able to adapt yourself, if you are not prepared to crawl in the mud on your belly, you are not a revolutionary but a chatterbox.” Such retreating, as with Brest-Litovsk or the New Economic Policy launched in 1921, did not mark the end of the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary socialist mission; it only represented a pause—and a useful one in several respects.

Lenin had just barely sold his comrades on the usefulness of the treaty. Yet he had convinced a majority by arguing that German troops fighting on the Eastern Front would be transported westward to fight the “capitalist-imperialist” states of France, Britain, and the United States.¹ (The latter had been dispatching units of the American Expeditionary Force into France since early 1917.) The Germans soon carried out this deployment to the disadvantage of the Allied war effort against the Central Powers.

Brest-Litovsk provides a good example of dovetailing what looks superficially like mere reason-of-state diplomacy—namely, ending war on Russia’s western frontier—with the timeless dictates of Leninist ideology—namely, encouraging interimperialist “contradictions” and interimperialist fratricidal war. Here was set a lasting precedent, a harbinger of what was to become a perennial Soviet tactic in foreign relations—namely, helping the Western capitalist states self-destruct. As Lenin advised: In diplomacy, “we must exploit the contradictions and divergences in view between any two imperialisms, between two groups of capitalist states, pushing one against the other.”² The “pushing” included instigation of war between them.

Pondering Lenin’s words with the realist-versus-traditionalist points of view in mind (see chapter 1), was this instigation policy motivated by nonideological “geopolitical interests” alone? Or was it based on Bolshevist revolutionism? It would seem that both factors were operating. Yet without ideological underpinning about the “laws” of capitalist imperialism, the policy of fomenting intra-imperialist tensions would have lacked a perspective, if not a motivation.

Because of the transfer of German troops to the Western Front, Germany in spring 1918 seemed to have come near to winning the war against the Allies, with its 200 divisions poised to drive on to Paris—at one point the French capital lying only some 35 miles distant from the invaders. However, French and U.S. reinforcements succeeded in stopping the last of Ludendorff’s several offensives by summer 1918. By November the war was over.

Out of such internecine struggle within the imperialist camp of “bourgeois” capitalist states, as noted, Lenin hoped that strife and socialist revolution would grow. War, as Marx and Engels taught, is a catalyst of unrest and destruction. Later the Soviet leader gave Japan as an example of such a state with which the Soviets could help instigate future hostilities against capitalist America. He added that war between these two states in any case was “inevitable.” Referring to Japan, Lenin said: “To put it bluntly, we have incited Japan and America against each other and so gained an advantage.” In a speech to the Moscow party “aktiv,” on December 6, 1920, Lenin further declared:

Until the final victory of socialism throughout the whole world, we must apply the principle of exploiting contradictions and opposition between two imperialist power groups, between two capitalist groups of states inciting them to attack each other.... If it should prove impossible to defeat them both, then one must know how to rally one’s forces so that the two begin to fight each other. For when two thieves quarrel, honest men have the last laugh.... As soon as we are strong enough to defeat capitalism [worldwide], we will seize it at once by the scruff of the neck.

As we shall see, in the 1920s and 1930s Stalin enlarged on this Leninist concept of Soviet encouragement of divide and conquer via intra-capitalist-sphere war. The policy as applied to the Far East was to include Japan. This would become a war that ultimately began at Pearl Harbor and in the South Pacific in December 1941 and involved the capitalist powers, America and Britain. (Months in advance of Pearl Harbor Stalin had intelligence about the impending attack on December 7 but did not share that information with Washington; this, after all, would have violated the tactic of helping capitalist states commit fratricide.) Shrewd, overtly “nonideological” Soviet diplomacy, but a foreign policy that was in tune with the regime’s ideology, was the tool by which in an important way Soviet fundamental goals were to be realized.

DIPLOMACY IN STALIN’S INDUSTRIALIZATION

“Trade diplomacy,” the art of winning trade partners and achieving profitable trade deals that would strengthen the Soviet Republic especially in the military sense, had been an integral part of Soviet foreign policy at least since the inauguration of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. This was when Lenin ordered his temporary, tactical retreat in Soviet domestic and foreign policy under NEP. By this means he sought to repair some of the economic damage wrought by the previous three-year stint of radicalized “War Communism” and by the disruptive civil war of the same period. The Soviet leader thereupon began to open up the young Soviet state to intercourse with capitalist nations. This opened the period of intense Soviet-German military collaboration (see chapter 3) that set a lasting precedent right up to 1939 and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pacts.

After Lenin’s death and Stalin’s consequent consolidation of power, elaboration of Lenin’s commercial opening to the West was effected by Stalin. This partial rapprochement with the capitalist states, confined mainly to commerce, was linked to Stalin’s industrialization program, which was initiated with the First Five-Year Plan in the late 1920s.

Josef Stalin well understood that for the USSR to become a major player in the world arena, which he repeatedly said was his principal goal, it would have to be powerful in the military-industrial sense. He was not satisfied to relish the Soviet Union as the model socialist state merely in the idealistic sense or as an isolated “Soviet garden” lacking influence on the global chessboard. As he once asked matter-of-factly about the Vatican, the capital of Western Catholicism and a fountain of myths, “So, how many divisions does the Pope have?” Spiritual monumentality did not impress Stalin—except as propaganda frosting on the cake. Heavy industry and motorized infantry divisions were what really mattered to him.

Before Stalin could supply the Red Army with guns, tanks, motorized infantry vehicles, aircraft, naval ships, and ammunition, it was necessary, of course, to develop the basic “producer-goods” or heavy industries of mining, power (energy), iron and steel, and machine building of several types. Here again diplomacy would come to the rescue. In this case it took the form of fostering foreign trade and on-site aid together with sales of foreign patents to the Soviets.

It is sometimes forgotten that the process of industrializing Russia had proceeded at an impressive pace under the tsars before World War I, from the 1890s to 1914. But the devastation of that war had set back this impressive, nascent Russian industrial growth. Stalin picked up where the tsars had left off. Now, however, the Soviet leader’s emphasis was on defense production, which after Stalin’s death in 1953 had left per capita food and consumer goods output in Soviet Russia where the tsarist Russian economy had been forty years ago back in 1913. (First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev was obliged to disclose this embarrassing fact in September 1953, perhaps on Premier Georgi Malenkov’s urging.)

During the Five-Year Plans, Stalin repeatedly emphasized what the basic intentions of the Soviet buildup were, what its sacrifices were for. As he proclaimed, Soviet Russia would become a major power, in his words the “prototype of the future world socialist Soviet Republic,” calling it the “base for world revolution”: “The Russian proletariat is the vanguard of the international proletariat,” he said.³ In order for it (meaning Russia) to fulfill that role, it must become a world power. Moreover, in so doing the USSR would be more than able to defend itself against the “capitalist encirclement.” (Stalin ignored the fact that this “encirclement” had been distinctly passive since 1918 with the end of the war-related Allied intervention.) All of Soviet Russia’s “defense needs,” Stalin promised, would be met by the completion of the several quinquennial plans. By then, he promised, the country would be ready to meet any expediency—war being the most likely such event, as he himself had predicted.

As Mr. X documents with numerous citations directly from Lenin’s and Stalin’s speeches and writings, both Lenin and Stalin on many occasions predicted that a new world war was “inevitable.” They predicted that it would be one in which imperialism would perish—with Soviet help. For the Soviets, developing weapons of war was not, in their view, simply a case of militarism, Soviet style. The policy flowed from geopolitical as well as ideological premises formulated in Moscow.

Foreign economic assistance to the Soviet Union, aid that was developed through diplomacy, became crucial for the process of industrializing the USSR. Significantly, although not surprisingly, the Soviets’ main supplier in the 1920s and 1930s was Germany. The United States came in a close second. It is no exaggeration to say that without this foreign assistance the Soviet industries could not have developed apace, including its power industry (represented, above all, by the great Dnepropetrovsk Dam in Ukraine, built with U.S help and equipment); its manufacturing industries (including not only heavy industry but also textiles); its mining and oil-drilling equipment; its railroad construction; its tractor-, tank-, and aviation-production facilities; and much else. And this was not solely because of German and American assistance; other states gave assistance, too.⁴ The Soviets likewise purchased foreign patents where needed. When I visited the USSR, as late as 1966, I still saw old foreign trademarks stamped on metal labels affixed to factory machinery—in this case, at a major plant in Moscow, the Zhelyabov Textile Factory.

As the Red Army was training and equipping itself for mobile war, during 1934–39 alone its fleet of tanks tripled. Before the Soviet-German war began in June 1941, Soviet tank production already was up to 12,000 per year, with the total number of the fleet reaching 24,000 by summer 1941.⁵ This was a defense-production feat far exceeding even Germany’s, let alone the combined levels of tank production in France, Britain, and, not surprisingly, the United States in its defense-poor, pre-Pearl Harbor years. By means of the heavy industries that made all this possible, the USSR boosted itself to first, second, or third place in the world in the production of various kinds of electrical power (thermal and hydroelectric) as well as crucial raw and manufactured materials—iron, coal, and steel being among them.

Soviet production of tanks, planes, and many types of field weapons at that time exceeded the production of all the major Western countries combined! That is, of course, before U.S. arms production had made the United States by 1942–43 the “arsenal of democracy.” But even during World War II, the USSR far outproduced the United States in machine guns and mortars as well as cannons and tanks. Also, the unique, multiple-rocket firing “Katyusha” (or mobile “organ” artillery, so named because of its resemblance to a nest of organ pipes) was coming on line as the Great Fatherland War began. Like other new, world-class weaponry just starting to come off Soviet assembly lines in 1941, the Katyusha ultimately played a major role in Soviet victories.

Among the new Soviet tanks was the low-profile, diesel-driven, semiamphibious (fording) T-34, developed in the late 1930s. This was the only such tank of its kind in battle in 1941 and was the envy of the Wehrmacht. Early Soviet artillery likewise was impressive, as were several other types of ground-force weaponry, including mortars and infantry guns and vehicles (the hardiness of the latter under Russia’s severe winter conditions became a crucial factor). Moreover, the Soviet aircraft industry was developing apace. Many innovations, and some flight world records, were chalked up by the Red Air Force in the 1930s. (Pre-1917 Russian progress in aviation is, of course, well known to anyone who has ever heard the names Mozhaisky, Tsiolkovsky, or Sikorsky.)

Not the least of the impressive new Soviet aircraft were the twin- and four-engine, medium- and long-range bombers and transport aircraft. The latter especially would be used for transporting airborne troops. The long-range heavy bomber TB-3, to cite one example, could carry four light aircraft mounted atop its wings or slung below them and the fuselage. Such Red Air Force planes, powered by impressive engines, could carry more weight than any foreign equivalent. In some ways the power plants of these planes were the forerunners of the powerful rocket engines developed in the USSR in the 1950s.

From 1940 to mid-1941, the Soviet aviation industry was mass producing the MiG-3, Yak-1, LaGG-3, 11-2, Pe-2, and other aircraft. In that mere one-and-a-half-year period, the total fighters and bombers produced in the USSR came to 1,200 MiG-3s, 400 Yak-1s, 250 Il-2s, and 460 Pe-2s. According to British and other military analysts, the Soviet planes in some cases were, indeed, world class. Too, the rate of their production in the USSR in the late 1930s, even before Operation Barbarossa was launched against the USSR in summer 1941, exceeded German aircraft production by four to one. These machines included the Ilyushin-2, or “Shturmovik” air-ground support fighter; the heavily armed fighter Polikarpov (“Po-2”), which saw service in the Spanish Civil War; and the flyushin-16, Version 17, a Polikarpov design appearing in 1938, an outstanding aircraft with ShKAS machine guns mounted atop the engine cowling plus two 20-millimeter cannons mounted in the wings, firing 1,600 rounds/minute with a muzzle velocity of 2,700 feet/second. These were exceptional specs for its time. The 11-16’s armament and ordnance weight exceeded that of the Messerschmidt 109-E1 by double and that of the British Spitfire by three times.

The specs of several other types of Soviet planes also led their equivalents worldwide. Some broke records in long-distance flight and in the power of their engines. Red Air Force fighters could attain speeds of up to 260 miles/hour and outclassed in several respects the German single- and twin-engine Me-109, FW-190, and Ju-87 and -88.

By mid-1941, the total Red Air Force fleet consisted of 10,000 planes, with a monthly production rate of 1,630 aircraft. By 1942, this latter figure had risen to 2,120 on the production base already established during the two preceding years. The designers of such world-class aircraft included A. S. Yakovlev, S. A. Lavochkin, A. I. Mikoyan, N. E. Zhukovsky, V. M., Petlyakov, N. N. Polikarpov, S. V. Ilyushin, G. M. Beriyev, A. N. Zhuravchenko, D. A. Ventsel’, V. S. Pugachev, and G. I. Pokrovsky.

Soviet defense-production organization and experience became vital when the German penetration of the industrial Ukraine in the opening weeks of the Great Fatherland War in June-July 1941 forced the Soviets to step up the movement of their production facilities to the rear to the Ural Mountains industrial region, the easternmost boundary of European Russia. At this time the Soviet’s own production of war matériel rather dwarfed subsequent Lend-Lease aid—as vitally important, however, as the latter was, as per Stalin’s public postwar admission to U.S. Lend-Lease administrator Eric Johnston.

TRAIL OF BROKEN “FRIENDSHIP” TREATIES

As the Soviets built up their industrial and military strength, their diplomatic relations with the outside world appeared confusing. In the pre-World War II years, the “dialectical” twists, turns, and zigzags of Soviet tactics became standbys in Soviet diplomacy.⁶ Some Western analysts even thought that the Soviets were using such mind-boggling on-again /off-again tactics as a form of psychological warfare to baffle and “wear down” the adversary. Soviet policy toward the League of Nations is one of many examples of this zigzagging. The “Nazi-Soviet honeymoon,” suddenly inaugurated in August 1939, to the world’s surprise and certainly to that of the world’s Communist Party apparatuses, was only the latest of a string of such policy gyrations.

At times, such zigzag behavior profoundly disoriented foreign observers, especially pro-Soviet ones and fellow travelers. Why, some might ask, would Stalin and the Soviet Union conclude a friendship treaty with each of the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—while at the same time using Communist Party legals and illegals in those same countries to overturn their capitalist system, private ownership of property, and political order? Indeed, as early as 1918 as well as in the 1920s Lenin followed a policy of attempting to sovietize countries as far to the west as Hungary and Germany. Was this merely old-fashioned Realpolitik based on the basic Russian geopolitical situation? Or did the regime’s expansionist ideology serve as more than a contributing factor to such behavior?

The same could be asked about Moscow’s overtures to and agreements with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and other nation-states with which Moscow made nonaggression, friendship, or mutual-assistance treaties in the 1930s while at the same time fomenting unrest in those same countries or eventually in the postwar period even taking them over. In fact, a U.S. Senate staff study, compiled in 1959, found that in thirty-eight short years after 1917, the USSR

had broken its word to virtually every country to which it ever gave a signed promise. It signed treaties of nonaggression with neighboring countries then absorbed these states. It signed promises to refrain from revolutionary activity inside the countries with which it sought “friendship.” [One may] seriously doubt whether during the whole history of civilization any great nation has ever made as perfidious a record as this in so short a time.

Trade was a strong motivating factor in such diplomatic intercourse, to be sure, although not the only one. Not even trade—say, as embodied in the Anglo-Soviet trade pact of 1921—was allowed to interfere with Moscow’s pursuit of world revolution and subversion in all of the countries without exception with which it had diplomatic and other dealings.⁷

The several precedents in this respect established in Soviet behavior in the 1920s and 1930s shed light on Soviet serpentine maneuvering throughout 1939. This was at the time, namely, when negotiations were held simultaneously with the Germans on one hand and the French and British on the other (see chapter 4). In these negotiations the Soviets secretly shared the texts of their talks with the British and French with the Germans to win the favor of the latter. They did not perform this favor for the other two capitalist states. By contrast, on occasion the British kept Moscow informed of its talks with the Germans—and, of course, informed Stalin of some of the contents of Enigma Machine intercepts of German General Staff coded messages that pointed to the opening of German hostilities against the USSR in June 1941. The British and Americans never revealed, of course, the top-secret source of their information.

The United States was also the object of two-track duplicity. In 1933, Moscow, via the Soviet emissary to Washington, Maxim Litvinov, the same accomplished, wily Old Bolshevik who had taken part in the Rapallo negotiations with Germany and who, despite his Jewish ancestry, favored Soviet-Nazi rapprochement (see chapter 4), spoke for his government as he agreed to terminate Communist Party-supported activities in the United States. This was in exchange for recognition of the Soviet Union by the Roosevelt administration. But this promise, too, was to be broken, despite repeated U.S. protests.

THE COMINTERN

Lenin was a uniquely innovative political actor in several respects. Not the least of his extraordinary accomplishments was the founding of the modern world’s first totalitarian state. Another such innovation was his establishment in 1919 of the Third Communist International—the “General Staff of World Revolution.” World politics had assumed an entirely new character. Now organized, global subversion by a major power would cast a shadow over the ways in which the diplomatic game had been played traditionally in Europe since the 1600s. Lenin had broken entirely new ground by creating this world-girdling organization with its headquarters in Moscow.

A good deal more than a Kremlin toy but less than a world-revolutionary Red Army ready to march against the world, the Comintern and its mission assumed several effective forms. It cannot be underestimated as an influential tool used by the Kremlin in order to promote Soviet interests and ideology on a global scale. Specifically, it was tasked to do the following:

Propagate Soviet-style communism that Lenin described as the sole model for all bourgeois and colonial societies in order to make the transition to socialism via the dictatorship of the proletariat on the Soviet model.

Establish Communist-led vanguard political forces in the target countries, capitalist and pre-capitalist, that would unite with subsidiary “front” organizations in order more broadly—for example, via parliamentary struggle, through the trade unions, and so on—to wage class war to bring down bourgeois democracy.

Use the “citadel” of the Soviet Union, or “base of world revolution” (Stalin), as guide and leader of the world movement, even using its military force, the Red Army “of liberation,” wherever appropriate or feasible to bring about the Communist revolution in a given country or region. This was known as exporting revolution on the “tips of Red Army bayonets.”

Exploit pacifism by use of peace campaigns to sap and stop armed, defensive containment of Soviet-sponsored world revolution in capitalist countries, above all in Britain, France, and the United States. (An old piece of barracks humor in the Soviet Union had it that “one day the Soviet peace effort will be so successful that not a brick will be left standing anywhere.”)

Recruit spies and subversives within capitalist or colonial countries.

The Comintern’s life span was twenty-five years—from 1919 to 1943. During that time it was far from successful in its ongoing labors to trigger world revolution. Yet, at the very least, it was the source for recruiting numbers of effective spies and subversives. It also helped promote pro-Sovietism and poputchikestvo (fellow travelership). This it did not only in the industrialized capitalist countries but also throughout the Third World. Actually, the Comintern acted as an arm of the Soviet secret police (OGPU, GPU, later NKVD), which had thoroughly penetrated the organization.

Moreover, with clever operatives like Soviet Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, who organized outwardly non-Communist, though Communist-backed movements and demonstrations in the Western democracies, an impressive number of leftwing people and organizations there were bamboozled into accepting various Communist-supported radical stands. A number of very well known Western intellectuals were taken in. These Comintern positions revolved about such issues as opposing Western rearmament and military defense preparations, supporting unqualified Soviet friendship even if it meant disloyalty to one’s home country, and smoothing the way via innocuous-looking “fronts” toward spreading Communist propaganda and influence within the target societies. The Comintern’s work combined with national Communist parties’ activities worldwide succeeded in some places in thoroughly penetrating labor unions, youth groups, and even the media—though much less successfully in those days in the United States than in such European countries as the United Kingdom and particularly France and the Lowlands.

UNITED FRONT/POPULAR FRONT

Much has been written about the “Popular Front” tactic developed within the Comintern in the mid-1930s. Historians have described how this party line transitioned into the Comintern-backed anti-Fascist movement. Actually, Lenin invented the front tactic back in 1922, calling it at that time the “United Front tactic.” Later, under Stalin’s tutelage after 1924, the Comintern began sharply to distinguish Communist parties from Social-Democratic parties (SDs). Under Stalin’s direction, it sought to put them on diametrically opposite sides of the barricades. The SDs were stigmatized as “Social Fascists” by the Stalinite parties throughout Europe and the Americas.

By thus following Stalin’s orders in the Comintern, the German Communist Party adamantly refused to cooperate with the popular Social-Democratic Party, which opposed Hitler’s and his Nazis’ rise to power. With this in mind, as well as displaying his usual penchant for believing that “worse is better”—for communism and world revolution—Stalin instructed in the late 1920s:

It is necessary that Social-Democracy be unmasked and defeated and be reduced to being supported by an insignificant minority of the working class. Without this happening, it is impossible to speak of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat.... The most favorable circumstances for a revolution in Germany would be an internal crisis and a significant increase in the forces of the Communist Party accompanied by serious complications within the camp of Germany’s external enemies.⁸

It is now a consensus view held among Russian historians, a view that began to surface under glasnost’ near the end of Communist rule in the USSR, that Stalin’s aversion to democratic socialism as represented by the SDs helped pave the way to Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933 and with it German military aggression. Stalin believed that Hitler’s Nazis would only aggravate the German class struggle in ways he thought were useful to the Soviets. Because of Stalin-decreed splittism within the German Left, the anti-Hitler camp in Germany became divided. The German Communists refused to join forces on the Left to block the Brown Shirts.

When Lenin’s United Front tactic was refurbished and unfurled again as the “Popular Front” at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in August 1935, the organization’s leader, Georgi Dimitrov, described it as a boring-from-within tactic to be used among Communist-supported, leftwing forces worldwide in order to attract supporters of the USSR and of world revolution. These front groups were designed ultimately to fall under the leadership of the Communists. (I actually witnessed such a stratagem in the postwar period. It was used by Communists within the Chicago chapter of a World War II veteran’s organization, known as the American Veterans Committee [AVC]. The AVCs elected leaders got wind of this tactic and expelled the Communists. Similar episodes occurred within U.S. labor union executive bodies.)

Dimitrov explains the tactic quite candidly in his widely distributed pamphlet, with its yellow, red, and black cover, titled The Working Classes against Fascism: “Comrades, you will recall the ancient tale of the capture of Troy.... The attacking army was unable to achieve victory until, with the aid of the famous Trojan Horse, it managed to penetrate to the very heart of the enemy camp.” Dimitrov is quite frank about the fact that the forming of Popular Fronts with leftist-minded collaborators was not an end in itself. It was a step, he says, toward eventually capturing power for the Communists.

As to the anti-Fascist side of the Popular Front, this side, or thrust, of the movement did not in the least deter Stalin’s efforts to close ranks with the German Nazis (see chapter 3). This was true despite mutually hostile propaganda attacks shared between both parties’ propagandists, those of the Reds and of the Browns, throughout the 1930s and despite Hitler’s plans, as stated in his bible, Mein Kampf, to seize territory from Russia for the purpose of securing German “Lebensraum.” As author Stephen Koch explains:

Münzenberg’s apparatus, in turn, was ordered to transform the “peace” movement and use it to mount a new, world-wide anti-Fascist campaign.... The Soviet state under Stalin was assuming the moral high ground. Or so it seemed.... As such, communism seemed to represent the only real resistance to the new horror so obviously taking shape [in Nazi Germany]. The democracies, through their real or supposed inaction, were depicted as bound by capitalism either to the ineffectiveness of liberalism—or worse, to a secret sympathy for the Nazis, “Fascist brothers under the skin.” This myth therefore assigned moralized roles, casting the struggle between the two states as the definitive struggle between good and evil in the century. In it, the Stalinist line became good or at least necessary to the good, by virtue of its supposed opposition to Hitler’s evil....

The tremendous moral credit inuring to this myth, which was added to (and was much greater than) the already existing moral credit of the Revolution itself, came flowing toward the Soviets at exactly the moment that Stalin’s government was moving toward its most sinister and brutal phase. Paradox? It was not a paradox born in coincidence. It was a deception, and it was planned. For this great confrontation between the [two] totalitarian powers was itself a deception, and in every way a very different thing from what it appeared to be.⁹

Soviet aide Karl Radek, who had supervised the anti-Fascist line (and who, when he was briefly in prison in Germany in the 1920s, had been approached by representatives of the German General Staff who urged him to promote German-Soviet collaboration), had made the same points to Walter Krivitsky. He disclosed to Krivitsky the grand deception of the anti-Fascist movement sponsored worldwide from Moscow: “Only fools,” Radek said, “could imagine we would ever break with Germany. What I am writing here [of an anti-Fascist nature] is one thing. The realities are something else. No one can give us what Germany has given us. For us to break with Germany is simply impossible.” Stalin shared these sentiments.

Koch adds that just as Münzenberg was placing himself in Paris in charge of executing the Popular Front line in France, Radek was sent by Stalin into top-secret contacts with the German ambassador in Moscow, Radek acting as the Soviet dictator’s direct, confidential emissary These confidential discussions, in which the Soviets were initiators, took place without the knowledge of the Soviet diplomatic service or of the Army. The contents of the talks amounted to negotiations based on mutual benefit. In other words, they were the prelude to the Nazi-Soviet negotiations of 1939 in which the Soviets once again were the initiators.¹⁰

In July 2000, the Russian journal Vorposy Istorii published for the first time long excerpts from the diary of the head of the Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov. The document was unearthed by a Russian Academy of Sciences historian, F. I. Firsov, from the Archive of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee. Classified “strictly secret” (strovo sekretno), the Dimitrov diary contains many revealing facts about Stalin’s attitude toward world revolution, the capitalist states, Germany, and the coming war.

We learn, for instance, that far from downgrading the importance of the Communist International’s activities at any juncture in its history, Stalin took a special interest in its work. In remarks to Dimitrov on September 7, 1939, he explained the rationale behind the Nazi-Soviet agreements that, superficially at least, seemed only to help Germany. As Stalin explained:

War between the two groups of capitalist states (poor ones vs. rich ones in terms of their colonial possessions, raw materials, etc.) is taking place for the redivision of the world and for world domination! We won’t prevent them at all from fighting among themselves all they wish as they go about damaging and bringing down the capitalist system. Communists who are in power take a different position from those who are in opposition [seeking power]. We are masters in our own household. The Communists in capitalist countries, on the other hand, are in opposition to the bourgeois boss. So, we are able to maneuver, pitting one [bourgeois state] side against the other so that they will fight all the harder with each other. The [Nazi-Soviet] Nonaggression Pact helps Germany to a degree but at the next juncture spurs on the other side.¹¹

Here Stalin was suggesting that in helping Germany with the formidable shipments of Soviet matériel to buttress the German war machine (see chapter 4), the Soviets thereby aggravated the military balance between Germany and its potential enemies (World War II began September 1, 1939; it did not become a truly fighting war in Western Europe until the next year).

Stalin went on to say that while the antifascist line of the Comintern was useful before the war had begun, once it began, the line made no sense. Nor did distinguishing fascist from democratic states: “The war brought about a basic change. The united Popular Front of yesterday was merely to alleviate slavery under conditions of capitalism. But once the imperialist war begins, it becomes a question of destroying this slavery!” Another historian writes:

The main purpose of the “anti-fascist solidarity of all democracies” [line] had been to prevent a rapprochement between Hitler and the Western powers. When war was declared, this goal had been achieved; furthermore, the Kremlin now supported Germany for reasons of power politics—Hitler’s forces could be used as a battering ram against the “imperialists.” Anti-fascism had served its purpose and—at least for the time being—it was finished. It was perfectly clear at the time that the main thrust of Soviet policy was directed at the Western powers; this was true before, during, and after the Second World War. The anti-Hitler coalition, which came later, did not alter this fact. Very much to Moscow’s advantage, however, it veiled it from the eyes of democratic politicians and public opinion in the Western countries.¹²

At the sixteenth anniversary of Lenin’s death held in the Bolshoi Theater, January 21,1940, Stalin defined world revolution under the new conditions of actual, ongoing war as follows: “World revolution seen as a single act is pure nonsense. It proceeds through several stages at various times in the several countries. Actions by the Red Army also are part of the world revolution.”¹³ On November 25,1940, Dimitrov heard Stalin say the following in discussions between him and Foreign Commissar Molotov upon the latter’s return from Berlin: “In the lands destroyed by the occupation of German troops we will pursue a course there of carrying on our work but not screaming from the rooftops what we’re up to. We would not be Communists if we did not follow this course. The thing is to do this quietly.”¹⁴

Stalin closed down the Comintern in 1943 after almost a quarter century of it playing the role as something more than a mere disposable tool of the Kremlin. For some authors, the Comintern’s demise, on Stalin’s orders, testifies to the dictator’s demeaning of its importance. Yet the Comintern’s functions did not cease as the USSR allied itself with the Western powers in World War II. On the contrary, Comintern-like activities were continued. They were even strengthened in the name of spreading Soviet-style socialism worldwide by the Comintern’s successors, the Cominform and the CPSU Central Committee’s International Department, which was run by former Comintern executives. These “internationalist” organs by no means were vestigial. Their program for global subversion and Soviet expansionism was solidly within the traditions of the Comintern, the “General Staff of World Revolution.”

NOTES

The first epigraph is from Soviet Diplomacy and Negotiating Behavior, vol. 1, Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, 96th Congress (1979), p. 56. Zinoviev, later chairman of the Comintern, referring to treaties like that signed at Brest-Litovsk between Germany and the Soviet Republic in March 1918 that provide for momentary truces, remarked: “We should use breathing spaces so obtained in order to gather our strength.” Theodore J. Uldricks, specialist on the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, has written: “In the early days of the Soviet regime, the conception of ‘Bolshevik diplomacy’ seemed impossible to both friend and foe of the revolution. Could bomb-throwing revolutionaries suddenly don striped pants and sit down to tea with representatives of imperialism?” According to Uldricks, this they did with consummate ease because, in his view, ideology was no imperative to them or later to Stalin (Soviet Diplomacy and Negotiating Behavior, p. 47).

The second is from Soviet Political Agreements and Results, staff study, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 86th Congress, First Session (1959), p. ix. The report, written by the Democrat-led committee, states: “The staff studied a thousand treaties and agreements [that] the Soviets have entered into not only with the United States but with countries all over the world. The staff found that in the 38 short years since the Soviet Union came into existence, its government had broken its word in virtually every country to which it ever gave a signed promise. It signed treaties of nonaggression with neighboring states and then absorbed those states. It signed promises to refrain from revolutionary activity inside the countries with which it sought ‘friendship,’ and then cynically broke those promises.” The dates and circumstances for the Soviet takeovers of neighboring states after 1918 are given in Albert L. Weeks, The Other Side of Coexistence: An Analysis of Russian Foreign Policy (New York: Pitman, 1970), pp. 32–44; and in Martin Gilbert, Atlas of Russian History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 103, 113–14, 116.

The third is quoted in Weeks, The Other Side of Coexistence, p. 54.

The fourth is Stalin’s remark to Yugoslav No. 2 Communist official in Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (London: Harmondsworth Publisher, 1969), pp. 90–91. Two books on Radek are highly informative on Soviet-German ties established in the pre-1939 period: Jim Tuck, Engine of Mischief: An Analytical Biography of Karl Radek (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988); and Warner Lerner, Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970).

1

A. N. Yakovlev, Omut Pamyati (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000), p. 83. Yakovlev, former member of the Soviet Communist Party Politburo, describes the “new” Soviet diplomacy as follows: “The post-October 1917 Soviet pose of renouncing secret diplomacy and going over to above-board diplomacy quickly changed. Deceit, lying and dissimulation, so much a part of the history of diplomacy, were wholly adopted by Soviet foreign policy” (Omut Pamyati, p. 110).

2

Weeks, The Other Side of Coexistence, pp. 295–96.

3

For both quotations, see Albert L. Weeks, Soviet and Communist Quotations (New York: Pergamon-Brassey’s Publishers, 1987), p. 194.

4

Details are provided by many sources. Two suggested ones are Ellsworth Raymond, The Soviet State (New York: New York University Press, 1978), chapter 6; and Weeks, The Other Side of Coexistence, chapter 5.

5

Raymond, The Soviet State, p. 96. Raymond was in charge of analysis of the Soviet economy in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the late 1930s. He was regarded as one of the best-informed experts on the Soviet economy and Soviet war planning in the West. He played an advisory role in Washington, D.C., during the Lend-Lease period of aid to Russia in World War II.

6

For an analysis of the Soviet policy of “collective security,” see chapter 4.

7

A comprehensive, levelheaded exposition of Soviet “two-track” pursuit of diplomacy plus export of revolution may be found in Stanley W. Page, Lenin and World Revolution (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1959). Also see Soviet Political Agreements and Results.

8

J. V. Stalin, Sochineniya, vol. 7 (Moscow: Ogiz, 1947), p. 86.

9

Stephen Koch, Double Lives (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 54.

10

Yevgeny Gnedin, Iz istorii otnoshenii mezhdu SSSR i fashistskoi Germanii. Dokumenty i sovremenniye komentarii (New York: Izdatel’stvo “Khronika,” 1977), p. 262. One of historian Gnedin’s specialties is the career of Karl Radek, who headed a special foreign affairs directorate set up by Stalin whose main task was to solidify Soviet-German relations.

11

V. B. Mar’ina, “Dnevnik G. Dimitrova,” Veprosy Istorii, no. 7 (2000), pp. 36–38.

12

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. 54.

13

Topitsch, Stalin’s War, p. 40.

14

Topitsch, Stalin’s War, p. 41.