RC Raack. World Affairs. Volume 155, Issue 1, Summer 1992.
Sources recently made available by the dissolution of the Soviet Union indicate that, in signing a pact with Hitler in 1939, Stalin was not simply trying to defend his country but acting out a plan to expand the socialist state. Observers during World War II and since have thought security was Stalin’s only motivation in signing the pact. Recently released primary source records show the Soviets wished to expand into Poland, the Baltics and beyond well before Hitler provided Stalin with the opportunity.
Historians are at last getting major revelations from long-closed archives and other previously unavailable sources inside the former Soviet bloc. What began a few years ago as a trickle has now become a flood. Many past understandings of key historical events would already have been swept away were historians able to keep up with the newly revealed information.
What has appeared already portends a vast revolution in historical thinking. We can already see, in a new light, the era of Stalin—and especially his role in events central to the understanding of all contemporary world history, the beginnings of World War II, and the cold war. We are learning that they did not come about quite as recorded in most histories. What follows is part of the picture now developing from most recent writings and revelations, as well as from some documents heretofore unused or ignored that the author has found in the course of his research.
The Hitler-Stalin pact of 23 August 1939 produced the Second World War in the form in which history has recorded it. Without the pact’s making Stalin’s Hitler’s covert ally in the then still prospective revision of borders and nations of east central Europe, Hitler could never have planned and carried out his attack on Poland in the way that he did on 1 September 1939. The absolutely necessary anvil against which Hitler would launch the German steel hammer was fixed in place at the Poles’ geographical rear only on 23 August.
Hitler had to be utterly certain in advance of his attack that the Soviets would understand the limited extent of his Polish plan. He would bring his armies to a stop where the agreed border of the Soviet sphere of influence in Poland, fixed in the secret protocols of the pact, had been secretly set. Only this agreement, part of his undercover understanding with Stalin, guaranteed him the free hand that he required to deal with the Poles to the east. Stalin, the Poles’ eastern neighbor, was offered, in the same arrangement, the chance to deal with those in his “sphere.” The first Blitzkrieg in history could begin.
As part of their agreement, Stalin also pledged to Hitler his benevolent neutrality in the larger European war likely to come. He pledged to him as well enormous quantities of vital foods and materials to appease the German people in wartime. They knew from the bitter experience of 1917 and 1918 what it was to fight a two-front war without sufficient grains or fats, without enough materiel to bind together the Reich’s enormous war machine.
In return for Stalin’s benevolent neutrality, Hitler had to be prepared to accept the unbenevolent march westward of the Red Army through the eastern half of Poland to the Bug River. This choice by the German Fuhrer was another of this perennial risk-taker’s gambles. For even then he had plans to denude his eastern front military for his upcoming thrust to the west of Europe. When the war against Poland family ended, the Red Army was in position on relatively flat terrain only 500 miles from Berlin. It had advanced a giant step westward to landscape ideal for the operations of Soviet tanks. In the months following September 1939, the Bolshevik thrust to the west at the expense of the Poles was followed by others at the expense of the Finns, the Baltic peoples, and the Rumanians. This belt of territories, part of Germany’s traditional eastern glacis, Hitler had effectively abandoned to Stalin, just as he recklessly abandoned so much of what traditional notions of security required the German nation to maintain.
So what had become known as Hitler’s war became seventeen days later Stalin’s war as well, as the Red Army marched into Poland. But most historians in the west, and most historical commentators as well, have paid all too little attention to this second wartime front established by the Red Army across east central Europe and to the activities of the Soviet government east of its lines between 1939 and 1941.
Indeed, the overwhelming majority of historians writing since have accepted the notion, spread by Stalin and his propaganda agencies from the day the pact was revealed, that the Soviet assaults westward were intended only to set out defensive posts against an expected German attack. British Foreign Office, American Foreign Service, and State Department records reveal that even a number of ranking diplomats at the time uncritically swallowed the Soviet story. The confusion back then in many Western heads—including some as nobly drawn and well positioned as that of Winston S. Churchill—with respect to east central and eastern European demography and geography and to Soviet behavior, made this brazen Stalinist propaganda line all the more digestible. Yet the pact was the overture to the wartime destruction by both of its subscribers of nations and peoples on a scale never before imagined. And the cold war, so recently a frightening part of our daily environment, came about only as its later chief antagonists, the United States and Great Britain on the one side and the Soviet Union on the other, failed, after trying vainly all during the war to resolve the territorial, governmental, and demographic issues first posed by the results of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Part of those results were visible on maps as the division of east central Europe between the German and Soviet dictators. But no such comprehensible graphic depictions of their secretive demographic mayhem then existed.
Historical understanding about Stalin’s plans in 1939, to repeat, has remained ever since just about where it began: Stalin’s honest needs for defense were in the forefront of his mind when he made the pact. After the toasts at a dinner during the Yalta Conference in early 1945, the Soviet vozhd’ himself blithely suggested just about that explanation, and put the blame on the West (for making the Munich agreement) and on the Poles (for signing a non-aggression agreement with the Germans in 1934—like the one the Warsaw government already had with the Soviets) for his having signed up with the Fuhrer. Neither of his guests, Churchill and Roosevelt, then challenged the strange and strangely volunteered disclaimer that, according to the record, seems to have popped out of their host’s mouth wholly out of context. Perhaps he had lurking somewhere in his dark soul a bit of fear that his guests knew or suspected the truth. Perhaps he therefore felt he had better set up a defense of his deal with Hitler, though no one at Yalta had yet issued him an historical challenge on the matter. Nor would anyone. Perhaps that was because the Westerners knew too little history on which to found a challenge. Perhaps, too, they felt it necessary to behave as gentlemen in order to hold the coalition together and end the war.
Having seen the Soviet state pay terribly in 1941 and after for the failure to post a suitable defense in spite of the gains from the alliance with the German devil, many of the highest Western Allied statesmen, like Roosevelt and Churchill, all during wartime negotiations tried to understand and accept Stalin’s explanations. As the war went on, they tried to understand Stalin’s steady push westward, beyond the Soviet Union’s prepact borders, as part of an extended quest to restore Soviet security. They misunderstood this push westward as they had misunderstood Stalin’s deal with Hitler in 1939. And, although they slowly became aware during the war of Hitler’s terrible works, they preferred to ignore what they might have learned of the merciless destruction of peoples where Stalin ruled. Viewing only the border changes proposed by Stalin for the post-war map of Europe, they regularly, perhaps almost unconsciously, accepted the Soviets’ advances to the west at the expense of their neighbors as simply a retaking of the historical Russian borders long held by the earlier tsarist Empire. It, like Stalin’s empire, they agreed, required far-flung bastions to defend its eight million square miles from foreign invasion.
Even after the war, many leading Westerners continued to explain Stalin’s move westward as stemming from his quest for security—the same security that they assumed that he had earlier sought to achieve with the pact and with his wartime reacquisition of the territories that he had originally gotten in collaboration with Hitler. Yet his post-war security manifestly required bastions well beyond the gains of 1939 and 1940. He pursued further territorial expansion east as well as west: at the expense of the Japanese and Chinese in the Far East and at the expense of the Germans and Czechoslovaks, gaining still more lands stripped from the Finns, in Europe.
By 1949, only ten years after the pact, Stalin had fastened on people all over east central Europe in the lands occupied by the Red Army during and after the war that had not been annexed by the Soviet Union, a saddle of Leninist-style, Sovietized regimes. By that time, there were few doubts, except among a few intellectuals and other Soviet sympathizers in the West, that a confrontation with Stalin was necessary. But even then few thinkers and few historians, despite the two giant Soviet steps westward, systematically connected this Stalinist Drang nach Westen with a possible secret design to extend the Bolshevik band even farther, to all of Europe, using the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army as the need arose.
There was indeed just such a plan. If not written down, it was at least regularly dreamed, bespoken, outlined—even filmed—and, of course, implemented whenever possible. It was born in theory and fantasy in the Kremlin well before the heady moments of Soviet triumph in Poland in the late summer and fall of 1939. The goal was to plant the red flag as far west in Europe as possible. Even after the war, Stalin candidly said he expected the spread of “socialism” under the aegis of the Communist parties in Germany, France, and Italy, though he coyly neglected to describe what kind of socialism that might be or to mention the central role of the Red Army in effecting his dream sequence—for he was telling it at the time to one of the Labour party innocents, Professor Harold Laski. In fact, Soviet empire-building in the early days, in the last days of World War II and in early cold war times, can scarcely be viewed as anything less than a series of steps toward realizing Stalin’s program for the Bolshevization of Europe conceived many years before. That program, in fact, portrayed a Red Army thrust to the West and the spread of the revolution across the entire European continent.
But few Western historical writers—one of them Robert C. Tucker, whose second volume of a massive biography of Stalin was published in New York very recently—have ever questioned the notion that Stalin entered the war in 1939 only reluctantly and for defensive purposes. Only Tucker and a few others have doubted, on the basis of evidence that they have systematically amassed, that Stalin’s sudden deal with Hitler in August 1939 was made in desperation—that he jumped into Hitler’s arms only after he had decided that the British and French (whose delegates then sat hoping for his attentions in Kremlin waiting rooms) and their Polish allies were insincere in begging him to join them in a defensive league against Hitler.
In fact, there were credible witnesses, one of them a reliable Baltic leader, the first vice-premier and foreign minister of Lithuania after the Soviet occupation in 1940, who described publicly in the early wartime years how leading Soviet representatives had broadcast their expansionist plans. They had prophesied a Red Army Drang nach Westen, to the channel and perhaps beyond. This assault would come in the course of Hitler’s war with the West.
The early reports with respect to Soviet schemes were not found or, in any event, were ignored by historians. Or, oddly enough, those who found them did not connect them with later wartime and post-war Soviet behavior. But Stalin’s immediate underlings, like Viacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, and Andrei Zhdanov, head of the Leningrad party organization, were very high. Soviet authorities. It was they who were extensively reported by these sometime friends of the Soviet Union to have confidently predicted in 1940 that the war in Europe’s west, already begun, would come to a long drawn-out and dreary end, but only with the internal collapse of the warring states. This collapse, they went on, coming to the central point of their auguries that were repeated in several almost simultaneous harangues, would come in the aftermath of a war imagined in the Kremlin to be similar to that of 1914-1918, with its terrible bloodletting and agonies in the trenches, and the gradual exhaustion of front soldiers and civilian populations. Revolutions such as occurred in the Russian Empire in 1917 and 1918, and in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany in 1918 and 1919, would break out all over the West. The local revolutionaries would summon help from the Red Army.
Spiritually armed for a war of attack, as well-known, publicly broadcast Soviet war doctrines had for years envisioned, the Red Army, rearmed and refreshed while the armies in the West had fought to exhaustion on the Western Front, would break out to the west to aid the revolutionaries. With its successful advance, the glorious Bolshevik revolution would reign triumphant in Europe. World War I, according to the Leninist-Stalinist doctrine that they reported, had brought the establishment of the world’s first socialist state; World War II would end with the Bolshevization of Europe; and World War III would end with the triumph of the world revolution. So it would be, the Soviet chieftains broadcast to their astonished hearers, and so the former obviously believed.
In Stalin’s recorded words we can find many forerunners, as historian Tucker and other have now made clear, for this fantastic (or was it?) and monumental scheme. And, though it was locally reported in a Lithuanian wartime publication and later far more widely in testimony placed in the records of the American Eighty-Third Congress, its significance has been, to repeat, almost wholly ignored by historians, perhaps in part because of its suspect original sources and in part because it was so downright breathtaking.
In fact, recent reporters tell us, Stalin had not made the pact with Hitler, as Soviet propaganda had put it out and the former himself suggested, to secure his defense. Nor had he done it out of fear, nor out of disgust with the alleged dithering of the West in the 1939 negotiations, nor because the Poles resisted his demands to send the Red Army into Poland on his terms to help them against the Germans. Actually, Stalin had wanted for years, indeed craved, a deal with the German Fuhrer. Hitler finally caught the purport of Stalin’s numerous signals to that end and found himself attracted, as we know from his own words, to the idea at least as early as the fall of 1938, if not earlier.
With the pact with Hitler, Stalin, unchallenged by the Germans, won the first fine of territories to the West that the tsars had earlier held and that he must have as self-appointed successor (as Tucker effectively documents) to the tsarist and Leninist imperiums. He also set loose the dogs of war for the conflict to the bitter end that he wanted to see in the West—and ultimately throughout the world. Moreover, he thought that he secured a basis with Hitler for making even greater demands later in the Balkans and at the Turkish straits, that basis likewise historically founded on long-coveted tsarist Russian goals. Hitler quickly had these initial great achievements to his credit even if he should fail to accomplish in the longer run the far grander scheme that his tsarist-Leninist fantasies dictated.
Hitler’s offer of a deal came as one Stalin could not refuse. But what the latter obviously did not anticipate in 1939 were the events of 1948 in the West: the quick and complete collapse of the Western Allies, in particular of France, on the Continent. So his great leap forward actually became a cropper as early as June 1940, just as the Red Army marched triumphantly, in the wake of Hitler’s success in the West, into the Baltic states and Rumania. The raving anti-Bolshevik in Berlin, author of his own dreams of vast Lebenstraum for the German people in the east, was then suddenly master of all the resources of the Continent west of the Soviet border, as well as of the most successful army in the world. He, Stalin knew, had well-publicized plans of his own to carry out at the expense of the “Judeo-Bolsheviks,” plans that no one to the east could well ignore.
We at last know for certain that the older reports available in the West of those Soviet leaders’ earnest, if astonishing, forecasts and hopes of bringing about the political and economic collapse of Europe, and Red Army intervention beyond the Soviet borders, were neither misreported nor vaporings for the moment. For now, at last, Soviet historians allowed into Soviet records and archives so long closed to Westerners, as well as to Soviet citizens not part of the Stalinist and neo-Stalinist apparatus, have begun to report suspicions and to furnish striking descriptions of the same plans from local sources. After the war, Stalin had more in mind than idle envy when he noted his regret that Tsar Alexander I had gotten to Paris whereas he had not.
Stalin’s deeds have not been easy for historians to establish as historical fact. (But this has not kept a number of them from presuming to explain anyway just what he was about—the reader will recall in this context the numberless vast conclusions on this topic jumped to, without parachutes, by countless American “revisionists” over the last thirty or so years.) The essential Soviet archives, with their key documents, have long been kept well locked behind their own iron curtains. Moreover, Stalin superintended a style of government not unlike the intuitive and sporadic interventionist game of command Hitler played in the Third Reich. Like Hitler, Stalin deliberately left few formal records to explain his whimsical interventions in foreign policy matters or, for that matter, his random interventions in virtually every aspect of Soviet life from philosophy and literature to architecture and film. At least until 1941, he rarely met official diplomats, ambassadors, or other foreign representatives. He evidently did not participate in systematic discussions or sign documents of foreign policy. Even during the war, when he not unsurprisingly took over full military command (later, self-dubbed a generalissimo, he would take full credit for the dearly purchased victory), he directed Soviet foreign affairs in an unsystematic manner.
It was typical of Stalin that after discussions of matters of politics and other business of state he would host a late evening informal cabinet and discussion session, with food and drink supplemented by late-night film showings (late evening cinema and society was a habit also indulged in by his sometime ally Hitler). His boorish and bizarre in times—ranging from the perverted NKVD chief, Lavrenty Beriia, to jocular and incompetent Marshal “Klim” Voroshilov and servile Molotov—were frequent visitors to this late night talk, music, and cinema cabaret. Foreign diplomats and visitors were sometimes invited to these odd evenings after political talks. The Lithuanian foreign minister, Winston S. Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle, among others, witnessed such performances. (“C’est un monstre,” De Gaulle’s translator said of Stalin to French Foreign Minister Bidault after one evening session.) Milovan Djilas even recalled carrying on politics with Molotov in a pre-prandial visit the two made to the toilet. From the evidence we have (confirmed by Djilas), it is scarcely to be doubted that it was in the bibulous ambiance of these smoke-filled Kremlin chambers (absent the foreign guests) that Stalin and his troop inflated their various schemes, including the one for a Drang nach Westen, a mixture of theory, hubris, fantasy, and colossal duplicity and cruelty.
Recent histories published in the Soviet Union and elsewhere have added the following vital facts to support the dramatic description of the grandiose scheme outlined above. In March of 1939, well before the pact, L. Z. Mekhlis, another of Stalin’s intimates—he was in charge of the direction and development of Red Army propaganda—had already iterated that, if war struck, the war to come would be carried to the territories of the enemy. The Soviet Union’s “international obligations”—manifestly to bring Soviet “socialism” to other nations and to increase the number of Soviet republics—would be fulfilled. Mekhlis, speaking publicly at the eighteenth congress of the Communist party, made it clear that his remarks were founded on the opinions of Stalin—as inevitably they had to have been, or else remain unsaid, even unthought. Mekhlis’s words, providing a general outline of the program told above, have recently been reported by Soviet historian M. I. Semiriaga. At about the same time, another Soviet historian, V. L. Mal’kov, also ventured to suggest that Stalin had something other than defense in mind when he made the pact. Both cited published, but heretofore ignored, official sources as well as, for the first time, Soviet archival materials to the point.
Well before Mekhlis’s speech, the British Foreign Office was made aware by its staff in Moscow that official propaganda directives (Mekhlis’s bailiwick)—key indicator and definer of shifts in Soviet purposes—had already radically shifted. We know this from the London archives. At least from early 1939 on, so the British Foreign Office had learned, the Soviet public was to be made aware by means of subtle propaganda devices that even an agreement with the previously systematically derided “fascists”—in Soviet parlance that term included “Nazis”—might be necessary to advance the purposes of the world’s first “socialist” state.” Here is another proof that the apparent revolution in Soviet diplomatic thinking anticipating the pact was not at all a revolution born with the coming of Molotov to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in May but was being plotted months, indeed years, before the latter was signed. So even if the whole scheme was truly concocted and amplified in late evenings within Kremlin walls, it nonetheless came forth not as a whim or a short-lived blossom, but as a carefully nurtured, long-lasting bloom—an enduring, not to be forgotten, product of Stalin’s famous garden. And it manifestly took on a status in the minds of its creators—after all, it fitted their holy writ—that even major changes in the European power balance like those radical transformations of the spring of 1948, could not change.
Andrei Zhdanov, named above as one of the bearers of the glad tidings of the thrust to the Baltic in 1940, also outlined the program in private speeches (culled from the Soviet archives by historian Semiriaga) in the spring of 1941. So did Soviet theorist E. S. Varga, then one of Stalin’s favorites and one of his consultants, in a speech to the V. I. Lenin War-Political Academy around the same time. (Varga, too, just after the pact had been signed, had predicted the identical future course of World War II—a few months later similarly foretold by Molotov and Zhdanov—culminating in immense social revolution in the warring states. Can we doubt that there was an exchange of such notions among Kremlin insiders—one feeding another, until the entire scheme became future reality in their minds?) The plan was clearly still very much alive, even flourishing, shortly before Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.
Stalin and Molotov, blithely ignoring Hitler’s threatened moves eastward and, at the same time, catastrophically underestimating the German dictator’s armed might while clearly overinflating a vision of their own (in spite of their military debacle in Finland during the “Winter War”), were manifestly basking in the success of having vastly expanded Soviet territory in the aftermath of the pact to the Bug, the Baltic, and the Danube. These gains and the pact had triggered their “imperial ambitions” (to quote Semiriaga; historian D. A. Volkogonov terms the ambitions “Trotskyist”) whose underlying scheme, to repeat, had been born years before. The idea of the coming revolutionary thrust to the West was being widely bruited in higher Muscovite governmental echelons in the first half of 1941. And, we are now told by one conscientious researcher, conscious preparations were then underway in the Red Army for a war of attack—to the West.
So in spite of the German consolidation of power on the Continent, power Stalin and Molotov evidently still expected to see squandered in Hitler’s continuing war with Britain, and in spite of transfer of the bulk of Entler’s army to the Soviet frontier after the beginning of 1941, they continued to define publicly, albeit in these circumstances only circumlocuitorily, or revolutionary plans. These were the same plans Molotov, Zhdanov, and other Stalinist henchmen had blurted out directly, albeit privately, some months before to their Baltic confidants. There is every evidence that Stalin and Molotov were still determinedly dreaming these very dreams in the early morning hours of 22 June 1941, Along the newly established Soviet western border, the Soviet armies were fixed in attack positions, gearing up for the Drang nach Westen. The unanswered question remains: what circumstances did their Kremlin chieftain require before giving the signal for their break-out to the west?
In virtually all aspects of modern history where the Soviet Union has been involved, current Soviet and other moves toward opening its long secret archives in Moscow and all around the former East Bloc are certain to bring out facts requiring that a wholly new history of the period be written. We are patently at the outset of a revolution in historical understanding of the central events of our century. The changes that this historical revolution will bring are likely to be as radical as the stupifying political changes that we have recently witnessed all over the eastern half of the Continent. The most basic current understandings in the existing histories of the Second World War and of the cold war stand ready to be reconsidered or abandoned.