A prevalent school of thought among Russian and Western historians hews to the conventional line that has dominated history books in the USSR and abroad up until only recently. Based largely on Soviet-controlled documents, this interpretation insists, namely, that Stalin’s military policy from 1939 until the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 22,1941, was largely defensist. That is, Stalin and the General Staff harbored no offensive or “preemptive,” military-oriented Grand Strategy vis-à-vis Germany or against any other prospective capitalist enemy. In the prewar years up to June 1941, Stalin intended merely to keep the USSR as long as possible out of a new world war—predicted by Marxism-Leninism as “inevitable.” In this way, it is argued, the Soviets would have time to build up their defenses in the expectation of a coming global conflict that sooner or later would likely engulf them as hapless victims like Hitler’s other dupes. Among such defensive moves, the “defensist” school maintains, were the Soviet territorial acquisitions of 1939–40. These annexations consisted of half of Poland, which included territory added to Soviet Ukraine and Byelorussia; all of the Baltics; part of Finland; and northern Bukovina and Bessarabia at Rumania’s expense. Termed a “buffer zone” by the defensists and Soviet-period apologists, these territories were not the fruit of a deliberate Soviet expansionist policy, they claim. Rather, the annexations and sovietizations added up to merely protective measures wisely taken by Stalin as insurance against the day of a German invasion. That these territories remained parts of the USSR after World War II is deemed by some historians, strange to say, as all but irrelevant. Interestingly, the defensist argument about Soviet Russia was also given out by orientation officers to U.S. soldiers in World War II.1 These officers used such reference manuals as The USSR Institutions and People: A Brief Handbook for the Use of Officers of the Armed Forces of the United States. “The Nazi–Soviet Pact,” says the handbook,
was accepted by the Soviet people as an act of wisdom [gaining time] for them . . . in which to prepare for the Nazi attack which came in June 1941.... Soviet-advocated measures failed largely because the democratic powers mistrusted the Soviet Union. [The Soviet people felt] that the overtures made to the Soviet Union by Great Britain and France in the summer of 1939 lacked a basis for realistic and effective measures against Germany.
The same orientation pamphlet describes the USSR as a democracy and fatuously claims that Josef Stalin was the “elected” leader in the Western sense.
The invasion, an unforgivable “double cross” (вeроломcмво, or verolomstvo, in Russian), took Stalin by surprise precisely, it is alleged by this school, because he had been tricked into allowing Soviet Russia to become a “sitting duck,” a “dupe.” Foolishly, he had fully trusted his alliance with Hitler even as the latter so obviously deployed German invasion forces all along the Soviet western frontier by spring 1941. Stalin, moreover, blithely ignored the warnings of an attack proffered to him secretly by Roosevelt and Churchill (exploiting top-secret intelligence gleaned from Enigma Machine/Ultra decoding of German General Staff encrypted traffic) and by Stalin’s own best foreign agents. One of the latter even predicted the date of the invasion.
Stalin, in any case, distrusted the Western powers, those duplicitous “Munich appeasers.” The latter, it is alleged, had refused serious Soviet overtures to build collective-security guarantees against Axis expansionism. Yet, as we shall see, new documents indicate that Stalin preferred to strike a deal with Hitler than one with the scorned “Anglo-French bloc.” (For Stalin’s observations about this, which have been kept secret until recently, see appendix 3.)
The offensists, on the other hand, attempt to rebut the conventional image of Stalin’s alleged ignorance of Hitler’s plans. They claim that the Soviet dictator was well aware of Operation Barbarossa. But if he was aware and in what detail he was aware have yet to be fully supported by classified documents. (There are, after all, “white spots” within the released archival material itself. Many Russian researchers and historians complain that they have been given access only to a portion of the truth.) He erred in thinking Hitler would not get the jump on the Red Army, which had developed its own offensist plans.
Having earlier (mid-1930s) pursued a policy of joining the League of Nations and defining and touting the principles of nonaggression and collective security with England and France against Nazi Germany, Stalin—who at this stage thrust forward Maxim Litvinov to instrument this “peace-minded” policy—sought seriously, it is alleged in conventional as well as Soviet party-line histories, to curtail Hitler. He attempted by 1938–39, it is claimed, to align the USSR with the Western capitalist democracies.
However, recent research, as we will see, raises questions as to the sincerity of Stalin’s putative intentions concerning serious collective-security arrangements with the West European capitalist states. Incidentally, the same Litvinov, as Stalin’s commissar of foreign affairs in the early 1930s, who early on had changed his name from Vallach to Litvinov, was, ironically, instrumental himself in paving the way toward Nazi–Soviet rapprochement (see chapter 2).
Accordingly, at this time Stalin ordered Western Communist parties to adopt the Popular Front tactic. But the line was promoted always with the caveat that it was a means of enhancing communist opportunities for seizure of power in the given countries. Stalin, claims the defensist school, on the other hand, was frustrated in this putatively sincere endeavor to form a bloc against “fascism” (as Soviet ideology called Nazism and Italian Fascism). England and France, they claim, refused to cooperate in establishing collective security with the Soviets. The Anglo-French bloc was motivated, defensists say, by the hope that Germany and Russia would embroil themselves in war. As one defensist-minded American academic has written, the Western powers were blindsided by their hatred and fear of communism, even more than the Soviets were misled by their anticapitalist ideology. As he puts it, “Ideologically-derived perceptions [on the part of England and France] shaped the behavior of the Western leaders to a greater extent than they did Soviet policy.” 2 Such perceptions, the historian alleges, frustrated Moscow’s proposals for collective security.
Because of Western suspicions, this writer continues, reflecting a consensus among many historians, the Franco-British Munich appeasement policy evolved into abandonment of the Soviet’s principal central European ally, Czechoslovakia. Out of frustration, Soviet pursuit of collective security, therefore, was given up by Stalin. Litvinov himself, a symbol of collective-security policy, was abandoned by Stalin in early 1939. He was demoted, significantly, well before Western envoys had given up coming to Moscow to try to work out a deal in the summer of that year.