Trotsky once made an apt comment on the defensist appearance the Soviets should sport publicly in the form of propaganda: “The offensive . . . develops better the more it looks like self-defense.”6 Throughout most of Soviet history, this principle lay at the heart of the “operational art” of Kremlin-style diplomacy.
The defensist school recognizes the above but only to an extent. First, it supports a “realist” view toward ideology (see chapter 1). This view places ideological “posturing” outside the circle of day-to-day policy making. It describes the official ideology of Marxism-Leninism as virtually irrelevant. Second, it diminishes the importance of the Comintern. It regards this unique organization as little more than a toy pistol brandished by Stalin that, in any case, he dispensed with by the war year of 1943 after years of “neglect.” Yet, although ignored by those observers who question the importance of the Communist International, after the Comintern was disbanded, Comintern-like activities continued. They were taken over by the Central Committee’s Information and International Department (which later split in the 1970s into two departments, one for information, the other for sponsoring international expansionism). (The post-World War II “Cominform” also acquired some of the former Comintern’s tasks.) Ex-Communist International Executive Committee secretaries and officials were duly transferred to these departments in Moscow. Among them was Georgi Dimitrov, former general secretary of the Comintern, who after his death was followed by the well-known chief of the International Department during the Brezhnev era, Boris N. Ponomarev.
Post-1991 archive documents show that the investments in this “internationalist” enterprise cost the Soviets triple-digit billions of rubles during the seventy-plus years of such obviously serious, global subversive activity. It has been estimated that the Soviets spent on average some $1.5 billion per year on subsidizing foreign subversion and its accomplice, international guerrilla warfare and terrorism. As the armed components of Marxist-Leninist “internationalism,” they were tasked with preparing the way for Soviet-style socialism via guerrilla armed actions and armed seizures of power.
In the heyday of the Comintern, Soviet national expansionist interests would be abetted by Soviet peace-mongering propaganda. This was tasked to weaken Western defenses. “Both you and I,” Lenin reminded Commissar of Foreign Affairs Chicherin, “have fought against pacifism.... But where, when, and who denied the exploitation of pacifists by this party in order to demoralize the enemy?” Using Soviet Orwellian “newspeak,” the Theses of the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern (1928) put it this way—“dialectically”: “Revolutionary war by the proletarian dictatorship is but the continuation of a revolutionary peace policy.”7
Such activity was combined with outright sabotage within the given countries—for example, as against British, French, and the U.S. defense factories during the Nazi–Soviet “honeymoon” of 1939–41. As detailed in the Mitrokhin Archive, disclosed in 1999, the subversives likewise would serve as sleeper forces waiting to be called into action by Moscow Center in case of war in the name of socialism. In times of war or peace, they would prepare the ground for Soviet-style takeovers whether by countries or by regions.
The offensist historians, researching newly disclosed archive documents, further maintain that Stalin actually hoped for war, viewing it as he did as the “midwife” of revolution. In that way, revolution could be “exported on the tips of bayonets,” as Soviet spokespersons and military hawks openly declared in meetings of the Comintern in the 1920s and 1930s. In early 1940 the Soviet leader relished—indeed, encouraged—German expansionism against France, the Lowlands, Britain, and Norway. Shipments of war materiel through Brest-Litovsk on its way to Germany continued in gargantuan amounts right up to the Soviet–German war beginning in late June 1941. Moscow even broke off diplomatic relations with the governments of these West European countries out of respect for Hitler’s conquests.
Stalin stated openly to aides that he hoped to see all the “capitalist-imperialist” combatants self-destruct. In the Far East, Japan, Stalin said, would likewise become embroiled in a war with the United States, the advent of which would also serve Soviet interests by debilitating that distant capital-imperialist enemy. Stalin was informed by agents in Tokyo of plans for the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, but kept this information from the Americans, despite British and American Lend-Lease aid that had already begun to be shipped to the Soviets almost immediately after the German attack of June 22, 1941. Stalin still thought and spoke openly in this way at the end of World War II and up to the time he died in 1953.8
Some historians of this school present evidence for the fact that Stalin was planning to launch a preemptive war against Germany. It was to begin either by July 1941 (a minority view) or at the latest by mid-1942. Once it was fully supplied with modern weaponry, the Red Army would sweep clear through Europe, meeting the rebellious, war-fatigued masses in war-torn cities as it carried the red banner westward. Revisionist Russian historians note that in 1939 and in 1940–41 several of Stalin’s closest aides—Molotov, Zhdanov, Mekhlis, Shcherbakov, and so on—spoke explicitly and assuredly of “extending the frontiers of socialism” on the wings of the “inevitable,” coming war. It was as though war, deemed “inexorable” by Marxist-Leninist ideology and often reiterated by Soviet spokespersons, would become a self-fulfilling prophecy for the expansionist aims of the communist leadership. Indeed, five years before the start of World War II, Stalin predicted ominously:
War will surely unleash revolution and put in question the very existence of capitalism in a number of countries, as was the case of the first imperialist war.... Let not the bourgeoisie blame us if on the morrow of the outbreak of such a war they miss certain ones of the governments that are near and dear to them, and now are today happily ruling by the grace of God.
It can hardly be doubted that a second war against the USSR will lead to the complete defeat of the aggressors, to revolution in a series of countries of Europe and Asia. Victory in revolution never comes of itself. It must be prepared for and won.9
Although the revisionist interpretation is canvassed above, in the following chapters both arguments—defensist and offensist (or revisionist)—will be analyzed. This documented discussion—involving both Russian and Western historians in the post-1991 period to the present—will be viewed against the background of actual events and Soviet actions during the period. Readers can then draw their own conclusions from the arguments presented in these pages. In a concluding note, I will weigh both arguments as judiciously as possible on the basis of the latest available information.