Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  The Central Committee, the party’s sovereign body, had for years been no more than a sham. Its membership had swollen since Lenin’s day (when it had comprised forty-six voting and non-voting members), and the frequency of its meetings had declined. It had become, in fact, a vehicle entirely controlled by Stalin and serving merely to implement his will and legitimate his power. In the fevered atmosphere of 1937, the purge year, members were even prepared to denounce each other in full session of the Central Committee in order to curry favour with Stalin.25

  The Politburo, technically a subcommittee of the Central Committee, and in theory the decision-making body of the party, had some fifteen members and in the 1920s had met weekly. This, though retaining a constant size, was meeting less frequently by the later 1930s. There were 153 meetings between 1930 and 1934, only 69 between 1934 and 1939, and a halving of the latter figure in the following three years.26 Some of its business was by then hived off to commissions or subcommittees.27 And even before the purges of 1937, Stalin was systematically diluting the power of significant figures in the Politburo, dispersing some of them to posts outside Moscow, and concentrating control still further in his own hands. The Politburo fragmented and atrophied in function. Stalin increasingly operated with small groups drawn ad hoc and at his whim from within the membership of the Politburo. Formal sessions of the Politburo declined sharply in the later 1930s. Only six took place in 1938, two in 1939 and two in 1940.28 By this time, informal meetings with varying personnel were often taking place at Stalin’s dacha over dinner and copious amounts of vodka. By the beginning of the war, ‘operational matters’–meaning all crucial issues that Stalin wished to discuss with his closest associates–and in particular the concerns, by now greatly magnified, of foreign policy, were dealt with by a quintet–the ‘Big Five’–of Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, Beria and Mikoyan.29 But within the ‘Big Five’, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind whose opinion really counted.

  Far more than had been the case under Lenin during the early years following the Revolution, the state government was dominated in the immediate prewar years by the party’s increasingly elaborate organizational apparatus. Lenin’s most important power-base had derived from his position as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars–effectively Prime Minister of the state government. Stalin, though from 1929 at the latest the pre-eminent Soviet leader, took this position only in 1941 (after which, in wartime conditions, the role of the state greatly expanded). Until then, from 1930 onwards, Molotov had been Prime Minister. That he was, and saw himself as, wholly subordinate to Stalin indicated where power really resided. Intertwined though they were at all levels, the party apparatus controlled the state. And Stalin, holding all threads of the highly centralized organization in his own hands, controlled the party.

  As Stalin’s power expanded, and as the position of his subordinates, even their survival, depended on his grace and favour, obsequiousness and fawning even at the highest level of the regime reflected the growth of a strong personality cult that would have its apogee during the wartime and postwar years. By the beginning of the war, the process of constructing the image of Stalin as superman was already well under way. The bloated army of bureaucrats and apparatchiks–the ‘little Stalins’ and party drones in the provinces–could be guaranteed, encouraged by fear of the consequences of denunciation if they did not do so, to implement what they took to be the wishes of ‘our Leader, Teacher and Friend, Comrade Stalin’.30 It was no different at the top of the regime. Fear and dependence brought compliance and subservience. Stalin, shrewd and calculating, invariably testing the weakness and resilience of those around him as he did external enemies, was adept at playing individuals off against each other and exploiting vulnerable points of their personality or political misjudgements. The mass purges of 1937 ensured that Stalin would not be threatened, that his despotism would not be challenged, whatever his own paranoia told him. The purges also greatly weakened the position of the army’s General Staff in its dealings with the political leadership, most especially with Stalin himself. Beyond that, a huge purge of the staff of the Foreign Ministry when Molotov replaced Maxim Litvinov at the head of the Foreign Commissariat at the beginning of May 193931 meant not only a loss of experience, but that in this crucial conduit of policy formation, and at such a vital time, subservience dominated over professional judgement. But fear and servility, the reverse of the coin to the cult of the Leader’s infallibility, were scarcely recipes for good governance. Stalin–cautious, distrustful and cold-bloodedly ruthless–was increasingly told what his sycophantic and anxious subordinates thought he wanted to hear. This would play its part in the disaster of June 1941.

  In the vital months prior to the launch of ‘Barbarossa’, therefore, decisions on all matters of importance within the Soviet Union were taken by Stalin personally. There was discussion, sometimes lengthy and usually informal, with fluctuating groups from within the ‘inner circle’. But those who met Stalin on a regular basis saw each other as rivals, and were, consequently, divided among themselves. They were also acutely aware that their tenure was insecure. Their dependence on Stalin was total. So, therefore, was their loyalty to him. This did not make for an open exchange of views. Even Stalin’s most long-standing and trusted associates, insofar as the dictator trusted anyone, were extremely cautious at expressing views which he might take to be critical. He himself often held back during meetings from voicing his opinion until others had spoken. This only enhanced the wariness of those asked to commit themselves. The reinforcement of Stalin’s own views was, therefore, almost guaranteed. This would prove a major weakness, rather than a strength, as invasion loomed.

  During most of the 1930s the leadership of the Soviet Union had largely been preoccupied with the Stalinist revolution and its internal consequences. Foreign affairs, however, never sank far below the surface, particularly once Hitler had become Chancellor of the German Reich in January 1933. They exerted a continuing, if indirect, influence on domestic reconstruction. Preparing a socialist society for a war which Stalin and all his associates assumed to be coming in the foreseeable future was an underlying tenet of policy. And by 1938, just as Stalin was in the process of annihilating the leadership of his own army, that war suddenly began to appear very close. The Soviet Union, as Stalin more than anyone knew, was quite unready for it, the depleted armed forces especially unprepared. But foreign affairs now became a priority.

  II

  That the Soviet Union should have been caught so unawares by the German assault in June 1941 is not only staggering when we take Stalin’s intensely distrustful personality into account. It is also hard to explain in the light of the twin concerns–conventional, despite their ideological colouring–that had driven Soviet foreign policy since the 1920s: national self-interest and national security. Whatever cynical tactical manoeuvring or opportunistic twisting and turning had taken place found justification in those terms. That protection of Soviet security failed so catastrophically in 1941 seems, therefore, astonishing.

  The initial notion of ‘exporting’ the Bolshevik revolution to bring about the imminent overthrow of world capitalism had been abandoned following the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921. Thereafter the revolutionary foreign policy advocated by Leon Trotsky (whose influence now began to decline) came to be replaced by more conventional diplomacy. Two central tenets shaped the approach to Soviet foreign relations by the mid-1920s. The first was that war was inevitable as the imperialist powers competed to control the world’s material resources. War would be waged between rival imperialist countries (as in the First World War), and would benefit the Soviet Union and the cause of socialist revolution. But the Soviet Union would also find itself the target of imperialist ambitions, and directly threatened by war. So–the second tenet–socialism had to be constructed in the foreseeable future not through world revolution but within the Soviet Union itself (as the state became officially designated in 1924), which would thereby over time become
strong and impregnable in the face of a great and mounting threat from hostile and rapacious imperialist forces.

  Of course, the idea of Communist revolution spreading to other countries was not given up. The work of the Comintern–the Third Communist International, established in 1919–was to exploit the crises seen as intrinsic to the capitalist system, and to prepare the ground for eventual revolution. But this would be an organic process over an indeterminate period of time (though it is true that as early as 1925 Stalin envisaged major and prolonged war in Europe at some juncture as an engine of general revolutionary change).32 Meanwhile, Comintern operations in other countries were always subordinated to the paramount aim of protecting the interests of the Soviet Union, the one country where socialist revolution had already created a new framework for society. And for the foreseeable future, it was obvious that the Soviet Union would remain militarily and economically weak, compared with the great imperialist powers. Recognition of this demanded policies of rapid and forced strengthening of Soviet economic and military resources while at the same time operating pragmatically in international relations. It was assumed that the Soviet Union and capitalist countries, whatever their fundamental ideological differences, would for a lengthy period of time have to cooperate on a basis of ‘peaceful coexistence’. This would allow for the development and maximization of good trading and economic relations with capitalist countries even where conditions of mutual political antipathy prevailed.

  The corollary, in external affairs, was that the Soviet Union sought to break down the international isolation that had followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In this, the Soviet state was highly successful. Diplomatic relations were established with thirteen countries during 1924–5 alone. With many other countries, including Russia’s neighbours, a modus vivendi was found. By the end of the 1920s only the United States, among major powers, still refused recognition of the Soviet Union. Nowhere was there a sign of capitalist states forming an aggressive alliance against the Soviet Union. In the meantime, numerous commercial agreements had been reached with major European countries.33

  A special place in Soviet foreign relations in the postwar world fell to Germany. This was established by the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922, which repaired the breakdown that had followed the Revolution and created the basis of flourishing economic and, beneath the surface, military cooperation that lasted until Hitler’s arrival in power eleven years later. The Bolshevik state emerging from a ferocious and barbaric civil war and the new German liberal democracy struggling through severe initial crisis were hardly natural bedfellows. But circumstances threw them together and underpinned a treaty of mutual self-interest. Russia wanted to emerge from her international isolation, Germany to show the victorious western powers, France and Great Britain, which were pressing hard on reparations, that she had the option of a new ally in the east. From the Soviet side, it was a hedge against western powers intervening militarily again in Russia as they had done in the Civil War, however unlikely this had become in practice. From the German perspective, it headed off any possible renewal of the alliance that they had fought against during the First World War, though such a revival was now even more improbable.34 Politically, Rapallo was of more symbolic than real importance. In economic and military terms, the treaty had greater significance. Both countries saw the advantages of closer trading arrangements. By the end of the 1920s, Germany had developed into the Soviet Union’s most important commercial partner.35 And in the military arena, secret agreements following Rapallo offered both countries a way round the restrictions of the postwar order arising from Soviet isolation on the one hand and severe constraints imposed upon Germany by the Versailles Treaty on the other. Some parts of the agreements–a Junkers contract to build an aircraft factory in the Soviet Union, and an agreement for joint production of poison gas–never came to fruition. But cooperation of personnel on military exercises, experiments with chemical warfare and exchange of intelligence took place.36

  By the end of the 1920s the political aspect of the Rapallo Treaty had lost its edge. Though Germany had signed a treaty of neutrality with the Soviet Union in Berlin in April 1926, her signing of the Treaty of Locarno five months earlier had signalled the improvement in relations with the western democracies, France and Great Britain. The end of Germany’s international isolation, further and clearly marked by her entry into the League of Nations in 1926, had drained the significance that had been attached to the links with the Soviet Union, established four years earlier. But military cooperation continued. Economically, as the Soviet Union entered its big push for collectivization and Germany the terminal crisis of democracy that would let Hitler into power, the commercial links between the two countries even intensified. By 1932 almost half of Soviet imports came from Germany.37

  By then, however, the storm winds were starting to gather force. On both sides of the Soviet Union new threats were emerging. In the Far East, following the ‘Manchurian Incident’ in 1931, the shrill tones of militaristic nationalism could increasingly be heard from the old enemy, Japan. In Germany, meanwhile, Hitler, the most extreme voice of militant anti-Bolshevism, was on the verge of power.

  The Nazi takeover in Germany completely altered the framework of Soviet foreign relations. Fear of war now became a prevailing theme. By the end of 1933, the anti-Soviet thrust of the new regime was reflected in diplomatic coolness, directly promoted by Hitler. Rapallo was dead. Germany’s non-aggression treaty with Poland, signed in January 1934, was the most overt demonstration of a significant shift in German foreign policy and a new course towards the Soviet Union. Many in Germany, from Conservatives to Communists, had dismissed Hitler as nothing more than a loudmouth who would either quickly pass from the scene or moderate his rantings. Official Comintern dogma continued to preach that the German leader represented the last, desperate fling of failing capitalism. But the Soviet leadership viewed the threat of Hitler with deadly seriousness. Already in March 1933, Izvestiya, the central government organ, commented that ‘the National Socialists [had] developed a foreign policy programme against the existence of the USSR’.38 A month later, Sergei Alexandrovsky, a political counsellor in the Berlin embassy, reported that Hitler’s future foreign policy meant ‘military adventurism and, ultimately, war and intervention against the USSR’.39 Soviet leaders were aware of what Hitler had written in Mein Kampf in the mid-1920s and were far from ready to dismiss his outpourings as merely the radical rhetoric of a political hothead. At the 17th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 31 January 1934, Nikolai Bukharin, later to be one of Stalin’s purge victims, spoke of the possibility of a ‘counterrevolutionary invasion’ of his country either from ‘fascist Germany’ or from Imperial Japan. He went on to cite extensively from the passages in Mein Kampf in which Hitler spoke of Germany’s mission to acquire land in the east by force, at the cost of the Soviet Union. Bukharin concluded: ‘Hitler therefore calls quite frankly for the destruction of our state. He says openly that the German people must reach for the sword to expropriate the properties of the Soviet Union that it allegedly needs.’ Bukharin saw in this the enemy which ‘will oppose us in all the mighty battles that History inflicts on us’.40

  A realignment of Soviet foreign policy was obviously necessary. The Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov (who would be replaced by Molotov in 1939), was the chief proponent of the need to work with the western democracies, France and Great Britain, to construct a system of collective security in Europe. In 1934 the Soviet Union–by now also recognized, since November of the previous year, by the United States of America–joined the League of Nations and became the most prominent advocate of an ‘international peace front’ to combat the threat of aggression posed by Germany, Italy and Japan.41 In May 1935 the Soviet Union signed a treaty of mutual assistance with France and followed it up with a similar treaty with Czechoslovakia (though coming into operation only if France, which already had a mutual defence alliance with the Czechs, acted f
irst). The Soviet Union was the strongest supporter of sanctions against Mussolini later that year, in 1936 supplied arms to Republican forces in Spain at the outbreak of the civil war there, and in 1937, when Japan invaded China, provided aid for Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists.

  In Soviet thinking, a new imperialist war could only be postponed, not prevented, by collective security. A major conflagration would obviously involve the Soviet Union, directly or indirectly. In fact, another war, it was thought, would be a world war, most likely involving an attack on the Soviet Union by a coalition of imperialist countries, threatening her from west and east.42 And never far from the surface was the suspicion that there were forces in the west anxious to appease Hitler by deflecting his attention to the Soviet Union, or even considering joining forces with Nazi Germany in an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Support for collective security aimed, therefore, at buying precious time. But the more the League of Nations and hopes of collective security fell apart amid the western powers’ endeavours to come to an arrangement with Hitler, the more the suspicions grew. The Soviet Union’s international isolation, never surmounted, was highlighted more plainly than ever as the west caved in to Hitler’s expansionism in 1938. ‘The League of Nations and collective security are dead,’ Litvinov himself acknowledged in October that year. ‘International relations are entering an era of the most violent upsurge of savagery and brute force and policy of the mailed fist.’43

  With the weakness of the western democracies laid bare, Soviet fears of becoming dragged into an inevitable conflict–and of being unprepared for it–were hugely magnified. As the Sudeten crisis unfolded across the summer of 1938, the Soviet Union partially mobilized and proclaimed its readiness to fight to defend Czechoslovakia against aggression.44 The offer of assistance could be made in the near certainty that it would not have to be put into practice. Military involvement necessitated passage of troops through Poland (which would not permit it) and Romania (where limited permission was only belatedly given, and with severe restrictions). In any case, and far from the least consideration, the Red Army, its leadership drastically weakened by the purges of the previous year, was in 1938, as we have already noted, nowhere near ready for engagement in a major conflict. Its own planning foresaw full readiness for war as attainable only by the turn of the year 1942–3.45 Moreover, as Stalin knew only too well, Soviet armed intervention in Czechoslovakia was in any case only possible if the French moved first to fulfil their treaty obligations. And over the summer, with the French tied to the British and Chamberlain showing every endeavour to reach agreement with Hitler, it was never likely–quite apart from continuing western distaste for the Soviet Union–that Red Army troops would be called upon. As it was, the readiness of Britain and France to yield to Hitler’s bullying and collude in the carve-up of Czechoslovakia in the Munich Conference of 29–30 September 1938 had obvious meaning in Soviet eyes: war was coming, and the Soviet Union could reckon on no help from the west.