Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army's Victory That Shaped World War II

by Stuart D. Goldman

  Moscow perceived the Japanese presence in Manchuria as a threat that necessitated the strengthening of its Far Eastern army. The Japanese interpreted the increase of Soviet forces in the region as a threat warranting the further strengthening of Japanese forces in Manchuria, which, in turn, resulted in redoubled efforts to reinforce the Red Army in the Far East, and so forth. The resulting increase in the armed forces of both powers in that region is illustrated in the preceding chart.23

  These figures, however, create a false impression of Soviet preponderance. Geography strongly favored Japan. Japanese forces in Manchuria could be reinforced quickly and securely from the homeland and, after 1937, from Japanese armies in Northern China. Conversely, Soviet Far Eastern forces were spread over an immense area, 2.4 million square miles, two-thirds the size of the continental United States. And because of the remoteness of the Soviet Far East from the industrial and population centers of European Russia, Moscow had to make its Far Eastern forces as self-sufficient as possible. Even double tracked, the Trans-Siberian Railway was highly vulnerable in the event of war with Japan, because long stretches of its track ran so close to the Manchurian frontier that the Japanese easily might have cut it.24

  The Japanese probably enjoyed an overall strategic advantage vis-à-vis the USSR until 1937. In July of that year, however, with Japan’s invasion of China, the military balance began to shift, a fact that many Japanese military leaders, especially in Kwantung Army, failed or refused to recognize. But this carries the narrative a bit too far. Before considering the impact of the China War on Soviet-Japanese relations, there are several other related pieces of this jigsaw puzzle that must be put in place.

  CHAPTER 2

  _______________________

  THE GLOBAL CONTEXT

  Winston Churchill’s famous characterization of Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma aptly describes Soviet foreign policy in the 1930s. Josef Stalin’s diplomacy has been portrayed variously as a pursuit of world revolution, a defense of collective security, an exercise in balance-of-power politics aimed mainly at avoiding war, and a malevolent instigation of war. Stalin has been cast as a Russian nationalist, an international revolutionary, and a paranoid megalomaniac. Perhaps one reason why Stalin’s diplomacy evokes so much controversy and confusion is the common practice of considering Moscow’s European and Far Eastern policies as distinct, almost unrelated, entities. This chapter will examine the development of Soviet foreign policy as a unified whole.

  The Emerging Fascist Threat and the Popular Front/United Front

  Soviet Russia’s relations with the other major powers were inherently hostile. From the outset, foreign military intervention in the Russian Civil War was matched by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky’s shared conviction that for the revolution to survive in Russia, it had to spread to the West. After the foreign armies withdrew from Russia, having failed to oust the Bolsheviks, and Moscow’s early attempts to spread revolution to the West—by example, by subversion, and by war—also failed, the two camps gradually worked out a modus vivendi. But the underlying antagonism remained. Soviet relations with the capitalist world, particularly the major powers, in the 1920s and early 1930s generally ranged from surly to acrimonious.1

  This was reflected in the policies that Moscow imposed on foreign Communist parties, which were ordered to vigorously oppose their respective regimes, be they fascist dictatorship, monarchy, or bourgeois democracy. The principal instrument by which the Soviet Union controlled foreign Communist parties was the Communist International, or Comintern.2 Soviet authorities claimed that, although the Comintern was headquartered in Moscow, it was not controlled by the Soviet government. This was a fiction. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the only ruling Communist party, was absolutely dominant in the Comintern from the outset.3

  Long before the selective opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s, a lot could be learned about Soviet foreign policy priorities by studying the Comintern’s instructions to foreign Communist parties. These were conveyed not only in secret communications and closed and open meetings of the Comintern leadership in Moscow, but also in Comintern publications, widely distributed in many languages to the party faithful worldwide. The most ubiquitous of these was the Comintern’s news weekly, International Press Correspondence (Inprecor), renamed World News and Views in 1938.

  Through the 1920s and into the early 1930s, week after week, Inprecor spouted the orthodox Bolshevik line that the Communists’ main enemies were their competitors for proletarian and leftist support—trade unionists and socialists. This began to change with the rise of militant, stridently anti-Communist parties and regimes on Soviet Russia’s flanks. The winter of 1932–33 brought both the completion of Japan’s conquest of Manchuria and the rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany. The advent of Manchukuo and the Third Reich near the eastern and western frontiers of the USSR posed threats that Stalin could not ignore. Moscow’s response to these threats resulted in a reversal of basic Comintern and Soviet policies. In late 1932 Moscow reestablished diplomatic relations with the government of Chiang Kai-shek, a man who, since his coup of 1927, had been reviled by Inprecor as the archenemy of international Communism. Also in 1932 the Soviet Union concluded five nonaggression treaties: with France, Poland, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia. In November 1933 Moscow established diplomatic relations with Washington, partly to create the impression of Soviet-American solidarity against possible Japanese aggression. A year later the Soviets joined the League of Nations, which they had denounced for years as the “league of imperialists.” At the same time, Moscow ended the vehement campaign against socialism, which had been denounced as “social fascism” for a decade. Yet, despite these operational shifts, symbolized by Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov’s oratory at Geneva, Stalin’s goals remained fundamentally unchanged. In 1935, as in 1925, his paramount objective was to prevent the formation of a grand capitalist alliance directed against the Soviet Union.

  The Kremlin sought to avoid war with any powerful state, particularly if it involved the threat of combat on Soviet soil. Other objectives included the weakening of the capitalist powers (particularly by encouraging revolution in their colonial empires), and the fostering of conflict among the capitalist states. What seems to have changed in the transitional period of 1932–34 was Stalin’s perception of the immediacy of the international dangers threatening his regime and the means required to achieve the goals that had been pursued since coming to power.

  As the grim decade of the 1930s continued to unfold, the international situation confronting the Soviet Union grew increasingly menacing. The Japanese conquest of Manchuria and the Nazi triumph in Germany were followed by disturbing developments in France. On February 6, 1934, a new coalition government of leftist parties enjoying a strong parliamentary majority and headed by Edouard Daladier, was overthrown by the violent rioting of several militant groups of the extreme right. Although the French Republic itself may not have been in immediate danger, the events of February 6 had important repercussions. Daladier’s leftist coalition was replaced by a conservative “National Government” headed by a former president of the republic, Gaston Doumergue. Moderate and leftist elements perceived a threat, partly real, partly chimerical, of a fascist coup in France.4 Militant fascism appeared to be on the march. Its unchecked spread threatened to bring into being that situation most dreaded in the Kremlin: a unified Europe—and Japan—joined in an aggressive anti-Communist alliance. Such an alliance spelled doom for Stalin and the Soviet Union. Consequently, international affairs were accorded a new priority in Moscow. The top priority was to check the spread of fascism. This is the context in which Moscow’s new popular front/united front policy should be understood.

  The popular front/united front policy often is represented as a Soviet attempt to forge a powerful antifascist bloc, or even an antifascist military alliance, with itself at the head. Soviet leaders and historians and their post-Soviet successors have promoted th
is view. However, Soviet actions contradict that conclusion. Instead, they seem to suggest that Soviet objectives were of a more defensive character. The same can be said of the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact of 1935. Its greatest value to Moscow was not its faint promise of joint French-Soviet military action against a German threat, but that it placed an obstacle in the path of a future Franco-German rapprochement. Despite Soviet and Comintern rhetoric of the popular front era, this interpretation of Soviet policy is supported by the instructions passed on from Moscow to the Communist parties of foreign states.

  The popular front policy in its full and mature form was officially articulated at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, July–August 1935. The records of that meeting illuminate the objectives of the popular front/united front.5 Communist support for anticolonial liberation, which had been a central dogma of the Bolshevik Party since 1917, was played down. As a gesture to Britain, where Soviet anticolonialism rubbed a particularly raw nerve, no delegates from India were invited. Instead, the congress focused on cooperation with the “healthy” political elements of the center and left in opposition to fascism.

  If Stalin was really intent upon forging a firm antifascist bloc, and if he contemplated the possibility of joint military action against “international fascism,” he should have wanted the Western democracies to be militarily strong and prepared for war. However, the instructions given to the European Communist parties in 1935 indicate that Stalin was not overly concerned about the bourgeois democracies’ military preparedness. Although he did order the French Communists to drop their virulent antimilitarist and antinational defense campaign,6 he did not instruct them to support fully their government’s rearmament and defense plans. Maurice Thorez, head of the French Communist Party, declared at the Comintern congress that “we continue to fight in the name of the working class of France against the enslavement of the people, and against the return to the two-year term of military service.”7 Yet the instructions to the French Communists were generous when compared to those given to other European Communists. The unanimous voice of international Communism decreed that “the Communist Parties of all capitalist countries must fight against military expenditures … against militarization measures taken by capitalist governments, especially the militarization of youth.”8

  Even after the election of a popular front coalition government in France in May 1936, the French Communist Party did not come out wholeheartedly in favor of a strong program of rearmament and national defense. In fact, as late as the spring of 1939, the Comintern news weekly was still strongly denouncing Western military measures, such as Neville Chamberlain’s proposal for peacetime conscription.9

  This lack of solicitude on Stalin’s part toward the military preparedness of the West gives credence to a darker interpretation: that Stalin was actively conspiring to involve the West and the Axis in war, and like a shrewd racetrack handicapper, he was inhibiting Western rearmament vis-à-vis the still-weak Wehrmacht so as to promote a more evenly matched and exhausting struggle. There can be little doubt that such an outcome would have been much to Stalin’s liking. Indeed, it is arguable that any thoughtful strategist in charge of Soviet foreign policy, confronted with that array of powerful capitalist states, should have sought to incite conflict between the bourgeois-democratic capitalists and the fascist-militarist capitalists. But to suppose, as some have,10 that for five, or fifteen, years Stalin had been working unwaveringly toward that one goal underestimates the flexibility of Stalin’s diplomacy. The mutual destruction of the Western democratic regimes and the Axis regimes would have been the ideal, maximum achievement of Soviet policy, but the minimum vital task was to thwart a broad capitalist anti-Bolshevik crusade, or, perhaps only slightly less nightmarish to Stalin, a coordinated German-Japanese assault. It is reasonable to assume—although it must remain an assumption—that Soviet energies were divided between these maximum and minimum programs as one would expect, between that which one would hope to achieve and that which one must have for survival.

  Another insight that can be gleaned from the 1935 Comintern congress is Stalin’s perception of the relative acuteness of the threats posed by Germany and Japan. The outlawed German Communist Party was not called upon to sabotage the Nazi regime nor to attempt to organize armed resistance, but was instructed to “work inside the fascist mass organizations” to achieve higher wages and more decent working conditions for the laboring masses.11 Almost all speeches at the congress bespoke a fervent desire for peace. There was no talk of a preventive war against Adolf Hitler. In marked contrast, the one party at the congress that received really belligerent orders and that evinced a desire to come to blows with the enemy of the international proletariat was the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP was told to fight the Japanese aggressors with every means at its disposal.12 The Chinese delegate, Wang Ming, spoke emotionally of “the earnest desire of the Chinese people to take up arms against the Japanese oppressors.”13

  Yet, during that very period, July–August, 1935, the Chinese Communists were in the last stage of the exhausting “Long March” and were fighting for their very existence against the anti-Communist campaign of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army. Nonetheless, the Chinese Communists were instructed to embrace their would-be exterminator, Chiang, and to make common cause with him against Japan. Such a strategy, if successful, would have the effect of inciting conflict between China and Japan and of distracting General Araki Sadao and his clique from their anti-Soviet course. The utility of this Moscow-dictated popular front policy for the interests of the Chinese revolution was much more problematic, and it was accepted by the CCP only grudgingly and after much hesitation.14 The priorities established at the 1935 Comintern congress suggest that the Far East was in the forefront of Stalin’s mind as a danger area and that the popular front/united front policy was conceived and implemented at a time when Japan was perceived as the most immediate threat.

  If the Seventh Comintern Congress inaugurated the popular front/united front policy, the Spanish Civil War enshrined it in the hearts and minds of Western liberals. The Spanish generals’ insurrection against the popular front government in Madrid, and the aid their insurrection immediately received from Benito Mussolini and Hitler, is a well-documented tale. Soon after Italian and German aid was extended to the rebels, the Soviet Union began supplying the Republican forces with war materiel. While Soviet aid to Spain never reached the scale of that provided by Italy and Germany, it was a substantial contribution without which Republican opposition quickly would have been overcome.

  Why did Stalin send large numbers of Soviet tanks, planes, guns, and “volunteers” to fight in Spain? One can discount the Soviet contention that they were motivated primarily by the altruistic desire to help defend the freedom-loving people of the Spanish Republic. Conversely, it seems unlikely that Stalin seriously contemplated the establishment of a Soviet republic in Spain at that time. Whatever benefits might have accrued from a Soviet satellite in agrarian Iberia would have been greatly outweighed by the hostility such an enterprise would have engendered in France and Britain. There are a number of plausible explanations for Stalin’s substantial military aid to the Spanish Republican forces. To have refrained from assisting the socialist-oriented Republic against the assault of the fascist-supported Nationalists would have given credence to the accusations of the exiled Trotsky and his adherents that Stalin had turned his back on the international proletarian revolution. If the Madrid government—the first popular front government elected anywhere—were quickly and easily subdued by the very forces the popular front had been designed to combat, it might be taken symbolically and psychologically as the triumph of fascism over the whole popular front idea. As the conflict grew, the struggles and exploits of the Republicans captured the imagination and fired the spirit of millions of Western liberals who earlier had been opposed only passively to the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. The Spanish Civil War has been credited by some with
the conversion of the British Labour Party from pacifism in 1936 to militant antifascism by 1939.15 The protracted combat in Spain tied down a considerable amount of Italo-German military resources in a remote corner of Europe, and, to that extent, provided the Soviet Union with an added measure of military security at a fairly cheap price.

  These factors alone were probably sufficient justification for Stalin’s Spanish policy. But the evidence suggests that he was playing for higher stakes. By buttressing the Republican forces, Stalin fostered a prolonged and extensive Italo-German military presence in Spain, which in turn threatened France’s previously secure Pyrenean frontier. The Communist-controlled press hammered away week after week at the theme of the peril to France in Spain. It is a reasonable inference that Stalin hoped this would arouse the French government to take a firmer stand against the rapidly rearming Germany. This then would cause Hitler to direct his attention westward, rather than toward the Soviet borders. It even might lead to a war on the westernmost extremity of Eurasia between the fascist powers and the democracies, a conflict from which the Soviet Union might abstain. However, as in the analysis of the popular front policy in general, it would be a mistake to conclude that the instigation of an intracapitalist war was the sole raison d’être of Stalin’s Spanish policy. Long before the fall of Madrid in February 1939, it became clear that France would not be roused to resist Mussolini and Hitler in Spain. Despite that, Stalin was well served by his Spanish policy. In view of General Francisco Franco’s stubborn independence after 1939 and Spain’s neutrality in the Second World War, it might not be too much to say that Stalin derived more profit from the losing cause of the Republic than did Mussolini and Hitler from Franco’s victory.