by Ludo Martens
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Sipols and Kharmalov, A la veille de la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Moscow: Йditions Novosti, 1973), p. 262.
The Soviet Union was facing the mortal danger of a single anti-Soviet front consisting of all the imperialist powers. With the tacit support of Britain and France, Germany could, after having occupied Poland, continue on its way and begin its blitzkrieg against the USSR, while Japan would attack Siberia.
At the time, Hitler had already reached the conclusion that France and Britain had neither the capacity nor the will to resist. He decided to grab Western Europe before attacking the USSR.
On August 20, Hitler proposed a non-aggression pact to the Soviet Union. Stalin reacted promptly, and the pact was signed on August 23.
On September 1, Hitler attacked Poland. Britain and France were caught in their own trap. These two countries assisted in all of Hitler's adventures, hoping to use him against the Soviet Union. Right from 1933, they never stopped speaking in praise of Hitler's battle against Communism. Now they were forced to declare war against Germany, although they had no intention of doing so in an effective manner. Their rage exploded in a virulent anti-Communist campaign: `Bolshevism is fascism's natural ally'. Half a century later, this stupid propaganda is still be found in school books as an unquestioned truth. However, history has shown that the Germano-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was a key for victory in the anti-fascist war. This may seem paradoxical, but the pact was a turning point that allowed the preparation of the necessary conditions for the German defeat.
In fact, the Soviet Union concluded this pact with the clear understanding that sooner or later war with Nazi Germany was inevitable. Once Germany had decided to sign an accord with the USSR, Stalin forced out of Hitler a maximum of concessions, ensuring the best possible conditions for the war to come. The September 23, 1939 issue of Pravda wrote:
`The only thing that was possible was to preserve from German invasion Western Ukraine, Western Byelorussia (two provinces seized from the Soviet Union in 1920) and the Baltic countries. The Soviet government forced Germany to make the engagement to not cross the line formed by the Thasse, Narew, Bug and Vistula rivers.'
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Grigori Dйborine, Les secrets de la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Moscow: Йditions du Progrиs, 1972), p. 35.
In the West, those who sympathized with Hitler's anti-Communist politics immediately cried out: `The two totalitarianisms, Fascism and Bolshevism, shared up Poland.' But the advance of the Soviet troops corresponded to the interests of the masses in these territories, since they could get rid of the fascists, the landed gentry and the capitalists. This advance also helped the entire world anti-Hitler movement. The most realistic bourgeois saw clearly that by advancing its troops, the Soviet Union gave itself a better starting position for the coming war. For example, Churchill declared on October 1, 1939:
`(T)hat the Russian armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace. At any rate, the line is there, and an Eastern Front has been created which Nazi Germany does not dare assail.'
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Winston S. Churchill, op. cit. , p. 449.
Unable to see through their dream of seeing the Nazi army charge through Poland to attack the Soviet Union, France and Britain were forced to declare war on Germany. But on the Western Front, not a single bomb would bother Nazi tranquility. However, a real internal political war was launched against the French Communists: On September 26, the French Communist Party was banned and thousands of its members were thrown into prison. Henri de Kerillis wrote:
`An incredible tempest swept through bourgeois minds. The crusade storm raged. Only one cry could be heard: War on Russia. It was at this moment that the anti-Communist delirium reached its apogee.'
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Cited in La grande guerre nationale de l'Union soviйtique (Moscow: Йditions du Progrиs, 1974), p. 20.
At the same time, Stalin spoke with great insight to Zhukov:
`The French Government headed by Daladier and the Chamberlain Government in Britain have no intention of getting seriously involved in the war with Hitler. They still hope to incite Hitler to a war against the Soviet Union. By refusing in 1939 to form with us an anti-Hitler bloc, they did not want to hamper Hitler in his aggression against the Soviet Union. Nothing will come of it. They will have to pay through the nose for their short-sighted policy.'
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G. Zhukov, The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), p. 171.
Knowing that war with Germany was inevitable, the Soviet government was extremely worried about Leningrad's security, as it was only 32 kilometres from the Finnish border. On October 14, 1939, Stalin and Molotov sent a memorandum to the Finnish government about the problem of the defence of Leningrad. The Soviet Union wished to be able to `block the access to the Gulf of Finland'. It asked of Finland that it be ceded by lease the Port of Hanko and four islands. To ensure the defence of Finland, it asked for part of the ithmus of Karelia belonging to Finland. In exchange, the Soviet Union would offer to Finland part of Soviet Karelia, twice the size.
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Ministиre des Affaires Йtrangиres de Finlande, Documents sur les relations finno-soviйtiques (Paris: Йditions Flammarion, 1940), pp. 93--95, 109.
Encouraged by Germany, Finland refused. On November 30, 1939, the the Soviet Union declared war on Finland. A few days later, Hitler gave instructions for the coming war with the Soviet Union. Here is one passage:
`On the flanks of our operation we can count on active intervention from Romania and Finland in the war against the Soviet Union.'
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Jacobsen, op. cit. , vol. 1, p. 118.
Britain and France, worried about not getting caught up in this `strange war', charged headlong into a real war against the Bolshevik menace! In three months, Britain, France, the U.S. and fascist Italy sent 700 planes, 1,500 canons and 6,000 machine guns to Finland, `victim of aggression'.
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Pavel Zhiline, Ambitions et mйprises du Troisiиme Reich, (Moscow: Йditions du Progrиs, 1972), p. 74.
The French General Weygand went to Syria and Turkey to prepare an attack against the Soviet Union from the South. The French Chief of Staffs prepared to bomb the Baku oilfields. At the same time, General Serrigny cried out:
`In fact, Baku, with its annual oil production of 23 million tons, dominates the situation. If we succeed in conquering the Caucasus, or if these refineries were simply set alight by our air force, the monster would collapse exhausted.'
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Bernard Serrigny, L'Allemagne face а la guerre totale (Paris: Йditions Grasset, 1940), p. 228.
Even though no shot had been fired against the Hitlerites, despite the fact that they were in a state of war, the French government regrouped an expeditionary force of 50,000 men to fight the Reds! Chamberlain declared that Britain would send 100,000 soldiers.
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Falsificateurs de l'Histoire (Brussels: Йditions ABS, 1948), p. 118.
But these troops were unable to reach Finland before the Red Army defeated the Finnish army: a peace accord was signed on March 14, 1939. Later on, during the war, a Gaullist publication appearing in Rio de Janeiro claimed:
`At the end of the 1939--1940 winter, Chamberlain's and Daladier's political and military plot failed. Its purpose was to provoke a backlash against the Soviet Union and to end the conflict between the Anglo-French alliance and Germany through a compromise and an anti-Comminterm alliance. This plot consisted in sending an Anglo-French expedition to help the Finns, the intervention thereby provoking a state of war with the Soviet Union.'
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Petite encyclopйdie politique du monde (Rio de Janeiro: Йditions Chanteclair, 1943), p. 136.
The Germano-Soviet Pact and the defeat of Finland prepared the conditions for the Red Army's victory over the Nazis.
These two events had four important implications.
They prevented the formation of a united front of the imperi
alist powers against the socialist Soviet Union. A German attack in 1939 would certainly have provoked a Japanese intervention in Siberia. What in fact happened was that the Soviet Union succeeded in signing with Japan a Non-Aggression Pact that held until the defeat of fascism.
France and Britain, which had both refused throughout the thirties a collective security system, were forced into an effective military alliance with the Soviet Union once Germany broke the Germano-Soviet Pact.
The Soviet Union was able to advance its defences by 150 to 300 kilometres. This factor had great influence on the defence of Leningrad and Moscow at the end of 1941.
The Soviet Union won 21 months of peace, allowing it to decisively reinforce its defence industry and its armed forces.
Did Stalin poorly prepare the anti-fascist war?
When Khrushchev seized power, he completely inverted the Party's line. To do this, he denigrated Stalin and his Marxist-Leninist politics. In a series of incredible slanders, he even denied Stalin's lead in preparing for and undertaking the anti-fascist war.
So Khrushchev claimed that in the years 1936--1941, Stalin poorly prepared the country for war. Here are his statements.
`Stalin put forward the thesis that the tragedy ... was the result of the result of the ``unexpected'' attack of the Germans against the Soviet Union. But, comrades, this is completely untrue. As soon as Hitler came to power in Germany he assigned to himself the task of liquidating Communism ....
`Many facts from the prewar period clearly showed that Hitler was going all out to begin a war against the Soviet state ....
`Had our industry been mobilized properly and in time to supply the Army with the necessary matйriel, our wartime losses would have been decidedly smaller ....
`(O)ur Army was badly armed ....
`Soviet science and technology produced excellent models of tanks and artillery peoces before the war. But mass production of all this was not organized'.
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Khrushchev, Secret Report, pp. S36, S38.
That the participants in the Twentieth Congress could listen to these slanders without indignant protests coming from every part says a lot about the political degeneration that had already taken place. In the room, there were dozens of marshals and generals who knew to what extent those statements were ridiculous. At the time, they did not say anything. Their narrow professionalism, their exclusive militarism, their refusal of political struggle within the Army, their refusal of the ideological and political leadership of the Party over the Army: these factors all brought them closer to Khrushchev's revisionism. Zhukov, Vasilevsky, Rokossovsky, all great military leaders, never accepted the necessity of the Army Purge in 1937--1938. Nor did they understand the political implications of Bukharin's trial. Hence they supported Khrushchev when he replaced Marxism-Leninism with theses taken from the Mensheviks, the Trotskyists and the Bukharinists. There is the explanation for the marshals' silence over Khrushchev's lies about the Second World War. They refuted these lies later on in their memoirs, when there were no longer any political implications and when these questions had only become academic.
In his 1970 Memoirs, Zhukov correctly underscored, against Khrushchev's allegations, that the real defence policy began with Stalin's decision to industrialize in 1928.
`We could have put off a steep rise in the heavy industry for some five or seven years and given the people more consumer goods, and sooner. Our people had earned this right a thousand times. This path to development was highly attractive.'
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Zhukov, op. cit. , p. 107.
Stalin prepared the defence of the Soviet Union by having more than 9,000 factories built between 1928 and 1941 and by making the strategic decision to set up to the East a powerful industrial base.
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Ibid. , p. 137.
With respect to the industrialization policy, Zhukov gave tribute to the `wisdom and acumen of the Party line, finally indicated by history'.
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Ibid. , pp. 107.
In 1921, in almost all areas of military production, they had to start from nothing. During the years of the First and Second Five Year Plans, the Party had planned that the war industries would grow faster than other branches of industry.
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Ibid. , p. 138.
Here are the significant numbers for the first two plans.
The annual production of tanks for 1930 was 740 units. It rose to 2,271 units in 1938.
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Ibid. , p. 139.
For the same period, annual plane construction rose from 860 to 5,500 units.
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Ibid. , p. 140.
During the Third Five-Year Plan, between 1938 and 1940, industrial production increased 13 per cent annually, but defence industry production rose by 39 per cent.
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La grande guerre nationale, op. cit. , p. 33.
The breathing space offered by the Germano-Soviet Pact was used by Stalin to push military production to the hilt. Zhukov testified:
`Experienced Party workers and prominent experts were assigned to large defence enterprises as CC Party organizers, to help the plants have everything needed and ensure attainment of targets. I must say that Stalin himself worked much with defence enterprises --- he was personally acquainted with dozens of directors, Party leaders, and chief engineers; he often met with them, demanding fulfilment of plans with a persistence typical of him.'
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Zhukov, op. cit. , p. 191.
The military deliveries that took place between January 1, 1939 and June 22, 1941 are impressive.
Artillery received 92,578 units, including 29,637 canons and 52,407 mortars. New mortars, 82mm and 120mm, were introduced just before the war.
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Zhukov, op. cit. , pp. 198--199. La grande guerre nationale, op. cit. , p. 33.
The Air Force received 17,745 fighter aircraft, including 3,719 new models. In the area of aviation:
`The measures taken between 1939 and 1941 created the conditions necessary to quickly obtain during the war quantitative and qualitative superiority'.
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Zhukov, op. cit. , p. 201. La grande guerre nationale, op. cit. , p. 33.
The Red Army received more that 7,000 tanks. In 1940, production of the medium-size T-34 tank and heavy KV tank, superior to the German tanks, began. There were already 1,851 produced when war broke out.
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Zhukov, op. cit. , pp. 197. La grande guerre nationale, op. cit. , p. 33.
Referring to these achievements, as if to express his disdain for Khrushchev's accusations, Zhukov made a telling self-criticism:
`Recalling what we military leaders demanded of industry in the very last months of peace, I can see that we did not always take full stock of the country's real economic possibilities.'
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Zhukov, op. cit. , p. 192.
The actual military preparation was also pushed to the hilt by Stalin. The military confrontations in May--August 1939 with Japan and in December 1939--March 1940 with Finland were directly linked with the anti-fascist resistance. These combat experiences were carefully analyzed to strengthen the Red Army's weaknesses.
In March 1940, a Central Committee meeting examined the operations against Finland. Zhukov related:
`Discussions were sharp. The system of combat training and educating troops was strongly criticized.'
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Ibid. , p. 180.
In May, Zhukov paid a visit to Stalin:
` ``Now that you have this combat experience,'' Stalin said, ``take upon yourself the command of the Kiev Military District and use this experience for training the troops.'' '
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Ibid. , p. 170.
For Stalin, Kiev was of significant military importance. He expected that the main attack in the German attack would focus on Kiev.
`Stalin was convinced that in the war against the Soviet Union the Nazis would first try to seize the Ukraine and the Donets Coal Basin in order to deprive t
he country of its most important economic regions and lay hands on the Ukrainian grain, Donets coal and, later, Caucasian oil. During the discussion of the operational plan in the spring of 1941, Stalin said: ``Nazi Germany will not be able to wage a major lengthy war without those vital resources.'' '
