Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

If she thought that she had made sense of Stalin’s actions, the Soviet invasion of Poland in mid-September would throw her once again into turmoil. “Satan has won hands down,” she wrote the day after the Red Army’s invasion. “Stalin and Molotov have become the villains of the piece,” and their entry into Poland was “a monument of international immorality.” It was, she said, “the blackest tragedy in human history,” not because of the grim fate of the Poles but because her beloved USSR had squandered its “moral prestige.” The socialist writer Naomi Mitchison, meanwhile, saw the invasion as a personal blow: “I feel like hell deep down because of the Russian news,” she wrote in mid-September, adding that Soviet actions were “knocking the bottom out of what one has been working for all these years.” Others had more mundane concerns. One communist shop steward was devastated: “Bugger Uncle Joe, bugger Molotov, bugger the whole bloody lot of them! How the hell am I to explain this to the factory tomorrow?”

Yet darker days were to follow for Britain’s communists and their fellow travelers. After swallowing the line change in early October, they were shaken once again when the Red Army invaded Finland on the last day of November. So, as Comrade Dutt chimed in to publicly accuse hapless Finland of being a “semifascist state,” Beatrice Webb appeared to have given in to disillusionment, writing that it was the manner of the invasion, “hard hatred and parrot-like repetition of false—glaringly false—accusations,” that was “so depressing.” The leaders of the USSR had not yet “learnt good manners,” she chided, and “they will have to suffer for it.”

For those more in touch with the righteous wrath of the British people, much more than good manners or diplomatic niceties was at stake. According to Douglas Hyde, sellers of the Daily Worker were obliged to run the gauntlet, being “spat upon and assaulted in the streets doors slammed in their faces, even chamber-pots emptied on their heads from upstairs windows,” by an angry public. Moscow’s Winter War against Finland was one of a series of events that autumn that tested communist credibility in Britain, with some of the newer recruits and the less ideologically convinced becoming disillusioned and leaving the party.

There were some high-profile names among the defectors, including John Strachey. A former acolyte of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley and a prominent Marxist theorist, Strachey had been taken aback by the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact but only abandoned the party following the Nazi invasion of Norway in 1940, claiming that the “inter-Imperialist aspect of the struggle was subsidiary to the necessity to prevent a Nazi world-conquest.” Left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz did not wait so long. Appalled by the pact, he broke his long-standing connection with the Communist Party in protest and published an open letter to its members titled “Where Are You Going?” It was a typically woolly, verbose attack but nonetheless landed a few punches, not least in asking its readers to try to recall the days before the pact: “You regarded Hitler-fascist aggression, did you not, as a deadly menace, as the deadly menace, to everything in which we believe, and to every hope of further progress and advance. You were horrified at the tortures in the concentration camps; you loathed Hitler’s ideological repudiation of liberty, objectivity, mercy, pity and kindness, and his glorification of force and submission to force.” Yet, he went on, the Nazi-Soviet Pact had now created a new line, of “revolutionary defeatism,” which had brought communist propaganda to the uncomfortable position of aligning itself with Hitler’s once despised Nazi Germany and so was “running the terrible risk of bringing about the very catastrophe” that it had struggled to prevent. He urged party members to take a moment to reconsider the position that the Communist Party was asking them to adopt.

In the United States reactions were similarly mixed. Although as many as 2,000 American volunteers had fought against fascism in the ranks of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, a sizeable contingent of them were able to jettison their antifascism and march in Moscow-sponsored opposition to American entry into the war in the autumn of 1939. Popular ire against the US Communist Party’s (CPUSA) stance did prompt the winding up of the Comintern-funded American League for Peace and Democracy, but under the leadership of the Soviet spy Helen Silvermaster, it promptly morphed into the American Peace Mobilization and continued campaigning against American aid to Britain and against the “warmonger” President Franklin Roosevelt.

Alongside its stooges, the US Communist Party was also extremely active in campaigning for “peace” and against any American intervention in what it called the “European Imperialist War.” All its antifascist propaganda was duly halted, and the line touted in the pamphlets of the CPUSA’s leader, Earl Browder, such as “Whose War Is It?,” parroted Comintern slogans by stressing the culpability of the British, French, and Poles, while minimizing any criticism of Hitler’s Germany. According to Browder, Stalin’s actions in signing the Nazi-Soviet Pact had been proven correct “a hundred times over.” The Soviet Union, he claimed, was a force for peace that had even halted the Nazi advance by “redeeming more than half of Poland” and was “utilizing the contradictions among the imperialists to prevent them from carrying through their schemes of oppression and war.”

Such sophistry did little to endear the political Far Left to the American public, and the CPUSA suffered accordingly, with membership falling by around 15 percent in the opening six months of the war and new memberships virtually collapsing in 1940. The American political establishment was similarly unimpressed, and in October 1939 a federal grand jury indicted Earl Browder on charges of passport fraud, following the latter’s public admission that he had traveled abroad on falsified papers. Despite the overt political motivations behind his case, Browder was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and temporarily disappeared from the political stage. The party’s subsequent “Free Earl Browder” campaign foundered on public distrust and continuing resentment of Stalin’s pact with Hitler. The pact had dealt American communism a blow from which it would never recover.

While Gollancz wrestled with his conscience and American communists battled public suspicion, a few on the left contrived to see the Nazi-Soviet pact simply as a genuinely new political constellation. The idea that the two regimes had more in common than not had gained ground prior to 1939, and the signing of the pact appeared to have very publicly confirmed it. The idea was not as outlandish as modern minds might imagine. After all, Hitler’s Nazi Party had originated in an amalgam of socialist and nationalist principles. The name “National Socialism” had been sincerely meant, and though its socialist element had been corrupted and diluted in the interim, it had never been removed entirely, and Hitler and many of his acolytes clearly still saw themselves broadly as socialists.

Consequently, the idea that Hitler and Stalin were converging, or even that they shared some political DNA, enjoyed a season of currency. An editorial in London’s left-wing New Statesman , for instance, accused Stalin of “adopting the familiar technique of the Führer.” The piece pulled few punches: “Like Hitler,” editor Kingsley Martin wrote, Stalin “has a contempt for all arguments except that of superior force. Like Hitler, he would argue that in the world today only force counts. By the inexorable laws of its dialectic, Bolshevism brought into being its antithesis, National Socialism. Today the question being asked is whether the ugly thing that now reigns from Vladivostok to Cologne is turning into the inevitable synthesis, National-Bolshevism.” British socialist journalist Henry Brailsford was also plainly baffled by the pact, referring to it as the “central enigma” of the war, but he nonetheless concurred that some sort of convergence between the two regimes might be afoot. Both were revolutionary, he noted in the New Republic that autumn, and both despised the West. Was it not possible that the two were pursuing the same aims: waging a crusade against the “effete liberalism of the pluto-democracies”?