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

In fact, the Soviet Union was ripe for a change of tack in foreign policy. A late convert to the principle of “collective security” to deter fascist aggression, it had hoped that concerted action—whether via the “Popular Front” policy of the Communist International, the so-called Comintern, or via the high ideals of the League of Nations, which it finally joined in 1934—might contain and defeat Hitler. By the spring of 1939, however, it had begun to shift its position. With “collective security” already discredited by the international failure to confront German expansionism or Italian aggression against Abyssinia, the Soviets were terminally disillusioned by the West’s lack of vigor at Munich and became increasingly convinced that the British and the French would be happy to cut a deal with Hitler at their expense. At around the same time as Göring was hatching his petit jeu , therefore, Stalin was open to new suggestions in foreign policy, even erring toward a new policy of unilateralism, in which practical bilateral arrangements would replace previous multilateral commitments.

In a speech to the 18th Communist Party Congress on March 10, 1939, only days before Hitler sent his troops into Prague, Stalin had struck a novel note in vociferously attacking the West. A “new redivision of the world” was under way, he said, in which the “aggressor states” were gaining spheres of influence and colonies at the expense of the “nonaggressor states.” Yet, instead of standing up to aggression as the principles of collective security had proscribed, he explained, the British and the French were colluding with the aggressor states, drawing back and retreating, “making concession after concessioneager not to hinder [them] in their nefarious work.” Far from being motivated by mere cowardice, Stalin went on, the Western powers wanted to encourage the aggressors to become mired in a war with the Soviet Union, whereby both sides would “weaken and exhaust one another” until the “enfeebled belligerents” were ready to have conditions dictated to them once again by the capitalist world. This, he said, was the “true face” of “the policy of non-intervention.”

Although a few of the more hawkish anti-Bolsheviks in the West would have undoubtedly subscribed to this view, it was certainly not a fair reflection of mainstream Western opinion or policy. Rather, it was very much the result of Stalin trying to make sense of the outside world through the blinkers of communist ideology and the fog of his own paranoia. Stalin’s primary ideological problem was his inability—following the precepts of Marxism-Leninism—to differentiate clearly between Nazism and “ordinary” Western capitalism. Both were, according to communist doctrine, merely two sides of the same malevolent coin, albeit with Nazism considered to be further down the road to its supposedly inevitable demise. Consequently, from the Soviet perspective, relations with the outside world—democratic and totalitarian alike—could never be normal. Every relationship was viewed in Moscow as a zero-sum game, with the only governing ideal being the benefit and security of the USSR.

The Soviet Union therefore had little interest in assisting its ideological enemies in maintaining the status quo and was unafraid of instead fomenting conflict between its rivals so as to then be able to exploit the unrest and upheaval that might follow to its own benefit. In this regard, Soviet thinking was actually much closer to that of the Nazis. As Stalin later explained—somewhat clumsily—to British ambassador Stafford Cripps, “The USSR had wanted to change the old equilibrium. England and France had wanted to preserve it. Germany had also wanted to make a change in the equilibrium, and this common desire to get rid of the old equilibrium created the basis for the rapprochement with Germany.”

In private, of course, Stalin was more honest about his motivations. It is often suggested that he made his thoughts plain in a secret meeting of the Soviet government, the Politburo, on August 19, 1939, in which he advocated accepting Hitler’s proposal of a nonaggression pact in the expectation that conflict between the Germans and the Western powers would be inevitable and that the USSR could “remain on the sidelines” and “hope for an advantageous entry into the war.” Stalin, it is said, went further, giving a number of resulting scenarios in which the prospects for “world revolution” were enhanced. He supposedly closed by stating that the USSR “must do everything to ensure that the war lasts as long as possible in order to exhaust both sides.”

This text, which Stalin himself dismissed as “nonsense,” is now generally considered to have been a wartime forgery, intended to discredit the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, much of its content rings broadly true and indeed chimes with comments made by Stalin and others at the time. Sergo Beria, the son of Stalin’s NKVD chief, Lavrenti Beria, certainly remembered events in that way. In his memoir, he wrote of Stalin’s motivations in agreeing the pact, stating simply, “He aimed to set Germany against France and Britain.” A couple of weeks after the pact was signed, moreover, Stalin himself elaborated, explaining to his acolytes that the agreement and the ensuing war presented a vital opportunity to undermine capitalism itself: “A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries for the redivision of the world, for the domination of the world! We see nothing wrong in their having a good hard fight and weakening each other. It would be fine if, at the hands of Germany, the position of the richest capitalist countries (especially England) were shaken. Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system. We can manoeuvre, pit one side against the other to set them fighting with each other as fiercely as possible.”

Molotov expanded on those ideas in a meeting the following summer with the Lithuanian communist Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius, at which he mused on what the war might mean for the Soviet Union: “We are more firmly convinced now than ever that our brilliant comrade, Lenin, was not mistaken when he assured us that the Second World War will help us to gain power throughout all Europe as the First helped us to gain power in Russia.” Molotov then elaborated, explaining how the pact with Nazi Germany dovetailed with this overarching ideal.

Today we support Germany but just enough to keep her from being smothered before the miserable and starving masses of the warring nations become disillusioned and rise against their leaders. Then the German bourgeoisie will come to an agreement with its enemy, the allied bourgeoisie, in order to crush with their combined forces the aroused proletariat. But at that moment we will come to its aid, we will come with fresh forces, well prepared, and in the territory of Western Europe, I believe, somewhere near the Rhine, the final battle between the proletariat and the degenerate bourgeoisie will take place which will decide the fate of Europe for all time. We are convinced that we, not the bourgeoisie, will win that battle.

This last part was almost certainly a flight of Stalinist fancy—a calculated exaggeration to enthuse and inspire a provincial communist functionary—but it is nonetheless telling that such grand ambitions were being floated in Moscow at all, as it shows that they were undoubtedly part of the narrative.

Soviet policy in 1939 is still routinely described—particularly by those who cleave to a rosy view of the Soviet Union—as essentially “defensive” in nature, motivated by a desire to hold Hitler off and buy time to prepare for an inevitable attack. This has, at the very least, a modicum of retrospective logic to it, but it finds no contemporary echo whatsoever. When Molotov confessed, much later in life, that his task as minister for foreign affairs was “to expand the borders” of the USSR, he was not simply exaggerating or playing to the gallery; he was expressing a fundamental truth. The Soviet Union saw territorial expansion and the spreading of communism as part of its raison d’être: it had sought to expand west in 1920 and would do so with spectacular results in 1944 and 1945. There is no reason to suppose that westward expansion was not part of the plan in 1939. Far from being defensive, therefore, Stalin’s motives in 1939 are at the very least passive-aggressive, exhibiting a profound underlying hostility to the outside world in general, yet portraying it as nonaggression and neutrality. The Nazi-Soviet Pact presented Stalin with a golden opportunity to shake the tree, to set world-historical forces in motion, while remaining outwardly neutral, preserving the Red Army for future battles—be they on the Rhine or elsewhere.