|
|
| Red Army | Wehrmacht | Ratio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Divisions | 128 | 55 | 2.3:1 |
| Troop strength | 3,400,000 | 1,400,000 | 2.1:1 |
| Field guns | 38,500 | 16,300 | 2.4:1 |
| Tanks | 7,500 | 900 | 8.7:1 |
| Aircraft | 6,200 | 1,400 | 4.4:1 |
The attack was to begin in typical blitzkrieg fashion -- without warning, with air raids on enemy airfields, and with heavy artillery bombardment of front-line enemy forces. The USSR would thus have had the clear advantage of superior forces and the benefits of the first strike. Why Stalin did not give the order to attack is unknown.
In "Stalin's Lost Opportunity," Meltiukhov establishes, with meticulous documentation, that in the years 1938-40 the Soviet Union had carried out a massive build-up of military muscle that made it the superpower of the day, far exceeding the might of any enemy. Meltiukhov presents the comparative strength of the major belligerents for August 1939, on the eve of Germany's invasion of Poland, as shown in the table above.
Accounting for Stalin's Delay
Meltiukhov minces no words on Stalin's intent: "The content of the Soviet operational plans, the ideological guidelines and the military propaganda, combined with information on the immediate military preparations of the Red Army for an offensive, attest unambiguously to the intention of the Soviet government to attack Germany in the summer of 1941." He concludes that at first the opening strike against Germany (Operation Groza [Thunderstorm]) was scheduled for June 12, 1941, but that the Kremlin later fatefully shifted the date to July 15. According to Meltiukhov: "Unfortunately, what we now know today was a secret in 1941. The Soviet leadership made a fateful miscalculation by not striking first."
Meltiukhov speculates that Stalin delayed the date for the attack when he learned, on May 12, of Rudolf Hess' flight to Scotland. Stalin feared that if the Hess peace mission succeeded, and the British withdrew from the war, the Red Army would be left to stand alone against the Germans. When it became clear that the Hess mission had failed, Stalin set July 15 as the date for Operation Thunderstorm -- twenty-three days after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. Had the Red Army attacked on the originally scheduled date, Meltiukhov believes, it would have succeeded.
Although Soviet intelligence had been informed of the precise date of the German attack by its agent Richard Sorge in Japan, and by its "Korsikanets" and "Starshina" sources in Berlin, Stalin refused to be convinced. Moreover, Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt had also warned Stalin, to no avail: Stalin knew that Britain desperately needed the USSR in the war against Germany for its own sake. By failing to strike first, as planned, the USSR lost 800,000 men (Germany, 80,000), 4,000 aircraft (Germany, 850), 21,500 field guns and 11,800 tanks (Germany, 400) during the first two and a half weeks of the war. By the end of 1941 the Soviet Union had lost three million Red Army troops.
Meltiukhov rejects the term "preventive war." For a true preventive war, it is necessary for the attacker to know definitely that his adversary is about to invade. Meltiukhov maintains that, while the each side was aware of the other's build-up and deployment of forces, neither the Germans nor the Russians knew with certainty that the other was about to attack. Stalin believed, with some logic, that Hitler would never open a second front while the Britain was still in the war, but the German leader chose not to wait until the Red Army launched its attack: he unleashed his own blitzkrieg. The situation best resembles two cats sitting on a fence waiting to see which will jump off first. On the day before the attack, Hitler signaled his frame of mind in a letter to Mussolini:
Even if I were forced to lose 60-70 divisions in Russia by the end of the year, this would still only be a small fraction of the forces I would have to maintain constantly on the eastern border under the present conditions.
In the end Germany failed, Meltiukhov states, simply because it had neither the resources nor the reserves necessary to bring a long war to a successful conclusion.
A Suicidal Invasion?
The ever controversial, iconoclastic Suvorov dedicates his new book to his adversaries. He writes, "You can't dedicate a book with this title [Ledokol, or "Suicide"] to friends, so I dedicate it to my enemies." An enemy of the Soviet regime who defected to England, Suvorov was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. Although his opponents are legion, including many in the post-Soviet as well as the Anglo-American establishments, in today's Russia he is the most popular writer on the history of the Second World War.
Suvorov joins Meltiukhov in the belief that if any side was unprepared for the war that ensued, it was the Germans. On June 22, 1941 when Germany launched its desperate attack, Stalin had some 13,000 aircraft to Hitler's 2,500. Moreover, the Red Army had an even greater advantage in numbers and quality of tanks (24,000:3,700).
In "Suicide" Suvorov analyzes secondary sources in German, just as he did in his books on Russian war plans, and concludes that Hitler had lost the war even before the first shot was fired. It is Suvorov's contention that Hitler and the Nazi leadership were irresponsible in launching a war against the much larger, better prepared, and better armed Soviet Union in the absurd belief that the USSR could be defeated in ninety days -- July-August-September. Hitler and the German high command unpardonably underestimated the strength of the Soviet armed forces, which Stalin had been building up since the mid-1920s. Germany, of course, did not begin rearming until the mid-1930s, and would delay mobilizing for total war until around 1943.
Stalin and his advisors knew that the Wehrmacht lacked all the essentials for a protracted war under conditions of extreme cold. Through their intelligence services and agents, the Soviets had learned that: German tanks were inferior to their own in both quantity and quality; Germany was critically short of oil; Germany did not manufacture cold-resistant lubricants; the German forces had not been issued winter clothing; Germany was dependent for its war effort on the import of many raw materials; and much more.
Exasperated by the short-sighted, superficial German plan for victory in three months, Suvorov asks a few rhetorical questions: Did Hitler think that May followed October in Russia? Had he learned nothing from Napoleon's campaign? Did he not know that, even if he reached Moscow, Russia would have continued the war from the Urals in the interior, far beyond the reach of German long-range bombers?
By the end of the fourth month of Barbarossa, the German economy was already groaning. Fritz Todt, chief of arms production, advised Hitler to arrange for an armistice. Large-scale German tank operations had to be curtailed for lack of fuel. The German panzer units, with their limited number of tanks, were often forced to cover long distances to quell unforeseen exigencies, thereby further exhausting fuel supplies. (Large-scale blitzkrieg operations, ensuring the greatest possible encirclement and bag of prisoners, require that the tanks moving out from one pincer proceed with minimum diversion in order to meet those jumping off from the other pincer, thereby closing the encirclement.)
Beyond the Propaganda
Suvorov's list of villains is long indeed. Hitler, Goebbels, and the subservient German generals are castigated for their recklessness. But Suvorov's venom is mostly directed at the Communist and post-Communist establishment, whose spokesmen continue to mouth the Party line. He ridicules and mocks what he considers the falsehoods, misconceptions, myths, and errors about the German-Russian war invented and circulated by the various Soviet and post-Soviet "scientific institutes," including the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and the Institute of Military History, whose researchers have tried to dismiss Suvorov's findings as "unscientific."
Suvorov dismisses typical official Soviet sources for the war as specious propaganda devoid of hard facts or figures. The main message of the original six-volume History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-45, Suvorov contends, is that Nikita Khrushchev (under whose administration the work was compiled) won the war single-handedly. Suvorov goes on to observe that when the twelve-volume revised edition of this official history was written under Leonid Brezhnev, it was revised to show that it was actually Brezhnev who had won the Great Patriotic War.
Suvorov singles out the memoirs of Marshal Zhukov for special criticism. He hazards that these were probably written by Glavpur (the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army). Thus "Zhukov" writes that on June 22, 1941, the Germans enjoyed a 5-6:1 advantage over Soviet forces in field pieces, tanks and aircraft, when in fact the ratio was to Russia's advantage.
Suvorov considers Stalin to have been Hitler's superior in cleverness, rationality, emotional stability, international politics, cruelty, and blood-letting. Stalin was much better informed about German capabilities than Hitler was of Russian. Suvorov introduces a Russian adage to demean Hitler's attempt to outwit Stalin: "Never try to trick a trickster." The only reason for Hitler's initial success, for Suvorov, was that Barbarossa was an entirely irrational decision, which the thoroughly logical Stalin could not possibly have anticipated. In the opinion of this reviewer, that was precisely why Hitler took the gamble. Suvorov's Russian nativism shines forth when he writes: "Only a fool would consider defeating Russia! Only a complete idiot would ever think of defeating it in a three-month campaign!"
As brilliant as Suvorov has been in exposing the historical lies of the corrupt Communist and post-Communist regimes, even sympathetic readers must take issue with him on certain points. As with Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy, Suvorov's findings may not satisfy the more professional historians in every detail -- and some of them will be subject to revision.
Overrating Stalin
Occasionally Suvorov contradicts himself. For example, he argues that when Hitler turned his troops southward to Kiev before Moscow was taken, he all but lost the war. But elsewhere Suvorov recognizes that in war the best strategy is to defeat the enemy's armed forces, not to take prestige cities. In fact the German forces turned south not so much to take Kiev as to destroy another Soviet army. The German generals, who after all had some experience in the conduct of war, were of course perfectly aware of the pointlessness of capturing large cities merely for trophy value. When the enemy's armed forces are destroyed, his cities will fall on their own.
Only in the case of Stalingrad did the German invaders commit all their forces and energies to take a city -- with disastrous results. The previous winter, after the failure to take Moscow, reason had prevailed and the Germans retreated to a more defensible line, where they were able to regroup and reinforce their armies. Without the help of the Finns, German forces were inadequate to take Leningrad, so they bypassed the city. But Hitler forbade any retreat from Stalingrad. Its capture had been aimed, among other things, at blocking oil shipments up the Volga north to the Soviets. The Wehrmacht was no less concerned to fuel its own war machine: it had secured the Crimea in order to protect its chief sources of petroleum, in Romania and Hungary, from Soviet air attack from that peninsula.
Suvorov's excessive regard for Stalin's leadership and his equally overdone criticism of Hitler's ignores the fact that Germany nearly did defeat the Red Army. Had the United States, Great Britain, France, and other allies not supported Stalin with arms, trucks, provisions, and other necessities of war, the outcome might have been quite different. It must also be recalled that, throughout much of the long Russian-German conflict, Germany was compelled to divert twenty to thirty percent of its war effort to the Western front.
Suvorov's main contention, that Stalin groomed Hitler to do his dirty work in Europe, is untenable. It gives far too much credit to the Soviet dictator. Germany never wanted a war in the west, let alone one against Britain. True, the Germans suspected France -- especially under the government of Léon Blum's popular front -- of further mischief.
It must be recalled that Germany's ill-fated attack on the Soviet Union followed several successive attempts at its encirclement by its enemies. In the 1930s British and French diplomacy had succeeded in surrounding her with hostile nations. Then came the attempted Scandinavian and Balkan encirclement, and finally that of the U.S.,UK, and USSR. With both Soviet and Western forces increasing in strength, Germany took a desperate gamble to break the ring, rather than wait until the Red Army seized the most opportune time to pounce. True, the gamble failed. Today's Germany, however, is a prosperous country, much smaller than it might have wished, but the remnant of Stalin's USSR, stripped of the Tsar's empire, is not much more than an overgrown economic basket case.
Suvorov exaggerates Stalin's "genius." While it is true that he created a police state and built up the Red Army to superpower status, his armed forces failed miserably at the time they were most needed, June 1941. It is also true that Stalin dominated Churchill and Roosevelt, above all in the several conferences that determined postwar arrangements among the "Big Three," but the Western leaders had cast themselves in the role of supplicants who needed the Red Army to contain and destroy Germany.
For all that, Suvorov has made a great contribution to correcting the history of the Second World War by dispelling, once and for all, the myth of a peace-loving Soviet Union invented by Communist propagandists and circulated in the West by their dupes and sympathizers.
Trusting Stalin
According to Gorodetsky's version of the Soviet Union, the USSR planned only counter-attacks in defense of the homeland, and its leader, Stalin, was too trusting of Adolf Hitler. Gorodetsky completely ignores the Soviet Union's military build-up from the 1930s until the outbreak of hostilities in 1941. The tens of thousands of advanced tanks and aircraft; the training of hundreds of thousands of paratroopers; the forward deployment of airfields, depots, and attack units on the eve of the attack in June 1941 are all hard evidence of Stalin's real intentions.
The Israeli researcher has limited himself almost entirely to examining statements from official Soviet sources. For the most part, he ignores military analysts (whether Russian, German, or American), who are better equipped than he to evaluate military capabilities and designs. These researchers tend increasingly to agree with Suvorov.
Gorodetsky retains the stale support of the old Soviet establishment, while Suvorov has gained many post-Soviet adherents in recent years. While Gorodetsky is read mostly in England and the United States, erstwhile allies of Stalinist Russia, Suvorov is read widely in Russia and Germany, whose peoples experienced Stalin's and Hitler's war first hand.
No Room for Chivalry
In Stalin's War of Extermination Joachim Hoffmann examines both the underlying causes and the ruthless execution of the war by Russians and Germans alike, in a thoroughly engrossing, systematic approach that is unsurpassed with respect to comprehensiveness, objectivity, and documentation. Hoffmann has made extensive use of interrogations of Soviet prisoners of war, ranging in rank from general to private, conducted by their German captors during the war. These interviews, combined with the traditional exploitation of open-source, unclassified literature and recently declassified materials, irrefutably dispel the myth of a peace-loving Soviet Union led by a trusting, pacific Joseph Stalin. Hoffmann's research confirms conclusively that the Soviet Union was making final preparations for its own preemptive attack when the Wehrmacht struck.
Besides the POW interrogations, Hoffmann cites such military authorities as Dmitri Volkogonov, to the effect that Stalin needed only a few more weeks to bring his forces into complete battle readiness; Soviet military analyst Colonel Danilov, who agrees that the "vozhd" (commander) only needed a bit more time; and Colonel Karpov, who has written:
In the early grayness of a May or June morning, thousands of our aircraft and tens of thousands of our guns would have dealt the blow against the densely concentrated German force, whose positions were known down to battalion level -- a surprise even more inconceivable than the German attack on us.
Hoffmann contends that war between these two mutually hostile, ideologically driven nations was inevitable: it was merely a question of which side would initiate hostilities. He reminds us that the First World War had brought Communism to power over the one sixth of the Earth's surface that had been the Russian empire. A second world war, Lenin preached, would advance Communism throughout Europe. Stalin, Lenin's faithful disciple in propagating Communism, acted from the outset of his rule to increase the USSR's military might to that end. By 1941, the Red Army's aircraft, tanks, and field artillery exceeded Germany's by a factor of at least six to one in each category. In that year, the USSR's paratroops and submarines, exclusively offensive forces, exceeded those of the rest of the world combined.
The main principles of Soviet military doctrine in the spring of 1941 were: 1) the Red Army is an offensive army; 2) war must always be fought on enemy territory, with minimum friendly losses and the total destruction of the enemy; 3) the working class in the enemy's country is a potential ally and should be encouraged to rebel against its masters; and 4) war preparations must serve to ensure offensive capabilities.
So confident was Stalin of Soviet military superiority, Hoffmann asserts, that he doubted Germany would ever be foolish enough to attack, especially as long as Britain remained in the war. Dumbfounded at the German successes at the outset of Barbarossa, the Soviet dictator realized that he had underestimated Germany's chances of defeating the Red Army. Suvorov has described Stalin's probable state of mind as comparable to that of the designer of the Titanic after learning it had sunk. Nevertheless, vowing vengeance, still confident of ultimate victory, Stalin demanded the total extermination of the German invaders. On November 6, 1941, he declared:
Well now, if the Germans want a war of extermination, they will get it. From now on it will be our task, the task of the peoples of the Soviet Union, the task of our fighters, commanders, and the political officials of our Army and Navy to exterminate to the last man all Germans who have invaded Homeland as occupiers. No mercy to the German occupiers! Death to the German occupiers!
Hitler, for his part, by underestimating the military strength of the Soviet Union, led his country to a catastrophic defeat. Goebbels, in his diary, suggested that had Hitler known the actual strength of the Red Army, he might have at least paused before taking his fateful gamble. Yet, however disastrous the Axis attack finally proved for the German nation in the end, Hoffmann believes that all Europe would have suffered as grim a fate had the Red Army succeeded in striking first.
This clash to the death between two ideologically driven states, Hoffmann observes, left no room for chivalry, or for the strict observance of international conventions on land warfare. Stalin insisted that Soviet soldiers not surrender, and used maximal terror to prevent them from doing so. Soviet POWs were deemed deserters, and any Soviet soldier who surrendered was to be killed on falling into Soviet hands. (Near the end of the war German soldiers who refused to fight were shot and hanged from lamp posts for all to see.) Throughout the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets dubbed it, "Soviet patriotism" and "mass heroism" were heavily dependent on terrorism. As Hoffmann writes, the head of Red Army Political Propaganda, Commissar Lev Sakharovich Mekhlis, was empowered by Stalin to use every device of terror to keep the Red Army fighting. This Mekhlis did with relish. In consequence of the activity of this and other commissars, Stalin's terror against his own people (soldiers and civilians) during the war accounted for a substantial percentage of the estimated twenty-five million Soviet war dead. (See also Walter Sanning's essay on Soviet losses, "Soviet Scorched-Earth Warfare," in JHR 6, no. 1 [spring 1985]). Even so, more than five million Soviet soldiers managed to surrender to the invaders by the end of the war. Of those who survived the war, many had cause to wish they hadn't following their repatriation to the USSR.
Unpunished Crimes, Aggressive Plans
From the onset of the war, German soldiers unfortunate enough to be taken prisoner were often mutilated and murdered. When the Soviet forces entered Germany, men and boys were murdered or drafted for forced labor; the women were often raped, sometimes murdered, and, if strong enough, dragooned for forced labor.
Although by about 1950 Stalin decided to lessen the influence of Jews in the Communist Party, Jews were very much involved in murderous assignments during the war. In addition to Mekhlis, there was Lazar Kaganovich, responsible for the deaths of millions; General Abakumov, who headed the NKVD/MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs, or secret police), and Generals Reichman and Chernyakhovski, who were especially ruthless. Hoffmann hastens to add that the criminal actions of individual Jews should no more reflect on the Jewish people as a whole than the criminal actions of individual Nazis on the German people. Yet Nazis charged with war crimes have been, and continue to be, tried and punished, while, curiously, no courts appear to be interested in bringing Communist criminals to justice.
The thoroughness and reliability of Hoffmann's work (which helpfully includes an appendix containing key original documents in Polish, Russian, English, and German) is nicely exemplified in his treatment of Zhukov's plan of May 15, 1941. While Sergeyev and Bezymenski seem to suggest that the plan was only recently discovered, Hoffmann makes manifestly clear that the plan has long been known and analyzed. Colonel Valeri Danilov and Dr. Heinz Magenheimer examined this plan and other documents that indicate Soviet preparations for attack almost ten years ago in an Austrian military journal (Österreichische Militärische Zeitschrift, nos. 5 and 6, 1991; no. 1, 1993; and no. 1, 1994). Both researchers concluded that the Zhukov plan of May 15, 1941, reflected Stalin's May 5, 1941 speech (see above) heralding the birth of the new offensive Red Army. Hoffmann reproduces an original document, referred to as "Short Notation of Comrade Stalin's Speech to the Red Army Academy on May 5, 1941," which concludes with the words:
But now that we have reconstructed our army and abundantly saturated it with the technology to wage modern warfare, now that we have become strong -- now we are obliged to go from defense to attack. In defending our country we are obliged to act in an offensive manner. To switch over from defense to a military policy of offensive action. We must reconstruct our training, our propaganda, our agitation, and our press in the spirit of attack. The Red Army is now a modern army, and a modern army is an army of attack.
The Zhukov plan of May 15, 1941, indicates clearly that the Red Army planned a preemptive strike against the German forces across the border. Hoffmann further notes that a few days later, on May 20, 1941, Mikhail Kalinin, then chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet and nominally head of state, gave a speech in which he said:
War is a very dangerous business, laden with sorrows, but when a time comes when it is possible to expand the realm of Communism, war should not be discounted ... and the zone of Communism must be expanded. The capitalist world can only be destroyed by the red hot glowing steel of a holy revolutionary war.
Kalinin thus strongly implied that the war the USSR was about to wage was not a preventive war forced upon it by Germany, but a war of conquest to expand the Communist empire.
The Perfect Storm
The preponderance of documents uncovered in the past decade, including further analyses of the Zhukov plan of May 15, 1941, by members of the Suvorov school, should convince the impartial reader that: Germany was woefully unprepared for a long war; that the Soviet Union was not only armed to the teeth, but poised to spring in July 1941; that Stalin was Lenin's disciple in striving to advance Communism to the rest of Europe, especially to Germany; and that the governments of Britain and France were totally oblivious of the greater danger Communism posed to them when they declared war on Germany over its border dispute with Poland.The failure of the British, French, and American leaderships to perceive that the Soviet Union was by far the deadlier threat, even in 1939, was a mistake that has taken half a century to rectify, at the cost of countless millions of lives.
Hoffmann concludes that the war between the two irreconcilable ideologies was inevitable and unavoidable. Stalin's fanatical adherence to Communism (class hatred) and Hitler's equally fanatical adherence to racial theories (Hoffmann cites Disraeli: "The race question is the key to world history") led their peoples to a catastrophe unmatched since the Thirty Years' War. Hoffmann blames the horrible excesses the Red Army inflicted on German civilians on hate-obsessed war propagandists such as Ilya Ehrenburg in Russia who deliberately exaggerated German crimes. Thus, Hoffman notes, Ehrenburg announced a death toll of four million for Auschwitz on January 4, 1945, weeks before the capture of the camp. Likewise, months before the war's end, Ehrenburg reported that six million Jews had been murdered by the Germans. Moreover, in many instances, including the infamous Katyn forest massacre of Polish prisoners, Red propagandists shamelessly tried to blame the German army for crimes committed by the Soviets.
Like his colleague Wolfgang Strauss, Hoffmann advocates reconciliation between the peoples of Germany and Russia. The policies of both Stalin's Communist regime and Hitler's National Socialist state were aberrations far removed from the traditional friendship between the two peoples as prevailed under Bismarck and before him. In that spirit Hoffmann makes special mention of Drs. Heinz Magenheimer, Werner Maser, Ernst Topitsch, Günther Gillessen, Alfred M. de Zayas, Viktor Suvorov, and also Aleksandr Moiseevich Nekrich and Lev Kopelev, two former Soviet wartime commissars of Jewish extraction, for their courageous contributions to revisionist history. (Nor has Hoffmann been less than courageous: he testified in a German court to the scholarly quality of Germar Rudolf 's Holocaust revisionist anthology, Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte, later published in English as Dissecting the Holocaust.)
The extreme economic and political conditions that afflicted much of the first half of the twentieth century devastated Germany and Russia. The slaughter of the First World War, the triumph of Communism in Russia, the treaty of Versailles, and the Great Depression combined to culminate in the political storm of the century, the Second World War, much as unique and unforeseen meteorological conditions in October 1991 -- three merging hurricanes -- combined to create what writer Sebastian Junger called "the perfect storm," a devastating "nor'easter" in the North Atlantic. In historians such as Suvorov and Hoffmann, the historical tempest of the twentieth century is, increasingly, finding able and objective chroniclers.
Source: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org) Date: September/December 2001
"Stalin's Role in the Coming of World War II,"
Raack, R.C., World Affairs, (vol. 158, no.4) Spring 1996
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/raack.htm
Viktor Suvorov" is the nom de plume of a former officer of Soviet military intelligence long resident in England. In the 1980s, he published a new history of Stalin's wartime military plans that should have shaken established historical terra firma--were his account to be believed. In 1990, British publisher Hamish Hamilton finally put out an English translation of his book-length expose, The Ice-breaker. In it, Suvorov offers a new view of Stalin's war aims, a view elaborately supported with citations from Soviet military memoirs and other appropriate documents. Viking Press put out Suvorov's book in New York the same year.
The subtitle of the 1990 London edition read: "Who Started the Second World War?" Certainly that must have caught the attention of a number of readers. But in spite of the abiding interest in the history of the war of 1939-1945, especially in these anniversary years, neither the London nor New York edition was ever reviewed in journals of opinion and review, nor in the major professional historical journals in this country.(1) Surely the publishers, Hamish Hamilton and New York's Viking, wanted their publication to succeed--and therefore sent out the usual number of review copies. Why, then, the strange silence?
A book under a similar title, How War Came, by London professor D.C. Watt, was published in England and in the United States in 1989. It was reviewed, generally favorably, by at least fifteen journals (just counting those reviews cited in the American Book Review Digest and Book Review Index).(2) Professor Watt presented a relatively conventional account of the coming of the war, one based overwhelmingly on Western and German materials, a history quite without the support of the vast number of new sources on the subject then, in the early days of glasno, popping out from behind the former Iron Curtain.
Actually, the two books are in no way comparable in content, just similar in title: Watt's is a broader, far more traditional approach to a long reported subject; Suvorov's has one focus only, Stalin's war plans, largely ignored by most writers, and exploiting a wholly different, new range of sources, chiefly military-historical.
Suvorov made his novel argument from much neglected historical ground. That ground: the plan for an attack westward that he says Stalin had in mind in 1941, when the latter, allegedly positioned for an attack west, was caught flat-footed by the anticipatory German attack. There is not the faintest hint of such a Soviet war scheme in Watt's text. Suvorov also suggested a new account of what the Soviet boss also had to have had in mind two .years earlier, in 1939, when he signed the "nonaggression" pact with Hitler, a move that set up the conditions for the German and Soviet attacks on Poland. The pact made general European war inevitable, given earlier British guarantees to Poland, and put the Wehrmacht on Soviet borders within a month. Yet Without that mutual German-Soviet frontier, which Stalin deliberately helped to create in 1939; there could have been no direct German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.
Watt, as suggested earlier, was not alone in failing to lean forward in order to get a better look back. Countless other writers also failed to ask the question, wholly and oddly ignoring Hitler on the subject, though he was the main cause of it all. Hitler had several times remarked that he had to attack the Soviets before they attacked him.(3) Was he right? Did Stalin have plans for using war, and in particular the 1939 war, to the Soviet Union's and Bolshevism's advantage? In Stalin's eyes, the interest of one was identical with that of the other. Widely broadcast Marxist-Leninist theory, proclaiming wars between "imperialist" powers as the unavoidable path to their inevitable destruction in proletarian and colonial revolutions, should have focused contemporary and historical attention on the connection between the existing war and Stalin's likely interest in profiting from it.
These obvious diplomatic connections, Hitler's prophesy and Lenin's, have been almost universally ignored by historians--who have failed to ask the obvious question, What did Stalin actually expect from the second "imperialist" war. They evidently preferred to believe the word of Stalin and his friends that his purposes in making the pact were purely defensive, as were his purposes when Hitler suddenly attacked in 1941. In fact, much Western "informed" opinion then completely accepted ambiguous Soviet assurances that they had lost interest in the central tenets of Marxist-Leninist-driven international adventurism.(4)
Does the above introduction catch the attention of readers who by now find good reason to be suspicious of all kinds of apparitions produced by the media? And suspicious, too, where apparitions lack--in this case the missing reviews of a book put out by major publishers with a dramatic new historical line of argument? In fact, even in Britain only one major journal of opinion reviewed the Suvorov book; favorably, by the way.
John Zametica, writing that review in The Spectator, made one point readers may have already anticipated. He suggested that Suvorov's book was likely to be attacked "by many academic historians whose previous work would not make much sense if Suvorov is right." Among the attackers one might have anticipated finding many of those academic authors, and others, who wrote about the events of 1938-1941, from the crisis over Hitler's takeover of Austria and the Sudetenland to the German attack on the Soviet Union. But Suvorov got a different treatment: not reviewed and thereby advertised to a wider public, but ignored, allowed to quietly slip beyond the pale of academic opinion, effectively closeted; indeed, virtually beyond the reach of all the various intelligentsias grouped for information on the west side of the Atlantic around the American super-regional newspapers and established journals of opinion.(5) Was Suvorov perhaps the victim of an intellectual "cleansing" over here?
Just what is the history, not, to repeat, at all exclusive to academic authors, that the purport of Suvorov's work could demolish, should its arguments hold?
A reader nowadays seeking the causes of World War II would be likely to find an edition of the following generally accepted history-- here well rounded down for brevity's sake. It is the central historical basis underpinning the system of beliefs widespread in the West, which for years frequently helped put a good, at least more favorable, spin on explanations of Stalin's wartime and postwar behavior, and often still does. The conventional history goes as follows: Stalin's mistrust of the Western democracies, Great Britain and France, had increased radically after they effectively withdrew support from Czech President Benes in the face of Hitler's demands on the latter, in the months leading up to the Munich crisis of September 1938. The Soviet Union was then linked by a mutual defense pact to Czechoslovakia as well as to France, both agreements parts of the network of collective security the European powers had slowly been building up against Nazi Germany. But, to continue, when the British and French agreed with Hitler at Munich to allow him to annex German-populated parts of Czechoslovakia on demand, Stalin lost faith in the democracies. He thought their willingness to appease Hitler by satisfying his claims on Czechoslovakia and their failure to consult the Soviet Union in the matter portended little less than their equivalent willingness to see Hitler take all he wished all over the European east. Then he would be ready for the grand assault on the Soviet Union itself.(6) For, as all knew, Hitler had loudly broadcast his hostility to what he called "Judeo-Bolshevism," and his determination to achieve "living space" to the east for the German people. Given Hitler's known propensities, it would have been difficult to construe that vague expansionist aim as not including at least most of the western Slavic lands of the Soviet Union.
Anticipating the war coming with the Germans, Stalin, reacting (so the story continues), made haste to counter what he saw as Western scheming with some of his own. He would agree to let Hitler advance some steps to the east to take half of Poland in return for his agreement to Stalin's moving Soviet borders to the west by taking its other half. Stalin could thereby create a new and large defensive glacis against the Germans, composed of eastern Poland and the other east central European states and territories he got from this deal, a land bulwark standing before the eight million square miles of original Soviet territory. As a result, Hitler, because of his war against Poland, would fall into the British-promised confrontation with the Western powers. Stalin would thereby gain both the time and space he desperately needed for the build-up of his own defenses, for he knew Hitler was determined to make his move against him soon. Hence Stalin's pact with the Nazis and his agreement to supply Germany with many of the raw materials it then needed to make war with England and France in the west of Europe were both defensive moves, parts of a calculated stall to gain vital space and time.
Stalin's brand of Bolshevism was not aggressive, so the story emphasizing Stalin's defensive aims runs, in spite of the wars he quickly made on Poland and Finland in the aftermath of the pact, and notwithstanding his subsequent brutal occupation of the small Baltic states. He had, we have often read, long before quietly deflated the bloody Bolshevik expansionism originally authored in revolutionary days by Lenin and Trotsky, one of its failed efforts being the earlier, catastrophic (for the Bolsheviks), bungled invasion of Poland in 1920. Though Stalin was himself part of the commissarial apparatus over the Red army, and one of the main bunglers during that invasion, believers in this history nonetheless argued, against great evidence to the contrary, that he had later abjured such costly foreign adventures and the prescriptions of his dead Leninist mentor who commanded them. Stalin, this history goes on, was mainly concerned for domestic safety, fearful for the Soviet Union's future. So many history writers and others have judged for the last fifty years or so in sympathetic understanding of this era of the Soviet boss's foreign policy. He had, they contend, few, if any, alternatives to the pact with Hitler and his own warrior's role in the destruction of what remained of independent east central Europe.
But Stalin had fatefully miscalculated, so the tale continues. For, following the unexpected and sudden fall of France in 1940, the rest of the European continent was soon in Hitler's hands. With no serious enemies on the Continent to the west, the Fuhrer began to mass his armies to move against the Soviet Union. This early turn the Soviet dictator, whose plans to gain time and build in safety had been cut short by the German victories everywhere in Europe, had not foreseen. And though, following the pact with the Germans, he had rushed to rearm, and had indeed vastly expanded his defensive lines to the west, and had seemingly gained almost two years to prepare for war, the Red armies were nonetheless overran by the initial German assault when it came in June 1941. Likewise, the Red Air Fleet all along the line of German advance was virtually demolished, caught spreadeagled on its aerodromes. All this happened even after Stalin had received countless warnings of the impending attack From the beginning of the German assault, the Russians were almost everywhere in pell mell retreat. Millions of their troops were lost; when not dead, prisoners in the hands of the Germans and their allies. The major cities and industries of the Soviet west were soon in the latter alliance's hands. Monumental political disaster had been followed by monumental military disaster.
There is more than just a little wrong with the story just told (which also frequently leaves out the massive dimensions of the catastrophe Stalin, "humanity's greatest genius," as he was fond of being called, brought on the Soviet state). Yet, however implausible, it is still the one still most often repeated. Read a history book on the subject if you doubt me, or check your college textbooks if you still have them. The New Yorker is just one among the popular journals that regularly bombard readers with amateur histories of aspects of Hitler's war, also endlessly confirming, if only implicitly, the Stalinist defensive story.
Even during the war, the same story convinced many policy planners in London and Washington seeking a line on which to found in historical experience projections of postwar Soviet behavior. And it was evidently swallowed by our wartime Western leaders, Winston S. Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It therefore lay, as accepted history, behind much crucial decisionmaking and postwar planning during World War II--behind the key political and military decisions taken at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam. At those crucial conferences the choices with respect to Western treatment of the wartime ally, Stalin's Soviet Union, based on Western expectations of Stalin's behavior in the years to follow, were made. And when made, they were often made to Stalin's advantage out of both ignorance and misunderstanding of what really had happened.
The same story was subsequently offered to Western citizens to justify their wartime leaders' misplaced confidence in the Soviet Union even long after the Cold War had begun, when Soviet armies were ensconced all across the center of Europe and Stalin's borders and sphere of influence had been considerably expanded in Asia. Just a few years ago, former Soviet Communist Party chief Mikhail Gorbachev was still publicly playing out the tale to reinforce his own latter-day, bold-faced exculpation of Stalin.(7)
Behind the story, in its variant tellings never far removed from that above, lies the efficient voice of Stalinist propaganda and the willingness of leading Westerners, gullible journalists and politicians, and countless later historians to believe Stalin's defenders and to take his propaganda at face value. This now seems astonishing and should have seemed so from the beginning. For Stalin's Western contemporaries had no good reasons to hope for the best from their suddenly acquired wartime ally, Hitler's former wartime ally. Nor had those who followed. In fact, they had even less reason to see the best in him, as so many seem to have preferred to do over the years. We must by now recognize the long-time transcendence of the unlikely fable repeated above as the successful and enduring product of perhaps the best propaganda campaign ever conducted. But the recent opening of many former East Bloc archives heretofore long closed to independent researchers makes it certain that it cannot go generally unchallenged much longer.
If that long purveyed historical tale is indeed false, what kind of a history is to replace it? Following Suvorov, Stalin did not want peace at all, not in 1938, at the time of the Sudetenland crisis, or in 1939, or 1941. Nor was he defensive, nor reactive. Indeed he was not buying time for defense, but to prepare for attack, just waiting for the right moment for his own march westward. He saw Hitler as "the icebreaker" clearing the Bolshevik path west, the demonic nihilist who would tear apart the frail fabric of post-Versailles Europe, toppling governments, economic and social order everywhere, setting nation against nation, people against people, group against group. And, therefore, Hitler, the icebreaker, would open the Continent wide for the easy penetration of the Marxist terribles simplificateurs and their dream of imperialist wars put aside forever by the coming triumph of proletarian revolutions everywhere--when the masses at last rose against the capitalist war-makers in the conditions of privation, despair, and turmoil brought on by Hitler's war. The internationalist ideal of a European pax sovietica, ensured in triumph, as necessary, by the westward march of the Red army, heaping its brand of savage mayhem on the Nazi brand, making war to end all war, would triumph. The moment of that intervention, Stalin's push to the west by means of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, Suvorov argues, was set for the early summer of 1941.
If this argument were actually widely read and widely discussed, readers seeing Suvorov's elaborate apparatus of citations from Soviet military-historical documentation might begin to reconsider the entire old history of the coming of the war. And if it were considered and subjected to the test of historical proof, the apparently seamless web of pseudo-history outlined earlier might at last be shredded. For if Stalin did indeed intend to attack to the west at a moment of his own choosing, his motives in making the pact with Hitler in 1939 were patently neither defensive nor despairing, as so many have believed, but part of an elaborate scheme to end a mutually exhausting war, to effect the political, social, and economic collapse of the European powers. The Bolshevist path to the heart of Europe and beyond would be cleared where necessary by the Red army and prepared. as Suvorov argued, by the chaos and mass bloodletting of Hitler's war.
Author Suvorov, writing military history, did not deeply examine the documentation available back when he wrote to seek out the political scheme that drove and created the need for Stalin's military plan. But, in fact, such a plan for war and revolution had to have, and did have, a supporting politics.
The authors of those politics of aggressive war were clearly Stalin and his Kremlin insider cronies. Lenin had broken the path they followed. It was they who actually broadcast the scheme of war and subsequent pan-European revolution outlined above. We find it reported from authentic sources high up inside the Communist International itself. (Not only was Stalin a member of its Presidium, but Comintern chief Georgii Dimitrov was a frequent guest in the Kremlin and regularly in touch with Stalin and those of Stalin's inner circle who personally conveyed the decisions of the vozhd' to Stalin's agencies of political control, in Dimitrov's case, of international political control.) Long before Hitler's assault eastward of June 1941, Stalin and his inner circle foresaw the best outcome of the European war as exactly what Suvorov described in its military aspects almost fifty years later: the domestic collapse of the warring powers arising out of local discontent (which the Red army might forcibly encourage) ensuing from the war and its inevitable privations. He was preparing the Red army to jump in as soon as expected civil strife--repeating the domestic unrest and revolutions in the warring nations of 1917 and 1918--erupted in the west of Europe behind the fighting Allied and German armies.
Suvorov only sketched this risky scheme when he wrote. But we have it by now from three reporters, one independent source confirming the other, each telling what he heard from the mouths of the Kremlin leaders, their Comintern intimes, and other high Soviet sources.
As is well known, the lives of the Kremlin plotters stretching back to Lenin, and the lives of all those mature in years who trafficked there, and the key force driving them, Marxist-Leninist "scientific" soothsaying, had received much of their historical outfitting from the revolutionists' perceptions of the events of the First World War. Many of the revolutionaries' fantasies had taken actual shape in its appalling crucible. Hence, the Kremlin's Marxist-Leninist predictions and resulting plans were firmly cast in the mold set by its bloody events, as viewed through Lenin's bequeathed rose-colored spectacles.
The most detailed of these sources on Stalin's war is downright antique by the standards of contemporary history writing.(8) But the most recent, confirming evidence of the plan, that from the Comintern itself, became available only recently from a newly opened party archive in the former East Bloc. Its record of this frightful scheme for a drive to the west was supplied by the boss of the German Communist Party in Moscow exile, Stalin-true and close to the Comintern executive committee. That boss's report, copied down in February 1941 by another high, Stalin-friendly source, outlined the possible outcomes then foreseen in the Kremlin for the war raging to the west, in which the Soviet Union was then not directly involved.(9)
That February, Walter Ulbricht, the German Communist leader (years later, back in Germany, the author of the infamous Berlin wall), told his fellow exiles in Moscow what he had evidently just learned: the Kremlin-predicted possible scenarios for the end of the war then going on in western Europe.(10) One of them was the reckless scheme of international revolution supported by the Red army described above. It obviously had to be the outcome most favored in the Kremlin, because only it, among all possible suggested outcomes, brought the Soviet Union closest to its Bolshevist international goals.(11)
We still cannot be certain how long the plan had been nurtured in the heads of Stalin and his Kremlin band.(12) It augured revolutionary breakdowns of civil society behind the lines of the warring powers to be exploited by Bolshevik agitators. The Red armies, the Kremlin prognostication went, would, following the model of 1917-1922, march to the aid of the embattled proletarians (or, perhaps, imagined embattled proletarians) and the workers' and soldiers' councils in revolt to the west. Revolutionary governments would be set up all over Europe. Lenin's plans for international revolution in the aftermath of World War I would be fulfilled in the course of World War II.
There is another potential flaw in Suvorov's argument beyond his failure to supply a convincing source for the political scheme. This dramatic scenario, given the preconditions required by its implicit timetable of events for the Red march west, does not at all match the wartime conditions that obtained when Stalin was planning to attack Hitler, according to Suvorov on 6 July 1941. For, at that time, Hitler, if we imagine that he had not yet attacked the Soviet Union, as he in fact had on 22 June, would have been at the height of his military strength. He was tied down, not insignificantly, but only on several lesser battlefields, because of his and his allies' continuing war with Britain. Hence, this essential part of Suvorov's argument, especially the military timetable he outlined, merits a vast amount of doubt. But the general scheme for a Red military thrust westward is now too well founded in historical fact to doubt without first proving invalid the so far unchallenged testimonies behind it. In any event, the two historical arguments, one establishing the Kremlin's political scheme and one its military counterpart, must surely remain separate. The plan itself can by now be taken as proved out of the mouths of the authors and their close collaborators, though, as noted, it went largely unsubstantiated in Suvorov's account.(13)
Now we also find a major military-historical aspect of Suvorov's argument confirmed by evidence not available to him when he wrote. And this evidence, some from conclusions drawn from Soviet military archives and another vital bit from other previously restricted East Bloc archives, also merits very close attention. First of all, we report the results of an important recent article by another Soviet military-historical writer, V. I. Semidetko. He came to a conclusion about Soviet military behavior in early summer 1941 that he appears hardly to have expected when he began his research on "Results of the Battle in White Russia."
Semidetko was in all likelihood wholly unaware of Suvorov's work when he wrote. Yet he concluded, writing in the Soviet magazine Military-Historical Journal (Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal), in 1989, after research on the early months of the Soviet-German war in newly opened Soviet military archives, that the reason the German army had so easily sliced eastward through the Red army on the central, White Russian front in June 1941 (where both armies, attack and defense, were of approximately equal strength) was that the latter was in an attack position.(14) This is, of course, the very discovery central to the argument Suvorov made several years earlier to explain that same military debacle. The Red army, Suvorov then said, was positioning itself to attack west, hence wholly out of its defensive positions. Because of the Kremlin's longstanding doctrinal emphasis on assault, those positions had, in any event, long been neglected. The Red army was, therefore, totally vulnerable before the onrushing Germans who, anticipating Stalin's attack, attacked first.
Now other accounts confirming Suvorov's and Semidetko's separately reached conclusions on this key point--the fact of their separateness is itself important--have come into my hands, One is a source Soviet in provenance, again, diplomatic, or from diplomatic intelligence, and totally independent from the military sources cited by the two Russians. A third, totally independent, source producing the same astonishing information! It derives from Czech archives, long under Stalinist and post-Stalinist superintendence in communist Prague, and hence closed to independent researchers until very recently.
As the warnings of German war preparations on the Soviet western border, many of them British and American, one indeed from the German ambassador to the Kremlin,(15) poured into Moscow on the eve of the German attack, Stalin was clearly determined to still the diplomatic waters and quiet talk of a German invasion. What his purposes in doing this might have been we can now only speculate. And such a line of speculative inquiry, which would lead us away from the central purpose of this report, can be saved for another day.
The Kremlin had sent an emissary, a leading (but, in this source, unnamed) Soviet journalist, to Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maiskii in London. Apparently the latter, who, no doubt on instructions from Moscow, had long played an ostensibly independent game of currying favor for his bosses among the many responsive political groups and individuals in and about democratic London, conveyed much, perhaps all, of Stalin's soothing message to the British. We know that Maiskii had a long meeting with a very high British Foreign Office official on 15 June. There he was importuned to pass on to Moscow yet more urgent warnings of the coming German attack. (The reader will recall how sophisticated British interceptions of German communications were in those days.) The number of proofs the British diplomat proffered this time apparently shook Maiskii's faith in his own boss's disavowals for the first time.(16) (Disavowals proclaimed by "humanity's greatest genius" were surely not going to be readily doubted by someone who might be summoned home to Moscow.).
The British presumably then distributed Stalin's message denying the likelihood of a German attack to their allies as political intelligence. Three days later the report from Moscow was written down by at least one of them, Karel Erban, an analyst with the foreign ministry-in-exile of the Czechoslovak National Committee, and passed along to the Czech leadership in London.(17)
Erban reported that Moscow advised that the Soviets were in no way fearful of the Germans, explaining away the Teutons' massing on the Soviet borders as merely a test of the alertness and readiness of a potential opponent. Still, the Moscow emissary said, if necessary they were then ready to offer much, economically and politically, to buy Hitler off, even if the effect were only temporary. Explicitly mentioned was allowing German armed help to neutral Turkey (and, implicitly, therefore, what Berlin had long sought, a Turkish pirouette, voluntary or involuntary, into the German camp). Such a move, perhaps expected after Hitler's latest successful Balkan campaigns, would go unchallenged from Moscow. This indicated Stalin's at least temporary abandonment of Russia's traditional interest in far southeastern Europe, especially in Bulgaria and the straits-- an interest Stalin, via Molotov, had only recently urgently pursued to Hitler's evident disgust during Soviet-German negotiations in Berlin in November 1940.
That kind of German move to the southeast, Stalin likely imagined, would deflect Hitler's attention from Soviet borders for some time (as well as stretch Wehrmacht forces much farther southeastward, creating a vulnerable Balkan flank), as his Yugoslav, Greek, and Cretan campaigns of the spring of 1941 had also done. (A swift Soviet attack southward into Rumania, which Suvorov lists as essential to Stalin's plan for the anticipated attack on Germany, would not only have cut off Hitler's oil supply, it could also have trapped German armies to the south and east, keeping them from returning to the home front to meet the main Soviet attack westward across former Poland when it came.)
Stalin's evident plan to divert the resources of the potential Nazi enemy and also postpone at the expense of the Bulgarians his march directly eastward was likewise designed, the Soviet emissary reported, to weaken both sides in the war by seeing it drawn out as long as possible. For clearly, had Hitler taken Stalin's bribe, the British would have been drawn into further military involvement in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean. The Soviet yielding on Turkey to entice the Germans southeastward then could have required Hitler to postpone his attack until well into the fall. That postponement would have likely meant a delay, for climatic reasons, until the next spring. It would have given the Red army the chance to be first off the mark--if Stalin truly had the summer 1941 attack timetable that Suvorov alleges in mind (or even a 1942 timetable, as another historian has since argued.(18) So little fear of the Germans existed in Moscow, the reporter from the Kremlin advised, that the Red army was already in its attack, rather than defensive, positions.
Much of the fascinating information conveyed in this report, a document certainly unknown to the vast majority of researchers on the history of the Second World War, is confirmed by other sources. This confirmation lends credence to the source in general, and for our purposes, gives vital, wholly independent testimony about the astonishing, and vulnerable, attack posture of the Red army in the week before the German attack of 22 June 1941.
These findings on Soviet military behavior on the eve of Hitler's attack would certainly appear to require revived interest in the controversial conclusions of author Suvorov, especially as they are visibly central to the reconsideration required by a number of other new archival revelations bearing on this linchpin episode of modem history. So it seems important here to tell even more of the history of Suvorov's writing on this subject with a view to trying to tell why most anglophone history readers interested in the war have so far likely missed his account.
In fact, his conclusions appear to have been extensively challenged in English print by only one writer, Tel Aviv University Professor Gabriel Gorodetsky. He wrote his first critique in an original exchange of historical arguments with the Russian writer in the British Royal United Services Institute [RUSI] Journal a military magazine, back in 1986.(19) In fact, it was just before that exchange that Suvorov's arguments first appeared outside Russian emigre circles.
The RUSI Journal editors may have already decided, when they resolved to print Suvorov's then astonishing history, that it was controversial enough to require a quick rebuttal. Editors do sometimes use that technique to take themselves off the hook when putting out something that might appear utterly outlandish--in this case Suvorov's arguments, so at odds with received history, in one respect even potentially pro-German. For Hitler himself, as reported earlier, justified his attack on the Soviet Union by arguing that he had to strike east before the Soviets struck west. And what could be less politically correct, then as now, than agreeing in any way with the universally unlamented (in adult circles of the sane at any rate) Nazi Fuhrer. Another explanation is also possible. Gorodetsky may have seen the original Suvorov article and subsequently volunteered his argument to the editors in rebuttal.
In fact, Suvorov's arguments have been challenged on various grounds at other times (by this writer, for example, wondering how the Kremlin's plan for a thrust to the west in the aftermath of the anticipated internal breakdown of the warring states could have been set, as Suvorov has it, for 6 July 1941, when Hitler was actually militarily at his strongest and his conquered empire relatively in hand).(20) Yet historian Gorodetsky did not then try to rebut Suvorov's arguments, or even his strange timetable for the Soviet attack, by employing sources countervailing Suvorov's military-historical sources or disputing their authenticity. Rather, he cited diplomatic records, those of Soviet provenance published being, of course, carefully selected and edited and extremely unreliable. And he used none of his arguments to rebut Suvorov's assertions of a Kremlin political scheme lying behind the military plans. So Gorodetsky never really challenged Suvorov's contention that Stalin had, first of all, a political plan for a march west that the military plans were to realize. He simply ignored the political issue. Hence, while some of Gorodetsky's diplomatic arguments are indeed informative and challenging, he did not then directly cross intellectual swords with Suvorov on either of his key arguments. Nor has Gorodetsky since, in more recent writing on the same subject, shown even slight awareness of the documents for years in print that indicate there was a comprehensive political plan for a Soviet international intervention to the west.(21)
By contrast with the almost universal silence in the anglophone organs of review, which played its perhaps indicative role at the appearance of the English translation of Suvorov's book (five years after his RUS1 Journal article), when the German version of The Icebreaker, the earliest book-length edition of his argument, came out in 1989 (with a slightly different subtitle, Hitler in Stalin's Planning [Hitler in Stalins Kalku"(22)]), it was reviewed prominently. Reviewers included two very well informed reporters on the period, Professor Alexander Fischer of Bonn University (recently deceased, but previously a member of the important Parliamentary Committee for the Reexamination of the German Past) and Gunther Gillessen, a long-time history editor at Germany's most prestigious newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Professor Fischer, the author of numerous books and documentary compilations on the diplomacy of the period, including Soviet diplomacy, found Suvorov's book daring--but not convincing. Still, he tactfully reserved final judgment by contending, properly, that real conviction required seeing what the Soviet archives might someday have to say. Editor Gillessen described the book as too argumentative and, echoing Fischer, insufficiently convincing on the basis of its solely circumstantial proofs.(23)
The reader familiar with the tragic course of modern German history and the enormous weight of the need for historical and juridical clarification of the events resting upon the German people even today, several generations down the line from the disasters perpetrated by the Hitler Reich, will appreciate how careful German writers have to be in evaluating histories that might in any way shed a favorable light on the actions of the former German Fuhrer.
The gist of what might almost be called an unspoken contract among responsible German writers is that efforts to offload German responsibility for the war must not be undertaken lightly. The easy kind of offloading of historical responsibility that could be suggested by a too ready acceptance of Suvorov's arguments or similar contentions tending to unburden the history of the Third Reich must be avoided at all costs. The recent long, often savage, discussion in the German press about the sources of Hitler's murderous behavior (including an effort by some historians and others to locate them beyond Germany), the so-called "battle of historians" (Historikerstreit),(24) has clearly revealed how painful the entire, necessary historical discussion can be in a German society racked by guilt to a point close to spiritual self-annihilation. One can see the critical reservations of both German reviewers with respect to the validity of Suvorov's arguments (which undeniably merited considerable skepticism) as falling well within the focus of this observation. So the extreme caution dictated by the terrible events of the past in Germany has had effectively the same censorious effect as the apparent lack of interest in reconsidering this part of the past has had in the anglophone west.(25)
The very fact that the first book-length version of Suvorov's work appeared first in German is not only important for historiography, but also for the discussion of the historical events it purports to reveal. Suvorov's appearance in German, commercially published in book form, testifies to the key role of the pact and the Soviet war in the ever-running and lively, if restricted, German public historical discussion of wartime events and behavior. Its publication helped to reopen the issue almost never discussed, seemingly certainly settled, because of that long prevailing interpretation (prevalent in Germany, too) of the coming of World War 11.(26) For how could Hitler have begun the war he so desperately wanted in 1939 if the Soviet Union had actively supported, with military help or at least with masses of military supplies and provisions, the states on its west flank that blocked German aggression to the east, toward the Soviet Union? Even Hitler would have likely shied at such odds when also faced with powerful enemies to the west. But had that perennial risk-taker marched anyway, he would have caused a far different war, different alliances, and different timetables, than those the record gives us.
Further international developments in the continuing discussion of the issues related to Suvorov's work, and a new book by him with more elaborate proof of his arguments, have recently appeared. The argument for his history has grown much stronger. Hence, these issues now are now being discussed even more widely, if oddly still outside the headline areas of historical concern in the anglophone countries. The current discussion on the Continent was stimulated by the appearance of Suvorov's first book in both Polish and Russian editions.(27)
One could have anticipated the appeal of a Polish edition in post-Communist, newly liberated Poland. After all, World War II is the central event in modem Polish history. The Poles were the first, and ultimately the most thoroughly ravaged, victim of the Soviet-Nazi alliance of 1939 to 1941. They lost half their prewar territory to Stalin, numberless citizens to his and German death camps (the largest group of the millions of Jews killed in German death camps were Polish citizens), and spent the years 1944 to 1989 as prisoners in the tyrannical system Stalin and his friends invented for them--and had devised as well for anyone and everyone their Red army could corral. Finding Poles taking a big historical interest in their most recent, and most enduring--over the centuries-traditional tormentors, the Russians, will come as no surprise to those who know the east central European historical terrain.
But the 1992 Russian edition of Suvorov is, for purposes of this discussion of the fate of his ideas, the most important. For it manifestly helped bring discussion of the issue of Stalin's alleged war plan to a central place in the current Russian historical debate over Stalin and Stalinism.
Although the Russian edition of Suvorov appeared only in 1992, three articles on the same general subject, Stalin's military planning early in World War II, have since appeared in recent issues of post-Soviet, Russian historical journals. The leading historical journal Otechestvennaia istoriia (Fatherland History) reprinted just a year ago, in Russian translation, an article by the German military historian Joachim Hoffmann, "The Soviet Union's Preparation of a War of Attack in 1941."(28) The second article, in Novaia i noveishaia istoriia (Recent and More Modern History), "Did Stalin Prepare a Preventative Assault against Hitler in 1941 ," appeared at about the same time.(29) Its author, Colonel-General Iu. A. Gor'kov, took up one set of plans found some time back in former Soviet archives titled, "Observations on a Plan for the Strategic Development of the Forces of the Soviet Union in the Event of a War with Germany and Its Allies." The latter plan, prepared in May 1941 by then Komdarm (later Marshal) Georgii K. Zhukov, was published in 1991 in outline form in the sensation-loving German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.(30)
Hoffmann's article is an entirely different research effort from that of Suvorov to prove that Stalin intended to attack west in the early part of the war. It first appeared in 1991 in a volume of articles first published in German under the title Two Roads to Moscow (Zwei Wege Nach Moskau. Vom Hitler-Stalin Pakt zum "Unternehmen Barbarossa'")(31) Again Professor Gorodetsky was included in the same volume, nestled in print beside Hoffmann, aiming a rebuttal at Suvorov (reinforcing the impression that some editors fear to see historians who suspect Stalin of having aggressive plans wander alone and unchallenged, or in some cases, wander at all through the historical landscape). Strangely enough, virtually the same article, with some additions, had been published two years earlier in the usually reliable German historical journal Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte (Contemporary History Quarterly). There Gorodetsky had once again had his say on Suvorov.
Gorodetsky undertook to disestablish, just as testily as in his previous rebuttals of Suvorov (which he termed this time around: "the newest, most extreme, and most inaccurate portrayal of these events"),(32) the notion that Stalin had any such plan. But, once again, the attack was directed against the Russian emigre writer, not directly against the (perhaps nonetheless indicatively) subjoined Hoffmann, whose newer article right next door went unmentioned.
Hoffmann's work supports many of Suvorov's findings. But Gorodetsky evidently had not seen it when he wrote, except in a much earlier (1983), less-final, edition. Once again Gorodetsky jumped to his anti-Suvorov conclusion without examining any of Hoffmann's military-historical sources (in the most recent article, mainly German reports of interrogations of Soviet prisoners), just as he had not criticized the military-historical sources cited by Suvorov in his earlier effort to demolish the bases of the latter's then radical historical hypothesis. Moreover Gorodetsky still wrote manifestly unaware of the long published record of the Kremlin's political plans for the war.(33) These schemes, which, as noted earlier, Suvorov also missed, have since 1954 been readily available in English and were available earlier elsewhere. Rather, Gorodetsky blackballed the very notion that such non-defensive thinking was abroad in the Kremlin by identifying it with thoughts originated (presumably by anti-Stalinists) during "the height of the Cold War."(34) And, in a field in which new historical sources and surprises even then appeared almost daily, he offered as support for his newest rebuttal of Suvorov in print only materials that appeared at least two years before the German publication of Two Roads to Moscow.
Even with such frail props for his position, Gorodetsky nonetheless declared "absurd" the contention that Stalin was planning an attack to the west. And, having missed a number of recent accounts questioning on the basis of Soviet sources the assumption that Stalin's political purposes from 1939 to 1941 were benign and defensive, accounts provided as early as 1989 and 1990 by Soviet authors like V. I. Dashichev and M. I. Semiriaga, Gorodetsky came to the (as the reader by now knows, incorrect) conclusion that there is "a complete lack of witnesses [testifying to] Stalin's intentions."(35)
Gorodetsky connected the attention directed to Suvorov in Germany to the effort to displace German guilt elsewhere. He argued that the book's popularity in Germany (by contrast with its having virtually disappeared from view in England and France and, he might have added, the United States derived from secret support from neo-Nazis (historical reporting guilty by association?). In fact, Professor Gorodetsky, if he had kept up on the massive bibliography of German writings in his area of study, would know that the German historical interest in the eastern war front (and in eastern Europe in general, as measured by the amount of German academic reporting on Slavic subjects by contrast with, say, French) has for years been greater than elsewhere in the west of Europe-- for geographically obvious reasons, if for no other. This greater interest alone could account for the concern in Germany --just as, ten or so years ago, there was monumental German public interest and discussion of the very pro-Soviet, Moscow-originated television series, which played with far less eclat in the States under the title "The Unknown War." (The reader will perhaps recall its, often playing on PBS stations among others, with the Soviet-edited episodes introduced and narrated by Butt Lancaster. The original author of the series, Roman Karmen, was a famous Soviet film propagandist who had also authored violently anti-American films.) So Gorodetsky takes an odd posture indeed for a historian. One would expect a scholar to be committed to the open exchange of ideas, and not to their burial, the fate of Suvorov's English-language versions, which Gorodetsky implicitly celebrates.(36)
Colonel Gor'kov's article is interesting in that it denies that the May 1941 plan (that he helpfully prints) for a Soviet assault to the west was more than an effort to design a reactive assault in the face of the much reported German preparations for Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union. Emphasizing the defensive nature of the Soviet war plan, Gor'kov denies that the Soviets had any additional plan for the occupation of territory in the aftermath of this projected sweep west, a sweep which would, if successful, have brought them as far into Germany as Breslau and Danzig.
Yet the nonexistence of supplemental Soviet planning is unimaginable. How could either side have left the Red army standing along lines well inside Germany after such a vast initial military success---had it been brought off as Zhukov planned for his Kremlin boss? Was the Red army simply to remain in occupation of much of eastern Germany and what had earlier been Nazi-occupied central and even western Poland? Or was it, after a successful advance west, to hold steady along a newly established defense line while fighting a ferocious war of attrition against the Germans--a war supported by the Kremlin's vast resources in people and raw materials--until, as Stalin could have imagined, the German home front collapsed and the Red army marched west once more, this time almost unimpeded?
Yet, in the unlikely case that peace and not international revolution was what Stalin had in mind, the Soviets would surely have needed a political-military plan for the Red army's eventual negotiated return from its front in east central Europe to Soviet borders once Hitler had been defeated and peace made. The Red army could not simply have marched a couple of hundred miles into Hitler's well-armed Germany, as Zhukov's scheme imagined, and then have retreated to its original positions. To what purpose? There had to have been some other planning somewhere, at some level, for some sort of political result from a successful invasion according to the plan Gor'kov reported.
Gor'kov, however, seems unaware that the military plan he discusses might have some relation to contemporary Kremlin thinking about what was to follow its projected success in the campaign westward. And he, too, appears unaware of the Stalinist propensity to political adventurism already discussed earlier, discussed even in the Soviet historical press (and elsewhere) by Gor'kov's Russian colleagues, Dashichev and Semiriaga (again, to name only two).
Gor'kov's 1993 article is important nonetheless because it, like the Russian publication of Hoffmann in translation, brought the issue of Stalin's war plans into direct historical focus in the current lively Russian discussion of this key period of the Soviet past. Gor'kov took up in his discussion both Suvorov and a number of journalistic reports on the subject of Stalin's military plans that appeared in the Russian press, as well as a local Moscow historical "roundtable" held on the issue in May 1992 at the Institute for Military History of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.(37)
The third article, which appeared in Otechestvennaia Istoriia in the first issue of 1994, also keeps Suvorov in focus. The writer's purpose is clearly defensive, reporting chiefly the opinions of the many German critics of Hoffmann and Suvorov (ignoring, like just about everyone writing, those post-Soviet historians who have tried to prove Stalin's aggressive purposes). But the author, A. I. Borozniak, nonetheless notes that some of them have argued, like Professor Fischer, that the matter cannot be resolved until the Soviet archives, some of which still today remain closed to independent researchers for obvious political reasons, have been thoroughly examined.(38) More recently the very same Otechestvennaia istoriia has published several articles by Russian historians who have gotten into archives that are actually open to independent scholars, as the central "Presidential Archive" is not. The gist of their findings, in the case of three of them, is that Soviet doctrine encouraged "imperialist" war and that Stalin radically changed Soviet propaganda guidelines in the winter of 1941 (at the very time Walter Ulbricht was reporting to German party comrades the news of possible Red army support for revolution in the west) from denunciation of all "imperialist wars" to support for a war of assault.(39)
The discussion of Stalin's role in bringing on the war is now underway west and east, though some historians seem determined to cut off that discussion by denouncing challenges to the traditional view of Stalin's benign purposes as "absurd." Bringing Suvorov's and other arguments for Stalin's aggressive schemes into the currently raging post-Soviet Russian historical discussion of Stalin's role in local and international history should help draw these issues back into the mainstream of current international historical discussion over the next few years. And that is where they belong, over there and over here, as well---especially in view of the propensity of some post-Soviet Russian historians over there, as well as Stalin's defenders to the West, to discount in advance his responsibility for the disasters of World War II. Given the current Russian government's tendencies to accept military solutions to crises and to unabashed use of threat in dealing with its weaker neighbors, and even with the United States, a responsible historical debate, based on open archival access, leading to an honest understanding of the Soviet past and the debacles Soviet behavior has brought about domestically and internationally is wholly in order.
NOTES
1. Suvorov's book was actually briefly reviewed, together with D.C. Watt's (see text, and note 2 below) and one other on the same period, in The New York Review of Books, 12 October 1989, 11-16, by Professor (emeritus) Gordon A. Craig, of Stanford University. But Craig wrote of the German edition of the work for the review's American readership--the English version had not yet been published. Craig, who has written and taught over the years in the field of German history, but who has done little work in Soviet or east central European affairs, military or other, in the Stalin period, found Suvorov's arguments wanting. Craig opined that if Stalin indeed had a plan to attack west in 1941, as Suvorov contends, then Western military attaches and embassies in Moscow would have reported it. He found "no references to it in the diplomatic files of foreign embassies or in the reports of their military attaches." Even if we assume that Craig had exhausted the files and reports in many relevant archives, he had to have meant Western files and reports, for in 1989 many of the former East Bloc's archives had not yet been opened to Western and other independent researchers. Moreover, a scholar who has slogged through masses of Western and other diplomatic documents out of Moscow should know that in Stalin's paranoically secretive state, foreign diplomats and military observers did not have free run of the Soviet countryside, and especially of the recently occupied border regions in the Soviet west, to make their observations. Many Western diplomats alluded to this frustrating situation in their reports. Therefore, this argument against Suvorov hardly seems telling.
2. New York, 1989.
3. See Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels (translated from the German, New York, n. d.), citing Goebbels's diaries for 16 June 1941. In February 1945, Hitler repeated his insistence that Stalin had intended to attack westward. See Alan Bullock, Hitler und Stalin (translated from the English, Berlin, 1991), 924-26, 939, 941.
4. Many writers seemingly seized the commercial occasion offered by the fiftieth anniversary of the coming of the war in 1989 to write books about 1939. When the storm of revelations began to break in the Soviet Union in early 1988, and elsewhere in the former East Bloc soon after, they were likely either unaware of what was happening or were bound to contracts and other schedules that obliged them to meet the 1989 anniversary date. The new materials, vital to the history of the coming of the war, went unincluded. On those at the top in Western diplomacy who led the movement of belief in Stalin's defensive purposes, see R. C. Raack, Stalin's Drive to the West, 1938-1941. The Origins of the Cold War (Stanford, 1995), 55, 89.
5. 5 May 1990, 30. The book was ignored by major academic journals and specialty (Slavic studies-oriented) journals and was reviewed in the United States only in two relatively obscure military journals. In both cases the reviewers discounted Suvorov's account, one very strongly (in the Journal of Soviet Military Studies 4 [ 1991]: 195-97; the second review was a brief one, in Air Force Magazine 7 [1991]: 55). The JSMS's reviewer argued that the German military records did not support Suvorov's arguments, that the Soviets were unprepared, and that Stalin rejected Zhukov's plan for a preemptive strike. But see note 26, the discussion of the work of the German military historian Joachim Hoffmann, who makes his argument in partial support of Suvorov from just those German records. See also the discussion of Zhukov's plan in the text. In the U.K., the book went unreviewed in the two most important academic journals with a Slavic focus.
6. Igor Lukes, in several articles, has successfully debunked the notion that Stalin was willing to give the Czechoslovaks strong military support in 1938. See Lukes's articles, "Did Stalin Desire War in 19387 A New Look at Soviet Behaviour during the May and September Crises," Diplomacy and Statecraft, 2 (1991): 2-53; and "Benesch, Stalin und die Komintern 1938/1939. Vom Munchener Abkommen zum Hitler-Stalin Pakt," Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte, Jg. 1993, Heft 3, 325-53.
7. Gorbachev in Pravda, 3 November 1987. A representative, albeit small, sample of writings by popular as well as academic writers supporting the notion of Stalin as defender follows. Not all of the authors would agree on all the aspects of the story outlined in the text above. But the gist of the history, that Stalin's purposes in 1939 were defensive, is there, explicitly or implicitly. See, Winston S. Churchill, "The Gathering Storm" in The Second World War, I (Boston, 1948), 391-94; Arnold J. and Veronica Toynbee, eds., "The Eve of War, 1939" Survey of International Affairs 10 (London, 1958): 23, 25, 504; A. J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York, 1968), 163-64, 241,261, 263, 267, 278; D.C. Watt, How War Came. The Immediate Origins of the Second World War (London, 1989), 112-13, 117-19, 369-70, 372-73; Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint and John Pritchard, Total War. The Causes and Course of the Second World War (second ed., Harmsworth, 1989), 71, 96-100, 106; Hermann Graml, Europas Weg in den Krieg. Hitler und die Ma"chte 1939 (Munich, 1990), 251. By contrast with the above writers, James E. Macsherry, Stalin, Hitler and Europe. The Origins of World War II, 1933-1939, vol. II (Cleveland, 1970), gave proper attention to those Soviet sources extant when he wrote, but nonetheless optimistically contended that (well before the recent openings of former East Bloc sources and archives), "It is comparatively easy to form a clear picture of Soviet foreign policy in 1938 and 1939" (v). Only yesterday the notion of Stalin's defensive purposes in 1939 was suggested as if there were no possible challenge to it by Jonathan Haslam, "Soviet Foreign Policy, 1939-1941: Isolation and Expansion," Soviet Union 18 (1991): 106.
8. See my article, "Stalin's Plans for World War II" in Journal of Contemporary History, 26 (1991): 215-27.
9. Walter Ulbricht's speech in the archive of the Stiftung der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (Berlin), Wilhelm Pieck Nachlass 36/528: "Politischer Informationsabend am 21.2. 1941." Pieck also noted that Ulbricht had just previously spoken in the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. See also, "Did Stalin Plan a Drang nach Westen?," in World Affairs, 155 (1992), 13-22; especially the "Afterword;' 22, for background.
10. The reader will perhaps recall that the Soviets had, by February 1941, when Ulbricht spoke, already engaged in several undeclared wars, all related to the general European war first formally declared by Britain and France following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. The Soviets had been involved in major battles with the Japanese along the Manchurian frontier through the late summer of 1939. They invaded and warred on Poland in the same late summer and early fall in collaboration with Hitler, then repeated the same performance in Finland later the same year without his help. Some months later they had forced the Baltic States and the Rumanian provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina into the Soviet Union in 1940 under military threat. But too many history writers, often seeing the events of 1938 to 1945 solely through lenses crafted in the west of Europe and in the United States, have frequently overlooked the connections between Soviet adventurism in the east and the headline-grabbing German war in the more familiar European west.
11. Most accessible among several accounts, unless the reader reads Lithuanian, is the testimony of former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Vincas Kreve-Mickievicius, reported in English in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee on Communist Aggression, Third Interim Report (Washington, D.C., 1954), 340-45, 451-63. J. Edgar Hoover supplied an apparently independent report of the same from one of the "highest Russian sources" to A. A. Berle, 17 June 1940, in United States National Archives, M982, R25. See also, Grigorii A. Tokaev, Stalin Means War (London, 1951), chapter 2, passim.
12. In all likelihood from the earliest days of Bolshevist power in Russia, as the plan roughly duplicates Lenin's scheme for the war against Poland only recently published: V. I. Lenin, "Ia proshu zapisivat' menshe: eto ne dol'zhno popadat' v pechat'," Istoricheskii arkhiv, number 1/1992, 12-30; see also, Joachim Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg, 1941-1945 (Munich, 1995), 18.
13. See R. C. Raack, "Stalin's Plans for World War II," passim, and and the same author's "Stalin's Plans for World War II Told by a High Comintern Source," The Historical Journal 38 (1995).
14. V. I. Semidetko, "Istoki porazheniia v Belomssii," in number 4/1989, 30-1.
15. S. A. Gorlov, in Novoe vremia, number 8/1991, 38-9; and V. V. Sokolov, "Diplomaticheskii khod vo imia mira," Vestnik ministerstva inostrannykh del SSSR, number 20/1990, 57-58.
16. Gabriel Gorodetsky, "Was Stalin Planning to Attack Hitler in June 19417" RUSI Journal (June 1986): 71-72.
17. Dated 18 June 1941, and found in the Archiv ministerstva zahranicnich veci' (Prague), in file 4-70-114.
18. Joachim Hoffmann, "Die Angriffsvorbereitungen der Sowjetunion 1941" in Bernd Wegner, ed., Zwei Wege nach Moskau. Vom Hitler-Stalin-Pakt bis zum "Unternehmen Barbarossa" (Munich 1991), 367-88.
19. Viktor Suvorov, "Who was Planning to Attack Whom in June 1941, Hitler or Stalin?" RUSI Journal, (June t985): 50-55; Gorodetsky, ibid., June 1986, 69-72; and again, Suvorov, "Yes, Stalin Was Planning to Attack Hitler in June 1941," ibid., 73-74.
20. At a conference held in the Italian resort of Bellagio on the anniversary of the German attack, at least four of the historians dealt directly with that issue, but only two reporters brought up the issue of Stalin's plans for an attack west--both to denounce the notion. A German there, Gerd U"berschar, talked of "Hitler's Decision to Attack the Soviet Union in Recent German Historiography" (published in Soviet Union 18 [1991]: 297-316). He cited Suvorov's RUSI Journal articles, Suvorov's book and Hoffmann (on the latter, see note 18 below), and criticized the arguments of both.
Alexander Dallin, reported on "Stalin and the German Invasion," (printed in the same issue of Soviet Union 18, 19-37) Dallin remarked that "the notion of a likely Soviet attack on Germany in 1941 (or 1942) is absurd . . . [a] wholly untenable . . . hypothesis" (ibid., 20). He cites (21, fn 3) Suvorov's articles, but not the book, and Hoffmann's article. Dallin credited Gorodetsky's article in the Wegner volume (see note 21) with delivering "a skillful rebuttal" (ibid.). He did not tell the evidence and reasoning that supported his assertion. Karl Drechsler, a historian from the former East Germany, "Germany and its Allies and the War against the Soviet Union, 1940-1942," ibid., 39-58, made no mention of the issue, obviously central to his theme. Neither did British writer Jonathan Haslam (see note 7).
21. Gabriel Gorodetsky, "Stalin und Hitlers Angriff auf die Sowjetunion," in Wegner, 347-66.
22. Stuttgart, 1989.
23. Fischer in Das historisch-politische Buch, 1989, 117; Gillessen in "Politische Bucher," FAZ, 27 April 1989.
24. See the discussion in Charles S. Maier, The Unmastered Past (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).
25. An early version of a argument similar to that of Suvorov, Ernst Topitsch, Stalin's War: A Radical New Theory on the Origins of the Second World War (translated from the German, London, 1984), had none of the research substance in military documentation, or even in other source materials, to convince the present writer that it was, as written, more than a hypothesis.
26. The manifest self-censorship of German historians writing on the subject, to the detriment of all history writing, is described by GUnter Gillessen in a review of Joachim Hoffmann's book, Stalin's Vernichtungskrieg (see note 12), as "connected to political concerns and emerging in self-inflicted denials of professonal knowledge."
27. Lodolamacz (Warsaw, 1991), and Lodokol (Moscow, 1992). Suvorov's new book is Den' "M" (Kiev 1994).
28. Published in number 4/1993, 19-31, from what appears to be the identical German edition, in Wegner, 367-88.
29. "Gotovil li Stalin uprezhdaiushchii udar protiv Gitlera v 1941 g.," in number 3/1993, 29-45. The issue had in fact been taken up earlier in Moscow's Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 6/1991 (26-33), which published "Planiroval li Stalin voinu protiv Gitlera?" This article, a segment from a 1970 book by two German authors who, writing then had nothing like the evidence available now, sought to refute the notion that Hitler was compelled to fight a preventative war. My impression in reading this Russian version was that the journal's editors were eager to publish what they could to set aside that notion.
30. "Schukows Angriffsplan," Der Spiegel, 24/ 1991, 148.
31. See note 15. The volume recently appeared in an English-language edition.
32. Wegner, 362, note 1. Gorodetsky also attacks a 1983 article ("Der Rote Armee bis Kriegsbeginn 1941 ," in Horst Boog, et al., Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, IV [Stuttgart, 1983], 56-75) by Hoffmann as "without substantial proofs" in Wegner, ibid.
33. See note 11.
34. Gorodetsky's article with a similar title to that in the Wegner volume, "Stalin und Hitlers Angriff auf die Sowjetunion. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Legende vom deutschen Pra"ventativschlag," in Vierteljahrshefte far Zeitgeschichte, Jg. 37 (1989): 645-72. Gorodetsky's attribution of guilt by chronological association in Wegner, 363, note 13.
35. V. I. Dashichev, "Der Pakt der beiden Banditen," and "Stalin hat den Krieg gewollt," in Rheinischer Merkur/Christ und Welt, 21 and 28 April 1989; and M. I. Semiriaga, "17 sentiabria 1939 goda," Sovetskoe slavianovedenie 5 (1990): 14; and "Sovetskii soiuz i predvoennyi politicheskii krizis," Voprosy istorii 9 (1990): 54-61. Two well-known American experts who have also been highly skeptical of Stalin's alleged defensive plans, Robert Conquest and Robert C. Tucker are, like Hoffmann, sharply attacked in the Vierteljahrshefte article: 646 fn 3, 658 fn 40. Gorodetsky contends that the notion that Stalin had expansionist plans and aimed at the takeover of east central Europe are long out of date (in Wegner, 363, fn 13). (Tucker had argued in 1977 that Stalin's territorial schemes for international Bolshevism reached back to Lenin. See "The Emergence of Stalin's Foreign Policy," in Slavic Review, 36 [1977]: 588-89).
36. In the Vierteljahrshefte article (note 34), 645-48, Gorodetsky's apparent joy in Suvorov's obscurity in the anglophone countries, (646); G. invidiously connects Suvorov's popularity with the "revisionist" side of the Historikerstreit in Germany, ibid., 645-46. To this particular conclusion one might readily jump, and not without reason. But to what purpose? It seems perfectly obvious that historians should stick to getting the facts, setting then down, and critically considering arguments derivable from them, without attributing "politically incorrect" motives to those with whom they intellectually disagree.
37. Gor'kov, 29.
38. "22 iiunia 1941 goda: vzgliad c 'toi' storony," in issue 1/1994, 148-56. What author Borozniak, apparently delighted that these Germans, some of them at least, are eager to get Stalin (and the Russians) off the hook, does not appear to recognize is that a number of the German critics of the notion of Hitler's preventative war are guiltly of the same fatal blunder made by the mass of American historian "revisionists" writing about the Cold War: they attempt to divine the purposes of Stalin from research in domestic archives alone. But this obviously flawed research, and the resulting inevitably flawed findings, have not prevented their publishers from selling a lot of books.
39. See, in number 1/1995, L. N. Nezhinskii and I. A. Chelyshev, "O doktrinal'nykh osnovakh Sovetskoi vneshnei politiki v gody 'kholodnoi voiny'," 3-27, and, in number 2/1995, Vladimir A. Neveshin, "'Rech' Stalina 5 maia 1941 goda i apologiia nastupatel'noi voiny," 54-69, and M. I. Mel'tiukhov, "Ideologichiskie dokumenty maia-iiunia 1941 goda o sobytiiakh vtoroi mirovoi voivy," 70-85.
"Stalin's Role in the Coming of World War II:
The International Debate Goes On,"
Raack, R.C., World Affairs, vol. 159, no. 2, Fall 1996
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/raack2.htm
C'est un monstre," French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault said of Stalin following an overlong session of negotiation and enforced society, lasting almost until dawn, in the Kremlin in December 1944. The social exchange centered around a buffet and film seance commanded by Stalin. In the course of the evening with Charles DeGaulle and his advisers, Stalin had volunteered several times to speed negotiations to a conclusion by shutting up "boring" diplomats with a machine gun--never making wholly clear whether he intended to include the Frenchmen present in his proposed massacre.(1)
Perhaps Bidault was rendered excessively judgmental by what may have appeared to him as a close encounter with le faucheur sovietique. But he then expressed a view of Stalin now almost universally accepted, except by his most fanatical devotees--at least when the issue becomes the Soviet boss's appalling domestic misdeeds. Yet it was a view that, at the time, obviously eluded more naive Westerners, like Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, though each spent many more hours than DeGaulle's group in wartime negotiation and diplomatic society with the Soviet boss.
Better informed anglophone observers of the time were not misled. One was George F. Kennan, then influential in the U. S. Embassy in Moscow, if largely ignored in Roosevelt's White House. He wrote to his Washington colleague, Charles Bohlen, in January 1945, before the Yalta conference had finished: "Soviet political aims in Europe are not . . . consistent with the happiness, prosperity or stability of international life on the rest of the Continent." To attain Europe's weakness and disunity, "There is no misery, and no evil, I am afraid, which they would not be prepared to inflict, if they could, on the European peoples."(2) This view of Stalin and his aims--he was most certainly their author--fit exceptionally well the larger picture of Stalin's personality now being rounded out by contemporary Russian writers Edvard Radzinsky and Arkady Vaksberg. In books first published in Russian but placed recently before Western readers in translation (Radzinsky, Stalin; Vaksberg, Stalin and the Jews, Hotel Lux, and Die Verfolgten Stalins(3)) both writers have taken the historical measure of the long-time Soviet leader whom only the French, among his executive-level wartime Western visitors, caught. Radzinsky and Vaksberg fix in their pages the figure of evil that must inform any assessment of Stalin's wartime, pre-war, and Cold War plans beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.
The breakout this year of the discussion of Stalin's war goals on a second national front, part of the newly lively international discussion on the effects of the opening of many former East Bloc archives to independent researchers, may signal a turning point in the history of the debate. The fact that for several years Stalin's adventurous foreign goals have been mainline historical discussion in Russia suggests the vast amount of new historical information on Stalin and his successors now emerging from the formerly closed archives. The multiform layers of concealment the Soviet boss created are gradually unfolding--but without the help of, indeed in the face of, apparently deliberate stonewalling by many Western editors and history writers, not to mention the current Russian government. Among the Westerners, there appears to be a clear unwillingness to accept, or even to publicize, what is known. Someone among the former Soviets clearly just doesn't want us to know. The Russian government has closed the most important political archive to independent researchers.(4) One can only imagine the racks of skeletons desiccating in that closet.
Only last February the intensive international debate over Stalin's aggressive war plans broke through the odd indifference in which most of the Western popular media, and the overwhelming mass of academic media, had heretofore clothed it. This occurred directly on the German-language front--Austrians, Swiss, and Germans, eighty or so million comparatively well educated Europeans--where the debate had earlier been conducted at considerably less than front-page level.
To put this key bit of publishing history in context, one need only recall the vehement objections of some of those who have opposed the controversial Suvorov "thesis"--the argument of the Russian exile author, Viktor Suvorov, first produced in book form as The Icebreaker in 1989. He argued that Stalin planned an attack to the west against Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe in July 1941. The Soviet drive was planned to anticipate Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, which the Kremlin master had no doubt was in the works. The Red army was not, however, to march in a preventive strike, but to carry out a full-fledged assault to the west.(5) Those reporters and historians on an international front who did not originally wholly ignore Suvorov's astonishing thesis (and they made up the vast majority) epitomized in their responses to his book both outrage and hostility.(6) Yet by now his history, some of it originally rather speculative, has been taken up in significant measure by other historians and also considerably enhanced, amplified, and further documented.(7) A whole new set of centrally important sources have been found, in spite of the archival blockade erected in Moscow, to underpin much of what he wrote. Some will be reported below for the first time to English-language readers.
The reader of my earlier article on this subject will remember some of the responses to Suvorov. After his book appeared in English, two professors from different sides of the globe jumped in to call the argument that Stalin planned a war of assault against Nazi Germany, Suvorov's story, "absurd." Not long after that, Suvorov and a number of others who had written on the subject (including, by implication, the writer of this article) were cast beyond the pale of professional respectability, characterized as "crass outsiders" for suggesting that Stalin had aggressive plans in Europe in 1941. Recently, the Suvorov thesis was gratuitously described by a Swiss academic as an "unspeakably (unsaglich) pseudo-revisionist argument. . . [that] receives the treatment it deserves"--in a book of over a thousand pages by an American historian. That book the reviewer lauds as "more than just a future standard work on the history of the Second World War."(8)
Some of these comments obviously go far beyond the usual cautious razor cuts employed by academic reviewers, I think the reader will agree. But they clearly are comments redolent of strongly held passions, as well as of convictions that are far more widespread than those few examples can convey. Three well-known German public figures on the Left--one quite far, to be sure--told visiting Russian television interviewers in an off-camera discussion that even if the Suvorov thesis were correct, his story should not be told since it disencumbered Hitler (and, by implication, the Germans who followed him) of some of the guilt for bringing on the war. Years back, Dr. Goebblels shocked the civilized world by publicly burning books on the Opernplatz in Berlin. Now there are distinguished members of the German Left who, if not obviously as rabid as some professors, propose to ban history books for political purposes--and not a genuine Bolshevik, nor, I'm sure, a sincere devotee of Stalin, among them!(9)
Gunter Gillessen was one German writer who had skeptically, but not negatively, reviewed Viktor Suvorov's first book, The Icebreaker, in 1989 (in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung).(10) The German edition had just appeared. Other reviewers had drawn similar skeptical conclusions. But, a year later, the English-language editions went almost unnoticed in both popular journals of opinion and professional journals.(11) By 1995--long after the discussion of Suvorov's argument that Stalin had planned to attack Hitler, had Hitler not attacked the Soviet Union first, had become a first-page story in Russia and Suvorov's readers had climbed into the millions--several other German writers had taken up the argument. They relied for their proof mainly on Suvorov and the late Aleksandr Nekrich. Nekrich, a Russian emigre scholar attached to the Harvard Russian Research Institute, had early found his way into the newly opened Soviet archives. There he found convincing evidence, from the mouths of Stalin's closest cronies, of a general plan to unleash the Red army westward, first against its immediate western neighbors, Hitler's Germany and its subjected peoples.(12) Suvorov, the reader may recall, had actually set the date for that attack as early July 1941.
Then, last February, the former editor of the influential German news magazine Der Spiegel, Rudolf Augstein, let fly a broadside at those who had indicted Stalin for conniving to bring on the war by making the infamous pact with Hitler and later planning to attack him. Augstein's denunciation was directed at Suvorov and Gillessen (who had kept up on the discussion of Stalin's war plans in Germany and reported it circumspectly in Germany's leading national newspaper) and a few other German history writers relying largely on Suvorov and Nekrich for their evidence of Stalin's war plan. Augstein's denunciation was important enough in the minds of the Spiegel's current editors to command the cover of the journal. "Aggressor Hitler, Aggressor Stalin?" read the title page in five colors. Oddly flattering close-ups of each dictator faced off across the cover.(13)
But there was no real historical contest and regrettably little up-to-date information on the subject of Stalin's war aims inside the Spiegel. Augstein made certain that Hitler won indictment as the guilty war party, and the history writers, all of whom had done a great deal more research and reading than journalist Augstein, were verbally leveled. All of them were Germans with the exception of Suvorov. The rest of the non-Germans who had written on the subject went unmentioned and, at least technically, unscathed. The Spiegel editors, following what seems to be modern custom in journalistic responsibility, then made certain that no serious criticism of Augstein's essay cropped up in subsequent letters to the editor.(14)
Although Augstein commanded the front cover of Der Spiegel, his reading and research on this subject was at least as far behind as 1989. But his zeal, committed effectively in defense of the history supplied first by Stalin and his propagandists and still so dear to many hearts, was impressive. And, whether he wanted to or not, he suddenly and effectively pushed the discussion at last out of the closet as far as the Germans are concerned. He made it open, if not quite salonfahig. Yet, as the reader will have noted, by aiming only at German writers and Suvorov, the lone foreigner published on the subject in German, he managed to make the discussion seem only national--and provincial. In other words, Augstein reduced the debate to a German Federkrieg, local swordplay with quills.
In fact, the discussion is international. But Augstein perhaps calculated that if he made that point he would likely only strengthen his opponents' case. For if germanophone readers had learned that Suvorov sold editions of a million or more in Russia, they would know that another people was coping with key historical issues that could bring them further into painful confrontation with, rather than away from, their intractable history. And the German readers would see that the intractable history being reconsidered abroad also bears directly on the Germans' own intractable past--not quite so clear-cut a story as Augstein would have them believe. He also failed to note that English-language writers, Nekrich and this writer, had also entered the book and academic journal market bearing new materials on the topic generally supporting Suvorov.
In addition, if the international dimensions of the controversy had been revealed, the German writers might have looked less like gentlemanly historical rationalizers for the behavior of would-be neo-Nazis (as Augstein seemed pleased to have them portrayed), the skinhead teenagers whose current antics so embarrass, properly so, civilized Germans. In any event, Augstein cleansed the palette and removed the foreign matter--and correspondingly censored the discussion and impoverished his readers. Or perhaps he had no choice. Perhaps he suffers from "linguistic isolationism" to use Gerhard Weinberg's deft characterization of history writers limited in their intake of vital professional information because they lack foreign language skills.
Augstein's criticism of the arguments in favor of Stalin's aggressive designs to the west was rather mild compared with the vehemence of those members of the academic fraternity quoted earlier. Yet his headline treatment assault has yet to inspire the more popular organs of political commentary and review on the west side of the Atlantic to take up the subject--six years after the appearance of Suvorov's book in English, to repeat, a bestseller abroad.
At least one cause behind Stalin's oddly persisting reputation as a mainstay of international peace and a victim of heinous aggression in World War II, in spite of his obvious collaboration with Hitler in the military destruction of much of east central Europe, does not wholly derive from genuine historical unawareness. As an alleged socialist experimenter, Stalin and his state for years garnered many positive sentiments from some of the world's certifiable socialists and other leftist well-wishers whatever he and it did. Indeed, the long-prevailing textbook myth of Stalin's willingness to collaborate with the Western democracies in 1938, to save Czechoslovakia from Hitler and thus maintain European peace, has only recently been professionally demolished, once and for all, it appears.(16) Stalin's historical reputation has for years been enhanced by his alleged support for the hapless Czechs in their vain efforts to save themselves from Hitler at the time of Munich--that, we now know, just another among many other historical illusions carefully cultivated by Soviet propaganda mills.
His sometime ally and rival Hitler, by contrast, was obsessively, and publicly, dedicated to his religio-racialist spatial and purification policies, even then a menacing and unsavory nationalist mix. He seemed oblivious to the political need for craft and compromise, even to the point that his mistreatment of potentially friendly "inferior" peoples, like the Ukrainians and Balts, enemies, real or potential, of some of his enemies, and his madly systematic approach to the elimination of "non-Aryans" actually interfered with the successful conduct of his war. Ethnic obsession rather than either geopolitics or realpolitik was the great driving force behind his actions. His propaganda was necessarily directed domestically, for its racially exclusionary doctrine, whether played high or low for the occasion, had little appeal beyond members of his chosen people. His wildly expansionist plans, publicly articulated, quickly raised the level of energy abroad among his enemies to fevered hostility. The primitiveness of his doctrines only mirrored favorably by contrast intellectualized "scientific" socialism's international appeal.
Stalin was manifestly far more clever, if just as mad. Following Vaksberg and Radzinsky, Stalin was as much a racist, but one who went about his elimination of those peoples that obscured his domestic panorama of a greater Russia with far more stealth. He simply had those groups he disliked removed to the vast reaches of Siberia and central Asia to perish or ultimately dissolve in a sea of peoples, while dealing with individual members of their groups, like the entire panoply of his imagined enemies, via public and secret trials. They quickly passed through his kangaroo courts and on to banishment, or were despatched to the Gulag, or to death. Meanwhile, he eliminated other presumed rivals and "socially dangerous elements" by means of staged accidents, poisonings, and pre-arranged medical "errors." All of the atrocities occurred while his propaganda organs proclaimed support for international peace and amity. Countless Western "useful idiots," and deluded and self-deluding journalists, naive or corrupted, who wrote from, or returned from Stalin's paradise to witness the wonder of society remade there, covered for his dreadful works. Today they are well, but still insufficiently, remembered--if, in some circles, it appears, only painfully.(17)
Since Suvorov's first book appeared in Russian in 1992, he has written two more volumes, Den' "M" (Day "M"), which appeared in 1994, and Poslednaia respublika (The Last [or Final] Republic(18)), which has just appeared in Russia. Each adds substantial proof and additional details to the arguments he made for Stalin's determination to bolshevize Europe, beginning with an attack on Germany in the summer of 1941, an attack he imagined would move with lightning speed, supported behind enemy lines by uprisings of the local proletariat egged on by local Communist parties, all the way to the channel. Georgii Zhukov, later the famous Marshal Zhukov, one of the most successful Soviet commandants of the victorious Red Army in World War II, was the commander he selected for his anticipated thrust to the west.
Meanwhile other Russian historians, in spite of the current Russian government's portentous archival closing, have not been idle. For if the current Russian government has done as much as possible to block the central presidential repository from releasing its facts, ancillary archives have been opened and remain so. And the details of an enterprise as grand in its dimension, and as macabre in its destructive prospects as that drive to bolshevize Europe to the west that Stalin planned, had to have left a paper trail way beyond the Kremlin offices and apartments and the suburban dachas of Stalin and his intimes. A number of those Russian writers have now been conveniently drawn together by Russian editors in a paperback edition (in Russian), Did Stalin Plan a War of Aggression against Hitler?(19) Moreover, the editors of the independent Russian professional journal, Fatherland History (formerly History of the USSR), brought together an editorial panel to discuss a then-controversial article they would soon publish suggesting yet more factual underpinning for the Suvorov thesis. The editors subsequently have published a number of articles on the same subject, including one by this writer.(20)
Most important of all, recently a copy of Stalin's speech to the Soviet Politburo of 19 August 1939 has been published in the Soviet press. Suvorov lacked in his first books just this kind of archival testimony to Stalin's aims. But I myself had meanwhile--piqued by his arguments and hopeful of closing gaps in my own knowledge--discovered three documents proving Stalin's secret plan to use the war Hitler brought on for the sovietization of all Europe. One came from the once Soviet-friendly Lithuanian foreign minister, who reported what he heard from Molotov and his Foreign Affairs Commissariat subaltern (actually a representative of the NKVD) V. G. Dekanosov. Another proof, also from 1940, and contemporary with that of the Lithuanian, came from J. Edgar Hoover, who likely got it from a paid Soviet informer he termed a "high Russian source." And another derived from the Presidium of the Comintern, where Stalin was a member, though he was usually represented in its meetings by one of his henchmen.(21) Meanwhile, Alexander Nekrich, mentioned above, had also, for some years unbeknownst to me, been at work in the former Soviet archives unearthing further evidence. These are strong and persuasive, so-far-unchallenged testimonies to Stalin's war plans in the words of his own Kremlin band.
But the new source from Stalin's own mouth is of overriding importance. It is his speech outlining to the Politburo of the party his general scheme for the sovietization of Europe from Germany to the channel. It was evidently given to justify his apparent sudden and total reversal of diplomatic course, and to supply the grounds for his choice to join Hitler in the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939.(22) This heretofore unpublished speech is surely the most important document to appear from out of the Soviet archives since they were opened half a decade or so ago.
What Stalin told the Politburo on 19 August 1939, four days before German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop arrived to join Stalin and Molotov in signing the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its secret protocol dividing large parts of east central Europe between the two rapacious dictators, should convince even the most firm doubters of the nature of Stalin's war plans.
"If," Stalin said, "we accept the German proposal to conclude a non-aggression pact, [Germany] will attack Poland, and the intervention of France and England in this war becomes inevitable. Western Europe will be subjected to serious unrest and disorder [from social unrest caused by the harsh wartime conditions]. In such circumstances, there will be more of a chance for us to stay out of the conflict, and we may hope [later] to be able to find our way advantageously into the war. [Our] experience of twenty years shows that, in time of peace, it is not possible to have a communist movement in Europe powerful enough [in any one nation] for the Bolshevik party to take power. A dictatorship of this party becomes possible only as the result of a great war.... For the realization of these plans [creating the situation of domestic unrest and disorder he referred to above] it is unavoidable that the war should last as long as possible." That advantageous Soviet entry into the war, once it had been dragged out as long as possible, Stalin also made clear, was meant to secure the bolshevization of both Germany and France using the power of the Red Army.(23)
There is yet more new evidence. Historians have recently produced a more complete text of Stalin's speech and supplementary commentaries of 5 May 1941 at the Soviet War Academy. It is a speech long known in various versions, but in the new, more complete version he announced his determination to go to war, justifying moving from a posture of defense to a posture of assault in the near future. He also spoke of the vast amount of modern equipment the vastly expanded Red Army and other forces had recently acquired. "A modern army," Stalin said, "must be an offensive army."(24) This speech was made approximately two months and a few weeks before the July days the most plausible accounts give for the Red Army's march west.
Suvorov was right about the most important parts of the story from the start. Almost all the other writers, including this writer, utterly skeptical of Suvorov's "thesis" for a time, have been wrong. Most remain so. Moreover, to pick up the appropriate comparison with the clearly demonic Hitler once more, who can be certain whether he, faced directly with the issue at the outset of the war, would have begun a war calculatedly determined to stretch it out, whatever the cost--for Stalin said nothing of costs--for the longest possible time. Obsessed as Hitler clearly was, he never thought in terms of Marxist-Leninist long-term timetables, but only in terms of lightning victories. He thought only of acting quickly before his imagined mission to save the German people was aborted by what he thought would be his early death. But his war became Stalin's war; and Germany's disaster flowed from both.
One senses that a long repressed public spirit questing for truth and justice in Russia struggles to master the evil legacies Stalin left. Thanks to Russian researchers, we now have Stalin's scheme for an attack on Germany, starting that war to the west, right from his own mouth. All of the remaining evidence of his purposes is reciprocally supporting and likewise suggests the authenticity of this document. Those arguing to the contrary, here and abroad--and they are many--can only contend, and they do vigorously still contend, that the supportive information is still insufficient--although some deny that there is any evidence. But somewhere in the great, ineffable subconscious of the former Soviet peoples the longing for an honest history, telling the past as it actually happened, has clearly persisted through all those agonizing Soviet years, persisted, for sure, more strongly than the quest for historical truth among Suvorov's Western opponents. Suvorov may at first only have guessed correctly much of the time in joining the parts of his tale where he had little or no persuasive evidence, but somehow he was on the trail of this amazing story from the outset.
Stalin brought almost every possible disaster to the door of the Soviet peoples as a result of his plan to sovietize Europe. It was "humanity's greatest genius" himself, imagining that he could get off the mark before the Germans, who brought the Nazi Wehrmacht to the Soviet border. Even his "Great Patriotic war," which the Germans began with a giant first leap, finished with a hollow Soviet victory. At war's end, the western Soviet lands were ugly scenes of the sheer devastation of the past barbaric conflicts. The remaining vast countryside had been ruthlessly and heedlessly scavenged to support years of pell-mell industrialization and war production for Stalin's war.
The Soviet Union ended the war with countless millions dead or in work camps, with a corrupt domestic tyranny as vicious as the pre-war tyranny that had preceded it firmly in place. The popular victor, Marshal Zhukov, a potential rival in Stalin's view, was banished to the provinces and even banished from filmed "histories" celebrating the military triumph. In them, Stalin took over retrospectively as the victorious strategist and supreme commander. Zhukov's double removal was one immediately visible aspect of the vast purges Stalin was soon to recommence, as well as an external sign of the otherwise invisible dementia in the Kremlin.
A Cold War with sometime allies had suddenly quickened in the aftermath of the military victory over Germany. The Cold War's conflicts first developed as Western attitudes toward their former ally hardened when they met his looting and raping Red Army and barbarous NKVD in the middle of Europe. Those attitudes were further solidified when the Westerners contemplated the sovietization Stalin pushed, if sometimes temporarily concealed behind the facade of creating anti-fascist democracy, wherever the Red Army was in control. Along with that new war came another exhausting armaments program--in part dominated by an accelerated push to match the American atomic bomb--reimposed on the tired Soviet peoples.
Outside of Russia, with the exception of the recent publicity given the subject in Germany, the mass of Western scholars and writers writing on the war and on the Stalinist period have simply kept silence on the historical issues Suvorov raised. The stillness of reviewers in the face of his once shocking thesis tells part of the frightening story of apparently voluntary vows of silence making up an ineffable, but effective, censorship. Where have the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, journals that dote on war stories and recapitulations and reviews on the subject, been? Where Time, where Newsweek? Indeed, one approach of no doubt carefully selected reviewers, when the subject of Stalin's aggressive war plans was noticed, has been to scald the authors who have argued for their existence with doubt, unsupported to be sure, or to ignore books and articles directly on the subject.(25) The very fact that Stalin's speech of 19 August 1939, which has been available in Russia for over a year, has until now, as I write in the summer of 1996, gone unreported in the United States and perhaps elsewhere in the West suggests that something has indeed gone wrong.
Many history writers in the West, those who for years have written their accounts of the war in one way or the other in line with the original Soviet propaganda story of how the war came about, have been often naively unaware of what they were doing. For years the crucial East Bloc archives were closed to independent researchers. But when they did open, many writers with impressive bibliographies were simply unprepared to take advantage of the grand new research opportunities. Some were functionally illiterate in the languages they needed to undertake acute research in the vital, newly available sources. Others perhaps felt trapped by professional publication histories, the keys to impressive academic careers, they would be loath to repudiate. Yet by long supporting in print, explicitly or implicitly, the Stalinist line that the dictator's purposes were regularly defensive, many historians suddenly have much to lose, both in money--from best selling textbooks and other editions--and in reputation, if Suvorov's thesis were ever generally accepted as correct. As the archival documents now emerge, some must now sit increasingly uneasy in their professorial chairs. Hence, perhaps, one cause of the conspicuous silence.
Hitler was the "icebreaker," as Suvorov argued from the virtual beginning of the debate. Suvorov's chapters and proofs, one by one as they appear, now get headline copy and provide Sunday supplement material in Russia's leading independent newspapers. But a search through the current, 1995-1996 version of Books in Print will show the reader that none of his books is currently available in English. That editorial chistka on this side of the Atlantic, and on much of the Continent, as of this writing remains almost total.
But the genie of truth is now out of the bottle, at least in Europe, thanks to former editor Augstein, who sought but failed to bury his persistent historian-opponents with a recapitulation of antiquated Stalinist and post-Stalinist propaganda, and to industrious Russian historians and journal editors who have recently found key supportive documents in the campaign to identify Stalin's ghastly war game. How long will it be before the battle to broadcast the debate over Stalin's bloody wartime adventure is joined on behalf of the broad reading and viewing public on the west side of the Atlantic?
NOTES
(1.) Jean Laloy, "A Moscou: entre Stalin et De Gaulle. Decembre 1944," Revue des etudes slaves, 54 (1982): 151.
(2.) Kennan to Bohlen, 26 January 1945, United States National Archives, Records of Charles Bohlen, 1942-1952, Bohlen correspondence, Box 3.
(3.) Vaksberg: Stalin and the Jews (New York, 1994); Hotel Lux (Paris, 1993); Die Verfolgten Stalins. Aus den Verliesen des KGB (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1993). Radzinsky, Stalin (New York, 1996).
(4.) Serge Schmemann, in The International Herald-Tribune, 27 April 1995,2.
(5.) Viktor Suvorov, The Icebreaker. Who Started The Second World War? (London, 1990), and under a slightly different subtitle, New York, 1990.
(6.) R. C. Raack, "Stalin's Role in the Coming of World War II: Opening the Closet Door on a Key Chapter of Recent History," World Affairs, 158 (1996): 198-211.
(7.) Joachim Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945 (Munich, 1995); Walter Post, Unternehmen Barbarossa: Deutsche und Sowjetische Angriffsplane 1940/41 (second ea., Hamburg, 1996), Werner Maser, Der Wortbruch: Hitler, Stalin und der Zweite Weltkrieg (Munich, 1994). Of the three books, Maser's has much less new than the other two to offer. See also Raack, Stalin's Drive to the West, in note 9, below. This writer, however, was originally skeptical of the time Suvorov set for the Soviet attack, early July 1941, and remains partially so, though more and more convinced that the summer of 1941, perhaps even later in July, is correct. The summer of 1941 is the time now held to by Hoffmann and Post, and it seems increasingly plausibly supported by their arguments and those of others.
(8.) Raack, "Stalin's Role," 206-07, and notes 20, 34-36; Bernd Bonwetsch, in a review of Maser, Osteuropa, 3 (1995): 286; Stig Forster, in a review of Gerhard Weinberg's A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, 1994), in Das Historisch-politische Buch, 1/2, (1996). Weinberg writes, "certainly there were no plans for a Soviet preventative attack into the German buildup; the Germans never considered such Soviet action likely; they found no evidence of such a project after the invasion; and they were assured by their own military adviser in the Soviet Union before June 22 that there were no signs of aggressive intentions" (204). He cites as proof for the statement, the wartime diaries of two German generals, a report of the German military attache in Moscow, and an unprinted conference paper from 1991. But the documents printed by Walter Post, Unternehmen Barbarossa, 353-65, from a number of German generals and others certainly testify to Hitler's and other German chieftains' awareness and fear of a possible Soviet attack on Germany. (In fact, Weinberg somewhat misstates the issue: Stalin was not planning a "preventative attack," he was planning a war of assault to bolshevize, or help bolshevize Germany.)
(9.) The Russians went on to tell the story to Dr. Joachim Hoffmann, who has also written on Stalin's war and who was one of the chief victims of Spiegel editor Augstein's farrago of Soviet disinformation, misinformation, and lack of information. The three current German notables may be able to count on an American associate in realizing their wish for historical suppression. That associate is professor, Beveridge Prize-winner, etc., and endowed chair-holder, Melvyn Leffler. He compiled a review for Foreign Affairs (July/August 1996) of books on the cold war from English-language books mainly published recently. But he failed to review, or even mention, my recent book, Stalin's Drive to the West, 19381945: The Origins of the Cold War (Stanford, 1995), which is published by the same press as his book on the immediate post-war period. No other historical study focusing on the close connection of the wartime origins of what was later called the cold war with Stalin's pre-war and wartime plans has yet been published in English, nor in any other language. In addition, the book is securely based on revelations from a number of the recently opened former "enemy archives," perhaps on more of the latter than most other recent books on the cold war. So it undeniably fell directly into the context of Leffler's review, dramatically titled "Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened." I cannot imagine that Professor Leffler's Foreign Affairs editors would not want to clear up the matter of the odd gap in his cold war reportage.
(10.) 27 April 1989.
(11.) See note 6.
(12.) Aleksandr Nekrich, "A Wise Design," Perspective (Boston), I, number 2, 2-3, 7.
(13.) Der Spiegel 6/96, 100-25; The American reader must try to imagine a bookish historical debate on a matter of such relatively antique provenance--fifty-seven years--and yet central historical importance making the covers of Time or Newsweek The recent "Enola Gay" fracas comes to mind--yet that was about a museum exhibition suddenly to be unveiled for popular consumption in a national and publicly supported center. In. that case, no debate based on a sudden outpouring of vital new insights in books and articles based on new historical materials directed to a stunning new historical argument had occurred. Germany, of course, lies unmercifully entwined in its past, and is not the United States of America, and history, and historians, are regularly taken seriously over there.
(14.) In the experience of this writer, journalistic style today appears to be to print one letter one for, one against, the original writer--unless the writer is an outside authority for whom readers strongly take sides, for or against. In this case, this historian sent a letter, in German, to the editors pointing out the antiquity of former editor Augstein's information, much of which was simply a repetition of the claims of Stalin and his foreign ministers. I also noted that the only writers on the subject of Stalin's intended march west were not solely native germanophones plus Suvorov. The argument for Stalin's war plan could, therefore, not be easily put aside as the sinister fantasies of right-wing German extremists. Of course, my letter, a serious professional criticism of Augstein's account, went unprinted. Perhaps other professional critics got the same treatment, for none was offered to Spiegel readers (see 8/1996). Stalin's reputation is still tenderly guarded in the Spiegel's Hamburg, as well as, it appears, in a number of New York editorial offices. Two books harshly critical of Western journalists' failures to point out Soviet realities to readers at the time of the Stalinist Reich, both especially hard on The New York Times, went unnoticed and unreviewed (according to Book Review Digest and Books in Print) by any of the major newspapers in the States. I refer to James William Crowl's Angels in Stalin's Paradise: Western Reporters in Stalin's Russia, 1917-1937 (Washington, D.C., 1982), and Sally Taylor's Stalin's Apologist. Walter Duranty (Oxford, 1990). See also, for contrast with our domestic journalistic silence on past error, an honest and reflective journalist's report on reportorial conditions in Stalin's Russia, Paul Winterton's Report on Russia (London, 1945).
(15.) See Markus Wehner, "Der letzte Sowjetmythos," in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10 April 1996.
(16.) Igor Lukes, Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler (New York, 1996).
(17.) See Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims (New York, 1981), and note 14.
(18.) The first printed in Kiev; the second in Moscow, 1996.
(19.) Gennady Bordiugov, ed., Gotovil li Stalin nastupatel'nuiu voinu protiv Gitlera? (Moscow, 1995).
(20.) "S zasedaniia redkollegii," Otechestvennaia istoriia, number 4/5, 1994. As of this writing, I am aware of no discussion--to print or not to print--of the subject at such an editorial level reported in an English-language journal. See also Bordiugov, 6-63, and the citations in my previous article on this subject in World Affairs, 158 (1996): 211, note 39. The Russian translation of this writer's article, "Stalin's Plans for World War Two Told by a High Comintern Source," first published in The Historical Journal, 38 (1995): 1031-36, appeared in Otechestvennaia istoriia, 3 (1996). As of this writing, I have not seen a copy of it.
(21.) Raack, Stalin's Drive to the West, 21-28, and supporting footnotes, especially notes 19-22 to chapter one. See also, Raack, "Stalin's Plans for World War II Told to a High Comintern Source," passim.
(22.) For the background of the reversal of alliances, please see the citations in note 21, above.
(23.) From the copy found by T. S. Bushuevaia in the "Secret Booty Funds of the Special USSR Archive" (Tsentr khraneniia istoriko-dokumentalnykh kollektsii, byvshii Osobyi arkhiv SSSR), f.7, op. 1, d. 1223, first published in the journal Novyi Mir in 1995.
(24.) See Post, 274-78 and V. A. Nevezhin, "Vystuplenie Stalina 5 maia 1941 g. i povorot v propagande. Analiz direktivnykh materialov," in Bordiugov, 147-67.
(25.) See, for example, Steven M. Miner's review of Radzinsky's Stalin, in the New York Times Book Review, 5 May 1996, 14-15, for expressed, but unsubstantiated doubts, and no suggestion of the overwhelming documentary evidence establishing Stalin's war scheme. See also note 9, above.
America's Deathbed Confession
Adolf Hitler is vindicated by the exposed monstrous
criminal actions of "Jewish International Finance"
themselves.
By Dick Eastman
6-21-8