
Examining Stalin's 1941 Plan to Attack Germany
Revising the Twentieth Century's 'Perfect Storm'
Russian and German
Historians Debate Barbarossa and Its Aftermath
"Stalin's Role in the Coming of World War II,"
"Stalin's Role in the Coming of World War
II:
The International Debate
Goes On,"
Exposing Stalin's Plan to Conquer Europe

Book Review
How the Soviet Union
'Lost' the Second World War
Reviewed by
Daniel W. Michaels
For several years now, a former Soviet
military intelligence officer named Vladimir Rezun has provoked heated
discussion in Russia for his startling view that Hitler attacked Soviet Russia
in June 1941 just as Stalin was preparing to overwhelm Germany and western
Europe as part of a well-planned operation to "liberate" all of Europe by
bringing it under Communist rule.
Writing under the pen name of Viktor
Suvorov, Rezun has developed this thesis in three books. Icebreaker
(which has been published in an English-language edition) and Dni M ("M
Day") were reviewed in the Nov.-Dec. 1997 Journal. The third book,
reviewed here, is a 470-page work, "The Last Republic: Why the Soviet Union Lost
the Second World War," published in Russian in Moscow in 1996.
Suvorov presents a mass of evidence to
show that when Hitler launched his "Operation Barbarossa" attack against Soviet
Russia on June 22, 1941, German forces were able to inflict enormous losses
against the Soviets precisely because the Red troops were much better prepared
for war -- but for an aggressive war that was scheduled for early July -- not
the defensive war forced on them by Hitler's preemptive strike.
In Icebreaker, Suvorov details
the deployment of Soviet forces in June 1941, describing just how Stalin amassed
vast numbers of troops and stores of weapons along the European frontier, not to
defend the Soviet homeland but in preparation for a westward attack and decisive
battles on enemy territory.
Thus, when German forces struck, the
bulk of Red ground and air forces were concentrated along the Soviet western
borders facing contiguous European countries, especially the German Reich and
Romania, in final readiness for an assault on Europe.
In his second book on the origins of the
war, "M Day" (for "Mobilization Day"), Suvorov details how, between late 1939
and the summer of 1941, Stalin methodically and systematically built up the best
armed, most powerful military force in the world -- actually the world's first
superpower -- for his planned conquest of Europe. Suvorov explains how Stalin's
drastic conversion of the country's economy for war actually made war
inevitable.
A Global Soviet Union
In "The Last Republic," Suvorov adds to
the evidence presented in his two earlier books to strengthen his argument that
Stalin was preparing for an aggressive war, in particular emphasizing the
ideological motivation for the Soviet leader's actions. The title refers to the
unlucky country that would be incorporated as the "final republic" into the
globe-encompassing "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," thereby completing the
world proletarian revolution.
As Suvorov explains, this plan was
entirely consistent with Marxist-Leninist doctrine, as well as with Lenin's
policies in the earlier years of the Soviet regime. The Russian historian argues
convincingly that it was not Leon Trotsky (Bronstein), but rather Stalin, his
less flamboyant rival, who was really the faithful disciple of Lenin in
promoting world Communist revolution. Trotsky insisted on his doctrine of
"permanent revolution," whereby the young Soviet state would help foment
home-grown workers' uprisings and revolution in the capitalist countries.
Stalin instead wanted the Soviet regime
to take advantage of occasional "armistices" in the global struggle to
consolidate Red military strength for the right moment when larger and better
armed Soviet forces would strike into central and western Europe, adding new
Soviet republics as this overwhelming force rolled across the continent. After
the successful consolidation and Sovietization of all of Europe, the expanded
USSR would be poised to impose Soviet power over the entire globe.
As Suvorov shows, Stalin realized quite
well that, given a free choice, the people of the advanced Western countries
would never voluntarily choose Communism. It would therefore have to be imposed
by force. His bold plan, Stalin further decided, could be realized only through
a world war.
A critical piece of evidence in this
regard is his speech of August 19, 1939, recently uncovered in Soviet archives
(quoted in part in the Nov.-Dec. 1997 Journal, pp. 32-33). In it, Lenin's heir
states:
The experience of the last 20 years
has shown that in peacetime the Communist movement is never strong enough to
seize power. The dictatorship of such a party will only become possible as
the result of a major war ...
Later on, all the countries who had
accepted protection from resurgent Germany would also become our allies. We
shall have a wide field to develop the world revolution.
Furthermore, and as Soviet theoreticians
had always insisted, Communism could never peacefully coexist over the long run
with other socio-political systems. Accordingly, Communist rule inevitably would
have to be imposed throughout the world. So integral was this goal of "world
revolution" to the nature and development of the "first workers' state" that it
was a cardinal feature of the Soviet agenda even before Hitler and his National
Socialist movement came to power in Germany in 1933.
Stalin elected to strike at a time and
place of his choosing. To this end, Soviet development of the most advanced
offensive weapons systems, primarily tanks, aircraft, and airborne forces, had
already begun in the early 1930s. To ensure the success of his bold undertaking,
in late 1939 Stalin ordered the build up a powerful war machine that would be
superior in quantity and quality to all possible opposing forces. His first
secret order for the total military-industrial mobilization of the country was
issued in August 1939. A second total mobilization order, this one for military
mobilization, would be issued on the day the war was to begin.
Disappointment
The German "Barbarossa" attack shattered
Stalin's well-laid plan to "liberate" all of Europe. In this sense, Suvorov
contends, Stalin "lost" the Second World War. The Soviet premier could regard
"merely" defeating Germany and conquering eastern and central Europe only as a
disappointment.
According to Suvorov, Stalin revealed
his disappointment over the war's outcome in several ways. First, he had Marshal
Georgi Zhukov, not himself, the supreme commander, lead the victory parade in
1945. Second, no official May 9 victory parade was even authorized until after
Stalin's death. Third, Stalin never wore any of the medals he was awarded after
the end of the Second World War. Fourth, once, in a depressed mood, he expressed
to members of his close circle his desire to retire now that the war was over.
Fifth, and perhaps most telling, Stalin abandoned work on the long-planned
Palace of Soviets.
An Unfinished Monument
The enormous Palace of Soviets, approved
by the Soviet government in the early 1930s, was to be 1,250 feet tall,
surmounted with a statue of Lenin 300 feet in height -- taller than New York's
Empire State Building. It was to be built on the site of the former Cathedral of
Christ the Savior. On Stalin's order, this magnificent symbol of old Russia was
blown up in 1931 -- an act whereby the nation's Communist rulers symbolically
erased the soul of old Russia to make room for the centerpiece of the world
USSR.
All the world's "socialist republics,"
including the "last republic," would ultimately be represented in the Palace.
The main hall of this secular shrine was to be inscribed with the oath that
Stalin had delivered in quasi-religious cadences at Lenin's burial. It included
the words: "When he left us, Comrade Lenin bequeathed to us the responsibility
to strengthen and expand the Union of Socialist Republics. We vow to you,
Comrade Lenin, that we shall honorably carry out this, your sacred commandment."
However, only the bowl-shaped foundation
for this grandiose monument was ever completed, and during the 1990s, after the
collapse the USSR, the Christ the Savior Cathedral was painstakingly rebuilt on
the site.
The Official View
For decades the official version of the
1941-1945 German-Soviet conflict, supported by establishment historians in both
Russia and the West, has been something like this:
Hitler launched a surprise
"Blitzkrieg" attack against the woefully unprepared Soviet Union, fooling
its leader, the unsuspecting and trusting Stalin. The German Führer was
driven by lust for "living space" and natural resources in the primitive
East, and by his long-simmering determination to smash "Jewish Communism"
once and for all. In this treacherous attack, which was an important part of
Hitler's mad drive for "world conquest," the "Nazi" or "fascist" aggressors
initially overwhelmed all resistance with their preponderance of modern
tanks and aircraft.
This view, which was affirmed by the
Allied judges at the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal, is still widely accepted in
both Russia and the United States. In Russia today, most of the general public
(and not merely those who are nostalgic for the old Soviet regime), accepts this
"politically correct" line. For one thing, it "explains" the Soviet Union's
enormous World War II losses in men and materiel.
Doomed from the Start
Contrary to the official view that the
Soviet Union was not prepared for war in June 1941, in fact, Suvorov stresses,
it was the Germans who were not really prepared. Germany's hastily drawn up
"Operation Barbarossa" plan, which called for a "Blitzkrieg" victory in four or
five months by numerically inferior forces advancing in three broad military
thrusts, was doomed from the outset.
Moreover, Suvorov goes on to note,
Germany lacked the raw materials (including petroleum) essential in sustaining a
drawn out war of such dimensions.
Another reason for Germany's lack of
preparedness, Suvorov contends, was that her military leaders seriously
under-estimated the performance of Soviet forces in the Winter War against
Finland, 1939-40. They fought, it must be stressed, under extremely severe
winter conditions -- temperatures of minus 40 degrees Celsius and snow depths of
several feet -- against the well-designed reinforced concrete fortifications and
underground facilities of Finland's "Mannerheim Line." In spite of that, it is
often forgotten, the Red Army did, after all, force the Finns into a humiliating
armistice.
It is always a mistake, Suvorov
emphasizes, to underestimate your enemy. But Hitler made this critical
miscalculation. In 1943, after the tide of war had shifted against Germany, he
admitted his mistaken evaluation of Soviet forces two years earlier.
Tank Disparity Compared
To prove that it was Stalin, and not
Hitler, who was really prepared for war, Suvorov compares German and Soviet
weaponry in mid-1941, especially with respect to the all-important offensive
weapons systems -- tanks and airborne forces. It is a generally accepted axiom
in military science that attacking forces should have a numerical superiority of
three to one over the defenders. Yet, as Suvorov explains, when the Germans
struck on the morning of June 22, 1941, they attacked with a total of 3,350
tanks, while the Soviet defenders had a total of 24,000 tanks -- that is, Stalin
had seven times more tanks than Hitler, or 21 times more tanks than would have
been considered sufficient for an adequate defense. Moreover, Suvorov stresses,
the Soviet tanks were superior in all technical respects, including firepower,
range, and armor plating.
As it was, Soviet development of heavy
tank production had already begun in the early 1930s. For example, as early as
1933 the Soviets were already turning out in series production, and distributing
to their forces, the T-35 model, a 45-ton heavy tank with three cannons, six
machine guns, and 30-mm armor plating. By contrast, the Germans began
development and production of a comparable 45-ton tank only after the war had
begun in mid-1941.
By 1939 the Soviets had already added
three heavy tank models to their inventory. Moreover, the Soviets designed their
tanks with wider tracks, and to operate with diesel engines (which were less
flammable than those using conventional carburetor mix fuels). Furthermore,
Soviet tanks were built with both the engine and the drive in the rear, thereby
improving general efficiency and operator viewing. German tanks had a less
efficient arrangement, with the engine in the rear and the drive in the forward
area.
When the conflict began in June 1941,
Suvorov shows, Germany had no heavy tanks at all, only 309 medium tanks, and
just 2,668 light, inferior tanks. For their part, the Soviets at the outbreak of
the war had at their disposal tanks that were not only heavier but of higher
quality.
In this regard, Suvorov cites the
recollection of German tank general Heinz Guderian, who wrote in his memoir
Panzer Leader (1952/1996, p. 143):
In the spring of 1941, Hitler had
specifically ordered that a Russian military commission be shown over our
tank schools and factories; in this order he had insisted that nothing be
concealed from them. The Russian officers in question firmly refused to
believe that the Panzer IV was in fact our heaviest tank. They said
repeatedly that we must be hiding our newest models from them, and
complained that we were not carrying out Hitler's order to show them
everything. The military commission was so insistent on this point that
eventually our manufacturers and Ordnance Office officials concluded: "It
seems that the Russians must already possess better and heavier tanks than
we do." It was at the end of July 1941 that the T34 tank appeared on the
front and the riddle of the new Russian model was solved.
Suvorov cites another revealing fact
from Robert Goralski's World War II Almanac (1982, p. 164). On June 24, 1941 --
just two days after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war:
The Russians introduced their giant
Klim Voroshilov tanks into action near Raseiniai [Lithuania]. Models
weighing 43 and 52 tons surprised the Germans, who found the KVs nearly
unstoppable. One of these Russian tanks took 70 direct hits, but none
penetrated its armor.
In short, Germany took on the Soviet
colossus with tanks that were too light, too few in number, and inferior in
performance and fire power. And this disparity continued as the war progressed.
In 1942 alone, Soviet factories produced 2,553 heavy tanks, while the Germans
produced just 89. Even at the end of the war, the best-quality tank in combat
was the Soviet IS ("Iosef Stalin") model.
Suvorov sarcastically urges
establishment military historians to study a book on Soviet tanks by Igor P.
Shmelev, published in 1993 by, of all things, the Hobby Book Publishing Company
in Moscow. The work of an honest amateur military analyst such as Shmelev, one
who is sincerely interested in and loves his hobby and the truth, says Suvorov,
is often superior to that of a paid government employee.
Airborne Forces Disparity
Even more lopsided was the Soviet
superiority in airborne forces. Before the war, Soviet DB-3f and SB bombers as
well as the TB-1 and TB-3 bombers (of which Stalin had about a thousand had been
modified to carry airborne troops as well as bomb loads. By mid-1941 the Soviet
military had trained hundreds of thousands of paratroopers (Suvorov says almost
a million) for the planned attack against Germany and the West. These airborne
troops were to be deployed and dropped behind enemy lines in several waves, each
wave consisting of five airborne assault corps (VDKs), each corps consisting of
10,419 men, staff and service personnel, an artillery division, and a separate
tank battalion (50 tanks). Suvorov lists the commanding officers and home bases
of the first two waves or ten corps. The second and third wave corps included
troops who spoke French and Spanish.
Because the German attack prevented
these highly trained troops from being used as originally planned, Stalin
converted them to "guards divisions," which he used as reserves and "fire
brigades" in emergency situations, much as Hitler often deployed Waffen SS
forces.
Maps and Phrase Books
In support of his main thesis, Suvorov
cites additional data that were not mentioned in his two earlier works on this
subject. First, on the eve of the outbreak of the 1941 war Soviet forces had
been provided topographical maps only of frontier and European areas; they were
not issued maps to defend Soviet territory or cities, because the war was not to
be fought in the homeland. The head of the Military Topographic Service at the
time, and therefore responsible for military map distribution, Major General M.
K. Kudryavtsev, was not punished or even dismissed for failing to provide maps
of the homeland, but went on to enjoy a lengthy and successful military career.
Likewise, the chief of the General Staff, General Zhukov, was never held
responsible for the debacle of the first months of the war. None of the top
military commanders could be held accountable, Suvorov points out, because they
had all followed Stalin's orders to the letter.
Second, in early June 1941 the Soviet
armed forces began receiving thousands of copies of a Russian-German phrase
book, with sections dedicated to such offensive military operations as seizing
railroad stations, orienting parachutists, and so forth, and such useful
expressions as "Stop transmitting or I'll shoot." This phrase book was produced
in great numbers by the military printing houses in both Leningrad and Moscow.
However, they never reached the troops on the front lines, and are said to have
been destroyed in the opening phase of the war.
Aid from the 'Neutral' United States
As Suvorov notes, the United States had
been supplying Soviet Russia with military hardware since the late 1930s. He
cites Antony C. Sutton's study, National Suicide (Arlington House, 1973), which
reports that in 1938 President Roosevelt entered into a secret agreement with
the USSR to exchange military information. For American public consumption,
though, Roosevelt announced the imposition of a "moral embargo" on Soviet
Russia.
In the months prior to America's formal
entry into war (December 1941), Atlantic naval vessels of the ostensibly neutral
United States were already at war against German naval forces. (See Mr.
Roosevelt's Navy: The Private War of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, 1939-1942 by
Patrick Abbazia [Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1975]). And two days after
the "Barbarossa" strike, Roosevelt announced US aid to Soviet Russia in its war
for survival against the Axis. Thus, at the outbreak of the "Barbarossa" attack,
Hitler wrote in a letter to Mussolini: "At this point it makes no difference
whether America officially enters the war or not, it is already supporting our
enemies in full measure with mass deliveries of war materials."
Similarly, Winston Churchill was doing
everything in his power during the months prior to June 1941 -- when British
forces were suffering one military defeat after another -- to bring both the
United States and the Soviet Union into the war on Britain's side. In truth, the
"Big Three" anti-Hitler coalition (Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill) was effectively
in place even before Germany attacked Russia, and was a major reason why Hitler
felt compelled to strike against Soviet Russia, and to declare war on the United
States five months later. (See Hitler's speech of December 11, 1941, published
in the Winter 1988-89 Journal, pp. 394-396, 402-412.)
The reasons for Franklin Roosevelt's
support for Stalin are difficult to pin down. President Roosevelt himself once
explained to William Bullitt, his first ambassador to Soviet Russia: "I think
that if I give him [Stalin] everything I possibly can, and ask nothing from him
in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything, and will work with
me for a world of peace and democracy." (Cited in: Robert Nisbet, Roosevelt and
Stalin: The Failed Courtship [1989], p. 6.) Perhaps the most accurate (and
kindest) explanation for Roosevelt's attitude is a profound ignorance,
self-deception or naiveté. In the considered view of George Kennan, historian
and former high-ranking US diplomat, in foreign policy Roosevelt was "a very
superficial man, ignorant, dilettantish, with a severely limited intellectual
horizon."
A Desperate Gamble
Suvorov admits to being fascinated with
Stalin, calling him "an animal, a wild, bloody monster, but a genius of all
times and peoples." He commanded the greatest military power in the Second World
War, the force that more than any other defeated Germany. Especially in the
final years of the conflict, he dominated the Allied military alliance. He must
have regarded Roosevelt and Churchill contemptuously as useful idiots.
In early 1941 everyone assumed that
because Germany was still militarily engaged against Britain in north Africa, in
the Mediterranean, and in the Atlantic, Hitler would never permit entanglement
in a second front in the East. (Mindful of the disastrous experience of the
First World War, he had warned in Mein Kampf of the mortal danger of a two front
war.) It was precisely because he was confident that Stalin assumed Hitler would
not open a second front, contends Suvorov, that the German leader felt free to
launch "Barbarossa." This attack, insists Suvorov, was an enormous and desperate
gamble. But threatened by superior Soviet forces poised to overwhelm Germany and
Europe, Hitler had little choice but to launch this preventive strike.
But it was too little, too late. In
spite of the advantage of striking first, it was the Soviets who finally
prevailed. In the spring of 1945, Red army troops succeeded in raising the red
banner over the Reichstag building in Berlin. It was due only to the immense
sacrifices of German and other Axis forces that Soviet troops did not similarly
succeed in raising the Red flag over Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Rome,
Stockholm, and, perhaps, London.
The Debate Sharpens
In spite of resistance from
"establishment" historians (who in Russia are often former Communists), support
for Suvorov's "preventive strike" thesis has been growing both in Russia and in
western Europe. Among those who sympathize with Suvorov's views are younger
Russian historians such as Yuri L. Dyakov, Tatyana S. Bushuyeva, and I. V.
Pavlova. (See the Nov.-Dec. 1997 Journal, pp. 32-34.)
With regard to 20th-century history,
American historians are generally more close-minded than their counterparts in
Europe or Russia. But even in the United States there have been a few voices of
support for the "preventive war" thesis -- which is all the more noteworthy
considering that Suvorov's books on World War II, with the exception of
Icebreaker, have not been available in English. (One such voice is that of
historian Russell Stolfi, a professor of Modern European History at the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. See the review of his book Hitler's
Panzers East in the Nov.-Dec. 1995 Journal.)
Not all the response to Suvorov's work
has been positive, though. It has also prompted criticism and renewed
affirmations of the decades-old orthodox view. Among the most prominent new
defenders of the orthodox "line" are historians Gabriel Gorodetsky of Tel Aviv
University, and John Ericson of Edinburgh University.
Rejecting all arguments that might
justify Germany's attack, Gorodetsky in particular castigates and ridicules
Suvorov's works, most notably in a book titled, appropriately, "The Icebreaker
Myth." In effect, Gorodetsky (and Ericson) attribute Soviet war losses to the
supposed unpreparedness of the Red Army for war. "It is absurd," Gorodetsky
writes, "to claim that Stalin would ever entertain any idea of attacking
Germany, as some German historians now like to suggest, in order, by means of a
surprise attack, to upset Germany's planned preventive strike."
Not surprisingly, Gorodetsky has been
praised by Kremlin authorities and Russian military leaders. Germany's
"establishment" similarly embraces the Israeli historian. At German taxpayers
expense, he has worked and taught at Germany's semi-official Military History
Research Office (MGFA), which in April 1991 published Gorodetsky's Zwei Wege
nach Moskau ("Two Paths to Moscow")
In the "Last Republic," Suvorov responds
to Gorodetsky and other critics of his first two books on Second World War
history. He is particularly scathing in his criticisms of Gorodetsky's work,
especially "The Icebreaker Myth."
Some Criticisms
Suvorov writes caustically,
sarcastically, and with great bitterness. But if he is essentially correct, as
this reviewer believes, he -- and we -- have a perfect right to be bitter for
having been misled and misinformed for decades.
Although Suvorov deserves our gratitude
for his important dissection of historical legend, his work is not without
defects. For one thing, his praise of the achievements of the Soviet military
industrial complex, and the quality of Soviet weaponry and military equipment,
is exaggerated, perhaps even panegyric. He fails to acknowledge the Western
origins of much of Soviet weaponry and hardware. Soviet engineers developed a
knack for successfully modifying, simplifying and, often, improving, Western
models and designs. For example, the rugged diesel engine used in Soviet tanks
was based on a German BMW aircraft diesel.
One criticism that cannot in fairness be
made of Suvorov is a lack of patriotism. Mindful that the first victims of
Communism were the Russians, he rightly draws a sharp distinction between the
Russian people and the Communist regime that ruled them. He writes not only with
the skill of an able historian, but with reverence for the millions of Russians
whose lives were wasted in the insane plans of Lenin and Stalin for "world
revolution."
About the author:
Daniel W. Michaels is a Columbia
University graduate (Phi Beta Kappa, 1954), a Fulbright exchange student to
Germany (1957), and recently retired from the US Department of Defense after 40
years of service.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v17/v17n4p30_Michaels.html
Source: The Journal for
Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)
Date: July/August 1998
Book Review
Examining Stalin's 1941 Plan to Attack Germany
-
Unternehmen
Barbarossa und der russische Historikerstreit ("Operation Barbarossa and
the Russian Historians' Dispute"), by Wolfgang Strauss. Munich: Herbig,
1998. Hardcover. 199 pages. Illustrations. Source references. Bibliography.
Index.
Reviewed by Daniel W. Michaels
No two peoples suffered more during the
Second World War than the Russians and the Germans. In the carnage of that great
global conflict, nothing matched the massive destruction of life and property
wrought on the Eastern front by Russian and German forces fanatically driven by
irreconcilable ideologies.
Now, more than 50 years after the
end of the "clash of the titans," free Russian and German historians are
collaborating to ascertain the historical decisions and actions that led to that
bloodiest of all conflicts. Wolfgang Strauss, a respected German Slavicist and
political analyst, explains this clarifying historical process in "Operation
Barbarossa and the Russian Historians' Dispute," his most recent work.[note
1] He examines here the research of revisionist
scholars in Russia and Germany on Stalin's role in igniting the German-Russian
conflict and his efforts to expand the Soviet empire across Europe. Perhaps most
importantly, he also shows how a shared understanding of the war is contributing
to reconciliation between these two great European peoples.
Strauss affirms the view of German
historian Ernst Nolte that Hitler's militant anti-Communism was an
understandable reaction to the looming Soviet threat to Europe and humanity. Put
another way, the militancy of the "fascist" movements that arose in Germany,
Spain, Italy and other European countries in the 1920s and 1930s was, in
essence, a response to the undisguised Bolshevik goal of dominating Europe.[note
2] This view, Strauss contends, has now largely
been embraced by Russian revisionists and the French historian François Furet.[note
3] It is basically irrelevant whether one
regards the war that broke out in June 1941 between Germany and Soviet Russia as
a war of aggression, a preventive war or a counterattack. For each side, Nolte
and others contend, this was a life or death struggle to decide which world view
and way of life would prevail in Europe -- atheistic, internationalist Communism
or the bourgeois Christian civilization of the West.
The Black Book
In no way does Strauss dismiss or
whitewash Hitler's brutal excesses. He also holds that Hitler's racist concept
of the inferiority of the Slavic peoples and his attempt to colonize their lands
was not only wrong but doomed his military campaign, and ultimately the Third
Reich, to failure. At the same time, Strauss stresses the monumental brutality
of Soviet and international Communism. In this regard he cites The Black Book of
Communism: Crimes, Terror and Repression, a recent 860-page work by French
scholar Stéphane Courtois and others.[note
4]
As Courtois stresses, many American and
European scholars have upheld a morally peculiar view of history that fervently
condemns National Socialist Germany while maintaining a meretriciously
non-judgmental "objectivity" toward Soviet Russia. But there is no hierarchy of
death and suffering. As Courtois writes: "The death of a Ukrainian peasant
child, deliberately exposed to starvation by the Stalinist regime, is just as
important as the starvation of a child in the Warsaw Ghetto."
As Strauss relates, Courtois finds
that 1) some 100 million human beings lost their lives as a result of Communist
policies in the Soviet Union, Red China and other Communist states 2) The
Communists made mass criminality an integral part of their governmental system;
3) Terror was part of the Soviet regime from the outset, beginning with Lenin;
4) Class and ethnic genocide, begun by Lenin and systematized by Stalin,
preceded Hitler's dictatorship by years; 5) Stalin was unquestionably a greater
criminal than Hitler; and 6) Stalin's joint, if not primary, responsibility for
the outbreak of Russo-German War is undeniable.[note
5]
It is often forgotten that the
Russian people were the first victims of Communism. Citing evidence from
British, Russian and other sources, Strauss shows that those who imposed
Communist despotism on the Russians were primarily non-Russian and non-Christian
aliens -- above all, Jews.[note 6]
Their goal was nothing short of eradicating Christianity and European
civilization, at whatever the human cost. Many Russians place the primary
responsibility for the crimes of Communism, particularly in the first ten years
of Soviet rule, on the Bolshevik party's non-Russian elements. For example,
Strauss notes, the Russian press has referred to the execution of Tsar Nicholas
II and his entire family as a "Jewish ritualistic murder."[note
7] In a similar context, Strauss cites from
Solzhenitsyn the names of the ruthless Soviet secret police (NKVD) chiefs -- all
of them Jews -- who put tens of thousands of slave laborers to death under
appallingly inhumane conditions in building the White Sea Canal.[note
8]
One should not, however, get the
impression that Slavs were the exclusive victims of Stalin's terror, or that the
murderers were all non-Russians.[note
9] During the Great Purge of 1937-39, Strauss
points out, Stalin executed many Jews who had played a prominent role in the
early Soviet regime. In 1940 Stalin succeeded in killing his greatest rival, Lev
Trotsky (Bronstein), who had once been the second most powerful figure in the
Soviet state. And when Stalin installed the Russian Nikolai Yezhov as head of
the NKVD, replacing the Jewish Genrikh Yagoda, thousands of Yagoda's followers
and their families, mostly Jews, were murdered or committed suicide.
Pioneering Russian Revisionists
One of the earliest Russian
revisionists of World War II history was Pyotr Grigorenko, a Soviet Army Major
General and highly decorated war veteran who taught at the Frunze Military
Academy. Already in the early 1960s, during the Khrushchev era, he was a
"dissident," publicly supporting civil rights for oppressed ethnic minorities.
(Authorities committed him to a mental asylum.) In 1967, Strauss relates, he was
the first leading Soviet figure to advance the revisionist arguments, which
became well known during the 1980s and 1990s, on Stalin's preparations for
aggressive war against Germany. In an article submitted to a major Soviet
journal (but rejected, and later published abroad), Grigorenko pointed out that
Soviet military forces vastly outnumbered German forces in 1941. Just prior to
the German attack on June 22, 1941, more than half of the Soviet forces were in
the area near and west of Bialystok, that is, in an area deep in Polish occupied
territory. "This deployment could only be justified" wrote Grigorenko, "if these
troops were deploying for a surprise offensive. In the event of an enemy attack
these troops would soon be encircled."[note
10]
The best known Russian historian
to advance revisionist arguments on Stalin's preparations for a first-strike
against Germany has been Viktor Suvorov (pen name of Vladimir Rezun). Strauss
recapitulates his main arguments (which have been treated in detail in the pages
of this Journal).[note
11]
Strauss examines three significant
speeches by Stalin (which have also been dealt with by Suvorov, as well as in
the pages of this Journal):[note
12] 1. In his address of August 19, 1939,
shortly before the outbreak of war, Stalin explained why a temporary alliance
with Germany was more beneficial to Soviet interests than an alliance with
Britain and France. 2. In his speech of May 5, 1941, Stalin explained to
graduate officers of military academies that the impending war would be fought
offensively by Soviet forces, and that it would nonetheless be a just war
because it would advance world socialism. 3. In the speech of November 6, 1941,
some four months after the outbreak of the "Barbarossa" campaign, Stalin
stressed the importance of killing Germans. (This speech helped to "inspire" the
Soviet Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg to make his notorious contribution to the
war effort in the form of murderously anti-German propaganda.)
Recent Russian Revisionist
Historiography
A radical revision of World War II
history, Strauss contends, became possible only after the collapse of the
multinational Soviet Union (1991), when some 14 million previously classified
documents dealing with all aspects of Soviet rule were finally open to free
examination. This book's greatest contribution may well be to highlight for
non-Russians the research of Russian revisionists. Strauss is very familiar with
this important work, which has been all but entirely ignored in the United
States. The most important publications cited by Strauss in this regard are two
Russian anthologies, both issued in 1995: "Did Stalin Make Preparations for an
Offensive War Against Hitler?," and "September 1, 1939-May 9, 1945: 50th
Anniversary of the Defeat of Fascist Germany."[note
13] The first of these contains articles by
revisionist scholars as well as by critics of revisionism. (The "Russian
historians' dispute" referred to in the subtitle of Strauss' book echoes the
"German historians' dispute" of the 1980s, in which Ernst Nolte played a major
role.)
As Strauss notes, the most prominent
critic of the revisionist view of Suvorov and others has been Israeli historian
Gabriel Gorodetsky, who teaches at Tel Aviv University. (Strauss suggests that
he is an long-time apologist for Stalin.) Gorodetsky is the author of a 1995
Russian-language anti-Suvorov work, "The 'Icebreaker' Myth," and a detailed 1999
study, Grand Illusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia.
In his discussion of "Did Stalin Make
Preparations for an Offensive War Against Hitler," Strauss writes (pages 42-44):
Even though revisionists as well as the
critics of revisionism have their say in this book, the end result is the
same. The anti-Fascist attempts to justify and legitimize Stalin's war
policy from 1939 do not hold up. The view that the Second World War was "a
crime attributable solely to National Socialist Germany" can no longer be
sustained. The historical truth as seen by Russian revisionists is
documented in this collection of articles published by Bordyugov and
Nevezhin as well as by the renowned war historian Mikhail Melitiukhov,
academic associate of the All-Russian Research Institute for Documentation
and Archives.
This most recent compendium of
Russian revisionist writings deepens our understanding of Stalin's
preparations for a military first-strike against Germany in the summer of
1941. The strategic deployment plan, approved by Stalin at a conference on
May 15, 1941, with General Staff chief Georgi Zhukov and Defense Commissar
Semen Timoshenko, called for a Blitzkrieg:
Tank divisions and mechanized corps
were to launch their attack from the Brest and Lviv [Lemberg] tier
accompanied by destructive air strikes. The objective was to conquer East
Prussia, Poland, Silesia and the [Czech] Protectorate, and thereby cut
Germany off from the Balkans and the Romanian oil fields. Lublin, Warsaw,
Kattowice, Cracow, Breslau [Wroclaw] and Prague were targets to be attacked.
A second attack thrust was to be
directed at Romania, with the capture of Bucharest. The successful
accomplishment of the immediate aims, namely, to destroy the mass of the
German Army east of the Vistula, Narev and Oder rivers, was the necessary
prerequisite for the fulfillment of the main objective, which was to defeat
Germany in a quick campaign. The main contingents of the German armed forces
were to be encircled and destroyed by tank armies in bold rapid advances.
Three recurrent terms in the
mobilization plan of May 15 confirm the aggressive character of Stalin's
plan. "A sudden strike" (vnyyzapni udar), "forward deployment" (razvertyvaniye),
and "offensive war" (nastupatel'naya voyna). Of the 303 [Soviet] divisions
assembled on the western front, 172 were assigned to the first wave of
attack. One month was allotted for the total deployment -- the period from
June 15 to July 15. Mikhail Melitiukhov: "On this basis it appears that the
war against Germany would have to have begun in July."
This anthology also devotes much
attention to analyzing Stalin's speech of May 5, 1941, delivered to
graduates of Soviet military academies. In this speech Stalin justified his
change of foreign policy in connection with the now decided-upon attack
against Germany. From the Communist point of view even a Soviet war of
aggression is a "just war" because it serves to expand the "territory of the
socialist world" and "to destroy the capitalist world." Most important in
this May 5 speech was Stalin's efforts to dispel the "myth of the invincible
Wehrmacht." The Red Army was strong enough to smash any enemy, even the
"seemingly invincible Wehrmacht."
Strauss lists (pages 102-105) the major
findings and conclusions of Russian revisionists, derived mostly from the two
major works cited above:
- Stalin wanted a general European
war of exhaustion in which the USSR would intervene at the politically and
militarily most expedient moment. Stalin's main intention is seen in his
speech to the Politburo of August 19, 1939.
- To ignite this, Stalin used the
[August 1939] Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, which: a) provoked Hitler's
attack against Poland, and b) evoked the declarations of war [against
Germany] by Britain and France.
- In the event Germany was defeated
quickly [by Britain and France], Stalin planned to "Sovietize" Germany and
establish a "Communist government" there, but with the danger that the
victorious capitalist powers would never permit a Communist Germany.
- In the event France was defeated
quickly [by Germany], Stalin planned the "Sovietization" of France. "A
Communist revolution would seem inevitable, and we could take advantage of
this for our own purposes by rushing to aid France and making her our ally.
As a result of this, all the nations under the 'protection' of a victorious
Germany would become our allies."
- From the outset Stalin reckoned on
a war with Germany, and the [Soviet] conquest of Germany. To this end,
Stalin concentrated on the western border of the USSR operational offensive
forces, which were five- to six-times stronger than the Wehrmacht with
respect to tanks, aircraft and artillery.
- With respect to a war of
aggression, on May 15, 1941, the Red Army's Main Political Directorate
instructed troop commanders that every war the USSR engaged in, whether
defensive or offensive, would have the character of a "just war."
- Troop contingents were to be
brought up to full strength in all the western military districts; airfields
and supply bases to support a forward-strategy were to be built directly
behind the border; an attack force of 60 divisions was to be set up in the
Ukraine and mountain divisions and a parachute corps were to be established
for attack operations.
- The 16th, 19th, 21st, 22nd and 25th
Soviet Armies were transferred from the interior to the western border, and
deployed at take-off points for the planned offensive.
- In his speech of May 5, 1941, to
graduate officers of the academies, Stalin said that war with Germany was
inevitable, and characterized it as a war not only of a defensive nature but
rather of an offensive nature.
- Stalin intended to attack in July
1941, although Russian historians disagree about the precise date. Suvorov
cites July 6, [Valeri] Danilov [a retired Soviet Colonel] gives July 2,
while Melitiukhov writes: "The Red Army could not have carried out an attack
before July 15."
Hitler's Proclamation
In an appendix of documents, Strauss
includes portions of Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa" directive of December 18,
1940. Also here, in facsimile, is a German press announcement of June 22, 1941,
that gives Hitler's reasons for Germany's attack against the Soviet Union:
This morning the Führer, through Reich
Minister Dr. Goebbels, issued a proclamation to the German people in which
he explains that after months-long silence he can finally speak openly to
the German people about the dangerous machinations of the Jewish-Bolshevik
rulers in Soviet Russia. After the German-Russian Friendship Treaty in the
Autumn of 1939, he hoped for an easing of tensions with Russia. This hope,
however, was crushed by Soviet Russia's extortionist demands against both
Finland and the Baltic states as well as against Romania.
After the victory in Poland the
Western powers rejected the Führer's proposal for an understanding because
they were hoping that Soviet Russia would attack Germany. Since the Spring
of 1940 Soviet troops have been deploying in ever increasing numbers along
the German border, so that since August 1940 strong German forces have been
tied down in the East, making any major German effort in the West
impossible.
During his [November 1940] visit to
Berlin, [Soviet foreign minister] Molotov posed questions regarding Romania,
Finland, Bulgaria and the Dardanelles that clearly revealed that Soviet
Russia intended to create trouble in eastern Europe. To be sure, the
Bolshevik coup attempt against the [Romanian] government of Antonescu
failed, but, with the help of the Anglo-Saxon powers [Britain and the United
States], their putsch in Yugoslavia succeeded. Serbian air force officers
flew to Russia and were immediately incorporated in the Army there.
With these machinations Moscow
has not just broken the so-called German-Russian Friendship Treaty, it has
betrayed it. In his proclamation the Führer stressed that further silence on
his part would be a crime not only against Germany, but against Europe as
well. On the border now stand 160 Russian divisions,[note
14] which have repeatedly violated that
frontier. On June 17-18 Soviet patrols were forced back across the border
only after a lengthy exchange of fire. Meanwhile, to protect Europe and
defend against further Russian provocations, the greatest build-up of forces
ever has been assembled against Soviet Russia. German troops stand from the
Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, allied in the north with Finnish troops and
along the Bessarabian border with Romanian forces.
The Führer concluded his
proclamation with the following sentences: "I have therefore decided to once
again lay the fate and the future of the German Reich and of our people in
the hands of our soldiers. May the Lord God help us especially in this
struggle!"
Coming to Terms With the Past
Even though more and more independent
Russian, German and other European historians support the revisionist arguments
of Suvorov (and others), it still seems impossible, especially in Germany, to
reapportion historical responsibility from Hitler to Stalin. In this regard,
Strauss recalls (pages 45-46) a discussion in May 1993 at the Military History
Research Office in Freiburg involving German historian Dr. Joachim Hoffmann,
decades-long associate of the Research Office, and Russian historian Viktor
Suvorov. Hoffman told of conversations on the "preventive war" issue he has had
with prominent Germans, including President Richard von Weizsäcker, the
influential journalist Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, and political figures Egon Bahr
and Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel. In every case he was told that even if Suvorov
is correct, and Hitler's attack indeed preceded Stalin's by weeks, this must not
be acknowledged publicly because it would exonerate Hitler. This is typical,
says Hoffmann, of the immoral attitude that prevails in Germany. In their
egotism, he adds, these Germans do not realize that they are, in effect,
demanding that Russians accept the propaganda lies of the Stalin era.
Strauss contrasts the very
different attitudes of Germans and Russians toward 20th century history, and the
role of historical revisionism. Whereas Germans are imbued with a national
masochistic guilt complex about their collectively "evil" past, which was
instilled during the postwar occupation as part of Allied "reeducation"
campaign, and reinforced ever since in their media and by "their" political
leaders, Russians are much more free and open about their Communist past,
largely because they have not been occupied by foreign conquerers, and their
media and educational system has not come under the control of outsiders.[note
15] Although die-hard Communists try to uphold
the historiography of the Soviet era, most Russians want to know the truth about
their past. After all, Strauss points out, one out of every two Russian families
suffered under the Stalinist tyranny. For the time being, anyway, nothing is
taboo in Russia, including the role of Jews in the Communist movement. (By
contrast, Germans are forbidden by law to say anything derogatory about the
political activities of Jews in the first half of the 20th century.)
The term "genocide" is used to
refer particularly to the World War II treatment of Europe's Jews. Without in
any way minimizing the sufferings of innocent Jews caught up in that maelstrom,
one should not forget that Stalin's Soviet regime inflicted a much more ruthless
and widespread genocide against the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. It is
estimated that in the Soviet Union about 20 million people, the vast majority of
them Slavs, lost their lives as a result of Soviet policies, either executed or
otherwise perished in the Gulag prison network or as victims of imposed famine,
and so forth. Millions of Germans were also victims of genocide. It is estimated
that some four million Germans were killed or otherwise perished during the
1944-1948 period, victims of Allied-imposed "ethnic cleansing," starvation,
slave labor in the USSR, and in inhumane POW camps administered by the
victorious Allies.[note
16]
In promoting greater understanding of
the calamitous German-Russian clash of 1941-1945, German and Russian revisionist
scholars foster reconciliation between these two peoples. Strauss cites recent
developments that attest to this process. In Volgograd, victors and vanquished
have joined to erect a monument dedicated to all the victims of the Battle of
Stalingrad. Its inscription, written in Russian and German, reads: "This
monument commemorates the suffering of the soldiers and civilians who fell here.
We ask that those who died here and in captivity will rest in eternal peace in
Russian soil." On the outskirts of St. Petersburg a German soldiers' cemetery
and memorial was recently dedicated. Across Russia today, it is not unusual for
Russian women to tend the graves of German soldiers. (Because the Soviet
government did very little to help identify and provide decent burials for their
war dead, few Russian women have had any idea where their own sons, brothers,
and husbands fell.)
In the book's epilogue, Strauss
describes the fervent indignation and rage of Russians over the criminal
capitalism that has taken hold in their country. The inequities between the
nouveau riches and the mass of Russian working class people are now greater than
under Soviet rule. Many Russian revisionists see an intrinsic resemblance and
affinity between capitalism and Communism. Given that many former Soviet
officials still hold office or otherwise wield power in the "new Russia,"
everyone readily sees how easy it has been for members of the old Soviet elite
-- the Nomenklatura -- to reemerge in Russia's predatory capitalism as
racketeers, gangsters, money speculators, bank frauders, extortionists and
mafiosi. On the ruins of the Soviet system, writes Strauss, has emerged a new
dictatorship of pitilessness, corruption, criminality, social division, poverty
and despair. Resentment against the "reformist" policies advocated by the United
States is widespread.
In this regard Strauss cites the
views of Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, who asserts that if this social
pathology endures in Russia, then Karl Marx's analysis will be proven correct,
at least in part. While Marx was wrong about the promised virtues of Communism,
writes Goytisolo, events seem to confirm his critique of capitalism, especially
of unrestrained monetarism that knows only one value, namely, maximum profits
regardless of human cost.[note
17]
'Strong and Free'
Whether they call themselves "Reformers"
(Westernizers), Communists or nationalists ("Eurasians"), Russians today, writes
Strauss, overwhelmingly reject all forms of internationalism, whether Communist
or capitalist. They want a Russia that is strong and free.
Toward this goal, many look to
geopolitics, an outlook built on the Eurasian "heartland" theory expounded by
20th-century British geographer Halford Mackinder and promoted in Third Reich
Germany by Karl Haushofer. (According to this theory, Russia has the potential
for great power and prosperity because it is the core of the vast, resource-rich
Eurasian heartland.) The leading exponent in Russia today of this view is
Alexander Dugin, whose book, "The Basics of Geopolitics: Russia's Geopolitical
Future," has been influential with both old Communists and new nationalists in a
grouping sometimes referred to as the "national Bolshevik alliance," and whose
adherents are known as "Eurasianists." Dugin is a close associate of Gennady
Zyuganov, head of the country's largest political party, the Russian Communist
Party (which, in spite of its name, is much more nationalist than Marxist).
Zyuganov himself is the author of a recent book, "The Geography of Victory: The
Bases of Russian Geopolitics."
Russia's parliament, the Duma, has
established a Committee of Geopolitical Affairs, chaired by Alexey Mitrofanov, a
member of Vladimir Zhirinovksy's Liberal Democratic Party. (Zhirinovsky proposes
the formation of a Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo axis, and has been quoted as saying:
"Today, the United States of America is the major enemy of our country. All our
actions and dealings with America from now on should be undertaken with this in
mind.")
Notes
- Strauss, born in 1931, was arrested
for anti-Communist activities as an Oberschuler (secondary school student)
in East Germany (DDR) and imprisoned, 1950-1956. He is the author of several
other notable books on Russia, including Russland wird leben: vom roten
Stern zur Zarenfahne (1992), Drei Tage, die die Welt erschutterten (1992),
Burgerrechtler in der UdSSR (1979), and Von der Wiedergeburt slawophiler
Ideen in Russland (1977). He is also a frequent contributor to scholarly
journals. He currently lives in Bavaria, where he works as a Slavic affairs
specialist.
- See: Ernst Nolte, Der Europäische
Bürgerkrieg 1917-1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Munich: 1997
[5th ed.]). Nolte has strongly suggested that Hitler's wartime treatment of
the Jews might legitimately be regarded as a defensive response by Hitler to
the threat of Bolshevik mass murder of the Germans. In a 1980 lecture he
said: "It is hard to deny that Hitler had good reason to be convinced of his
enemies' determination to annihilate long before the first information about
the events in Auschwitz became public." See also the interview with Nolte in
the Jan.-Feb. 1994 Journal (Vol. 14, No. 1), pp. 15-22, and "Changing
Perspectives on History in Germany: A Prestigious Award for Nolte: Portent
of Greater Historical Objectivity?," July-August 2000 Journal, pp. 29-32.
- François Furet and Ernst Nolte,
Feindliche Nähe: Kommunismus und Faschismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein
Briefwechsel (Munich: 1998).
- The Black Book of Communism:
Crimes, Terror, Repression, by Stéphane Courtois and others (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999). Original edition: Le livre noir du
communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression (Paris: 1997). Earlier works by
Courtois include Histoire du parti communiste français (1995), L'etat du
monde en 1945 (1994), Rigueur et passion (1994), 50 ans d'une passion
français (1991), and Qui savait quoi? (1987).
- Courtois has also written: "I am
fighting for a reevaluation of Stalin. He was to be sure the greatest
criminal of the century. But at the same time he was the greatest politician
-- the most competent, the most professional. He was the one who understood
most perfectly how to put his resources at the service of his goals."
- Russian nationalists are fully
aware, just as were the anti-Bolshevik "White Russians," that the leaders of
Russia's Marxist movement -- Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike -- were
predominantly not Russian at all. As evidence of the alien character of the
Bolshevik revolution and of the early Soviet regime, Russian nationalists
(along with many others) often cite The Last Days of the Romanovs, a work by
British writer Robert Wilton (and now translated into Russian). In an
appendix to the 1993 IHR edition of this work (pp. 184-190), Wilton also
notes: "According to data furnished by the Soviet press, out of important
functionaries of the Bolshevik state... in 1918-1919 there were: 17
Russians, two Ukrainians, eleven Armenians, 35 Letts [Latvians], 15 Germans,
one Hungarian, ten Georgians, three Poles, three Finns, one Czech, one
Karaim, and 457 Jews." See also: M. Weber, "The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik
Revolution and the Early Soviet Regime," Jan.-Feb. 1994 Journal, pp. 4-14.
- A special 1996 edition of the
Moscow newspaper Russkiy Vestnik lists the names of the executioners: Yankel
Yurovsky, Anselm Fischer, Istvan Kolman, A. Chorwat, Isidor Edelstein, Imre
Magy [?], Victor Grinfeld, Andreas Wergasi and S. Farkash. The article
concludes: "All of this attests to the non-Russian origin of the murderers."
- According to Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, the six directors were Semyon Firin, Matvei Berman, Naftali
Frenkel, Lazar Kogan, Yakov Rappoport, Sergei Zhuk. The Head of the Military
Guards was Brodsky, the Canal Curator of the Central Executive Committee was
Solts, the GPU and NKVD heads were Yagoda, Pauker, Spiegelglas, Kaznelson,
Sakovskiy, Sorensen, Messing and Arshakuni. As the names indicate, all were
non-Russians. Stalin awarded most of these murderers the honorary title
"Hero of Labor." See: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, III-IV,
Book Two (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 79, 81, 82, 84, 94, etc.
- This generalization is mostly valid
for the first 20 years of Soviet rule. However, following the Great Purge
(1937-1939), and except for several years after World War II in East Europe
where Stalin used Jewish Communists to instal puppet regimes, the dictator
until his death actively opposed elements he referred to as cosmopolitans,
parasites, and so forth.
- Grigorenko originally submitted his
article to the Soviet journal Voprosy istorii KPSS, which (of course)
rejected it. It was published in 1969 by Possev, a Russian emigré publishing
house in Frankfurt am Main.
- Suvorov's first three books on
World War II have been reviewed in The Journal of Historical Review. The
first two, Icebreaker and "M Day," were reviewed in Nov.-Dec. 1997 Journal
(Vol. 16, No. 6), pp. 22-34. His third book, "The Last Republic," was
reviewed in the July-August 1998 Journal (Vol. 17, No. 4), pp. 30-37.
- See the review of Stalins Falle
("Stalin's Trap"), by Adolf von Thadden, in the May-June 1999 Journal, pp.
40-45.
- Gotovil li Stalin nastupatel'nuyu
voynu protiv Gitlera ("Did Stalin Make Preparations for an Offensive War
Against Hitler?," by Grigoriy Bordyugov and Vladimir Nevezhin (Moscow: AIRO
XX, 1995), and, 1 sentyabrya 1939-9 maya 1945: Pyatidesyatiletiye razgroma
fashistkoy Germanii v Kontekste Nachala Vtoroy Mirovoy Voyny ("September 1,
1939-May 9, 1945: the 50th Anniversary of the Defeat of Fascist Germany in
the Context of the Beginning of the War"), edited by I.V. Pavlova and V. L.
Doroshenko (Novosibirsk Memorial, 1995). The latter work was briefly cited
in the Nov.-Dec. 1997 Journal, pp. 32-34.
- The German High Command greatly
underestimated the number of Soviet divisions, as well as the quality and
quantity of Soviet tanks. Hitler and the Wehrmacht were to find not 160
divisions on their doorstep, but more than 300. See: David Irving, Hitler's
War (New York: Viking, 1977), pp. 205-206, 297. On the correlation of forces
in June 1941, see also Joachim Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945
(Munich, 1995), Chapter 1, and esp. pp. 31, 66.
- Ominously, however, the
"oligarchs," most of them Jewish, exercise considerable control over the
Russian media. See: Daniel W. Michaels, "Capitalism in the New Russia,"
May-June 1997 Journal, pp. 21-27, and, "A Jewish Appeal to Russia's Elite,"
Nov.-Dec. 1998 Journal, pp. 13-18.
- See: Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, The
German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1993), Alfred-M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans
From the East (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1989 [3rd rev. ed.]), James
Bacque, Other Losses (Prima, 1991), J. Bacque, Crimes and Mercies (Little,
Brown, 1997), Ralph Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies' Postwar War
Against the German People (IHR, 1992).
- Juan Goytisolo, La Saga de los Marx
(Barcelona: Mondadori, 1993). Although Goytisolo was undoubtedly one of
Spain's foremost 20th century novelists, both his political views and
private life were highly controversial. Expelled from Spain by Franco, he
lived most of his life in France.
About the author
Daniel W. Michaels is a Columbia
University graduate (Phi Beta Kappa, 1954), and a former Fulbright exchange
student to Germany (1957). He is retired from the US Department of Defense after
40 years of service.
Source: The Journal for
Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)
Date: November/December 2000
Revising the Twentieth Century's
'Perfect Storm'
Russian and German
Historians Debate Barbarossa and Its Aftermath
Daniel Michaels
- Grand Delusion: Stalin and the
German Invasion of Russia by Gabriel Gorodetsky. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999. 408 pages.
- Samoubiystvo (Suicide) by
Viktor Suvorov. Moscow: AST, 2000. 380 pages. Illustrations.
- Upushchennyy shans Stalina
(Stalin's Lost Opportunity) by Mikhail Meltiukhov. Moscow: Veche, 2000.
605 pages. Illustrations, maps.
- Stalin's War of Extermination,
1941-45: Planning, Realization, and Documentation by Joachim Hoffmann.
Capshaw, Ala.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2001. 415 pages.
Illustrations.
Revising the history of the Second World
War's crucial Russo-German campaign is very much a work in progress, nowhere
more so than in Russia and Germany. Ever since Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Rezun)
broke the ice a decade ago with his sensational Ledokol (published in English as
Icebreaker [reviewed in the Journal of Historical Review 16, no. 6 (Nov.-Dec.
1997)]), Russian historians have been reexamining the many myths, legends, and
fantasies associated with the outbreak of the death duel between Communism and
National Socialism. The role of Joseph Stalin, in particular, has aroused the
most heated controversy.
In Russia, the debate has involved two
major groups. The first asserts that the Soviet Union had no aggressive designs
against Germany or Europe and was unprepared for war, while the second maintains
that Stalin and the Red Army indeed had plans for a surprise attack against
Germany and Europe, but were beaten to the punch by Hitler.
Contending Factions
To the first group have belonged such
notables as the late Marshal Georgi Zhukov, journalist Lev Bezymenski (also
professor at the Academy of Military Sciences), General M. A. Gareyev, V. A.
Anfilov, and Yu. A. Gorkov. This group, in general, also contends that Stalin
had decapitated the Red Army by purging many high-ranking officers just before
the war; that he was too trusting of Hitler, wrongly believing that the Führer
would never deliberately initiate a two-front war; and that Stalin was the cause
of Communism's failure. These views are shared by many, regardless of political
leanings.
An Israeli, Gabriel Gorodetsky, much
ballyhooed in the English-speaking world, also fits in this company. Gorodetsky
is a colleague of Lev Bezymenski, as he was of the late General Dmitri
Volkogonov. Gorodetsky, Suvorov contends, has been granted unparalleled access
to selected archives of the Russian Foreign Ministry, the General Staff, the
NKVD, the GRU, and other records usually closed to researchers, above all
revisionists, who might probe too deeply. For this reason Suvorov suspects
Gorodetsky of being a conduit for information that the Russian government
chooses to have disseminated.
To the second group belong military
historians such as Viktor Suvorov, Mikhail Meltiukhov, V. A. Nevezhin, V. D.
Danilov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as several Germans (Joachim
Hoffmann, Wolfgang Strauss, Fritz Becker) and Austrians (Heinz Magenheimer,
Ernst Topitsch). (See review of Topitsch's Stalin's War in JHR 8, no. 2 [summer
1988]). They argue that Stalin trusted no one, least of all Hitler; that Stalin
had, together with Marshal Zhukov, devised his own plan for a surprise offensive
against Germany, with the ultimate goal of establishing Communism in Europe; and
that it was the USSR, not Germany, which was better prepared for war. Suvorov
has also argued that Stalin's purges actually improved the Red Army, by ridding
it of the heavy-handed political commissars, most of whom were Trotskyite thugs
despised by the people. As is well known, many of Trotsky's followers were his
fellow Jews, often foreign born rather than native to Russia.
The American historians Richard Raack
and R. H. S. Stolfi (see review in JHR 15, no. 6 [Nov.-Dec. 1995]) have joined
the debate, lending it a worldwide dimension. Professor Raack in particular has
reinforced the arguments of the Suvorov group, writing that "in fact the
discussion is now international ... the genie of truth is out of the bottle."
The first group has been taxed with
harboring Stalinist apologists for the old Soviet Establishment, the second of
seeking to justify Hitler's German invasion. Polemics aside, the
historiographical roots of the division are manifest in the reliance of the
first group on the Soviet political literature to substantiate its arguments, as
opposed to the second group's reliance on historical analysis based on military
science, studying and comparing troop deployments, weapons systems, and so on.
In the past few years, several major
books have appeared from representatives of both sides of the dispute.
Gorodetsky, supported in his research by many former Soviet Jews now residing in
Israel, has recently published Grand Delusion. Widely circulated in the West, it
has won the acclaim of most of its Anglo-American reviewers. The irrepressible
Suvorov, who resides in England, has published his fourth major book on the war,
entitled Samoubiystvo ("Suicide"), dealing with events immediately preceding the
outbreak of hostilities, while Meltiukhov, currently associated with the
All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Documentation and Archival Science,
has just published Upushchennyy shans Stalina ("Stalin's Lost Opportunity").
Regrettably, with the exception of Icebreaker, none of Suvorov's and
Meltiukhov's works are currently available in English, and they have only rarely
been reviewed or evaluated in the English-speaking world. Finally, an excellent
translation of Stalin's War of Extermination, by Joachim Hoffmann, historian at
Germany's Military History Research Office (MGFA), has now been made available
to English speakers. This book has gone through several editions in Germany and
is widely read there.
Suvorov's works enjoy the greatest sales
and circulation of serious Russian literature on the war. At first his opponents
(almost all professional historians) tried to ignore him. Later, when compelled
to recognize his work, they attempted to dismiss his theses as the product of a
fantast who had had no access to official documents whatsoever. Yet, working
solely from Soviet open source literature on the war, Suvorov deduced the Soviet
plan to invade Germany, predicting that in time official documents would be
found to substantiate his conclusions. With the collapse of the Soviet Union,
such documents have surfaced with increasing frequency, and in recent years
Suvorov has found a perfect partner in Meltiukhov, who, with his experience in
documentation and archival science and his easier access to Soviet-era records,
has provided documentation for Suvorov's theses.
Plan of attack
The Zhukov Plan of May 15, 1941,
discussed briefly in these pages last year (see JHR 19, no. 6 [Nov.-Dec. 2000]),
continues to be the focus of analysis and discussion. Recently, on the
fifty-ninth anniversary of the German attack, Vladimir Sergeyev described and
published excerpts from the Zhukov document, which was discovered in the
Archives of the President of the Russian Federation some years ago. For ultimate
security, the original twelve-page text had been handwritten by then Major
General, later Marshal, A. M. Vasilevski, and addressed to the chairman of the
USSR Council of Peoples Commissars, Joseph Stalin. The document, marked "Top
Secret! Of Great Importance! Stalin's Eyes Only! One Copy Only!," was authorized
and approved by People's Defense Minister S. K. Timoshenko and Zhukov, then
chief of the Red Army general staff.
A key passage in the war plan not
previously cited in these pages reads:
In order to prevent a surprise
German attack and to destroy the German Army, I consider it essential that
under no circumstances should the initiative for freedom of action be given
to the German High Command[. I consider it essential] to preempt enemy
deployment, to attack the German Army when it is still in the stage of
deployment and has not yet had time to organize his front and the
interaction between his service arms.[The word for "preempt" was underlined
twice in the original document. -- D. M.]
Thus did Zhukov propose to Stalin
precisely what the German Army would do to his forces a month later.
The Suvorov school and certain German
military analysts speculate that Stalin's failure to attack before the German
onslaught of June 22, 1941, was probably because his own forces had not yet
fully deployed for the offensive. Sergeyev, on the other hand, suggests that the
attack plan prepared by Zhukov was faulty.
Upon his return from the successful
blitzkrieg operation he had orchestrated in the battle of Khalkin-Gol in
Mongolia (August 1939), Marshal Zhukov was put in charge of the Kiev Special
Military District, where he commanded the Soviet Southwestern and Western
fronts. His plan of May 15, 1941, assigned these fronts the task of destroying
the Wehrmacht units before them, then advancing southwest across Poland to the
German border. This operation was intended to cut German forces off from the
Balkan theater of operations and from their Romanian and Hungarian allies,
including their vital oil fields.
Zhukov was unaware that the main
deployment of German forces was not on the Soviet left flank, but in Army Group
Center, further to the north. Thus, had Soviet forces attacked toward
Cracow-Lublin, as Zhukov's plan called for, Army Group Center could easily have
cut through the exposed right (northern) flank of the Soviet thrust, upset the
Soviet offensive, and then advanced along the Minsk-Smolensk line toward Moscow.
In that event, the Red Army would have found itself in an even worse situation
than after the outbreak of the actual German offensive on June 22. Zhukov
admitted as much later to military historian V. A. Anfilov: "In retrospect it is
good that he [Stalin] did not agree with us. Otherwise, our forces might have
suffered a catastrophe."
Stalin's Aims
In a more detailed study of the May 15
document, L. A. Bezymenski notes that the plan had even more ambitious goals.
After completion of the first stage of the offensive, Soviet forces were to turn
north and northwest to destroy the northern wing of the German front, thereby
occupying East Prussia and all of Poland. Meanwhile, to the north, the Red Army
would once again invade Finland. According to Bezymenski, Zhukov's bold
offensive plan had very probably been influenced by Stalin's speech of May 5 to
Soviet military academy graduates, in which the Soviet leader emphasized the
superiority of offensive over defensive military planning.
Soviet mobilization and deployment in
the period January-June 1941 took place in three stages:
- first stage, January-March, the
call-up of about a million reservists, industry ordered to step up
production of T-34 and KV tanks, first echelon troops brought up to
strength;
- second stage, April-June, second
echelon forces moved up to the western border, Far Eastern troops moved
west;
- third stage, June 1-June 22, Stalin
agrees to open mobilization and to advancing second echelon armies to the
front. All these operations were to be carried out in secrecy, without the
enemy taking note. Once mobilized and in position, the Soviet forces were to
launch a sudden, decisive offensive against Germany and her allies.
According to Meltiukhov, the correlation
of forces along the front from Ostroleka (Poland) to the Carpathians at the time
of the planned Zhukov offensive was as shown in the table below.
| |
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 groupe |