Exposing Stalin's Plan to Conquer Europe

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

• Poslednyaya Respublika ("The Last Republic"), by Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Rezun). Moscow: TKO ACT, 1996. 470 pages. Hardcover. Photographs.

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.

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Feindliche Nähe: Kommunismus und Faschismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein Briefwechsel (Munich: 1998).
4. 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).
5. 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."
6. 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.
7. 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."
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. See the review of Stalins Falle ("Stalin's Trap"), by Adolf von Thadden, in the May-June 1999 Journal, pp. 40-45.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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).
17. 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

• 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.

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