Chapter Eight
Of all the European states, Bolshevik Russia most obviously conceived of itself in ideological terms, and gave ideological explanations for everything it did. As such, the state set up by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 was a new and profoundly divisive element in world affairs. The regime called itself a dictatorship of the proletariat, dedicated at home to the building of socialism and abroad to the promotion of revolution.
In 1918–19, and even into 1920, the Bolsheviks believed that European revolution was imminent, and indeed necessary for their own salvation. They set out to hasten it: by propaganda; by organisation, through the Communist International (Comintern), founded in 1919; and, when the opportunity offered, by force. In 1920 the Bolshevik armies drove Polish forces out of the Ukraine and pursued them across the ethnic frontier of Poland in the hope of carrying revolution into Germany. The invasion failed, and the Red Army was driven back by the Poles after a decisive battle outside Warsaw; but the episode was alarming to European governments.
At the same time, and to their surprise, the Bolsheviks found that they had to conduct an orthodox foreign policy. Germany was still at war with Russia, and a peace had to be negotiated. Trotsky, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, attempted a new, revolutionary style of diplomacy, but came up against the rock-like opposition of the German high command, which insisted on dictating its own terms in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918). Later, the war with Poland also had to be brought to a negotiated end, by the Treaty of Riga in 1921. In 1920–21 treaties were signed with Turkey, Afghanistan, and the Baltic and Scandinavian states, with which some form of normal relations was found to be necessary. Thus Bolshevik foreign policy assumed a form which it was long to maintain: a dual relationship with the rest of the world, in which the Bolsheviks set out with one hand to subvert other governments, and with the other to develop normal relations with them.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world reacted to this new phenomenon of a revolutionary state. When the Bolsheviks took Russia out of the war against Germany, the response of the Allied powers was to try to restore an eastern front and to keep certain areas (e.g. the Caucasian oil-fields) out of German control. British, French, Japanese, American, and Canadian forces were despatched to various parts of the old Russian Empire. This intervention continued after the end of the war in Europe, and Allied troops supported anti-Bolshevik forces in their attempts to overthrow the revolutionary regime. This intervention was small in scale, half-hearted in spirit, and divided in purpose. The French hoped to restore the unity of the Russian Empire, while the British encouraged separatist movements. The Japanese wanted to impose their own control on Vladivostok and the Maritime Province, while the Americans tried to obstruct them. The whole operation came to a ragged and unsuccessful end between 1919 and 1922. Nonetheless, foreign intervention made a lasting impression on Bolshevik minds. The capitalist and imperialist powers had tried to strangle the revolutionary regime at birth, and the new state acquired a form of siege mentality.
Relations between the new regime in Russia and the rest of the world got off to a thoroughly bad start. In part this was due to circumstances; but it was also due to a deep ideological conflict. Bolshevik Russia and other states, especially the homes of advanced bourgeois capitalism, were opposed to one another because they represented opposite philosophies and ways of life. The Bolsheviks were as much opposed to the governments of the Netherlands or Switzerland, which posed no military threat, as to those of Britain or France, whose troops fought in Russia. An old Bolshevik declared in all seriousness in 1935 that ‘world revolution is our religion.’1 This hostility was reciprocated, and Bolshevik Russia was the outcast of Europe. This divide could be bridged for powerful reasons of realpolitik or economics; and the first country to build such a bridge was Germany, which in the 1920s developed open economic and clandestine military links with Russia. But the divide remained, and introduced into European affairs a source of suspicion, tension, and conflict unknown since the wars of the French Revolution.
Stalin and Stalinism
In 1922 the new state took the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, asserting its ideological claims in its very nomenclature. The relations between the USSR and the outside world, and the mixture of repulsion and attraction with which the Bolshevik regime was regarded, cannot be understood without some discussion of the nature of that regime.
During the 1920s, the USSR settled into a new shape. After the death of Lenin in January 1924 there was a prolonged struggle for power, in which Stalin emerged as the victor by December 1927. His great rival Trotsky was exiled in January 1929; and Stalin's fiftieth birthday on 21 December of the same year was marked by a new form of adulation — fulsome tributes in the press, floods of congratulatory telegrams, the display of countless pictures, the renaming of towns. The USSR not only had a new leader, but a new cult.
The century of the common man thus received another recruit. Mussolini was the son of a blacksmith; Hitler of a minor customs official; Stalin of a worker in a shoe factory. Each became dictator of his country — a career open to talent. Stalin probably wielded greater power than did Hitler; he certainly exercised it for longer. His name became synonymous with the whole character of his rule, so that we speak of Stalinism in the same way as we speak of Nazism or fascism. As with the other great dictators, there are paradoxes and puzzles about his character, notably the contrast between what is often described as a colourless personality and the scale and monstrosity of his deeds. Colourless he may have been; and it is often remarked that he made no profound contribution to communist theory. He did not need to. Stalin was a practical man, and his political ability left everyone standing. He outmanoeuvred his Bolshevik opponents in the late 1920s, and later destroyed them — even Trotsky, far away in Mexico. During the Second World War, he persuaded a series of foreign statesmen, none of them political simpletons, that he recognised, or even sympathised with, their points of view. He convinced Churchill that they were both realists, who could strike a bargain which would be kept; Roosevelt that he understood the language of international agreement; de Gaulle that he took him seriously as a world statesman.
It is frequently asked — though with no certainty of there being an answer — where the balance lay between Stalin's socialism and his realism. He is often referred to as a ‘Red Tsar’, but how far was he a tyrant who happened to speak the language of Marxism-Leninism, and how far a Marxist-Leninist who happened to take the form of a tyrant? Khrushchev, in the speech of February 1956 in which he denounced Stalin's cult of personality and some of his misdeeds, still concluded that Stalin believed that all his measures were necessary for the interests of the working class and the victory of socialism. Adam Ulam, in his biography of Stalin, also wrote that he was ‘a true believer: to his mind capitalism was doomed’; and its end would come through the military and industrial strength of the Soviet Union.2 Roy Medvedev, in his powerful indictment of Stalin from the point of view of a Soviet Marxist, repeatedly appealing to Lenin as the source of unquestionable truth, held the opposite view. Stalin's mind was formed in a Marxist mould; and he wrote and spoke the language of Marxism; but he was not truly a Marxist, because he lacked the basis of conviction and moral principle which lies in devotion to the happiness of all working people.3 The questions remain open. Was Stalin concerned with power for its own sake, or power to transform the Soviet Union into an efficient vehicle for the advancement of socialism? If Stalin wrote and spoke like a Marxist all his adult life, how far was it possible for him not to think like a Marxist, or at least to see the world through Marxist spectacles? With a man who lived so secretive a life, and rarely if ever let down his guard, it is difficult to tell; but Richard Overy's recent conclusions command respect. In Overy's view, Stalin took his Marxism seriously, and never wavered from ‘the central issue of creating a communist society.’4
The regime created by this grim and enigmatic man had four major characteristics: the concept of ‘socialism in one country’; the collectivisation of agriculture; rapid industrialisation; and repression. All were accompanied by the process, common to the great dictatorships of the 1930s, by which the leader was elevated into a sort of god. The singular aspect of the cult of Stalin was the degree to which he was worshipped outside the USSR, in countries where coercion could play little part and there was ample access to non-Stalinist sources of information. In France, for example, that home of the intellect and rational enquiry, Stalin's death in 1953 was still mourned as that of a hero and superman.
The concept and practice of socialism in one country, taken up by Stalin in 1925–26, recognised that there was likely to be a prolonged wait before revolution spread to the more advanced industrial countries. There would be an extended period of co-existence between the new socialist state and its capitalist opponents; and meanwhile the socialist society must be built. The collectivisation of agriculture, forced through with extraordinary rapidity and brutality between 1929 and 1934, was a crucial element in this process. The human cost was enormous — the death-toll certainly ran into millions; and the economic gain was doubtful — there was a great famine in 1932–33, and grain production in 1935 was only marginally above that of 1928, even on Soviet figures.5 But the political and psychological results were formidable: rural society was shaken to its foundations; the control of the state was forcibly imposed upon the peasant population; and the Soviet Union began to make its name abroad for large-scale economic planning and modernisation. Industrialisation ran alongside collectivisation, with greater economic success. The first Five-Year Plan (1928–32) was followed by two others. The statistics claiming their triumphant fulfilment took the form of percentage increases which cannot be checked; but certainly heavy industry (iron and steel) and fuel production (coal, oil, electricity) developed rapidly, and new industries, notably chemicals, were started from scratch. The Soviet Union became, with exceptional rapidity, a great industrial state. Not least in importance from the point of view of prestige, the process included a number of dramatic projects: the Dnieper dam, the White Sea Canal, the creation of a new city at Magnitogorsk in the Urals.
These changes were accompanied and enforced by a vast system of repression, directed against both individuals and whole categories of the population — kulaks, the intelligentsia, subject nationalities. The great empire of the camps, later made famous under the name of the Gulag Archipelago, grew in numbers in the 1930s. In 1935 there were 725,483 prisoners in the Gulag, and 240,259 in labour colonies. In 1938 these figures had risen to 996,367 and 885,203 respectively — a grand total of over 1.8 million.6
The most extraordinary manifestation of repression was the great wave of purges that swept the USSR between 1936 and 1938. The purges took several forms. The most spectacular were the public show trials, which have been well likened to great theatrical productions. In August 1936 eight major political figures, including the old Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev, along with some lesser figures and four junior officers of the NKVD, were put on trial in Moscow. All confessed abjectly to a variety of crimes — the murder of Kirov (a close colleague of Stalin and Communist Party boss in Leningrad, shot on 1 December 1934), conspiring with Trotsky to seize power, plotting to assassinate Stalin. Sentences of death were passed, and it was announced that they were carried out within twenty-four hours of the end of the trial. (The NKVD officers, though only there to make false confessions, were shot with the rest.) The second show trial was in January 1937, with the Deputy Commissar for Heavy Industry, Pyatakov, and sixteen others accused of the systematic wrecking of Soviet industry as part of a plot by Trotsky to restore capitalism in the USSR, with help from Germany and Japan. All were found guilty, but only thirteen condemned to death. Finally in March 1938 another ‘old Bolshevik’, Bukharin, was put on trial, along with twenty others (including Yagoda, former head of the NKVD). Eighteen were sentenced to death, three to prison.
The second great element was the purge of the army. On 11 June 1937 it was announced in Moscow that eight members of the Soviet high command, including Marshal Tukhachevsky, Deputy Commissar for Defence, had been charged with treason. They were tried, condemned to death and executed on the same day. On 12 June Pravda carried the terse summary: ‘for espionage and betraying their country: The firing squad.’7 This was followed by purges which continued into 1938, and in some cases beyond. The whole existing high command, a high proportion of senior officers, and some 35,000 junior officers, were purged.8 The operation was accomplished with astounding ease. While Hitler had to work hard, and exploit folly on the part of a senior officer, to remove two generals and put others on the retired list, Stalin simply swept away half the officer corps of the Red Army. When it came to dealing with the military men, the Führer came some lengths behind the Red Tsar.
These operations were only the tip of the iceberg. In less spectacular fashion, the purge fell heavily on the Communist Party. The NKVD itself was purged, and two of its heads (Yagoda and Yezhov) fell victims. In the Ukraine in 1937 and 1938 the whole government and party were purged twice over. Foreign communists in Moscow were killed; and the NKVD stretched its arm abroad, notably to Spain during the Civil War, and to France. Many were swept in for no particular reason. Estimates of total casualties vary from a low figure of 400,000–500,000 executions and 4–5 million arrests, 1936–39, to figures of about 1 million executions and 7 million arrests. Another figure estimates a total of 10 million deaths, counting 1 million executions and about 1 million deaths per year in the camps for nine years.9
The motives behind the great purges remain obscure. Stalin may have been seeking the security of total control over his country, with no vestige of independent initiative or organisation surviving. It may be that he genuinely feared political opposition from the army, or the resumption of the old contacts with the German General Staff. Whatever the motives, the effects of the purges on the Soviet position in world affairs were far-reaching. For a period of three years, and perhaps longer, the Soviet Union was so racked internally, and its military organisation so disrupted, that it was gravely weakened as a power. It could contemplate war only in the case of absolute necessity, or in very favourable circumstances against a weak opponent.
The Soviet Union and its foreign supporters: the ‘great light in the east'
Stalinism was a regime of terror, which by 1939 far outstripped either Nazism or fascism by the simple measurement of casualties caused among the people of its own country. At that date, in sheer destructive capacity, Stalin made Hitler look a mere beginner. Moreover, the main features of Stalinism were essentially inward-looking. The Soviet Union was a fortress of socialism in one country, fighting its own internal battles and building its own industrial base.
But despite these characteristics, the Soviet regime attracted powerful support outside its own frontiers. This sprang from faith: the conviction that the Soviet Union was the Workers' Fatherland, and the home of the only successful proletarian revolution so far achieved. Many believed that communism was the best (or even the only) way forward for mankind, and during the 1930s Stalin became by common consent the leading communist. More, he was a father-figure, at once stern and reassuring. This faith was fostered and directed by the disciplined organisation of the Communist International (Comintern). This body was set up in Moscow in 1919, and its Second Congress in 1920 laid down the Twenty-one Conditions which had to be accepted by all parties affiliated to it. A powerful form of central control was created; and the overriding duty of all communist parties was declared to be to protect existing socialist states — which meant in practice the Soviet Union, because no others emerged.
Through this combination of faith and organisation there emerged communist parties which followed whatever line of policy was laid down in Moscow, with effects which were felt across Europe and played no small part in the coming of the Second World War. In the 1920s and 1930s Comintern proclaimed that the main enemies of communism were the social democratic parties, often denounced as ‘social fascists’. In Germany, the communists pursued a tactical co-operation with the Nazis against the social democrats, and so indirectly helped Hitler come to power. Then in 1935 the Comintern line was changed to the formation of a Popular Front against fascism, and the social democrats became allies. In France, the Communist Party, after years of denouncing militarism and conscription, supported the two-year conscription law of 1935 after the signature of the Franco-Soviet Pact. Later, the policy of the Popular Front and anti-fascism was itself overthrown after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. This reversal was a severe trial for many communists, but after a period of confusion and heart-searching, discipline usually prevailed, and the parties (though not all their members) fell into line behind the new policy.
Stalin: benevolent father-figure for communists and fellow-travellers.
Source: Bettman/Corbis
The obedience that carried the communist parties through these drastic changes was reinforced, and the attraction of communism to outsiders was strengthened, by many of the circumstances of the 1930s. The economic depression, with its attendant mass unemployment, seemed to demonstrate that capitalism was not only evil but also a failure. Over against the dire spectacle of capitalism in disarray stood the shining contrast of the Soviet Union, with its planned economy and a society where all worked together for the common good. Moreover, it appeared in the late 1930s that only the Soviet Union and the communists were really determined to oppose fascism. The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) threw this aspect of communist virtue into particular prominence, and increased the attraction of communism for all those who were inspired by the struggle of the Spanish Republicans against what appeared to be the massed forces of fascism. Much the same was true with regard to general British and French policies towards Germany and Italy. If Chamberlain, Daladier and appeasement were the best that the parliamentary democracies could offer, then many turned (whether in hope or despair) to Stalin.
The Soviet Union thus drew on a substantial body of support outside its own borders. The hard core was made up of committed communists, disciplined and determined, willing if need be to go underground, to betray their own countries, and even to die for the cause. Outside that core were the fellow-travellers and sympathisers, vitally important for propaganda purposes, because they seemed to offer independent endorsement of the Soviet regime. The prestige — and the gullibility — of western intellectuals were considerable assets to Stalin in his dealings with the outside world.
All this had far-reaching effects on international affairs. The Soviet government could rely on an organised body of support in every other European country to promote its interests. (It could also rely on certain well-placed individuals to provide valuable intelligence.) Equally, every other European government knew that a group of its own citizens owed its primary allegiance to a foreign state, and was working to overthrow the existing social and political order. Relations with the Soviet Union were thus bound to be difficult in themselves, and a contentious issue in domestic politics. Even when calculations of power politics made it expedient to form an alliance with the USSR (for example, the Franco-Soviet treaty of 1935), it could only be an uneasy partnership. Indeed, there were bound to be obstacles to any close relations with the Soviets. It was natural for European states, and especially the great imperial powers, Britain and France, to regard Soviet communism as their sworn enemy — for so it was. From this fact of life some took the short step to the belief that the enemies of communism were your friends, and that fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were useful bulwarks against Soviet influence. Once this notion took root, it was hard to accept that the Nazi regime was itself a threat, nearer and more dangerous than the Soviet Union. Even when this threat was recognised, the background of hostility to the Soviets could not be instantly dispelled or ignored, but remained to hamper diplomacy — as was shown in the British and French negotiations for a Soviet alliance in the summer of 1939.
Ideological conflicts, and the presence of committed adherents of the Soviet system in all countries, therefore affected the foreign policies of almost every European state. How far did ideology affect the foreign policy of the Soviet Union itself?
Ideology and Soviet foreign policy
Every state and regime is subject to the influences of geography and history. The Soviet Union, with all its Marxist-Leninist ideology and its revolutionary claims, occupied roughly the same geographical area as the old Tsarist Russia, and perforce inherited its concerns and constraints. The Dardanelles and Bosporus still linked the Black Sea with the Mediterranean; and the USSR took a leading part in negotiating the Montreux Convention on the straits (1936), which gave her a generally favourable position, especially on the question of the passage of warships through the straits. The Soviet Union still sprawled across two continents, with one extremity in Europe and the other on the Pacific; and when Stalin met Anthony Eden in March 1935 he showed his visitor a map, with Germany on one side, Japan on the other, and the USSR in between.
A purely ideological foreign policy was out of the question for the USSR — any illusions on that score were shed by the time the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in March 1918. Much of Soviet foreign policy, especially under Stalin, was hard-headed and cautious in the extreme, going for material gain if it was available, and bargaining with great toughness. At another meeting between Stalin and Eden, in December 1941, Stalin remarked that a declaration of principle was algebra, but a treaty was arithmetic — and he preferred arithmetic. This does not mean that ideology was abandoned, or had no influence, especially on attitudes to the world outside the Soviet Union; for the question is above all one of the spectacles through which that outside world was seen. Lenin, at whose name every knee in the communist camp continued to bow, left his successors with important assumptions about the nature of international relations.
The most significant was his view of the nature of war. Lenin read Clausewitz, and accepted his view that war was the continuation of policy. Moreover, he believed that the existence of capitalist states meant that they were in a state of war with socialist states; and that capitalism, and its most extreme stage, imperialism, inevitably produced war between capitalist states themselves. It followed that two types of war were virtually inevitable: war between capitalist and socialist powers, as seen in the wars of intervention against the Bolsheviks; and wars between imperialist powers, usually over markets and fields for investment, as in the First World War. The second type of war was bound to weaken the capitalist states and assist the advance of socialism, as in fact it did in 1914–18; and in logic it was therefore in the interest of a socialist state (the Soviet Union, in practice) to keep out of a capitalist and imperialist war as long as possible, allowing the imperialists to destroy one another. This analysis had lasting effects on Soviet policy, as Silvio Pons concludes: ‘The concept of war as the inevitable consequence of inter-capitalist conflicts became firmly embedded in the Bolshevik mentality, and … exercised a long-standing influence on Soviet foreign policy and on the communist movement.’10
Lenin also believed that, strictly speaking, no lasting alliance was possible between socialist and capitalist states. They were fundamentally opposed to one another, so that socialists must consider all bourgeois capitalists as enemies, just as the capitalists would regard them as enemies. This did not rule out particular arrangements for specific purposes — the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Treaty of Rapallo with Germany in 1922, the scheme under which Germany developed weapons in the USSR; but they could not be expected to be permanent. (There was nothing singular, or even particularly Bolshevik, in this: Palmerston held that Britain had no perpetual allies — only her interests were eternal.) The making of such particular arrangements was a matter of tactics; and Soviet negotiators were naturally expected to drive the hardest possible bargain.
Lenin attached much weight to this kind of ideological analysis, and yet he also behaved in foreign affairs as a hard-headed realist, operating within the limits of the possible and the expedient. Much the same seems to have been true of Stalin. We cannot tell how fully he remained committed to the ideology, but he used the language, and it is probable that he was influenced by its thought-forms. Above all, he was unavoidably cast for the role of leader of world socialism, and as such he had to be seen to lead it. Yet at the same time he was a realist, with a power base to protect; and he had to be cautious, for that base was not yet of great strength. The result was a foreign policy in which ideology and realism were always mixed, and could always be reconciled with one another, because after all the power base and the Workers' Fatherland were one and the same.
Ideological analysis resting on the belief in the hostility of all capitalist states was prominent in 1927–28, when Stalin publicly referred to the threat of a new imperialist war. He claimed that various events in 1927 (the British raid on the Soviet trade mission in London, and subsequent rupture of diplomatic relations; the French request for the recall of the Soviet Ambassador in Paris; the assassination of the Ambassador in Warsaw) were all parts of a single plot, designed to culminate in an attack on the USSR by the imperialist powers. The same assertion followed the first of Stalin's show trials, in 1928, when mining engineers at the town of Shakhty in the Don Basin were accused of sabotaging coal production on the instructions of foreign capitalists. (The only evidence was their confessions; five were shot.) Stalin claimed in a speech of 1929 that such ‘bourgeois wrecking’ was proof that the capitalists were preparing new attacks on the Soviet Union.
How far such claims were believed, even by Stalin, must be open to doubt. Those were the days of the struggle against Trotsky, and the ‘war scare’ was used to denounce those who sought to divide the country in the face of an outside threat. Equally, there was little sign of the capitalists keeping the Soviet Union in a state of siege, or blockade. Relations with Germany were good, in political, commercial, and military terms. After the Treaty of Rapallo, over 2,000 German engineers and technicians went to work in Soviet industry. Junkers, the German aircraft firm, had a factory at Fili, near Moscow; and Krupps were making guns in factories in central Asia. Despite the Shakhty trial, in 1929 the USSR still had technical agreements with many German and American firms, and Standard Oil won a contract to build an oil refinery at Batum. As Lenin predicted, the capitalist search for profits caused firms to contribute to building up the Soviet economy; and the Soviet authorities were willing to allow them to do so.
The assumption of capitalist hostility continued to exist; but for practical purposes it seems unlikely that an actual attack was expected, and economic co-operation was the order of the day. The same was true of Italy, the first fascist power, with which Soviet relations were good in the 1920s. During the first Soviet Five-Year Plan large orders for industrial equipment were placed in Italy; and for its part the Italian government, despite its declared hostility to communism, guaranteed the long-term credit arrangements which firms offered to their Soviet customers. Early in 1934, addressing the Seventeenth Communist Party Congress in Moscow, Stalin remarked that the Soviets were far from enthusiastic about the new fascist regime in Germany, but pointed out that fascism in Italy had not prevented the establishment of excellent relations with that country. As late as July 1940, Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, told the Italian Ambassador in Moscow that their two countries could co-operate on a simple geographical basis, with the Soviet Union maintaining its legitimate rights in the Black Sea and Italy doing the same in the Mediterranean.11
Despite all this, the rise of fascism and Nazism presented a serious ideological problem to the Soviet regime, and the answer produced had important effects on policy. As early as 1922 Comintern publications identified fascism as a manifestation of monopoly capitalism. It was easy to find in the writings of Marx and Engels the view that the bourgeoisie sometimes protected its interests by renouncing the direct exercise of power in favour of a dictator — Louis Napoleon was Marx's case in point. The parallel with fascist dictatorships seemed simple: fascism corresponded to a phase in the decay of capitalism; the bourgeoisie was trying to prolong its existence and protect its profits by bringing in a dictator; fascist leaders were paid by, and were the instruments of, big business. For a long time in the 1920s and early 1930s this theory was accompanied by the view that the bourgeoisie was also in alliance with the social democrats, who were themselves in league with the fascists. In November 1923, for example, the German Communist Party declared that the true fascists were not in Munich, where Hitler had just attempted his coup d'état, but in Berlin, where the social democrats were in alliance with the military fascists of the German Army. In 1928 Thaelmann, the German communist leader, described the German government as a ‘social-fascist gang’; which was at the time a conventional term of abuse for the social democrats.
As late as 1930–33, facing the rapid rise of Hitler, the communists accepted that the Nazis had revolutionary aims, but refused to regard them as the greatest danger. The Nazi movement, which was the symptom of the decay of capitalism, bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Even when Hitler came to power, the Comintern line was that he was merely hastening the coming of the proletarian revolution; and the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler crushed his rivals in the SA, was greeted as a demonstration that the Nazi movement was tearing itself apart. If all this was true, then Nazi ideology was only so much mumbo-jumbo and mystification to cover the nakedness of the Nazi alliance with big business and monopoly capitalism; and so it came about that the communists, looking at Nazism through their own ideological spectacles, misunderstood its nature as much as did the bourgeois liberal statesmen of France and Britain. Moreover, if a change of attitude and policy were to be made, and an alliance against Nazism/fascism attempted, the communists would have to get themselves out of an ideological box. Social democrats could no longer be social fascists, but would have to become allies against the fascists. How could this be done?
The answer was found by redefining fascism, at the Seventh Congress of Comintern, held in Moscow in August 1935 to proclaim the new doctrine of the Popular Front against fascism. The Secretary-General, Dimitrov, described fascism as the open dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinist, and imperialist elements of finance capital; which allowed it to be deduced that social democrats and even bourgeois liberals did not fall into this category. The former simple rule that fascism amounted to finance capital, the bourgeoisie, and their accomplices was tacitly abandoned.
These contortions, and in particular the long struggle against the social democrats/social fascists, showed both the real effect of ideology on Soviet and Comintern policy, and the way in which that effect could be reversed for tactical reasons. They were developments which influenced the movement towards war in two different ways. First, the division on the Left of European politics, and notably the long feud between communists and social democrats in Germany, assisted the rise of fascism in general and of Hitler in particular. Defeated and disgruntled German socialists claimed after 1933 that without Stalin there would have been no Hitler: which is doubtless an exaggeration, but not wholly without substance. Second, the swing to the Popular Front against fascism was one of the elements which helped to move left-wing opinion in Europe towards the idea of war. For those who took their line from Moscow, war in defence of one's own country and a bourgeois social order was anathema; but war to protect the Soviet Union was an imperative.
From the point of view of the Soviet government (which in the last resort meant Stalin), ideological influences on foreign policy appear to have diminished during the 1930s. Ideological analysis of the international situation naturally continued. In his speech to the Eighteenth Communist Party Congress in Moscow, on 10 March 1939, Stalin's discussion of the European position was authentically Leninist. He distinguished between the aggressive capitalist powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) and the non-aggressive capitalist powers (Britain, France, and the USA); but he was conscious that all were capitalist first and foremost. The non-aggressive powers were as great a threat as the aggressive ones, because they were playing a waiting game, hoping that the forces of Nazism and communism would become engaged in war and exhaust one another. Indeed, Stalin had more to say about Britain and France than about Germany; he argued that the Western powers had, in the Munich agreement, yielded Czech territory to Germany as an inducement to the Germans to attack the USSR, and that their policy amounted to an encouragement of the aggressor states.
This was both orthodox Leninism and a plausible interpretation of the facts. But, though we cannot see into Stalin's mind, there is every sign that his foreign policy in the late 1930s was dominated by a cautious, and sometimes ruthless, realism. The great purges and the pursuit of industrialisation were presumably decisive in this: while they were in progress, foreign war was unthinkable unless it was absolutely forced upon him. (When it was so forced, in the Far East, by the danger of Japanese encroachment on Soviet territory in 1938 and 1939, the Red Army stood and fought, in large-scale and notably successful actions.) Stalin took precautions against a German attack — the Franco-Soviet Pact (signed on 2 May 1935), and the Popular Front policy adopted by Comintern in the same year. But both stopped carefully short of advocating or preparing war against Germany. The alliance with France was not followed up by a military convention, or even serious military conversations, and this was not just the fault of France. The Comintern Congress that adopted the Popular Front stopped short of calling for war against fascism; the object was the limited one of preventing European states from remaining neutral, or even joining Germany in a possible war between Germany and the Soviet Union.
Stalin said in January 1934 that the advent of the Nazi regime in Germany, though unwelcome, need not preclude good relations. He tried to keep open a line to Berlin, making approaches through the press attaché at the Soviet embassy in Berlin in 1935, and through David Kandelaki, a trade representative in Berlin (and reputedly a boyhood friend of Stalin), in the same year. Soviet policy in the Spanish Civil War showed no profound commitment. It was not until 4 October 1936, two and a half months after the war began, that Stalin sent a telegram to the Spanish Communist Party expressing his support for the republic. Most Soviet aid to the republic was channelled through Comintern, allowing the government to adopt a position of reserve and to adhere to the non-intervention agreement. Soviet military ‘advisers’ were sent to Spain, but no regular units as in the case of Germany and Italy. In so far as there was ideological involvement in Spain, it was as much against Trotskyists and anarchists as against fascists; and the NKVD extended the purges from its home ground to Spain, where Spanish and other foreign communists were their targets. The Soviet attitude during the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1938 was similarly cautious. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 was a stroke of realpolitik, coming to terms with the highest bidder. It is often described as a denial of ideology; but this is not so — it was perfectly compatible with an ideological stance. All capitalist and imperialist states were enemies, and there was no reason to regard the Anglo-French imperialists as more favourable to the Soviet Union than the Germans.
The Nazi—Soviet Pact, despite its horrifying appearance and the shock it created, was the result of a marriage between Leninist ideology and political opportunism. As such, it was in line with much Soviet foreign policy between the wars, which followed a double line of realism and ideological commitment. When one asks how far the ideological element contributed to the coming of war in Europe, the answer seems to be threefold. First, the very existence of communism and its international organisation, Comintern, introduced a degree of permanent discord in Europe. The liberal democracies (France, Britain, and the smaller states) had a declared enemy within their own boundaries as well as in a foreign state; and it was natural for them to seek ideological allies in fascism and Nazism, underestimating the threat to themselves inherent in those regimes. It was also difficult to deal with the USSR simply on a basis of power politics: an alliance with her was seen also as an alliance with communism. Second, the excessively simple and blinkered communist interpretation of Nazism, and long insistence that the social democrats/social fascists were the greater enemy, helped to open the way to the Nazis in Germany, and almost certainly caused Stalin to underrate the danger posed by Nazi Germany in international relations. This was almost a mirror-image of Western attitudes, based on ideological misconceptions and hopes of ‘appeasement’. Third, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which was at least compatible with Soviet ideology and well within a Leninist analysis of the European situation, helped to create the circumstances for a war between the capitalist and imperialist states, which should in theory have been favourable to the interests of the Soviet Union and of communism. These influences were of real significance; but it is hard to think that they place Soviet communism high among the ideological forces pressing towards war in Europe.
References
1. Quoted in Jonathan Haslam, ‘Soviet Russia and the Spanish Problem’, in Robert Boyce and Joseph Maiolo (eds), The Origins of World War Two: The Debate Continues (Basingstoke 2003), p. 73.
2. Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: the man and his era (London 1973), p. 361.
3. Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge (London 1971), esp. pp. 333, 336.
4. Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia (London 2004), p. 10.
5. 1928: 73.3 million tonnes; 1935: 75 million tonnes. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London: Pelican 1972), p. 186.
6. Jean-Piere Bardet and Jacques Dupâquier (eds), Histoire des populations de l'Europe, vol. III, Les temps incertains, 1914–1998 (Paris 1999), p. 670. The figures were kept with remarkable care.
7. Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–39 (London 1984), p. 138.
8. Overy, Dictators, pp. 447–448.
9. The low figures are from Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 239; for the others, see Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, (London, 1968), Appendix A, pp. 525–535, and Hingley, Stalin, p. 282. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy (London 1991), p. 307, gives ‘a cautious estimate’ of between 4.5 and 5.5 million arrests in 1937–38 alone, with 800,000–900,000 condemned to death, quite apart from countless others who died in camps.
10. Silvio Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War (London 2002), p. x.
11. Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of the Soviet Union (New Haven 1999), pp. 28–29.
Economic Issues and the Coming of War
During the Second World War there was a widespread belief that the great depression of the early 1930s had played a crucial part in causing the war, and prescriptions for future peace often concentrated on trying to eliminate economic problems. These views on the economic origins of the war comprised three principal arguments. First, it was held that the depression of 1929–35 destroyed the atmosphere of confidence and détente that flourished in Europe after 1925, and created in its place fierce economic nationalism and cut-throat competition for the shrinking amount of world trade. Second, the social and political tensions engendered by the depression brought Hitler to power in Germany at the head of an aggressive and self-confident dictatorship, and at the same time sowed dissension within Germany's likely opponents. France in particular was riven by internal disputes which were exacerbated by the depression; and in Czechoslovakia the Sudeten Germans, in their economic distress, looked across the border to Germany for support. Third, there was a strong feeling, voiced for example by Cordell Hull, the American Secretary of State, that the closed trading systems of the 1930s led towards war. Too many states were trying for self-sufficiency, and saw the raw materials or food supplies which they needed at the mercy of the policies of other governments and the vagaries of foreign exchange. Some countries then sought to break out and secure their own positions by force of arms: Germany and Japan went to war to conquer zones of economic control, in which they could safeguard their own imports and fix their own rates of exchange, free from the uncertainties of foreign trade.
In the lengthening perspective since the end of the war, and after another severe depression following the oil price shock of late 1973, which brought economic difficulties and social strains but left international stability largely undisturbed, these analyses have not always carried the same conviction. But there remains a powerful school of argument that the Second World War in Europe had significant economic origins.
We must therefore examine the impact of the economic depression in the early 1930s; ask how far it created the preconditions for a European war; and analyse the links between economic issues and the actual coming of war. The issues involved were sometimes technical, concerning currency exchange rates and international clearing agreements; but their effects were practical and down-to-earth, touching the livelihood of millions. These were matters which had a more immediate (though not necessarily in the long run a more profound) influence than ideology on the daily lives of whole peoples.