Molotov Signing the Pact Between the Third Reich
and the USSR
A new collection of letters (“I Saw It“) from Russians about their experiences during the war has come out in Russian, and it seems to paint a rather different picture from the one celebrated recently in Red Square. Here’s one letter:
Two weeks before the start of the war, they gathered us in the building where the top brass lived to listen to a lecture called “Germany — The Faithful Friend of the Soviet Union.” Our tanks had been mothballed, our weapons were stored in the warehouse.
I got to the park at 12:30 a.m. Planes were buzzing in the sky. Everyone was happy; the maneuvers had started! The first bomb strike hit our supplies. People shouted, “They’re dummy bombs made of cement.” The second one hit the neighboring battalion. People shouted that somebody had been killed, another had his leg blown off. … Only then did we realize that this was war.
Why was it forbidden to tell us the truth, that Hitler was going to attack us? Who can believe that Stalin and the General Staff did not know that 200 German divisions were moving toward the border? Could it have been possible that the local population knew but Stalin didn’t?
Modest Markovich Markov
Anzhero-Sudzhensk, Kemerovo region
To the anger of the Russians who were caught so unprepared could be added the anger of the Poles and the people of the Baltic nations, whose countries were divided up by a partnership made up of the USSR and the Third Reich, as laid out in the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 23, 1939.
This is interesting. How come the people knew about the Nazi offensive and Stalin didn’t? Could it be that Stalin was more concerned about attacking Germany than in defending the USSR from Hitler?
In the December 2003 issue of The Freeman there’s an interesting review of the book “Stalin’s Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941,” by Albert L. Weeks. According to the author, Stalin was planning a war against Nazi Germany, but Hitler attacked the Soviet Union first. Stalin was hoping that a long war in the Western front would weaken both allies and Germany, so the Soviet Union would enter the conflict at a time of its choosing and advanced its troops towards the West, defeating Nazis and allies. The only problem: Stalin had a schizophrenic maniac like him as a “partner.”
I haven’t read Weeks book, but I find the hypothesis that Stalin planned war on Germany hard to believe. I’ve tried to follow as much Soviet & Russian writing on the subject of the war as I can, and everything I have seen suggests Stalin was entirely focused on butchering his own people.
E.g. According to Col. I.G. Starinov (one of the chief architects of Soviet partisan warfare in WWII; some of his writing available in English in “Over the Abyss”), prior to the war the Red Army was developing plans and accumulating equipment for partisan warfare in case of an invasion from the west. When Stalin learned of this he entirely eliminated the program ( and many of the planners). Starinov also says that Stalin’s continuing purges of the Red Army officer corps destroyed much of its fighting capability, and that a round of purges was underway when Germany invaded.
Incidentally, there’s a fine PBS video series on the USSR & Stalin in WW2 that was made with the help of Russian historians with access to old Soviet archives. Excellent, but heartbreaking.
Albert Weeks’ book “Stalin’s Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941”, is yet another book in a series of books on the topic of Soviet offensive war-plans circa 1941. I believe the opening round in this thesis, i.e. that Stalin was on the verge of attacking Germany in June 1941, was fired by Russian author Viktor Suvorov with his book “Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?” english edition circa 1990 ( see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icebreaker_(Suvorov) ), in which Suvorov argues that Stalin was on the verge of an offensive assault into the West and that Hitler launched his pre-emptive Barbarossa Blitz-krieg on a basis of gathered intelligence…
apparently this thesis has been not only widely discussed in Europe and Russia for the past 15 years, but in fact it is accepted as doctrine in much of Eastern Europe, i.e. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa was indeed a defensive measure in the face of Stalinist westward aggression.
The interesting progress made since Suvorov seems to be further revelations from the Soviet archives, specifically access to texts of speeches and documents which confirm Stalin’s offensive plans: Stalin’s famous toast to graduates of the Soviet military academies, May 5, 1941, the text of Stalin’s previously hotly disputed secret speech to the Soviet Politburo of Aug. 19, 1939, and a document, titled “Considerations of the Plan for the Strategic Deployment of the Armed forces of the Soviet Union in Case of War with Germany and its Allies,” dated May 15, 1941.
The latter document fully conforms to the offensive military doctrine of the Soviets that called for “deep operations” into enemy territory (a fact confirmed by many Soviet officers and historians, but neglected and disputed by various foreign authors e.g., David Glantz and historian Gabriel Gorodetsky, who tend to use pro-Soviet arguments throughout their books).
Weeks, in fact, convincingly critiques Glantz’s and Gorodetsky’s arguments. See Glantz and Gorodetsky for a rebuttal to Suvorov in defense of the conventionally accepted doctrine, i.e. that Hitler started an aggressive war of conquest for lebensraum and racial supremecy on an unsuspecting and defenseless Stalinist Soviet Union… as if Hitler wanted and needed a 2-front war.
NOTE:
Stalin’s speech to the Politburo on 19 August 1939
http://home.swipnet.se/nordling/ww2/stalin_speech_complete.html