It was greed that almost destroyed the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was in a pact with the Nazis, but they got greedy, leading Hitler to get angry and attack them. The greed of the Soviets is hugely ironic, of course, since much communist propaganda was devoted to denouncing the greed of the capitalists, but they themselves were greedy enough.
First, though, let me recount the events relating to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. It began partly because while both sides hated the other and hated the Western democracies, they also feared that the other side would make a pact with the Western democracies to their own disadvantage. Having a pact with each other mitigated these fears. Plus, each would benefit from trade, with Germany getting Soviet raw materials and the Soviets getting German manufactured goods. A secret protocol of the pact allowed each side to gobble up neighbors (a horribly brutal process waged by both sides). Moreover, the Soviets had given up on the League of Nations as an organization that would be able to stop German aggression, so the best thing was to have an alliance with them that prevented it. This would encourage the Germans to wage war against the Western democracies, and of course the Soviets thought they could then walk in and take over all of Europe without too much trouble. The claim that the pact gave time for the Soviets to prepare for the inevitable German assault is rejected by the author as having no evidence behind it; it is nothing but post-war propaganda.
The pact broke down partly because the Soviets were greedy. They were constantly haggling over the details of the trading involved, always trying to get more money for their raw materials than they were worth. In addition, while the pact allowed them to take part of Poland, and all of Estonia, Latvia, and Finland, it eventually became clear to the Nazis that the Soviets wanted a lot more of eastern Europe than that. They grabbed Lithuania, for example, and later offered monetary recompense (though naturally less than the Germans wanted from them). But even that wasn’t enough for the Soviets. Hitler, in a meeting with the Soviet Union’s foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov about a year after the pact was signed, suggested that once he conquered Britain, the British empire would be dissolved, so why didn’t they take the lands south of Russia that Britain now controlled? Molotov never accepted that proposal, and it became clear that they wanted countries like Hungary instead. The Soviet idea was that communism really needed to exist in the countries with the highest industrialization, and that meant heading west and not south. It is true that the pact also broke down because Hitler was suspicious of British resistance: surely the Soviets were secretly helping them? But Soviet greed probably furthered things along. The greed was based on the idea that the working classes in those countries would rise up and help the Soviets once they came along, though that is doubtful. Even so, dialectical materialism predicted that they would rise up on their own, so the Soviets could have waited for that to happen. But they were greedy instead.
Anyway, as everyone knows, Hitler attacked, and despite having tons of signals that this attack was going to happen, Stalin discounted every single one of them. Moorhouse insists that it is not true that Stalin spent ten days in shock and doing nothing, but he also says nothing about the moment when Stalin actually figured things out, since the first reports of the attack he took to be nothing but a negotiating ploy. That is, Stalin had been assuming all along that he could baby Hitler along by easing up on all the obstructionist behavior regarding the export of their raw materials if it looked like Hitler were looking frustrated, but in fact Hitler had decided on a military attack months before. Likewise, Stalin thought (based on what had happened in Germany in World War I) that it was the German generals he needed to worry about, so he needed to ensure that Hitler could restrain them, when in fact it was the other way around.
Once the pact broke down, the British stepped in, wanting to acquire the Soviet Union as an ally, but trying to get both the Poles and the Soviets together was a terrible challenge. The Polish representative was steaming, demanding that all Poles who had been shipped out of Poland and were languishing in Soviet prisons and gulags be returned. The Soviets thought that if someone was a criminal, then they deserved to be in prison, so why were the Poles upset? The Poles replied that the Soviets treated all Poles as criminals. In addition, they argued over post-war borders, with the Soviets wanting the borders they had forced upon Poland after the pact had been signed, while Poland wanted the pre-war borders. Once again, the Soviets were greedy. Eventually, an agreement was reached, with most of the details to be worked out after the war. It’s pretty clear that the Poles got the short end of the stick in these negotations.
With the end of the war came the Nuremberg trials. I confess I learned about these when I was in my teens and haven’t read anything detailed about them since, but the Soviets come off very poorly here. The Nazis wanted to insist that the Soviets were just as bad, which was certainly true, but the Soviets managed to fend them off. They also managed to blame the Katyn massacre, the murder of some 22,000 Polish army officers, on the Nazis when it was the Soviets themselves who had done it. In addition to not admitting to this atrocity, the Soviets denied that there had been a secret protocol, and it wasn’t until the dissolution of the Soviet Union that both of these sins were finally acknowledged.
Let me now talk about a couple of topics. First, there was the overrunning of eastern Europeans by the Soviets. We are used to thinking of how awful the Nazis were, and in no way do I want to diminish them, but lots of people still can’t grasp or acknowledge how awful the Soviets were. Moorhouse doesn’t flinch concerning this topic. He says, for example, on page 43 that “measures used against the racial enemy in one half of Poland were virtually indistinguishable from those applied to the class enemy in the other.” That is, the Nazis took over the western half of Poland and engaged in some dreadful ethnic cleansing, while the commies took over the eastern half and engaged in some dreadful class cleansing. It was so bad that at one point there were two trainloads of Polish refugees headed in opposite directions passing each other, each amazed at what the other wanted to flee to (55). In fact, neither direction looked promising. Even some of the Polish communists were disillusioned with Soviet rule (55). Moreover, just prior to the Soviet takeover, there were Jews in the Baltics who feared Soviet rule so much they were willing to take their chances with the Nazis. After the pact broke down, lots of people in the Baltic countries viewed the advancing German troops as liberators (264).
The second topic concerns what the author called “contortions.” He had an entire chapter with this label, and it is about the nearly intolerable ideological shifts that both commies and Nazis suddenly had to make in the wake of the pact. For the communists, the pact knocked a huge hole in their recruiting campaigns because those campaigns had been as much anti-fascist as anti-capitalist. Suddenly, their claims that the Western imperialist democracies were themselves fascist looked rather weak. The author says that communism in America never recovered, and though it recovered in Britain after the Soviet Union was attacked, it took a big hit in the twenty-two months of the pact. For example, Orwell claimed (105) it was “the complete destruction of left-wing orthodoxy.” Also, those people delivering the Daily Worker in Britain often had chamber pots emptied onto their heads (107). Much of this chapter details some of the problems various leftists had in reconciling the pact with their staunch anti-fascist views, and while some took it in stride, believing that Stalin could do no wrong, others were horribly upset by it. I admit I had a lot of fun reading it.
The Nazis, too, had problems, and they suffered morally in the eyes of their supporters elsewhere (such as in Italy and Japan), who were blindsided by the news. And they had the same problem in reverse of what the communists had, namely that they had been recruiting on an anti-communist agenda, so where did that leave them?
Some of the other interesting, unexpected, or even comic tidbits that can also be mentioned:
• Hitler first tried to form an alliance with the Poles, but they weren’t interested.
• Prior to the pact, the British were trying to form a pact with the Soviets, but it didn’t work. One of the British negotiators had the ridiculous name of Admiral Sir Reginald Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax.
• A British sailor who was a communist was arrested in New York City for giving secrets to the Germans. He had obviously taken the pact to heart, but by the time he was executed, the pact was no longer in existence (110). As Glenn Reynolds would say, Heh.
• Then there was the German soldier who deserted to the Soviets just prior to Hitler’s attack in order to warn them. They had him executed (252).
• One Soviet military commander, Grigory Kulik, still favored horses rather than motorized vehicles in the army (222).
• The Soviets arrested various enemies of their rule in the territories they conquered, including Esperantists and workers for the Red Cross (49, 245).
• Ernst Thälmann, a commie in Germany, was imprisoned and tortured and never heard from again when Nazis came to power (112). I can’t have any sympathy for him since his side did the same to their enemies.
• Stalin had not counted on the quick successes of the Germans, who used the blitzkrieg. He thought they would be mired in a long war against the French, just as in World War I, and that he could then move in easily among the exhausted participants and take over. It didn’t work out that way.
• The Rudolf Hess episode (236) should have led the communists to the conclusion that perhaps a split had occurred among the Nazis, but instead Stalin used it as more evidence that the British couldn’t be trusted. Hess had wanted to get the Germans and the British into some kind of alliance, but it didn’t work.
• Stalin eventually knew that war was coming, but thought it would be preceded by “demands, negotiations, and an ultimatum” (250). So, he wasn’t initially worried about news of attacks because he expected something different first. When he finally realized that they were attacking, he complained that they were “like gangsters” (258). That has to be one of the most pathetic and disingenuous claims ever, given the gangster-like way that Stalin had ruled.
• When the Poles and Soviets met in Britain to iron out their differences, a Polish representative angrily asked the Soviets why they had made a pact with the Germans, given that they hated them. The answer was Hillaryesque (286): “All that is past history.”
Let me conclude with one last topic, which is the status of communism in today’s political milieu. As many on the right have complained, Hitler is universally reviled, while Stalin is basically condemned by the right only. We are even told that the Soviets bore the brunt of the sacrifice in defeating the Nazis, a claim that wholly ignores the fact that they were in an alliance with the Nazis for one-third of the conflict; therefore, they deserved to make the greater sacrifices.
But why is it that the communists get off so lightly? Partly it was because of the alliance that included the Soviet Union and partly because of the positive feelings many workers in Britain and presumably elsewhere had about the communists. Accordingly, Britain had vowed to defend Poland against attack by the Nazis, but not by the Soviets. And partly it was because the Soviets lied about what was going on, lies that weren’t revealed until the end of the Cold War. They lied about the Katyn massacre, and they lied about the secret protocol of the pact that allowed them, among other things, to get part of Poland and other countries, and they lied about their motives for the pact.
We can say a lot more. Germans feel guilty about the Holocaust, but Russians don’t feel any guilt about what Stalin did, nor do any leftists. As I mentioned the other day, August 23rd has been set aside as a day of remembrance for the victims of both Nazism and communism. This was promoted by people in the Baltic countries who on the fiftieth anniversary of the pact formed a human chain across their countries in protest against the Soviet annexation and occupation. It was the largest popular protest the Soviet Union had ever witnessed. I have to confess that I do not remember this event at all, even though I was well into adulthood when it happened.
Anyway, anyone on the right who complains that the communists aren’t reviled the way the Nazis are can champion that day as a day of remembrance.
