jazzeum
Four Star General
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2005
- Messages
- 38,386
Continuing from Part 1.
****
Yet there is a problem. While Stalin clearly did consider the possibility of attacking Germany, he was just as clearly in no hurry to do so. What he commissioned were sketches of a pre-emptive strategy; there was no detailed operational planning of the sort the Germans had been working on since July 1940. So why did Stalin ignore the intelligence that (in his terms) Hitler was about to pre-empt him?
According to Gabriel Gorodetsky, Stalin was a prisoner of history. Memories of the Crimean War and of British intervention in the Russian civil war had persuaded him that the Soviet Union had more to fear from a British naval raid than from a German invasion.
Murphy prefers to see Stalin as having been blinded by a combination of Communist dogma and Nazi guile. As a convinced Marxist, Stalin assumed that the capitalist powers, led by Britain, were more interested in the destruction of the Soviet Union than in the destruction of Nazi Germany. Any intelligence that pointed toward a German invasion of Russia must therefore be disinformation emanating from British sources, who hoped to dupe the two dictators into fighting each other.
As evidence for his interpretation, Murphy publishes a translation -- originally from a French source -- of a speech that Stalin may have made at a Politburo meeting on Aug. 19, 1939, supporting a nonaggression pact with Hitler. Even more intriguing, though perhaps just as likely to be fake, are the letters Hitler allegedly wrote to Stalin in December 1940 and May 1941, swearing on his ''honor as a chief of state'' that the German troops gathering on Russia's borders were destined for the British Isles, not the Ukraine. If genuine, the May letter does indeed indicate that Hitler's psychopathic mendacity trumped Stalin's pathological mistrust.
But there was also a historical calculation in Stalin's mind. One of his favorite arguments was that Germany, having lost one two-front war in 1918, would never risk fighting another. Thus, so long as Britain was not defeated, Hitler would never invade Russia. In ''Stalin,'' his excellent new biography, Robert Service adds a further important point: Stalin may have ruled out a German invasion so late in the year as June 22, given the limited time that would remain before autumn rains turned the Russian roads into impassable bogs.
Yet whatever Stalin was thinking -- whether he deluded himself or was deluded by Hitler -- the fact remains that he, and he alone, was to blame for the greatest military defeat in Russian history. How, then, did he get away with it? The answer is simple. By 1941 he had so ruthlessly wiped out any potential rivals to his authority that no one dared try to get rid of him.
Service and Pleshakov both describe the extraordinary scene on June 30, 1941, when Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, led a deputation from the Politburo to Stalin's dacha, where ''the boss'' had been skulking for nearly two days. Stalin seems to have feared that this was his comeuppance: ''Why have you come?'' he muttered. But instead of arresting him, they invited him to head a new State Committee of Defense.
Was Stalin an unnecessary evil? The majority of Russians -- and not only those old enough to have been exposed to his cult of personality -- think not. In a poll conducted in 2003, on the 50th anniversary of his death, the Russian Center for Public Opinion found that 53 percent of Russians still regard him as a ''great'' leader. He was, a Russian pensioner told the BBC's Moscow correspondent, ''the father of the family, the person who took care of us.'' The popular view remains that Stalin brought victory on the battlefield and discipline on the home front -- a combination that many Russians look back on with nostalgia after the upheavals of the past two decades.
If historians have failed to change such popular views, it has not been for want of trying. Like Stalin's other recent biographers -notably Robert Conquest, Dmitri Volkogonov and Edvard Radzinsky -- Robert Service paints a picture of a warped monster of a man, insatiable in his pursuit of power, ruthless in his treatment of real and imagined rivals, remorseless in his murder of millions. Service's innovation is to reveal Stalin's frailty -- above all, his capacity for miscalculation. He made no blunder costlier than that of June 1941; yet he himself got off scot-free.
Intelligence failures, in short, can change the course of history, whether failures of espionage or failures of analysis. Had successive administrations heeded Richard A. Clarke, the World Trade Center might still stand. Had the C.I.A. discerned and frankly reported the feeble state of Iraq's defenses, Saddam might still rule in Baghdad. These are imaginable scenarios, because the consequences of these errors, though grave, have not been truly disastrous. It is much harder to conceive how World War II might have turned out if Stalin had not trusted Hitler -- or had not survived the terrible consequences of so doing.
****
Yet there is a problem. While Stalin clearly did consider the possibility of attacking Germany, he was just as clearly in no hurry to do so. What he commissioned were sketches of a pre-emptive strategy; there was no detailed operational planning of the sort the Germans had been working on since July 1940. So why did Stalin ignore the intelligence that (in his terms) Hitler was about to pre-empt him?
According to Gabriel Gorodetsky, Stalin was a prisoner of history. Memories of the Crimean War and of British intervention in the Russian civil war had persuaded him that the Soviet Union had more to fear from a British naval raid than from a German invasion.
Murphy prefers to see Stalin as having been blinded by a combination of Communist dogma and Nazi guile. As a convinced Marxist, Stalin assumed that the capitalist powers, led by Britain, were more interested in the destruction of the Soviet Union than in the destruction of Nazi Germany. Any intelligence that pointed toward a German invasion of Russia must therefore be disinformation emanating from British sources, who hoped to dupe the two dictators into fighting each other.
As evidence for his interpretation, Murphy publishes a translation -- originally from a French source -- of a speech that Stalin may have made at a Politburo meeting on Aug. 19, 1939, supporting a nonaggression pact with Hitler. Even more intriguing, though perhaps just as likely to be fake, are the letters Hitler allegedly wrote to Stalin in December 1940 and May 1941, swearing on his ''honor as a chief of state'' that the German troops gathering on Russia's borders were destined for the British Isles, not the Ukraine. If genuine, the May letter does indeed indicate that Hitler's psychopathic mendacity trumped Stalin's pathological mistrust.
But there was also a historical calculation in Stalin's mind. One of his favorite arguments was that Germany, having lost one two-front war in 1918, would never risk fighting another. Thus, so long as Britain was not defeated, Hitler would never invade Russia. In ''Stalin,'' his excellent new biography, Robert Service adds a further important point: Stalin may have ruled out a German invasion so late in the year as June 22, given the limited time that would remain before autumn rains turned the Russian roads into impassable bogs.
Yet whatever Stalin was thinking -- whether he deluded himself or was deluded by Hitler -- the fact remains that he, and he alone, was to blame for the greatest military defeat in Russian history. How, then, did he get away with it? The answer is simple. By 1941 he had so ruthlessly wiped out any potential rivals to his authority that no one dared try to get rid of him.
Service and Pleshakov both describe the extraordinary scene on June 30, 1941, when Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, led a deputation from the Politburo to Stalin's dacha, where ''the boss'' had been skulking for nearly two days. Stalin seems to have feared that this was his comeuppance: ''Why have you come?'' he muttered. But instead of arresting him, they invited him to head a new State Committee of Defense.
Was Stalin an unnecessary evil? The majority of Russians -- and not only those old enough to have been exposed to his cult of personality -- think not. In a poll conducted in 2003, on the 50th anniversary of his death, the Russian Center for Public Opinion found that 53 percent of Russians still regard him as a ''great'' leader. He was, a Russian pensioner told the BBC's Moscow correspondent, ''the father of the family, the person who took care of us.'' The popular view remains that Stalin brought victory on the battlefield and discipline on the home front -- a combination that many Russians look back on with nostalgia after the upheavals of the past two decades.
If historians have failed to change such popular views, it has not been for want of trying. Like Stalin's other recent biographers -notably Robert Conquest, Dmitri Volkogonov and Edvard Radzinsky -- Robert Service paints a picture of a warped monster of a man, insatiable in his pursuit of power, ruthless in his treatment of real and imagined rivals, remorseless in his murder of millions. Service's innovation is to reveal Stalin's frailty -- above all, his capacity for miscalculation. He made no blunder costlier than that of June 1941; yet he himself got off scot-free.
Intelligence failures, in short, can change the course of history, whether failures of espionage or failures of analysis. Had successive administrations heeded Richard A. Clarke, the World Trade Center might still stand. Had the C.I.A. discerned and frankly reported the feeble state of Iraq's defenses, Saddam might still rule in Baghdad. These are imaginable scenarios, because the consequences of these errors, though grave, have not been truly disastrous. It is much harder to conceive how World War II might have turned out if Stalin had not trusted Hitler -- or had not survived the terrible consequences of so doing.