3D WARTIME COAL STRIKE BEGUN AT MIDNIGHT; PARLEYS BREAK OVER PORTAL-TO-PORTAL ISSUE (6/21/43)

Well OK then. I sent the last post while at a baseball game so I could not elaborate on a smart phone between innings.

My explanation is based on what I consider a fairly extensive library as well as some long discussions with some other people who share my passion for this aspect of World War 2.

In my discussions with others, the question that came up was a serious discussion of whether or not Stalin was of an imperialist/expansionist mind set before he entered the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler’s Germany. It’s pretty clear that after that, he was expansionist in the imperial sense, as he grabbed the Baltic republics, eastern Poland and Bessarabia before World War 2. After World War 2 he was clearly expansionist as he treated eastern Europe as his conquered vassal states, and set the Soviet Union on a course of international expansion of communism. Before then, other than through the Communist International, Stalin had not shown much inclination to go conquer and subjugate other countries.

A couple of people I argued with said Stalin had never shown that expansionist bent, and even deviated from the Holy Grail of Communism by his doctrine of “Socialism in One Country.” They even argued that the Soviet domination of all other communist parties through the Comintern was essentially designed to maintain Stalin’s grip on the domestic party. There could not be a “competing brand” of communism, lest it compete with Stalin in the USSR.

My contention is that Stalin was probably going to get around to being expansionist/imperialist in the realm of foreign policy sooner or later. In his paranoid world view, he could never tolerate an independent, non-communist neighbor to the USSR. It was a threat and if there is one consistent trait he exhibited, it was how he dealt with threats. But above all else, Stalin was a pragmatist. He knew that the USSR could not go on any sort of imperial adventure unless it became economically and militarily stronger than its neighbors. Thus the five-year plans and the crash industrialization of the country. It was only when he got his house in order could he then go back to the Holy Grail of international communism, which of course would be Soviet-run communism.

Hitler was the wild card in Stalin’s plans. An expansionist fascist Germany was a clear danger to the USSR, and Stalin knew it. In 1939, he was also keenly aware of his own vulnerability. While the five-year plans had brought about industrialization, the military had been through the Purge and he’d decapitated the officer corps. In response to Hitler’s remilitarization of Germany, Stalin expanded his own armed forces. They went from a stable force level of about 1.5 million men to five million in about three or four years. Arming, training and supporting the huge increase had not been digested yet. Leadership was also a huge problem. Because of the dual effects of expansion and the purges, a 26 year old captain commanding a company jumped two or three grades to become a 27 year old regiment or division commander a year later. He was scared of his own shadow because of the purges. His staff was just as scared and just as green as he was.

Don’t forget that in Stalin’s paranoid mind, it wasn’t just Hitler who worried him. He was always worried that France and Britain would put aside their differences with Hitler and make common cause against him. He didn’t trust the British or French any more than he trusted Hitler. In fact, he probably trusted Hitler more. In a situation rich with irony, Stalin, the man who trusted no one, wound up trusting the one man no one should trust: Hitler.

But in summer 1939, Stalin isn’t ready for war, he knows it, but he also knows war is coming. The French and British send a diplomatic mission to discuss an alliance, and the French and British bungle it badly. The two repesentatives are non-entities, have no authority and take the slow boat to get there. It becomes apparent to Stalin that the French and British intend to sit behind the Maginot Line, and defeat Hitler by use of copious amounts of Russian blood. Then, in Stalin’s mind, they take out both he and Hitler.

Stalin wants none of this, so he decides to turn the tables on both Hitler and the western allies. When Hitler courts him, he jumps on it and the Non-Aggression Pact is a done deal in days. Stalin now believes that the Germans and western allies will exhaust themselves and it will allow him to clean up in Europe. Add to this the realization that under that arrangement, Britain will blockade Germany again. Hitler must come to him for raw materials to fight his war. Sooner or later, Stalin will blackmail Hitler. In the end, Stalin sees a redux of World War 1, and the repetition of the conditions that brought Lenin to power in Russia. This time he stands ready to foment the same through all of Europe.

Ah, but history loves irony and this did not come to pass. Not entirely, anyway, and not at all the way Stalin planned. The French threw in the towel in six weeks, the British were kicked off the Continent, and now Stalin faced Hitler, more or less alone, and not yet ready. Thus, Stalin appeased Hitler hoping to buy time.

So you get to the main question; would Stalin have eventually attacked Hitler? I believe that his first strategy would have been to turn the tables once he felt strong enough. His way of turning the tables would have been to choke off Germany from the resources in the east and start the economic blackmail. He was not going to tolerate a dangerous Hitler next door forever. My guess is that would have been some time during the winter of 1941-42 at the earliest (knowing war could not start until late spring) or one year later at the latest. He would not have directly attacked Germany without trying the economic blackmail first.

Would he have directly attacked? The way I look at it, he would have provoked Hitler into war, and then attacked. I don’t think he would have sucker-punched him. It wasn’t Stalin’s way. But the Red Army was built as an offensive instrument, and Stalin tried to use it as such in June and July 1941, with disastrous results. But in 1942, after Hitler had been provoked, yes, fight would have been on. And it would have been at Stalin’s instigation.

I think Hitler knew this. Barbarossa was a case of “hit back first” or “do to your enemy before he does it to you.” Hitler was never going to be in a better position than he was in June 1941; it was then or never.

So in the ultimate irony, Hitler is defeated...at the cost of copious amounts of Russian blood. And Stalin gets half a loaf in Europe, which is better than no loaf at all.

Thanks very much for your response. I share your interest in the eastern front but don't know nearly as much about it.

An expansionist Stalin regime would be a continuation of centuries of Russian foreign policy. Russia was always intent on dominating Poland as buffer with Germany and finally achieved that goal with the Partitions under Catherine the Great. Another goal was absorption of the Baltics and domination of the Gulf of Finland and Eastern Baltic Sea. Russia lost those in the aftermath of WWI and the Revolution.

The vast expansion of the Red Army is very telling. It appears Stalin believed war was coming and it might not have been important to him which one started it. Mein Kampf is explicit that the lebensraum Hitler sought would be carved out of eastern territories. From the Rhineland on Hitler had a history of pausing to absorb the new territory before moving to grab the next. So, the Non-Aggression Pact would not be viewed as any sort of permanent solution by the Germans, no more than Munich was.

They both wanted Poland and half was not going to work for either one in the long term. And Hitler had made clear even all of Poland would not be enough for him.

I like how you pointed out the expansionist nature of Tsarist Russia, and Stalin was an extension of that long-standing policy.

Hitler and Stalin had to fight each other eventually. They were not compatible in the long term. So it was a matter of which one was going to be ready for the fight first. That was Hitler. Maybe the point of whether Stalin would have attacked Hitler was moot in the sense that Stalin was never going to be ready before Hitler was.

So it was a matter of which one was going to be ready for the fight first. That was Hitler.

Do you mean psychologically ready or logistically ready? Two years after Barbarossa the Germans are still looking for the wherewithal to finish off the Red Army.

“Do you mean psychologically ready or logistically ready?”

Yes.

The Germans thought they were ready, both pyschologically and logistically. Halder and his staff seriously underestimated the enormity of the task. But ready or not, the Germans were never going to be stronger vis a vis the USSR than they were on June 22, 1941. By June 22, 1942, the Wehrmacht would not have been qualitatively better, while the Red Army would have had a full year to get the officer corps acclimated to their new jobs, all of those mechanized corps would have been equipped with T-34s instead of the old junk, and the support services would have been in place.

I think the Soviets would have stopped them cold a year later.

It’s an interesting thought experiment to speculate what would have happened if Hitler had not divided his forces and focused on taking Moscow before he went south.

I gotta go drink a beer and fire up the grill, so more on that some other time. Suffice to say, it might not have mattered logistically.

Lots of “what ifs” but the rule I always try to apply is that the “what if” isn’t valid if it involves Hitler not being Hitler and the Germans not being the Germans.