[Leaning Right]

> Stalin practically was bending himself over in appeasing Hitler <

I once read a book that presented those days from Stalin’s point of view. (The book was written by an anti-communist, by the way. So it wasn’t a hero worship kind of thing.)

Anyway, Stalin watched as Hitler gobbled up the Rhineland, then Austria, then the Sudetenland, and then Czechoslovakia itself. All the while France and Britain did absolutely nothing to stop him.

So maybe Stalin thought: The West will not oppose Hitler. And I could be next. Better to ally with Hitler than be his next victim.

Stalin was wrong about that, of course. But the reasoning makes sense.

[gr8eman]

Yes...he ignored a ton of intel that countered his stupid ideas. The US, Brits, Swedes...everyone told Stalin what was coming. Even his own intel people. They captured German soldiers who also told them what was going on. A very amazing part of history!

[ScaniaBoy]

That is the orthodox view of the politics prior to and during the first couple of years of WWII, and definitely the way the Soviets wanted it portrayed.

In his memoirs “White Nights” the late Israeli PM Menachem Begin describes how in early 1940 he and other Polish intellectuals imprisoned by the Soviets were lectured to by a Red Army political officer on exactly that view on Europe. The political genius in the Kreml (Stalin of course) had turned the European power triangle on its side, and caused Berlin and London to fight each other instead of Berlin and Moscow.

However, much contemporary evidence from the late 1920s and 1930s indicate that Hitler and Stalin had started to cooperate long before the fateful summer 1939 and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

It will take too long to go through all the evidence, but if you are interested I recommend the memoirs of the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky (In Stalin's Secret Service, 1939) and the journalist and novelist Arthur Koestler (The Invisible Writing, The second volume of an autobiography, 1932 - 1940; 1954). Also, some historical books (but exciting enough to read like novels) on among other things politics of the Soviets prior to WWII: Chekisty; The history of the KGB by John Dziak (1988) and Double Lives; Stalin, Willi Münzenberg, and the Seduction of the Intellectuals by Stephen Koch (1995). If I had to chose one of these books I would chose the last one. It is not only a good read, but very revealing on Soviet disinformation campaigns both before and after WWII.