Abstract
One of the most mystifying aspects in the history of the Second World War is the remarkable recovery of the Red Army after the disastrous first six months of Operation Barbarossa – the German invasion of the Soviet Union. According to the conventional wisdom, the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, was woefully unprepared for the invasion, but miraculously mobilized the tottering Soviet republic to repel the Nazi onslaught. Perhaps, however, there is more to this history. In a provocative study – The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II – Viktor Suvorov, a former Soviet Army intelligence officer, argues that Stalin had long planned to foment a European war with the aim of exhausting the European powers so that the Red Army could enter at the opportune time and conquer the continent. According to this line of reasoning, the war would be an ‘icebreaker’ for a continental communist revolution. To make his case, Suvorov amasses an impressive collection of credible facts culled from Soviet memoirs, archives, and postwar studies.
As Suvorov explains, Stalin was a master of doing everything with someone else’s hands – that is, eliminating one enemy with the hands of the other. After reading Mein Kampf, he reasoned that Adolf Hitler could be used as a tool to precipitate a war in Europe. To help gain control of the German government, in 1932, Stalin instructed the German Communist Party not to make common cause with the Social Democratic Party in uniting against the Nazis. Seeking to liberate Germany from the chains of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler was sure to provoke other European countries. Hitler was adamantly committed to regaining German territories, and his demands on Poland and Czechoslovakia alarmed the western powers that began to form alliances as a way to contain him after the Munich Conference in 1938. Not unlike the research contained in A.J.P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War, and more recently Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, Suvorov avers that Hitler’s foreign policy aims were actually quite limited.
Hitler’s principal strategic error was his failure to prevent Germany from getting involved in another two-front war, the same diplomatic mistake that he sought to avoid as explained in Mein Kampf. His failure in statecraft resulted in uniting the strongest industrial powers in the world against Germany. Although he considered France to be an implacable enemy, Hitler had much admiration for England and hoped to form an alliance with that country. In fact, when given the news that Britain was about to declare war on Germany shortly after the invasion of Poland, Hitler is reported to have turned to his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and remarked, ‘What now?’
At first blush, the German-Soviet Pact of 1939 appeared to be the quintessence of statecraft in that it ignored ideology in favour of pursing national policy. Suvorov makes a compelling case that Hitler was outmanoeuvred by Stalin in the months leading up to the war. According to his thesis, Stalin’s masterstroke was the 1939 non-aggression pact signed by Vyacheslav Molotov and Ribbentrop, which agreed to the dismemberment of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union. Hitler, seeking to avoid a two-front war, expected his Soviet ally to attack Poland contemporaneously in the east with the German invasion in the west, though Stalin waited two weeks to invade, by which time France and Britain had already declared war on Germany. Announcing his military action as a protective measure for what remained of Poland, Stalin was able to avoid war with the west.
Explicitly rejecting the assertion that Stalin’s army was in a defensive position, Suvorov argues that after the pact was signed the Soviet leader rapidly expanded the Soviet armed forces, the great bulk of which was deployed near the German border, thus casting doubt on the popular assumption that Stalin trusted Hitler. By contrast, after the defeat of France in May 1940, Hitler ordered a drastic reduction in German armed forces, thus suggesting that he had yet to plan an attack on the Soviet Union.
The Soviet economy was mobilized for war far ahead of the German economy, which was not fully mobilized until February 1943, in the wake of the disastrous defeat at Stalingrad. By the spring of 1941, Suvorov claims, German intelligence determined that a Soviet invasion was imminent. In the months leading up to the war, Stalin persistently crawled toward the vital life-sustaining resources of Germany, cutting off iron ore, timber, and nickel from Finland and oil from Romania. These actions, according to Suvorov, amounted to Stalin raising an axe over Hitler’s head on two sides. Ultimately, Suvorov asserts, the threat to the Romanian oilfields is what compelled Hitler to order his military commanders to prepare for a strike against the Soviet Union. Stalin reasoned that it would be suicidal for Hitler to launch a strike against the Soviet Union, which would trap his country in another two-front war. As he watched the Soviet noose tightening, faced with this fait accompli, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on 21 June 1941, thus catching Stalin off guard.
Because the Red Army was in an offensively deployed forward position, Suvorov contends that this is the main reason why it suffered a series of colossal defeats in the opening months of the war. To buttress his claim, he points out that many of the Soviet weapons were most suited for offensive, not defensive, warfare. Rather than a struggle for Lebensraum, Suvorov argues that Hitler ordered the invasion out of desperation as it amounted to a pre-emptive strike for national survival in the face of strangulation. Suvorov characterizes Stalin as one of the greatest diplomats of the twentieth century. When Hitler conquered half of Europe, nearly the rest of the world declared war on him. By contrast, Stalin ended up conquering half of Europe and received the world’s largess and greetings. While the world hated Hitler, it commiserated with Stalin.
To Communist strategists, Germany was long considered a pivotal country, considering its advanced industrial development, politically organized labour force, and central location on the continent. Like his predecessor, Lenin, for whom the First World War was the catalyst that enabled him to orchestrate the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin also believed that he could spread the communist revolution in the cauldron of war. After initially consolidating power and building socialism in one country, foreign policy took precedence and plans were made for a major European conflict out of which the Soviet Union would lead the world communist revolution. Toward that end, the Soviet government allowed the German Reichswehr and the Luftwaffe to train on Soviet territory during the interwar years, and even supplied Germany with invaluable resources, including military materiel, effectively putting a sword in Hitler’s hands.
Although the Soviet Union was suited for conquest and was the only country to expand its borders as a result of the Second World War, Suvorov observes that the country was not adapted for peacetime. Inasmuch as the Soviet Union could survive only in a crisis environment, with the failure to conquer the whole of Europe, it was only a matter of time before the system crumbled. Thus, ironically, he credits Hitler with the downfall of communism.
Though Suvorov’s case is compelling, it remains circumstantial and selective. For instance, he dismisses Hitler’s Drang nach Osten (‘drive to the east’) aspirations, as expressed in Mein Kampf, as fanciful and not to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, he categorically rejects any suspicion that he is seeking to exonerate Hitler, commenting that although he was a criminal ‘it does not follow that Stalin was his innocent victim, as Communist propaganda portrayed him to the world’ (p. xi). As Suvorov explains, his primary reason for defecting to the west in 1978 was to make his research discoveries available to the Russian people and the world public. He was later tried in absentia in the Soviet Union and sentenced to death for treason. In order to settle the controversy, he demands that the Russian authorities open the archives relating to the years leading up to the Second World War. A highly controversial study, Suvorov’s book is nevertheless well researched and warrants further examination into this critical period in the history of the war.