The standard invective of diehard Stalinists, which must have haunted Khrushchev, was that he should have known that by bringing Stalin down he was bringing Russia down as well. But my reproach to Khrushchev is far more specific. I accuse him of sheer dishonesty. Using anti-Stalinism as a mere tool in his struggle for personal power, he deliberately made Stalin look like a fool, even though he knew better.
It would be unconscionable to deny the fact or the extent of Stalin’s atrocities in the 1930’s. However, these terrible events must not be seen out of their historical context, as if there had been no Hitler and the terrible war with Germany had not been imminent.
Mind you, I am not trying to whitewash Stalin’s brutality, but I am putting it into its proper context. My readers’ view of him may not change after this, but at least they will have more facts at their disposal, and form their opinion on a more solid foundation than underinformed judgment and common superstition.
It can be virtually taken for granted that the key to the dramatic change in Soviet domestic policies, starting in 1927, was Stalin’s reading of Hitler’s ominously revised Mein Kampf (see my earlier entry Stalin Reads Mein Kampf). With his pathological fear of telling the truth under any circumstances, even when the truth is helpful to your cause (nothing hurts you more than telling the truth, as truth exposes your vulnerabilities to the enemy, whereas lies conceal them), Stalin would never think of publicly stating the bottom-line rationale for his brutal policies even after the war had ended. But from 1927 on, Stalin considered it his sacred task as the leader of the nation to transform the USSR into a mighty war machine, capable of not only resisting the German Drang nach Osten, but prevailing as an emerging world superpower in the end.
The first to be scrapped was the NEP, the New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin in 1921. Instead, in 1928, Stalin would launch the fiendish five-year economic plans, throwing every available ruble, hand, and brain into heavy industry and war production. Stalin’s well-known wartime slogan “All for the front, all for victory!” ought to be applied, therefore, not just to the four years of war, from 1941 to 1945, but also to the preceding fourteen years of Soviet history.
Stalin’s brutal agricultural program of mass collectivization waged from 1928 to 1933, also stressed the war needs. It especially zeroed in on certain specific geographical areas, where potential saboteurs and potential German collaborators were preemptively, and most savagely, repressed. Even such grotesque monstrosities, as the MTS, the much-ridiculed machine-and-tractor stations which clustered all heavy farm machinery in a few strategically selected spots, thus making them excruciatingly difficult to borrow by any individual farms for their needs,--- even these should now start making sense, in the context of mass mobilization.
…Another mystery raised, but never properly explained by Khrushchev, was the extermination by Stalin of the old guard of the Soviet Army. There were apparently two logical reasons for replacing the whole Soviet military command structure with the new faces. The first one dates back to the time of the Civil War and the existence of two separate armies, as my reader may remember. Stalin never denied that those commanders whom he had wiped out had all been brilliant men, only, maybe, a bit too brilliant for their own good. In the coming apocalyptic war with Hitler, Stalin needed Voroshilov-like loyalty from his generals far more than their most exceptional military skills.
The other reason for Stalin’s purge of the military was terribly ruthless, but also practical. As the reader may remember, after the First World War, Soviet Russia was instrumental in building up the German Wehrmacht. Considerable numbers of German troops had been trained on Russian soil, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Professional and personal contacts between Soviet and German military officials had been numerous and intimate. Moscow had her spies and agents of influence in Germany and the reverse must be true as well. Under the emerging conditions of an inevitable war with Germany, one German spy in the Soviet military command could spell disaster. Stalin thought that he had enough untainted military talent in Russia, to allow him to get rid of all the officers compromised by their German ties, even though they had been compromised on Lenin’s and Stalin’s own orders!
…The harshest bashing of all was reserved by Khrushchev for Stalin’s behavior as the Commander in Chief on the eve of Hitler’s attack on Russia, in 1941. “Unbelievable blindness” and “gross incompetence” were among the nicer terms used. Khrushchev’s historians accused Stalin of turning a deaf ear to the numerous warnings from every corner about the impending German offensive. In his published memoir, Khrushchev says that Stalin had been so afraid of provoking a war, so stubbornly convinced that Hitler would honor the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and not attack Russia, that he had sacrificed all vigilance and allowed the Nazis to catch the Soviet Army unprepared, after which he himself fell apart.
Such criticism has been a demonstrably cheap shot. Stalin’s stalling for time was never more critical for the fate of the country than in the spring of 1941. Had Stalin put the Soviet troops on alert in March, or in April of 1941, Hitler would surely have taken notice, and he would not have committed the second worst and no-less fatal mistake of his whole political career (the first one was devising the Operation Barbarossa in the first place!), which had been to postpone the Operation Barbarossa from its original date of May 15 to June 22, just because Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941 looked to him more threatening than Stalin’s inept Russia. (For more examples of Stalin’s calculated incompetence see my later entry “We Fooled Them!” and several other places in my World War II subsection.)
Yes, it was precisely Stalin's “incompetence” which had relaxed the Führer into negligence and deprived the German Blitzkrieg in Russia of the critical extra thirty-eight days of good weather, essential to the success of the German Moscow offensive. According to German and subsequent Soviet analysis, only three to four extra weeks of tolerable weather conditions would have been sufficient for Germany to take Moscow, and if not to win the war against Russia before the end of 1941, as Hitler had planned, then at least to raise German morale quite substantially, instead of shattering it in the lost battle of Moscow.
Thus, Hitler’s critical blunder was less the result of his unbridled arrogance than of Stalin’s ability to fool him by the deliberate mismanagement of Soviet Western defenses, and it was that blunder--committed not by Stalin, but by Hitler, on Stalin's daring ruse!-- which would deny the Nazis in 1941 their only chance of winning the war.
…But no matter what, his massive preparation for a war with Germany was not an altogether desperate race for time, on Stalin’s part. He still had his ace in the German hole, apparently, alive and well. After Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933, Stalin, consequently, had not completely given up hope that, given some gentle persuasion, the Führer might still be able to reconsider his anti-Soviet posture in favor of the anti-French one.
And now that particular "ace in the hole" comes up front and center as the subject of my next entry. His name is Rudolf Hess.
It would be unconscionable to deny the fact or the extent of Stalin’s atrocities in the 1930’s. However, these terrible events must not be seen out of their historical context, as if there had been no Hitler and the terrible war with Germany had not been imminent.
Mind you, I am not trying to whitewash Stalin’s brutality, but I am putting it into its proper context. My readers’ view of him may not change after this, but at least they will have more facts at their disposal, and form their opinion on a more solid foundation than underinformed judgment and common superstition.
It can be virtually taken for granted that the key to the dramatic change in Soviet domestic policies, starting in 1927, was Stalin’s reading of Hitler’s ominously revised Mein Kampf (see my earlier entry Stalin Reads Mein Kampf). With his pathological fear of telling the truth under any circumstances, even when the truth is helpful to your cause (nothing hurts you more than telling the truth, as truth exposes your vulnerabilities to the enemy, whereas lies conceal them), Stalin would never think of publicly stating the bottom-line rationale for his brutal policies even after the war had ended. But from 1927 on, Stalin considered it his sacred task as the leader of the nation to transform the USSR into a mighty war machine, capable of not only resisting the German Drang nach Osten, but prevailing as an emerging world superpower in the end.
The first to be scrapped was the NEP, the New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin in 1921. Instead, in 1928, Stalin would launch the fiendish five-year economic plans, throwing every available ruble, hand, and brain into heavy industry and war production. Stalin’s well-known wartime slogan “All for the front, all for victory!” ought to be applied, therefore, not just to the four years of war, from 1941 to 1945, but also to the preceding fourteen years of Soviet history.
Stalin’s brutal agricultural program of mass collectivization waged from 1928 to 1933, also stressed the war needs. It especially zeroed in on certain specific geographical areas, where potential saboteurs and potential German collaborators were preemptively, and most savagely, repressed. Even such grotesque monstrosities, as the MTS, the much-ridiculed machine-and-tractor stations which clustered all heavy farm machinery in a few strategically selected spots, thus making them excruciatingly difficult to borrow by any individual farms for their needs,--- even these should now start making sense, in the context of mass mobilization.
…Another mystery raised, but never properly explained by Khrushchev, was the extermination by Stalin of the old guard of the Soviet Army. There were apparently two logical reasons for replacing the whole Soviet military command structure with the new faces. The first one dates back to the time of the Civil War and the existence of two separate armies, as my reader may remember. Stalin never denied that those commanders whom he had wiped out had all been brilliant men, only, maybe, a bit too brilliant for their own good. In the coming apocalyptic war with Hitler, Stalin needed Voroshilov-like loyalty from his generals far more than their most exceptional military skills.
The other reason for Stalin’s purge of the military was terribly ruthless, but also practical. As the reader may remember, after the First World War, Soviet Russia was instrumental in building up the German Wehrmacht. Considerable numbers of German troops had been trained on Russian soil, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Professional and personal contacts between Soviet and German military officials had been numerous and intimate. Moscow had her spies and agents of influence in Germany and the reverse must be true as well. Under the emerging conditions of an inevitable war with Germany, one German spy in the Soviet military command could spell disaster. Stalin thought that he had enough untainted military talent in Russia, to allow him to get rid of all the officers compromised by their German ties, even though they had been compromised on Lenin’s and Stalin’s own orders!
…The harshest bashing of all was reserved by Khrushchev for Stalin’s behavior as the Commander in Chief on the eve of Hitler’s attack on Russia, in 1941. “Unbelievable blindness” and “gross incompetence” were among the nicer terms used. Khrushchev’s historians accused Stalin of turning a deaf ear to the numerous warnings from every corner about the impending German offensive. In his published memoir, Khrushchev says that Stalin had been so afraid of provoking a war, so stubbornly convinced that Hitler would honor the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and not attack Russia, that he had sacrificed all vigilance and allowed the Nazis to catch the Soviet Army unprepared, after which he himself fell apart.
Such criticism has been a demonstrably cheap shot. Stalin’s stalling for time was never more critical for the fate of the country than in the spring of 1941. Had Stalin put the Soviet troops on alert in March, or in April of 1941, Hitler would surely have taken notice, and he would not have committed the second worst and no-less fatal mistake of his whole political career (the first one was devising the Operation Barbarossa in the first place!), which had been to postpone the Operation Barbarossa from its original date of May 15 to June 22, just because Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941 looked to him more threatening than Stalin’s inept Russia. (For more examples of Stalin’s calculated incompetence see my later entry “We Fooled Them!” and several other places in my World War II subsection.)
Yes, it was precisely Stalin's “incompetence” which had relaxed the Führer into negligence and deprived the German Blitzkrieg in Russia of the critical extra thirty-eight days of good weather, essential to the success of the German Moscow offensive. According to German and subsequent Soviet analysis, only three to four extra weeks of tolerable weather conditions would have been sufficient for Germany to take Moscow, and if not to win the war against Russia before the end of 1941, as Hitler had planned, then at least to raise German morale quite substantially, instead of shattering it in the lost battle of Moscow.
Thus, Hitler’s critical blunder was less the result of his unbridled arrogance than of Stalin’s ability to fool him by the deliberate mismanagement of Soviet Western defenses, and it was that blunder--committed not by Stalin, but by Hitler, on Stalin's daring ruse!-- which would deny the Nazis in 1941 their only chance of winning the war.
…But no matter what, his massive preparation for a war with Germany was not an altogether desperate race for time, on Stalin’s part. He still had his ace in the German hole, apparently, alive and well. After Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933, Stalin, consequently, had not completely given up hope that, given some gentle persuasion, the Führer might still be able to reconsider his anti-Soviet posture in favor of the anti-French one.
And now that particular "ace in the hole" comes up front and center as the subject of my next entry. His name is Rudolf Hess.
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