We Fooled Them!!!
“...If tomorrow’s the war, if tomorrow we march, be prepared for the march today!”
This memorable song was being sung throughout the 1930’s by every unpurged man, woman, and child in Soviet Russia. Everybody was getting ready for war, from the least to the foremost.
In the spirit of this massive national effort, Stalin was reviewing the status of Soviet military hardware, and found it wanting. He called the top weapons designers, engineers, and manufacturers, and demanded from them a quick and comprehensive rearmament program which would provide the nation with superior fighter planes and bombers, superior tanks, and mobile artillery vehicles. In other words, with everything needed to ensure a victory over Hitler “in the air, on the ground, and on water” (which was yet another verse from the same song). After some tough scheduling and pledges of super-heroic effort on the part of his weapons builders, Stalin was assured that, some time by the end of 1943, the nation could be totally and radically re-equipped.
Stalin was a statesman, which means that he did not have the special skills to make an atomic bomb, or to build a tank. His job was to make sure that the nation’s military transformation into a superpower colossus would go unhindered and waste-free. Wherever physical labor was required, he had an unlimited supply of cheap labor force among the millions of gulag inmates. Wherever brilliant minds had to be put to work, he knew only too well how to bring out the best in his people. He was going to shorten the tightest deadlines by twenty percent, and place their talent under martial law, literally: deliver or perish! Yes, he was a very hard taskmaster. But he also knew how to be exceptionally generous, with the sweetness of the carrot matching the heaviness of the stick. While depriving his workers of all freedoms, often including that of seeing their families, he fed them well, with caviar, smoked sturgeon, and suckling pig.
In a separate meeting in 1938, Stalin gathered his top nuclear physicists, engineers and explosives experts, to ask them the most natural question on earth.--- How soon were they going to make the atomic bomb? The experts reassured Comrade Stalin that their research had by now gone beyond the hypothetical stage into the prospective stage, but it would still be a few years before a definite deadline could be set.
Stalin was a reasonable man. He chose not to push his scientists for a better answer, but later put Comrade Beria in charge of them instead. Still, he was quite anxious to know, whether any other power was capable of developing its own atomic weapons before Russia could. He was told that the Soviet Union was on the cutting edge of the nuclear program and that the other most advanced nations in the field were Great Britain and Germany, but that it was completely out of the question for them to beat the Russians to the bomb, as the Soviet nuclear program was farther advanced.
“What about America?,” Stalin asked. The consensus was that the level of interest in the atomic research in the United States was too low, at the time, to allow any substantial progress.
Now that Stalin had received some assurances that by the mid-1940’s his nation would be in proper shape, both conventionally and by becoming a nuclear superpower, he needed to concentrate on the most vital task at hand: stalling for time in his standoff with Hitler.
...As I said before, he had long been convinced that the West was deliberately pushing Hitler into a military confrontation with the USSR. His suspicion became a fire, burning out of control, at the end of September 1938, when the leaders of Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy sat down together at Munich, ignoring the USSR altogether.
The Munich Conference was immediately interpreted in Moscow as the West giving Hitler the green light to invade Czechoslovakia, and then Poland, in order to move next further east, into Russia!
(This scenario was so much on Stalin’s mind that in 1940, while World War Two was already in progress in Western Europe, he would be absolutely infuriated by the swift collapse of France, and suspect the same secret hand of anti-Soviet conspiracy as the chief motivation of the French government for not putting up a more respectable defense!)
Feeling a pressing urgency, in the wake of Munich, Stalin was now ready to resort to some pretty desperate measures. However, the ensuing Hitler-Stalin Pact would be much more than just a stopgap, or the last recourse. As I see it, it was Stalin’s historic triumph of fooling the West into a hasty declaration of a war on Hitler. Here is the line of thinking which certainly has solid logic and strategic merit behind it:
The West wanted Hitler to invade Russia. Stalin’s task was to persuade the West that Hitler was a double-crosser, who fooled them all, and re-defected from Mein-Kampf-Two back to Mein-Kampf-One. Whatever Stalin could do to provoke the West into punishing Hitler for his supposed treachery, would take the heat off Russia, and possibly reverse the odds in Russia’s favor.
Stalin would offer Hitler a sweetheart deal he could not refuse. Aside from the Non-Aggression Pact, which of course was not worth a penny, and a Secret Protocol, authorizing certain changes in the map of Eastern Europe, there was also an enticing Trade Agreement, guaranteeing among many things Soviet deliveries of large quantities of crude oil to Germany, a welcome food for Hitler’s war machine!
Stalin’s offer was designed to have still another attraction for Hitler: Poland. Planning to invade Poland, Hitler had to be much more worried about a hostile Soviet reaction to his provocative move, so dangerously close to the Soviet border, than about the British and French resolution to fight him over some phony peace treaty they may have signed with that despicable Polish “hyena” (to use Churchill’s unflattering contemporaneous metaphor for Poland). And now, see, Stalin himself was reassuring Hitler that the German hostile takeover of Poland would be accepted by Moscow in the spirit of friendship and cooperation!
Having been thinking over this so convincingly logical spin of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, I have long come to realize that should the German invasion of Poland have taken place in the absence of this brilliant ploy on Russia’s part, Britain and France would never have taken such a drastic action against Germany, as declaring a war on her. (Why would they do such a thing on Poland's behalf, the nation that was on Hitler's side at Munich, richly benefiting afterwards from Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia?!!)
...As a short postscript to this entry, it may be useful to remind the reader that Britain and France were by no means the only ones fooled by Stalin here. Hitler was certainly fooled as well. He failed to realize that this deceptively "easy" Treaty would make his future war with Russia a lost war for Germany.
“...If tomorrow’s the war, if tomorrow we march, be prepared for the march today!”
This memorable song was being sung throughout the 1930’s by every unpurged man, woman, and child in Soviet Russia. Everybody was getting ready for war, from the least to the foremost.
In the spirit of this massive national effort, Stalin was reviewing the status of Soviet military hardware, and found it wanting. He called the top weapons designers, engineers, and manufacturers, and demanded from them a quick and comprehensive rearmament program which would provide the nation with superior fighter planes and bombers, superior tanks, and mobile artillery vehicles. In other words, with everything needed to ensure a victory over Hitler “in the air, on the ground, and on water” (which was yet another verse from the same song). After some tough scheduling and pledges of super-heroic effort on the part of his weapons builders, Stalin was assured that, some time by the end of 1943, the nation could be totally and radically re-equipped.
Stalin was a statesman, which means that he did not have the special skills to make an atomic bomb, or to build a tank. His job was to make sure that the nation’s military transformation into a superpower colossus would go unhindered and waste-free. Wherever physical labor was required, he had an unlimited supply of cheap labor force among the millions of gulag inmates. Wherever brilliant minds had to be put to work, he knew only too well how to bring out the best in his people. He was going to shorten the tightest deadlines by twenty percent, and place their talent under martial law, literally: deliver or perish! Yes, he was a very hard taskmaster. But he also knew how to be exceptionally generous, with the sweetness of the carrot matching the heaviness of the stick. While depriving his workers of all freedoms, often including that of seeing their families, he fed them well, with caviar, smoked sturgeon, and suckling pig.
In a separate meeting in 1938, Stalin gathered his top nuclear physicists, engineers and explosives experts, to ask them the most natural question on earth.--- How soon were they going to make the atomic bomb? The experts reassured Comrade Stalin that their research had by now gone beyond the hypothetical stage into the prospective stage, but it would still be a few years before a definite deadline could be set.
Stalin was a reasonable man. He chose not to push his scientists for a better answer, but later put Comrade Beria in charge of them instead. Still, he was quite anxious to know, whether any other power was capable of developing its own atomic weapons before Russia could. He was told that the Soviet Union was on the cutting edge of the nuclear program and that the other most advanced nations in the field were Great Britain and Germany, but that it was completely out of the question for them to beat the Russians to the bomb, as the Soviet nuclear program was farther advanced.
“What about America?,” Stalin asked. The consensus was that the level of interest in the atomic research in the United States was too low, at the time, to allow any substantial progress.
Now that Stalin had received some assurances that by the mid-1940’s his nation would be in proper shape, both conventionally and by becoming a nuclear superpower, he needed to concentrate on the most vital task at hand: stalling for time in his standoff with Hitler.
...As I said before, he had long been convinced that the West was deliberately pushing Hitler into a military confrontation with the USSR. His suspicion became a fire, burning out of control, at the end of September 1938, when the leaders of Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy sat down together at Munich, ignoring the USSR altogether.
The Munich Conference was immediately interpreted in Moscow as the West giving Hitler the green light to invade Czechoslovakia, and then Poland, in order to move next further east, into Russia!
(This scenario was so much on Stalin’s mind that in 1940, while World War Two was already in progress in Western Europe, he would be absolutely infuriated by the swift collapse of France, and suspect the same secret hand of anti-Soviet conspiracy as the chief motivation of the French government for not putting up a more respectable defense!)
Feeling a pressing urgency, in the wake of Munich, Stalin was now ready to resort to some pretty desperate measures. However, the ensuing Hitler-Stalin Pact would be much more than just a stopgap, or the last recourse. As I see it, it was Stalin’s historic triumph of fooling the West into a hasty declaration of a war on Hitler. Here is the line of thinking which certainly has solid logic and strategic merit behind it:
The West wanted Hitler to invade Russia. Stalin’s task was to persuade the West that Hitler was a double-crosser, who fooled them all, and re-defected from Mein-Kampf-Two back to Mein-Kampf-One. Whatever Stalin could do to provoke the West into punishing Hitler for his supposed treachery, would take the heat off Russia, and possibly reverse the odds in Russia’s favor.
Stalin would offer Hitler a sweetheart deal he could not refuse. Aside from the Non-Aggression Pact, which of course was not worth a penny, and a Secret Protocol, authorizing certain changes in the map of Eastern Europe, there was also an enticing Trade Agreement, guaranteeing among many things Soviet deliveries of large quantities of crude oil to Germany, a welcome food for Hitler’s war machine!
Stalin’s offer was designed to have still another attraction for Hitler: Poland. Planning to invade Poland, Hitler had to be much more worried about a hostile Soviet reaction to his provocative move, so dangerously close to the Soviet border, than about the British and French resolution to fight him over some phony peace treaty they may have signed with that despicable Polish “hyena” (to use Churchill’s unflattering contemporaneous metaphor for Poland). And now, see, Stalin himself was reassuring Hitler that the German hostile takeover of Poland would be accepted by Moscow in the spirit of friendship and cooperation!
Having been thinking over this so convincingly logical spin of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, I have long come to realize that should the German invasion of Poland have taken place in the absence of this brilliant ploy on Russia’s part, Britain and France would never have taken such a drastic action against Germany, as declaring a war on her. (Why would they do such a thing on Poland's behalf, the nation that was on Hitler's side at Munich, richly benefiting afterwards from Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia?!!)
...As a short postscript to this entry, it may be useful to remind the reader that Britain and France were by no means the only ones fooled by Stalin here. Hitler was certainly fooled as well. He failed to realize that this deceptively "easy" Treaty would make his future war with Russia a lost war for Germany.
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