Stalin and Nazi Germany

Dictatorships & Democracies

Having consolidated his power in the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin long focused on internal affairs: the Five Year Plans, collectivization of agriculture, rapid industrialization, and modernization of the Red Army. Despite his penchant for domestic policy, from the summer of 1936 Stalin’s Soviet Union was increasingly drawn into foreign affairs. This article explores Stalin’s foreign policy on the eve of the Second World War. The Soviet Union’s multiple failures in forging an anti-Fascist alliance with Britain and France, most notably in the Spanish Civil War, will be explored as the prelude to Stalin’s eventual decision, in August 1939, to authorize the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The American Historical Review, 2001

Historians of Soviet foreign policy and the Second World War will welcome the arrival of Garbriel Gorodetskys Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia, the first study of Soviet decisionmaking between the Nazi-Soviet pact and the outbreak of the German-Soviet war to be based upon thorough research in Soviet as well as western archives. This is often an insightful and thought-provoking book that fills an important gap in the existing literature on the origins of the terrible struggle between Hitlers Germany and the USSR. Gorodetskys stated aim is twofold. First, he seeks to discredit further the "preventative war" thesis popularized in works such as Victor Suvorovs Icebreaker: Who started the Second World War? (London, 1990). Gorodetsky has already published extensively on this question and has succeeded admirably in revealing Suvorovs case (and that of like-minded German-speaking authors) as a tissue of speculation and distortion. It therefore comes as no surprise that Grand Delusion further undermines the flimsy edifice of right-wing revisionist works on the roots of operation "Barbarossa". Accordingly, this review will concentrate on Gorodetskys other objective, namely, his painstaking effort to explain Stalins policy toward Nazi Germany in this period, a policy that culminated in the Red Army being caught unprepared by the German onslaught of

A review of Jonathan Haslam's The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II

Prague Papers on the History of International Relations, 2015

The aim of the essay is to analyse the most important circumstances which could affected the final Stalin's decision leading to the ratification of Soviet-German political relations at the end of the thirties. Among others to verify the affirmation that it was a calculated deal with exact objectives in the case of Ribbentrop-Molotov's Pact. The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 23rd, 1939 was a calculated accord with precise objectives when in both systems common national interests, which consisted also in the partition of Poland, overshadowed their ideological differences. This paper outlines the circumstances of the negotiations, the main actors, and motives leading to the creation of the agreement. A part of the research is the analysis of importance and direct consequences of the German-Soviet Pact. The political alliance provided Germany both a feeling of relative security in the war against Poland and neutrality of the second party, including the guarantee of ...

This article will focus on the special events which will lead to, what Turkey calls «the Stalin 's demands ", in 1945, and on its consequences on the international system. We will show how the several territorial claims from Soviet Union can be seen as proofs and consequences of movements in the scale of hierarchy of powers, the birth of a new balance of power: the Cold War and her bipolar world3

The theme of my paper concerns the subjective side of this “aufbruch in die Moderne” which we are speaking about. I would like to explore how the complicated and very unstable international global situation in 1918 was seen and perceived by the leading Bolshevik decision-makers in the field of the foreign policy: Vladimir I. Lenin, Georgy V. Chicherin, and Leon D. Trotsky. Mentioning the short and long perspectives in the title of my paper, I aim to stress its two-sided approach. However briefly it could be done, it seems important to include the Bolshevik views in 1918 (so-called “short perspective”) in the more extended frame of time and to analyse the heritage of this first year of the Bolshevik rule in the following Soviet foreign policy and subsequent perceptions of the world realities (what is called “long perspective” in this paper). The choice of sources which this paper is based on, was governed by the desire to explore the three main questions: first, how the analysis of the international politics was elaborated inside the Bolshevik leadership (hence the interest to interior official and private correspondence of the Soviet officials); second, how it was presented to the party members and to the outside world (hence the attention paid to the speeches and articles of Lenin and other Bolsheviks, and to the materials of the Party and All-Russia Central Executive Committee congresses); and, finally, how this vision was translated into interaction with other states (hence the interest to the diplomatic documents concerning, especially, the Soviet-German, Soviet-Polish and the Soviet-Chinese relations). I will begin by reviewing what was distinct in the situation of 1918 for Bolshevik perception of world realities, then I’ll pass to the particular traits of the Soviet analysis of global “balance of power” and the Soviet view on trends of international developments. As a conclusion, some general thoughts on the question of continuity and change in the Soviet foreign policy between 1918 and 1945 are proposed.

In: H-German, 2010

SSRN Electronic Journal

The theme of my paper concerns the subjective side of this “aufbruch in die Moderne” which we are speaking about. I would like to explore how the complicated and very unstable international global situation in 1918 was seen and perceived by the leading Bolshevik decision-makers in the field of the foreign policy: Vladimir I. Lenin, Georgy V. Chicherin, and Leon D. Trotsky. Mentioning the short and long perspectives in the title of my paper, I aim to stress its two-sided approach. However briefly it could be done, it seems important to include the Bolshevik views in 1918 (so-called “short perspective”) in the more extended frame of time and to analyse the heritage of this first year of the Bolshevik rule in the following Soviet foreign policy and subsequent perceptions of the world realities (what is called “long perspective” in this paper). The choice of sources which this paper is based on, was governed by the desire to explore the three main questions: first, how the analysis of the international politics was elaborated inside the Bolshevik leadership (hence the interest to interior official and private correspondence of the Soviet officials); second, how it was presented to the party members and to the outside world (hence the attention paid to the speeches and articles of Lenin and other Bolsheviks, and to the materials of the Party and All-Russia Central Executive Committee congresses); and, finally, how this vision was translated into interaction with other states (hence the interest to the diplomatic documents concerning, especially, the Soviet-German, Soviet-Polish and the Soviet-Chinese relations). I will begin by reviewing what was distinct in the situation of 1918 for Bolshevik perception of world realities, then I’ll pass to the particular traits of the Soviet analysis of global “balance of power” and the Soviet view on trends of international developments. As a conclusion, some general thoughts on the question of continuity and change in the Soviet foreign policy between 1918 and 1945 are proposed.