Stalin’s Gamble: The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930–1936 by Michael Jabara Carley

Submitted to Canadian Kindle 27 Jun 2024

Essential reading about the lead-up to World War Two. But beware! Your illusions will be hurt.

The book is a long read but that is because it is the fruit of a long time: Carley has spent thirty years in the archives of the countries involved. Stalin’s Gamble is the first of a trilogy that covers the period from Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 to his invasion of the USSR in 1941, This volume takes us to 1936 and the signing of a France-USSR pact (much weakened by the French apparat and, in the end, ineffective) and Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland. Because of his labours in the archives, Carley has command of all sides of the issue.

The central theme and, no doubt, a complete surprise to most of its readers, will be that the the conventional story has got it exactly backwards: Stalin was not Hitler’s co-conspirator. He understood four things: 1) the previous good Moscow-Berlin relations were gone forever, 2) Hitler was a threat to all around him, 3) Hitler would break any agreement as soon as he could, 4) the only response was an agreement of Germany’s neighbours to block him. “Collective security” they called it: only together could Hitler be stopped; individual agreements just encouraged him to push somewhere else. This volume retails, meeting by meeting, the efforts of Soviet diplomats to get their interlocutors to grasp this and to construct an anti-Hitler resistance arrangement. They were not unsuccessful: important people in France, Britain (even the anti-Bolshevik Winston Churchill who met the Soviet Ambassador often), Romania and Czechoslovakia agreed with Stalin’s appreciation of the situation but they could never quite push their governments over the finish line.

The last flicker of Moscow’s attempts would be extinguished with an absurdly lethargic and powerless French-British military mission to Leningrad in August 1939; Stalin now understood that his Plan A was dead and the USSR was on its own. So, to buy time, he accepted Hitler’s offer of a non-aggression pact, grabbed territory to the west and buckled up for the inevitable war. But his timing was wrong and Hitler attacked, as David Glantz has observed, at exactly the worst time for the Soviets.

Hard as it may be for many in the West to admit, Stalin’s appreciation of the situation was completely correct and the alliance that could have deterred Hitler never happened.

This interview with Carley describes the trilogy. https://www.thepostil.com/of-collective-security-an-interview-with-michael-jabara-carley/