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/

ADDENDUM 1 July 2024. Received this from Kindle. The only true thing in this list was “links to other sites”. So I removed the last para and resubmitted. I must say that I have no great expectations.

ADDENDUM 4 Jul 2024. They published it.

So, when Western civilisation has finally ended,

what will be left for future generations?

We had values once. They meant something once. But then we shit on them. And nobody believes any more. (Vide Canadian Parliament)

Here’s my list

Newton https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/592171-to-myself-i-am-only-a-child-playing-on-the

and this

Turkey, Iran, Hungary, Vietnam. That’s something.

On this day, 12 August, in 1939, British-French-Soviet military talks began in Leningrad. The British delegation was headed by an obscure admiral and the French by an obscure general; they had taken five days to get there by boat. The Soviet delegation was headed by the Defence Minister and the Chief of the General Staff. At the first meeting the Soviet side said it was there to negotiate a real agreement to combine against Hitler; what were they authorised to do? To talk said the Frenchman, let me get back to London said the Brit. A couple of days later London said he was there to talk. Not an auspicious beginning.

About a year after Hitler took power, Moscow realised Hitler was coming for it and everybody else. At Stalin’s direction, the Foreign Minister, Maksim Litvinov, starting pushing “collective security”: everybody who was threatened by Hitler should get together to resist him. Obviously, the three principal powers, Britain, France and the USSR, would be the leaders, but Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia were all on Hitler’s hitlist. Alone they would be eaten one by one, only united could they stop Hitler.

Litvinov didn’t have much success: he did get a treaty with France in 1935 but it turned out to have little content in practice. Meanwhile Poland, vitally important to any anti-Hitler scheme because it lay between the USSR and Germany, signed the very first non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1934 and collaborated in the carve-up of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Washington rejected overtures in 1934. The UK signed a naval agreement with Germany in 1935. Litvinov kept trying, and people like Winston Churchill agreed, but the Munich agreement of September 1938 pretty well killed it off. Without Britain, France or Poland, it couldn’t be done.

The fuse was burning: in March 1939 Berlin tore up the Munich agreement and dismembered the rest of Czechoslovakia; in April it denounced the Polish pact. Litvinov got Stalin’s agreement for one last try. Even though Stalin replaced Litvinov with Vyacheslav Molotov, he was still hopeful enough to send his two top military people to meet the Anglo-French delegation when it finally got there. But what hope was there for a collective anti-Hitler alliance if the only result from years of trying was a low-level delegation with no negotiation powers and lethargic time appreciation? Evidently nothing would be coming from London or Paris or Warsaw. A low-level Anglo-French mission in, say, 1935 would have been a base to build on but in late summer 1939 it was absurd.

If you were Stalin, what would you do when your Plan A is dead? You know war is coming, you believe Hitler when he says his aim is to seize lebensraum to the east. Your potential allies don’t get it. What would you do?

While London and Paris dither and Warsaw dreams dreams (what dreams? Hitler just tore up the non-aggression pact you were counting on: you’re next) Hitler strikes. How about a non-aggression pact? Stalin seizes the chance, the agreement is immediately signed. Stalin knows perfectly well that Hitler is going to attack the USSR and so he starts to grab as much territory to the west as he can and put off the day as long as possible.

In a couple of weeks you will see a whole bunch of op-eds saying that those two evil BFFs got together to do the dirty on Poland and start the war. You won’t see any mention of the failed Soviet collective security attempt. Why not? Well, the authors probably haven’t heard about it (lots of things have gone down the memory hole) and, if they had, it would spoil the propaganda value of their rant about wicked Russia.

FURTHER READING. I knew this happened because AJP Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War was a set text in my university days and he mentions it. But the man who’s really done the big work on it today is the Canadian historian Michael Jabara Carley. Here’s an interview with him that covers the bigger picture and his trilogy about to be published, an essay on what I call Stalin’s Plan A, and a book 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Every now and again the corporate media forgets to forget it: “Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'”.

(By the way, while the West has pretty much forgotten this, you can be sure that Moscow hasn’t.)

He died on Tuesday. I haven’t bothered to read many of the obits that have been published but I will make a guess about their general flavour. The Western ones will say he ended the Cold War, removed the Soviet threat and, maybe, introduced fast food to Russia (a reverse on the supposed origin of the bistro). The Russian ones will be rather uncomplimentary and will blame him for the miseries of the 1990s when jobs disappeared, savings evaporated, deaths increased and Russia was pushed around.

I approach this with a somewhat different view that, as it happens, I share with Putin. I believe that, when Gorbachev became GenSek in 1985, the USSR system had exhausted its possibilities. I believe, but cannot find the reference, that Putin told Oliver Stone that the system was inefficient at its core, but more of his thoughts on the viability of the USSR can be found here. Not very complimentary: ideals not accomplished, too much repression ab initio, he pays credit to Stalin’s industrialisation for victory in 1945 but concludes “However, in the final count, the inability to embrace change, to embrace technical revolutions and new technology led to a collapse of that economy”. Or how about this from September 2005? “In the Soviet Union, for many decades, we lived under the motto, we need to think about the future generation. But we never thought about the existing, current, present generations.” (PS he never said “the greatest catastrophe”: that’s a mistranslation.)

In short, I believe that the USSR was heading for trouble in 1985: the 1990s were bad enough but I’m not sure they would have been much better with other players.

So Putin and I would agree that Gorbachev inherited a failing idea. He had three solutions. You can agree that they didn’t work but they were better than Andropov’s notion of tightening discipline and Chernyenko’s inertia. Glasnost was an attempt to start telling the truth, or some of it, and perestroyka attempted a side-to-side, top-to-bottom reconstruction. His third idea was a redesign of the union itself. This, by the way, gave me my first revelation that many Western “experts” formed their conclusions without data. At a Wilton Park conference, one of these “experts” built his whole presentation around the assertion that nobody had any idea what Gorbachev’s New Union would be. This after three drafts, produced after much negotiation, had been published in full in the media! I was rather amazed at this ignorance and equally so to be casually brushed off when I pointed out that the texts had been published and that I had read them.

The idea of re-creating the union was put to a referendum and, with certain revealing exceptions, passed by a solid majority. But the New Union never happened. A day or so before it was due to be implemented, the August coup attempt took place. I have written about my involvement in it here. As it turned out, that killed it. Shortly afterwards, for whatever reason, Yeltsin, Shushkevich and Kravchuk declared the USSR dead and gone and Gorbachev resigned and the flag came down. And that was that. (And, not for the last time, Kiev dismissed the wishes of the Ukrainian population: 59% of the total electorate having voted yes in the referendum.)

Could something different have happened? Had the treaty had been signed; that would have been different. Most of the USSR would have remained, with some republics at the edges gone, and a lot of the suffering of the breakup of such an absurdly centralised economy would have been prevented. The Union of Sovereign States would have remained a major player in the world system and there would have been less likelihood of outsiders meddling.

But it didn’t happen and therefore Gorbachev failed in what he was trying to do. Which was something dangerous and rarely successful.

But was it so bad for Russia? A question few ask. In 2005 Vladislav Surkov told Der Spiegal that he still remembered what he felt when the USSR went down: “an enormous sense of relief, as if a huge leech had dropped from my back”. He thereby showed himself to be one of the few people who understood that, whatever may have been true at other times, by the 1980s the RSFSR was subsidising the whole thing. Most people thought the opposite. Here’s Leonid Kuchma in 1993 “…like everyone else, I believed that Ukraine is so rich that it provided for the entire [Soviet] Union. It turned out that it is, in fact, rich. However, was it really a provider?” Thus, from Russia’s perspective, the end of the USSR was actually a good thing. Admittedly, a lot of misery had to be gone though first. But, of the former fifteen – and the 1990s were bad for all the USSR successor states, not just Russia – which is doing the best now? The Baltics with their huge population loss? Ukraine or Moldova, contenders for the poorest countries in Europe? Central Asia? The Caucasus? For those who think Russia is a decaying sinkhole I invite a perusal of these Google Street View shots of numerous cities taken ten years apart.

So, despite the strong dislike most Russians have for him, they may come to have a kinder view over time.

(PS I can’t give hyperlinks for everything. Most of this happened pre-Internet and the quotations are from the collections I made at the time.)