Is blaming or making the Soviet Union responsible for the outbreak of World Wr II a minority view?
I have only come across a handful of websites that make the case for the Soviet Union’s culpability and Odd Arne Westad’s “The Cold War” p. 40 “Knowing that at least some western leaders would gladly sacrifice the USSR to German aggression, Stalin made the move that would unleash World War II. In August 1939 he signed a treaty of nonaggression with the enemy he feared most, Adolf Hitlker”. …p. 41. “Stalin stubbornly planned to cash in on his pact with Hitler, even though there were plenty of warning stat the Nazis were preparing an attack on the Soviet Union”…"p44. “Not only had his pact with Hitler helped unleash World War II, but—shielded by the pact—his forces had invaded eastern Poland, occupied the Baltic. states, and attacked Finland.”
Also, why was Stalin so willing to believe all the negative personal attacks on him and the Soviet Union by the Western Allies and expected them to turn against the USSR sooner or later but not readily believe (despite all the evidence) that Hitler would also turn on Russia? Virtually everyone who had ever met him acknowledged how smart/shrewd he was? Was his lack of insight into Hitler just an anomaly?
I am not going to research this line of thought, but my off-the-cuff impression is that it smells faintly of denialism, albeit not specifically Holocaust denialism: “The Germans didn’t start the war, the nasty Soviets did. With their treacherous non-aggression treaty. Because you always start a war with a treaty designed to prevent aggression.” :dubious:
How can one blame the Soviet Union for STARTING WWII when history points out the obvious fact that Hitler started it? Though it was bloodless, he invaded Austria and annexed it, and it was his idea to invade Poland and split it with the USSR in a move to please, placate, and ally with a powerful force to the east. I can’t even fathom such an assertion.
I’m not a WWII scholar, but doesn’t the USSR’s actions in Poland and the Baltics, as well as their actions in eastern Europe (once it was clear the tide had turned) indicative of an expansionist desire of the Soviet Union on the same order as that of Germany and Japan? Now, their ability to expand was much more limited, of course.
That said, I think Chance got it in one. The actual European WWII we got, as opposed to one we would have gotten in an alternative universe with a stronger Soviet Union, was caused by German aggression, full stop.
I’ve never really heard this description of Stalin. Maybe it is just western propaganda, but I’ve always thought of him as an overly paranoid monster who decimated his own military, leaving them unable to defend against German invaders.
I did find this which was interesting. It involves exerpts from Molotov’s memoirs. It claims that Stalin refused to let the Nazis bait him into war, and he kept delaying a war so that the world would know Germany was the main aggressor. Stalin was afraid of a Germany-Britain alliance against the USSR, and also by delaying the war the Nazis invaded in winter which was their undoing.
I was a student of Arne Westad, and I firmly believe you are reading too much into what he wrote. While I have not read that book, I strongly doubt that his actual point is that Stalin started or is to blame for WWII. I think what he’s asserting is essentially the answer to this question: “Did the non-aggression pact pave the way for Nazi aggression?”
I think the clear answer is yes.
As to whether the war would not have occurred but for the pact, I’m not sure if Westad is offering an opinion on that.
Westad is tough in th Soviet Union, but he isn’t a nut like Francis Fukuyama is. I really think you’re misreading his point.
I can see that argument if “non aggression pact” is synonymous with “agreement to peacably secure Germany’s eastern borders, freeing Germany to turn westward.”
It’s not really knowable whether lacking the non-aggression treaty, Germany would have felt secure enough to start a single-front war to the west. Stalin was demonstrably treacherous, but it’s hard to believe a scrap of paper would really have been enough to give Hitler the warm-and-fuzzies necessary to turn his back on the USSR.
Maybe the Germans thought the idea of the shared dismantlement of Poland would be enough to satisfy the Soviets for a time? The USSR got a lot of prime ground out of that. A little bribe to keep Joe honest, perhaps.
Hitler was always clear about wanting *lebensraum *to Germany’s east, where he thought the Slavic and Jewish populace was inferior and undeserving of existence. A suggestion is not well supported that there could have been circumstances in which he wouldn’t have gone to war there to get it.
Hitler started WWII (assuming you go with the western view that WWII started in 1939). The exact circumstances of when and where he started the war depended on the actions of other countries but as long as Hitler was in power, the war was going to happen.
I’ll accept that we are talking about the west only.
It’s really impossible to argue that anyone other than Germany began WWII. Certainly the USSR made it slightly easier to invade Poland, and has culpability there that the allies largely ignored later in the war, but the USSR didn’t initiate that move. They certainly didn’t make make any of the other steps that Germany did prior to September 1939.
One can make a case that Germany isn’t to blame for WWI (make a case, not necessary win the argument), but it virtually impossible to do so in WWII.
Of course Nazi Germany started WW2, but that article does not claim Stalin did so, instead it accused him of “, Stalin made the move that would unleash World War II”. And sure, yes, giving Germany a safe Eastern border and trading raw material and war supplies to Nazi Germany likely made Hitler considerably more confident. There also has been shown a secret Hitler-Stalin deal where Stalin was able to come in from the other side and take over long desired land.
It is hard to say what actually started WW2. What would have happened had Britian & France let Germany have Poland? Would Hitler had gone West? Remember, he always planned to go East.
But my bet on who started WW2 is Chamberlian,Kim Philby and his ilk. Canaris and the German High command had a plan to take down Hitler should Hitler order a move into Czechoslovakia- and if the Allies promised military intervention. They knew the fledgling German military would lose- and fast. But Phily (answering to his Soviet puppetmasters) convinced the Secret Service and Chamberlain that Canaris’s promise of a coup should the Allies threaten military intervention and war was false.
Thus Chamberlain gave in to Hitler, and likely the last chance of a general coup was gone.
It was Chamberlain, not Stalin- but of course Stalin ordered Philby to convince him.
Stalin was pushing U.K. and France to take a more active stance, to come to Czechoslovakia’s defense. U.S. was encouraging this also. But U.K. and France did not welcome Soviet help, for the logical reason that Stalin would have to invade Poland (or Romania) just to contact Czech or Germany, and those countries feared Stalin at least as much as they feared Hitler.
Instead, with no support from the West, Stalin agreed to split up Poland with Hitler. This was short-term pragmatic opportunism on both sides, only postponing their eventual war. The West should be grateful Soviet advanced into Poland; when the Big War began, the Soviets’ initial line was 150 miles (or so) further west.
Yeah, I’d say that very few people think it was the cause or responsible for the war, though it’s actions contributed to it (such as it’s alliance with Nazi Germany to conquer and parse up Poland). I suppose you could make a case that one of the reasons Hitler went to war in the first place was because of Communism in the Soviet Union, but I don’t think you could make a case that this makes the Soviet Union responsible in any meaningful way.
The man was a paranoid monster, who was only ‘smart/shrewd’ in a gangster sort of way. What he was was much more ruthless than anyone else around him, and he used that to go from being basically a criminal gangster to the absolute ruler of a dictatorship that killed more people than any other in history (and helped several other ranking monsters do similar things in their countries). That said, he was absolutely right…the west DID try and stifle the Bolshevik’s in the early days of the revolution and did all they could to try and get rid of them, and of course even more so when Stalin showed his hand and took control of the country completely. No one could miss the fact that millions of Russians were dying or the brutal conditions Stalin et al had the Russian people in, nor things like the show trials or other farcical things they did during the 20’s or 30’s. As for Hitler, Stalin actually admired him early on, and actually modeled his own purge of military and communist high committee after Hitler’s night of the long knives coup that put Hitler firmly in the drivers seat. I think that, eventually Stalin did know that it would come down to a showdown of Germany verse the USSR, but he didn’t think this would happen for years or a decade or two further down the road. You have to remember that Germany and the USSR had a lot of secret agreements, such as the development of tanks as well as things like the partitioning of Poland, and Stalin took Hitler at his word that this was how things stood. Finally, you also have to recall the level of paranoia and false news that were endemic in the USSR during this period…you couldn’t trust anything that anyone was saying about basically anything. Crop reports, industrial production, factions…all were subject to vast distortion to the point where no one really knew what was real and what wasn’t. This was a time where much of the world was in the Great Depression, and the Soviets were saying that they were at all time highs wrt crop production and industrial output…all while millions starved and they were on the verge of peasant revolts, where production was stagnant and quality dropping. Stalin was being told a lot of things, and he probably didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t…so, he chose to believe that he had the correct wrt what Hitler and Germany were doing or going to do. He was wrong, obviously, but you can kind of see how that wasn’t such an unexpected outcome if you really think about it. Not that I’m making excuses for him, because the root cause for most of the above was Stalin himself…the environment of distortion, lies, corruption and distrust/paranoia were direct results of things he did or had done or policies he put in place.
That pretty much sums it up, without being a WWII scholar :).
I’d just add that another aspect to the ‘European WWII we got’, was a just a bigger scale of Germany’s revanchist aims based on its humiliation in WWI as compared to the USSR’s wrt the collapse of Imperial Russia and related events (like its post-WWI war with Poland). Assuming that is Hitler always intended to defeat France (particularly) in a war eventually, a reasonable assumption IMO. And the invasion of Poland by Germany was interpreted by UK/France as technically triggering their treaty obligations to go to war with Germany, something the two didn’t apply to the USSR’s collaborative invasion of eastern Poland ‘to keep order’. Later UK/France put themselves in a position potentially to end up at war with the USSR over its aggression v Finland by sending arms to Finland and Churchill even considered air raids v southern USSR oil fields. But it didn’t happen. The war which grew into ‘WWII in Europe’ was the one started by Germany, which later itself chose to change the USSR from uneasy collaborator into active enemy.
Thank you Ravenman. I am only quoting Arne Westad for his own work. His words are clear. Westad is saying that Stalin shares the blame, not that he is solely to blame for the outbreak of WWII. And this argument I had never come across before, which is why I searched online to find other similar viewpoints. As for paving the way, I agree that that case can be made and is made by several websites I’ve come across.
Odd Arne Westad’s “The Cold War” p. 40 “Knowing that at least some western leaders would gladly sacrifice the USSR to German aggression, Stalin made the move that would unleash World War II. In August 1939 he signed a treaty of nonaggression with the enemy he feared most, Adolf Hitler. The pact was not just about not attacking each other. It was also about dividing parts of Eastern Europe between the two dictators; western Poland went to Hitler, while the pact allowed Stalin to invade eastern Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, and Romania. Even if the details of the unlikely compact were not fully known at the time, the deal between the two archenemies led to incredulous and furious reactions all over the world.”
According to my reading, this does not leave Stalin off the hook. Nor does it make him the initiator of the war. But he was aware of what was about to happen.