Was Stalin planning to attack Hitler

Factual Questions
1

I’m reading Stalin, a biography of our favorite monster, written by Edvard Radzinsky. The book is … interesting. I don’t think most Western historians would adopt such a, for lack of a better word, personal approach to a biography (though, in the author’s defense, his personal history under Stalin would probably make it hard not to do so.)

But anyway, Radzinsky gives his theory as to why Stalin was so caught off-guard by Hitler’s assault in June 1941 and, more importantly, why Russias troops and airplanes were so badly positioned (the troops and airplanes concentrated near the frontier, where they were quickly attacked, cut off and destroyed). His theory is that strategicl doctrine mandates that you place your forces in a forward position when you are preparing to attack. Radzinsky also provides some documentary and eyewitness evidence supporting his theory. Not much, but then again Stalin did a great job of destroying archives - and killing off eyewitnesses.

I had never heard this theory before. Does it have any credence among historians? It certainly does explain a lot.

Sua

2

Very little credence. Most of those troops on the border had been in place for weeks or even months; hardly what would have happened if they were placed there for an offensive. In addition, the troops were dispursed all along the border rather than concentrated opposite targets in German territory; again a defensive formation. Nor were these troops equipped logistically for an attack. All the evidence is that the troops were stationed along the border in accordance with the stated Red Army policy of forward defense.

I won’t say that Stalin wouldn’t have attacked Germany eventually, but he was clearly not planning to do so in the summer of 1941.

3

I’m no military strategist, but in time of war, isn’t it SOP to have your troops stationed at or near a common border with your enemy? Like the Maginot line?

4

Radzinsky also wrote a book on Nicholas II, entitled “The Last Tsar”…you might want to check it out-it has a nice feel to it, as you read it.

5

Stalin planning an invasion two years after he executed half of his officer corps? Seems doubtful.

6

I agree with Little Nemo. Radzinksy is talking out of his arse.

Stalin was caught off guard in 1941 because he was an idiot. He had repeated warnings from Soviet intelligence that Hitler was about to attack but he stubbornly refused to believe them.

7

And even when the Germans did attack, and Stalin was awoken with the news, ol’ Uncle Joe refused to give the order to retaliate – he was that sure it must have been a mistake.

8

Also, on the eve of the invasion, Stalin was still sending raw materials by train to Germany as agred under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

9

I suppose one only had to look at Hitler’s track record regarding his honoring treaties but don’t forget that Stalin had a non-aggression pact with Germany signed two years earlier. While I doubt Stalin had any real trust or like for Hitler I would guess he’d figure Hitler would consolidate his conquests in Europe before turning his attention to Russia. Who wants to fight a two front war if it can be avoided? This would give Russia several years (presumably) to strengthen itself before they’d seriously have to worry about Germany.

Additionally, Russia’s army was no little thing back then. We’re not talking Poland here…Russia had a vastly larger and better armed army (4.5 million troops, the world’s only heavy tank at that time [KV-1], etc.) than most other countries Germany was attacking. One would think that a two front war against a well armed opponent wouldn’t be something Germany would willingly undertake.

So, I think it isn’t too far of a stretch to see why Stalin would reasonably suppose he was safe for the time being. Of course, what Stalin didn’t consider was his purge of over 90% of Russia’s generals (among many others) during the Great Terror. As a result Russia’s ability to make wise deployment choices was severly hampered. Germany’s generals, on the other hand, were quite good. They saw an opportunity to destroy much of Russia’s capabilities quickly and once Barbarossa was started they actually did. IIRC Russia had the world’s largest air force at the start of hostility and I think within a week it was almost completely destroyed (for which the Russian air marshal caught a bullet in the head at Stalin’s orders).

So, I seriously doubt Stalin wanted to start a war. He had more than enough problems at home to deal with without wishing for war at that time. Stalin just had lousy generals in 1941 who were thoroughly outclassed by their German counterparts so the Russian army was deployed stupidly. (NOTE: By the end of the war Russia had a few quite capable generals…war tends to cause the cream to rise to the top especially when the alternative to rising tended to get you killed.)

10

Apologies for the long reply–

First, Radzinsky is NOT especially reliable. He’s a dramatist, not a trained historian, and so he tends to not let the facts get in the way of a good story, and more often spins a single fact into a long flight of fancy.

The issue of Stalin’s preparing a war against Hitler goes WAY back. The Nazis, in fact, used it as cover back in '41–i.e., that they invaded the USSR to forestall Stalin’s plans to attack them. It was revived more recently by V. Suvorov, Soviet military officer and defector, who advanced the thesis in Icebreaker and other books. It has also been backed by some German historians, who use the idea of Stalin’s aggression to try to show that Hitler was not UNIQUELY evil–that the bad things that Hitler did were on a par with what Stalin did, including waging aggressive war.

The thesis has a lot of problems, but the issue is very complex. Suvorov, for example, comes close to nut-job status–his books are wrong on lots of little things, which makes you wonder about the big things.

SO–what were the Soviets up to in 1941? Certainly Stalin felt that war with Hitler was coming, and was preparing for it. He didn’t expect it on 22 June 1941, though. Odds are he expected Hitler to do the RATIONAL thing and wait for the end of the war with Britain, rather than fight a two-front war.

Stalin did miss a lot of intelligence about German war preparations, but the issue isn’t as clear-cut as it might seem. The Germans were mounting a very effective program of disinformation that fed directly into Stalin’s preconceived idea that war with Hitler wasn’t imminent. The Germans planted info through double-agents to alter how Stalin saw the German military buildup on the Soviet border, which was quite clear to Soviet intelligence.

Essentially, the Germans planted the idea that Hitler’s buildup was in preparation for an ultimatum to Stalin demanding economic and territorial concessions. Stalin then expected that before hostilities began, he could expect demands from Hitler which he could use to further stall war and allow him time to prep. He didn’t expect that Hitler would simply attack.

The Red Army’s deployments in 1941 WERE very far forward, but to some degree that can be explained by Soviet military doctrine, which was fundamentally offensive. The defensive plan was to counter the initial attacks and launch an immediate counter-offensive, for which you’d need lots of forces in place far forward. Didn’t work out quite so well.

As several people have mentioned, the Red Army was in bad shape in 1941. David Glantz, in the book Stumbling Colossus makes the explicit argument that the Red Army was in SUCH bad shape Stalin couldn’t have been planning a preemptive strike.

That argument doesn’t quite work, it seems to me. General Zhukov, who more than anyone else won World War II for the Soviets, and had a much better idea of exactly how bad off the Red Army was, nevertheless saw the German preparations for what they were and urged a preemptive spoiling attack in May 1941. He at least thought it could work, and he was in a position to know. Stalin rejected this plan. If he was planning on attacking Hitler, it wasn’t in 1941.

Politically, though, this whole debate to shift blame to Stalin misses the point. It is abundantly clear that Hitler’s plans to invade the Soviet Union had NOTHING to do with forestalling a Soviet attack.

The best book on these issue, based on the latest research, is Gorodetsky’s Grand Delusion, but it is NOT an easy read.

11

This is a bit of a hijack but is it reasonable to assume that war between Russia and Germany was a foregone conclusion even when Russia and Germany signed their non-aggression pact in 1939 (and do you suppose both leaders even thought so when they put pen to paper)? Is it as likely that Stalin would have attacked Germany sooner or later as Hitler attacking Russia but Germany just got around to it first? I realize this calls for speculation not entirely appropriate to GQ but I’m just curious and the thread is here so…

12

In Mein Kampf Hitler clearly states that Germany’s destiny lay towards the East. Besides, a monomaniac like Hitler wouldn’t have been satisfied controlling just part of the world. He would have kept going until he ran all of it.

13

Thanks. I figured Hitler always had global ambitions and sooner or later everyone was likely to endup in his sights had he been able to continue.

What I’m more curious about is if Stalin could live with Germany on his border or if Stalin had his own designs to take on Germany. As mentioned the Soviet military was a long way off in 1941 from being able to seriously consider an extended campaign but Stalin was working diligently to improve his military. At some point might Stalin have gone after Hitler on his own?

14

As best as anyone can tell (it’s very difficult to get inside Stalin’s head for all sorts of reasons), Stalin’s plan was to let Germany and Britain / France exhaust one another, then step in to rearrange Europe from a position of strength. France’s rapid collapse in 1940 screwed that up.

So, it’s certainly possible that Stalin would have attacked Hitler in 1942 or 1943 if Hitler hadn’t gotten around to Barbarossa by then, but the situation was so fluid it’s almost impossible to say. One of the key points that comes out of Gorodetsky’s book (mentioned above) is just how fluid the situation was. From the fall of France to Barbarossa, all parties were constantly jockeying for position, looking for allies, trying to embroil their enemies in wars–everything was highly unstable and highly contingent, so speculating far beyond was actually happened is very tricky.

Best example of this: Hitler’s mind appears to have been finally made up to go for war with the Soviet Union when the two sides couldn’t agree on how to divvy up influence in the Balkans. It’s easy to see how they could have come to a deal; they just didn’t. World War II could have looked very different.

15

I just want to point out that Stalin was already preparing defensively for a war with Germany, and despite some of the assertions here he did it by invasion.

Immediately after signing the Non-aggression Pact with Hitler, Stalin occupied the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, effectively safeguarding Leningrad from a German invasion out of East Prussia. Those countries were not in a position to fight back.

Similarly, it is often overlooked that the Soviet Union invaded Eastern Poland on September 17, 1939. Furthermore, if I remember rightly, they overran the agreed-upon line of demarkation and forced the Germans to cede that Polish territory to them as well.

And finally, that winter, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. As expected, the officer corps proved to be pretty bad after the purges of 1937, but even though they were badly mauled the Soviets got what they wanted–further buffering around Leningrad and the strategic Lake Ladoga.

Also in 1940, the Soviets coerced Rommania to relinquish its territory in Bessarabia.

The thing is, the moves into Poland and the Baltic states would also benefit the Soviet Union should they decide to attack Germany. They advanced their territory right up to the East Prussian border, and had only the indefensible plains of Western Poland to stand in the way of an invasion of Germany proper.

I think it’s possible that Stalin was contemplating a possible invasion in 1940, but the poor performance of the Army in Finland forced him to concentrate on equipment and leadership reform.

Whatever Stalin was planning, his actions bought him two new enemies which would later attack him (Finland and Rommania), a guaranteed and permanent antipathy with Poland, and the revulsion of France and Britain, so that when the Soviet Union was attacked, the Soviets were guaranteed to have the entire Eastern Front all to themselves.

16

Spooky. In the “about the author” blurb in Stalin, Radinsky is described (eerily matching your words) as a “trained historian.” Dunno about his educational credentials, but in the book he often refers to his career working in various archives under the Soviet Union.
Putting that aside, I certainly agree with your characterization of him. Describing the death of Stalin, he takes one fact (that Stalin, uncharacteristically, sent his servants to bed the night he fell ill), tosses in some testimony (disputed by other testimony) about the actions of the Politburo during Stalin’s illness, and concludes as fact that Beria, Kruschev, etc. murdered Stalin.

I was like, “whoa Nellie. Slow down there.”

Sua

17

You know along with Holocaust denial Neo-nazi’s promote this idea in a big way, their big hero did not guarantee he would lose the war by meglomanicial foolishness. No, he HAD to attack Russia.

So when I saw the OP, I thought there would be no credible voices on the other side. This linked guy almost changed my mind. He cites some pretty impressive sources. In the end tho, I agree with the consensus of the posters who went before me:

No, Stalin had no active plan to attack – at least in the foreseeable future in 1941.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/raack2.htm

IIRC Hitler by circa 1941 believed Soviet Russia would be strong enough to crush Germany militarily within a decade & that war was inevitable, so the sooner they threw down the better for Nazi Germany.

Also recall the sequence: Sept. 1 Germans invade Poland, Sept. 3 UK declares war, Sept. 17 USSR invades E. Poland. Stalin waited until there war GER-UK before invading & Germany didn’t invade until she had shorn up their flank. Apropos of what I’m not sure …

18

The increase of troops along the western border post the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was sure enough as much as the USSR could afford, but still not significant enough for aggression.

Stalin might have been a madman by this time but he was no fool. The Western borders and the cities deemed to be within reach by the German Reich were put on increased alert already by the end of the 30s.

The allied powers wanted him to prepare an attack on Germany. He remained reluctant to do so throughout 1940 even in the face of numerous attempts by Churchill to get him to do so. If Hitler would not have launched operation Barbarossa it is possible that he would have stayed out of the war altogether. Technically the USSR was not ready for a war against anyone at the time. Let’s remember that Stalin desperately requested and received material and human support from both Great Britain and the US to maintain his defensive shield in 1937, 1938, 1939 and 1940.

When Germany finally did attack, the Red Army needed quite some time to come together as a defensive contingency. Even then both Stalin and Hitler expressed recorded surprise after the USSR beat the Germans at the Battle of Moscow on December 5th 1941. In many ways this was the turning point of the war. At that time Stalin was still scrambling troops from the remote corners of the federation and it would be another six months before he had enough troops to not only hold the German forces, but also start driving them back.

As I said, he might have been crazy, but he was no fool. Stalin’s real interest in Hitler started when the latter attacked him, that not meaning he didn’t feel the threat, already in 1936 he stated:

To speculate what Stalin would have done if Hitler hadn’t is like reading in tea leaves… OTOH the fact remains that the USSR was not ready for war even when it happened.

Sparc

19

The Nazi state existed to destroy communism. By the mid-30’s, a general plan was in place for an attack on the Soviet Union. The Soviets knew this and spent the 30’s trying to build some kind of collective security in Europe. This went nowhere, basically because the Nazis had convinced influential British and French politicians (who included a not insignificant number of admirers of the Nazi state) that the Nazi state was not a threat to them.

If you have access to a good library, there are some very good books which objectively detail the diplomacy in Europe between the wars. Once the cold war got rolling, objective scholarship basically stopped as historians rushed to rewrite history in service to the cause of demonizing the USSR.