Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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Reviews
Robert B. McKean, St Petersburg Between The Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907-February 1917, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1990, pp606
This big book, written by a serious scholar (at the University of Stirling) on the basis of immense research, is a fine contribution to the growing literature on the social history of the Russian Revolution. This social history is not, of course, Trevelyan’s “history with the politics left out”!
McKean provides much information about the working class of St Petersburg – its distribution, composition and so on – in the period he has chosen, between the reactionary ‘coup d’état’ which closed the revolutionary epoch begun in 1905 and the onset of the February Revolution in 1917. In his analysis and commentary he challenges some widely accepted notions. For instance, he finds no evidence for the usual connexion made between the size of industrial enterprise and the degree of workers’ militancy:
Medium-sized engineering factories rather than gigantic enterprises were to the fore in terms of protest, in part precisely due to the fact that their intermediate size facilitated prompt mobilisation of employees.
Again, although the new workers who swarmed into the capital from the countryside as a result of Stolypin’s land policy have often been supposed to be a primitive, ignorant lot, McKean shows that they mostly came from areas with a relatively high level of literacy.
The author’s investigation leads him to the conclusion that the key to St Petersburg’s special rôle in the Russian labour movement is to be found in the concentration here of large numbers of young, male, skilled workers, with the particular importance of the city’s Vyborg District being due to the high proportion of them in its population. The metalworkers were outstanding in this respect – whereas there was a “relative paucity of Socialist cells” in the printing trade, even though this was a highly skilled trade, with the highest rate of literacy.
‘Social history’ is sometimes understood to mean, nowadays, history which plays down the rôle of elites and stresses the self-activity of ‘the masses’. While McKean certainly shows how little actual influence the emigré leaderships of the Socialist parties exerted in the movement on the ground in Russia during most of this period, he highlights the significance of what he calls the ‘sub-elite’, the praktiki, who were active in the factory committees, trade unions, insurance societies, educational clubs and so on. These men (and a few women) appear as the real achievers. They were often without guidance from their nominal leaders abroad. Thus, the author points out, with regard to the remarkable gains made by the Bolsheviks in 1913-14, that Lenin wrote nothing about trade union affairs in this period, and there is no evidence in the archives of any correspondence with Bolshevik trade unionists.
The Bolsheviks' commitment to a national political general strike from the summer of 1913, the electoral strategy in the Tsarist Duma elections, the decision to launch an attack on Menshevik union positions in the spring of 1913 and the resurrection of the slogan of a soviet in October 1915 were all cases where the activists took the lead. Lenin either gave them retrospective sanction or opposed them in vain.
When the local grassroots leaders considered a slogan sent to them from abroad to be inappropriate to their task, they would simply ignore it:
A textual analysis of 47 leaflets and appeals published illegally by Bolshevik militants between January 1915 and 22 February 1917 is most illuminating. Not a single leaflet mentioned the essential Leninist slogan of the defeat of Russia being the lesser evil ...
McKean has made especially thorough use of the records of the Okhrana, the secret police. Their reports supply, he says, “an invaluable corrective” to exaggerations and slanted accounts in contemporary newspapers and later memoirs. In particular they often expose the falsity of claims by Soviet historians that the Bolsheviks were responsible for some strike or demonstration. There was a great deal more cooperation on the ground between members of different Socialist parties and tendencies than official Soviet history would have us believe, and among the Okhrana’s chief concerns was the promotion of splits. It is startling how many agents and informers the police had in the labour movement: this information helps to explain the success of repressive measures taken at certain moments.
Prominent in many strike demands was a call for “polite address”. The constant insults to workers’ human dignity by their employers reflected the crude, “un-European” style of management in many factories – this although some of the most important employers were from the West (French, British, Swedish, etc). To autocracy in the state corresponded autocracy in the workplace. The St Petersburg bosses were notoriously a harder lot than their colleagues in Moscow.
In February 1917, however, they loosened their grip. McKean notes that when the troubles began, no thought seems to have been given to lockouts, with the result that revolutionary workers were able to use factory yards as meeting places, information centres and so on. Some of the industrialists may have sympathised with the movement at this stage. The author stresses the rôle of wartime conditions in making possible the fall of Tsardom. The foolish stubbornness of the military command in refusing to consider civilian needs, which resulted in severe shortages of goods in the cities by 1916, brought about, he thinks, a readiness on the part of sections of the middle classes to go along with the workers in the great demonstrations, in marked contrast to their indifference or hostility to the prewar labour unrest. McKean comes down strongly in support of the view that it was the World War that was crucial in settling the fall of the Romanov regime. He contrasts what happened in February 1917 with the crushing of the strike in July 1914 (sometimes presented as proof that Russia was already “on the brink of revolution” before the war began): in those days “the ancien regime in state and industry still retained sufficient cohesion and confidence in itself and the armed forces’ loyalty to act decisively and brutally”.
The book is, on the whole, well produced but it is a pity that the maps of St Petersburg provided were reprinted from another book, because the nomenclature of the city’s districts shown in them differs from that used in the text. Thus, the reader will look in vain in these maps for the ‘First Town’ and ‘Second Town’ districts often mentioned in the course of the author’s close examination of working class life in the capital.
Brian Pearce
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Reviews
Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: the Communist Party in the Capital 1925-32, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990, pp328, £47.50
Catherine Merridale has produced a book that is both useful and interesting. It is extremely valuable as a study of the processes at work in the Soviet Union’s largest party organisation at the time of Stalin’s rise to power and this, in itself, fills an important gap in our understanding. The book is also particularly informative in its attempt to focus, not simply on the ‘high politics’ of leadership struggles, but on the workings of the party at the grassroots and the role of local activists there. This has been aided by Merridale’s access to Soviet archives including factory records of major plants, and of the Metal Workers Union.
Existing under the very nose of the apparatus Moscow was always heavily, directly and more consistently influenced by the centre than were other local parties. However, up until 1924 the Trotskyist opposition did have significant support amongst youth in Moscow’s higher educational institutes, although less among workers than in some other areas. Merridale provides some useful documentation on this point. However, many readers of this journal will not agree with Merridale’s characterisations of the politics of the various left oppositions. For example she attacks the Trotsky-Zinoviev group for using the “same extreme language as the Stalin-Bukharin majority, not seeking common ground with their opponents, but seeing them as betrayers of Leninism” (p.23). She falsely claims that “no Bolshevik opposition after 1921 included soviet democracy in its programme” (p.24),while the Platform of the Joint Opposition of 1927 clearly raised just such a call (see Chapter 5). However she does provide us with useful evidence of the continuing support for the left, right up to its outright suppression in 1927.
As an example, the Democratic Centralists, part of the Joint Opposition, had the loyalty of the Klara Zetkin plant, right up to 1927. The Opposition had a considerable base in Sokol’niki, an area that Merridale explains as containing a great concentration of government and state institutions, whilst at one stage it could count on 62 cells in the Krasnaya Presnaya district.
At the time of the fight with the left in the mid and late 1920s the Moscow party apparatus was in the hands of the Bukharinite Uglanov. Merridale’s account of his regime is very illuminating indeed. It comes at a time when certain Soviet and western historians have suggested that the Bukharinites would have been a democratic alternative to the ‘command administrative’ system of both Trotsky and Stalin. She points out that Uglanov was a rigid bureaucratic centraliser who used the apparatus to exclude the New Opposition from political life in the capital, whose chief representative was Kamenev – the author seems to have a softer spot for him than for other opposition leaders. Unlike in Leningrad the New Opposition made no attempt to mobilise rank and file support for their platform. Yet Uglanov attempted to maintain an iron grip on the party organisation on behalf of Bukharin and Stalin.
However, Merridale points out that, once the Stalin-Bukharin bloc started to split, Uglanov saw his own power base shift from under him very rapidly. He was replaced as Moscow Party Secretary by Molotov, and cast into the ranks of the Right Opposition. In her discussion of the activities of the Right Opposition, Merridale makes it abundantly clear that they were simply a conservative part of the apparatus. They made no attempt to organise at the grassroots, but, appearing as the supporters of the existing order, they could command considerable support from the top levels of the government bureaucracy, trade unions and factory directors.
Merridale here highlights the depth of the fissures that existed within the party and governmental apparatus at this time, and she does it very well. Those fissures were to widen. Molotov was replaced by Bauman, who displayed those traits of voluntarism that were at the heart of the development of the Stalinist system. He lost no time in trying to move too rapidly in the campaign of collectivisation, and he was eventually replaced by Kaganovich, one of the most loyal of Stalin’s men. By 1930 the emerging Stalin clique had their hands firmly on the capital city’s party organisation. Yet even they were to have to do battle to oust the Secretary of the most prestigious Krasnaya Presnaya district, Ryutin, who lost his post only in 1932.
But, as we have already said, Merridale’s book is not simply about leadership battles along the road to Stalinism. Her intention is to explore the interrelationship between the emerging Stalinist system and the rank and file. Here, her thesis is summed up in the following way:
What is beyond question, however, is that the rank and file contributed to the implementation of Stalin’s policies after 1928. There is no doubt that their enthusiasm, however brutal its consequences in many instances, was indispensable to the Stalinist ‘great turn’. (p.67)
Here, broadly speaking, she puts herself alongside the school of revisionist historians of the Soviet Union in the West. They have broken with the old totalitarian school that saw the bureaucratic apparatus as monolithic and all-embracing, while the masses were but passive puppets. Before Merridale, others, such as Lynne Viola in Best Sons of the Fatherland (1987), have stressed the degree of popular motivation and enthusiasm that accompanied the ‘Great Turn’. Coming at a time when many Soviet historians are turning to totalitarian theories, this school offers many refreshing insights compared with the dull old Stalinist and Western orthodoxies. It points to the very real enthusiasm shown by a layer of workers for the ‘turn’ in its earliest years, and argues that, at least at this time, party activists were not simply passive dupes.
But the problem that they all have, including Merridale, is in proving that this groundswell actually helped to create the Stalinist system. She points to the highly contradictory nature of the party in the mid and late 1920s. She disagrees with Trotskyists that the Lenin Levy and subsequent mass recruitment drives simply filled the party with passive political illiterates:
To suggest that the new generation were all passive dupes of the General Secretary is to underestimate the interest the average worker had in the progress of the revolution, both in general and in terms of his or her prospects in the new society. Those who did not have this interest tended to stay away altogether. (p.139)
The attempt to create a mass party was indeed fraught with contradictions for the emerging bureaucracy. On the one hand, it was formed on the basis of shop and shift cells. On the other hand, the increase in its proletarian composition was also accompanied by the development of an ever greater network of supervisory committees to oversee the rank and file. However, Merridale documents a degree of grassroots vitality in the late 1920s within a party supervised by the emergent bureaucracy, but organised in the plants and workshops.
Party meetings at the Krasnyi Proletarii factory lasted until 3 or 4am despite proposals from higher up that such meetings be limited to three hours only. Merridale provides examples of lower party organs organising strikes in the late 1920s and in 1930. And there was often conflict in the plants between the party and a management with supposedly supreme powers under edinochalie (one man management).
Yet there is a real danger of drawing too many conclusions from this picture of rank and file activity, however good a corrective it may be to previous accounts. By 1932 most of the accoutrements of a mass party had been dissolved in order to guarantee a more smoothly running machine for the apparatus. Shop and shift cells were abolished. Political education remained a low priority as the agenda of party bodies was normally dominated by questions of production and productivity. Merridale’s discussion of the contradictions between their educational tasks and fulfilment of the plan presented to party officials is fascinating. As the magazine Propagandist described it in September 1930:
Propagandists with other party responsibilities left the preparation of classes until the last moment, reading teaching materials on the tram on the way in. (p.l50)
This is not surprising in an organisation that had ordained subordination to the claims of industrial management:
The party cells must actively promote the fulfilment of the principle of edinochalie in the whole system of industrial management. (quoted p.168)
Such a situation created very real tensions, as Merridale demonstrates. Most high ranking technical personnel were not party members, but were in many cases inherited from Tsarism or the non-party technical intelligentsia. In the giant Serp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) factory in 1925, only two members of the factory administration and not one foreman were party members. Hence the contradiction between a worker based party and a management whose dictates the workers were not allowed to challenge by the apparatus of that same party. And hence the need for the Stalinist clique finally to transform the party into an apparatus party.
While the book claims to prove that a movement of an enthusiastic rank and file shaped and, more importantly, supported the ‘Great Turn’, it often provides contrary evidence. For instance, in 1929 party election meetings at AMO and Serp i Molot failed even to muster a quorum. Whilst there was support amongst a large section of worker activists for a ‘second revolution’, which involved a ‘workers promotion’ system under apparatus patronage, this was definitely on the wane after 1930. Factory cells again started to give voice to workers’ grievances, and accordingly faced a clampdown on their residual independent rights. Even if the rank and file had been used against the right wing in the bureaucratic apparatus, they now constituted a potential challenge, not simply a support mechanism, for the emerging Stalinist regime. They could be used against the Moscow right because Nepmen, kulaks and their Moscow patron, Uglanov, were deeply unpopular amongst the Moscow workers. NEP meant 25 per cent unemployment amongst the capital’s industrial workers. But when they started to demand some of the fruits of the ‘second revolution’, the bureaucratic apparatus clamped down on them ever more firmly.
The book is a most valuable contribution to our understanding of the rise to power of the Stalin clique. Unfortunately, perhaps because she does not choose to deal with ‘high politics’, Merridale does not really look at the development and make-up of the group around Stalin. We need more such studies. Merridale has shown the range of materials that can be used. She has also shown some of the key themes that need to be. explored. Whilst having a few reservations about some of the book’s conclusions, this study is thoroughly recommended. It is just a great pity that it is so expensive.
Dave Hughes
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Reviews
Geoffrey Roberts, Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact With Hitler, IB Tauris, London, 1989, pp.296, £19.95
This is at the same time both a bad and an important book – quite often for the same reasons. Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, it is a child of glasnost, being the first Western study of the alliance to have made use of previously closed Soviet archive materials. This alone makes the book worth reading, for, as the author correctly points out, an enforced and near exclusive reliance on non-Soviet documentation has impeded attempts to understand the origins, significance and workings of the Pact. The author believes that his study of newly-available Soviet materials has enabled him to resolve previous doubts and differences over the Pact that were in part a result of this difficulty, and points to a series of conclusions, which he summarises at the beginning of his book. Those of special interest are as follows:
1.Stalin only signed his Pact with Hitler after the failure of his genuine attempts to secure an anti-Nazi alliance with Western bourgeois democracies.
2.Consequently, “the final decision of the Soviet Government to opt for rapprochement with Germany was not made until mid-August 1939” (p.5).
3.Stalin signed the Pact because he feared “Britain and France might abandon the USSR in the face of the coming German invasion of Poland” (p.5).
Before considering whether the author has indeed, on the strength of the evidence he presents, proved his case, something needs to be said about his approach to the subject. Should not a book devoted to such a momentous alliance place the Pact in the broader setting of the history of Russian-German relations? This it does not do, despite their importance not only for the countries in question, but for the history of Europe and indeed the world. For example, the reader is told nothing of earlier agreements by Russia and Prussia/Germany to partition Poland and more generally, in the words of the Pact, to create “respective spheres of interest”. This is surely a glaring omission, as is the lack of any serious treatment of the Marxist and especially Leninist response to the question of German-Russian relations. And it is not as if all this material is in closed archives. As early as 1851, the founders of Marxism were discussing how to “take as much as possible away from the Poles in the West, to man their fortresses ... with Germans on the pretext of defence, to let them stew in their own juice, to send them into battle, gobble bare their land, fob them off with promises of Riga and Odessa and, should it be possible to get the Russians moving, to ally oneself with the latter and compel the Poles to give way”. [1] Real Politik with a vengeance! The controversies surrounding Lenin’s precise relations with the Kaiser’s government during and after the episode of the ‘sealed train’ might also have been worth a mention. [2] Instead Roberts confines himself exclusively to the Soviet period of Russo-German relations. Yet here too there are serious omissions. There is only the most cursory mention of the Russian-Polish war of 1920, and, what is more serious, no reference whatsoever to the secret agreement concluded during the war between German army leaders and the Soviet government (chiefly Trotsky) to partition Poland along the pre-1914 frontier, an alliance that was to involve joint military action between the then advancing troops of the Red Army and units of the rabidly anti-Communist (but also anti-Polish) Free Corps stationed illegally in East Prussia. [3] But since the author’s intention is to present the Stalin-Hitler Pact as a bolt from the blue of an August 1939 sky, his failure to cite its possible precedents is perhaps understandable.
Roberts fares no better in his treatment of German ‘national Bolshevism’. Considering that its prime objective of an alliance with the USSR against the decadent Western liberal plutocracies was consummated by the Pact of 1939, one would have thought that this exotic – but highly symptomatic – political current would have merited more than a single paragraph (p.35). Surely he could have told us what Lenin thought of it, or made at least a passing reference to the outrageous ‘Schlagater’ speech delivered by Karl Radek to the Comintern Plenum of June 1923. Of the two, Lenin’s comments obviously carried greater weight and therefore, for us, have more interest. For example, in December 1920 he referred to a “political mix up in Germany” wherein the “German Black Hundreds [pro-Nazis – RB] sympathised with the Russian Bolsheviks in the same way as the Spartacus League does ...”, adding the telling point that this alignment had become “the basis ... of our foreign policy ...” [4] Another speech, made at the same time (but expunged, for obvious reasons, from editions of Lenin’s Collected Works) was even more explicit, referring to “an independent Poland” as being “very dangerous to Soviet Russia”. Moreover, “the Germans hate Poland and will at any time make common cause with us to strangle Poland ...” [5] Maybe the author’s tendency to idealise the early years of Soviet rule (“diplomacy, even of the propagandist kind initially practised by the Bolsheviks, was eclipsed by revolutionary endeavour”, p.26) partly accounts for such blind spots. The ‘Third Period’ phase of the Comintern again saw the Soviet leadership – now in the hands of Stalin – speculating on the supposed advantages of an alliance with German chauvinism, only this time in the form of unadorned National Socialism. [6] Only by ignoring such evidence – and there is much more – is it possible to sustain the book’s thesis on the origins of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But even in the area where the author claims a special expertise – the new Soviet materials – his research, which is the most interesting part of the book, is vitiated by a determination to prove, come what may, that the Pact was forced on Stalin by a Western refusal to stand up to Hitler. Stated briefly, Roberts believes that what other historians and analysts have interpreted as signals to Hitler (notably Stalin’s March 1939 speech to the Nineteenth Congress of the CPSU, and the sacking of Stalin’s Jewish Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov two months later) have been seriously misconstrued, and that in fact Stalin was earnestly pursuing a military alliance with the West against Hitler right up to the very eve of the Pact’s signing on 23 August 1939. Yet all the evidence to refute this claim is to be found in one single collection of documents, available to the public since its publication in 1948 by the US State Department. Significantly, much of Roberts’ book is taken up with trying to minimise either the significance or reliability of this documentary collection, culled after the war from the Nazi Foreign Ministry archives. It must be said, whatever the book’s other merits, in this endeavour it fails lamentably. The first document in the collection is dated 17 April, but in fact the final turn had already been made. Even before Munich, Stalin had made clear, through a speech by Litvinov to the League of Nations on 23 September 1938 that the USSR “had no obligation to Czechoslovakia in the event of French indifference to an attack on her ...” and that the USSR consequently had a “moral right” to renounce its pact with the beleaguered Czechs [7], which of course Stalin promptly did, doubtless much to Hitler’s gratification. Hints of a possible alliance between the ostensible enemies quickly ensued. At a diplomatic reception in Berlin on 12 January 1939, Hitler singled out for special and friendly attention the new Soviet Ambassador Merekalov. Early in February, during a dinner party at the home of a German industrialist, General Keitel (executed after the war for atrocities on the Eastern front) discussed with the Soviet Military Attache the possibility of combined action against Poland. [8] Hitler was informed at once. The wheels were beginning to turn. Next came Stalin’s speech of 10 March to the Nineteenth Party Congress, in which he accused the Western Allies of inciting conflict between Germany and Russia. Russia was not going to “pull the chestnuts out of the fire” for anyone. Of all the above events, Roberts mentions but the last – and only then to dismiss its significance as an olive branch to Hitler. Stalin “had little option, in the face of continuing German hostility, but adherence to the aim of creating an anti-Fascist alliance ...” (p.119). But, as we have seen, that hostility was waning. Hitler’s claims on Poland, followed by Western guarantees to maintain its existing frontiers, meant for the Nazis the risk of the dreaded war on two fronts, a prospect that drove Hitler inexorably towards securing his eastern flank by drawing Stalin into a new Polish partition. A Nazi diplomat reported that he could “discern in Stalin’s speech certain signs of a new orientation”. Roberts, despite all that ensued, does not think so. Yet sure enough, in a speech on 1 April, Hitler used the same code, repudiating any desire to “pull chestnuts out of the fire” (these were his actual words) by fighting the West’s battles against Russia. This speech was subsequently circulated by Hitler’s Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to the heads of all the European diplomatic missions. [9] On 12 May Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry issued a directive to the German press to maintain a total silence on relations with the USSR, following it up with another on 31 May warning that “now is not the time for an anti-Soviet campaign”. These moves only make any sense in the context of a Soviet approach, not to the Western Allies, but Hitler.
Roberts, it should be remembered, attributes no significance whatsoever to Stalin’s speech (or Hitler’s response to it, which he passes over) in preparing the ground for the Pact. Yet the documentary evidence totally refutes him. In the early hours of 24 August, during the celebrations that followed the signing of the Pact by Stalin and Ribbentrop, Molotov “raised his glass to Stalin – who through his speech of March this year, which had been well understood in Germany – had brought about the reversal in political relations”. Well understood in Germany ... but not by Roberts, who sees in it an attempt to secure an alliance with the Western Allies against Hitler! (Not to be outdone, Stalin also proposed a toast: “I know how much the German nation loves its Fuehrer; I should therefore like to drink to his health.”) [10] This is not the only document Roberts prefers in this instance to ignore, or in others, to misconstrue. Following hard on the heels of Stalin’s 10 March speech came the Nazi invasion of the remainder of Czechoslovakia on 15 March. Three days later Litvinov delivered to the German ambassador in Moscow a note refusing to recognise the ensuing Nazi occupation as in any way legal. Yet on 17 April the Soviet ambassador called at the German foreign office in order to secure the continued “fulfillment of certain contracts for war material by the Skoda works” [11], which were, of course, situated in Nazi-occupied Czech territory. The report speaks of the Nazi response to the request as being regarded by the Soviets as “a test” of German intentions towards the USSR. The hint being taken, the talk then drifted towards and around the subject of the possibility of a drastic improvement in German-Soviet relations. Merekalov left almost at once to report back to Moscow. How does Roberts treat this encounter? Predictably as a routine diplomatic exchange, and a bid by a new ambassador to advance his career (pp.126-7). He also neglects to point out that the Soviet request to supply the requested war equipment was granted – hardly the action of a regime bent on immediate war with its customer.
Roberts’ next big hurdle is the sacking of Litvinov. It is the one that more than any other brings him down. On 3 May Litvinov, the salesman and, let us grant the possibility, maybe the advocate of a pro-Western, and therefore anti-Nazi orientation, was dismissed from his post as Soviet Foreign Minister. Roberts observes (correctly) that “in the West the most popular explanation had been that Litvinov (a Jew and an opponent of rapprochement with Nazi Germany) was removed to facilitate negotiations with Hitler ...” (p.128). Like many academics (and, it should also be said, Marxists of various persuasions) Roberts suffers from an organic aversion to anything that is either popular or obvious. The truth can’t ever be that simple. The more the evidence and the general consensus seem to point in one direction, the greater the urge to look in another. Something that is widely believed and appears obvious may or may not be true ... but whether it is true or not has nothing to do with either. Lacking any hard evidence to refute the ‘popular’ view, to which we shall return in a moment, Roberts asks us to believe that Litvinov’s removal was partly the result of a routine domestic party purge instigated by Beria, and partly also a “reshuffling” (sic) of diplomatic staff designed to bring forward a “new generation of Soviet diplomats” (p.l29). Rather like the Red Army “reshuffle” of 1937 perhaps? Only Litvinov was more fortunate than his colleagues, merely being placed under house arrest. Insofar as Litvinov’s replacement by Molotov sent out any international signals, says Roberts, they were intended not for Hitler but the Western Allies – “it would put further pressure on the French and British to come to terms” (pp.130-1). Yet no evidence is cited either to suggest that this was the intention, or that its supposed recipients perceived it as such. Rather the contrary. On 4 May 1939 the German embassy in Moscow reported back to Berlin on the sensational sacking of Litvinov, regarded – possibly correctly – as the major enemy of Nazi Germany in the Soviet leadership: “The decision apparently is connected with the fact that differences of opinion arose in the Kremlin on Litvinov’s negotiations” [with the British and French – RB]. There then follows a reference to Stalin’s 10 March speech and then this final comment: “Molotov (no Jew) is held to be ‘most intimate friend and closest collaborator of Stalin’. His appointment is apparently to guarantee that the foreign policy will be continued strictly in accordance with Stalin’s ideas”. [12] The very next day the Soviet Charge in Berlin reinforced this impression in a conversation with a German diplomat, inquiring whether the removal of Litvinov “would cause a change in our [the Nazi] position toward the Soviet Union”. [13] A signal to Britain and France? I find it incredible that Roberts, who has surely read this document, sees fit to pass it over in silence, preferring instead his entirely unfounded explanation of a domestic purge and renewed commitment to an alliance with the Western Allies.
The benchmark for this approach is established on the book’s very first page, when the reader is asked to accept its axiom that until the Pact, the Stalin regime had been “the bulwark of anti-Fascism”. As evidence of the Kremlin’s role as “the citadel of resistance to Fascism and militarism” he cites Soviet arms supplies to Spain and support for sanctions against Italy (p.44), overlooking that, in the latter case, Stalin continued to supply oil to Mussolini for the duration of his invasion of Ethiopia and intervention in Spain. Other judgements also cry out for comment. On page 77 we are told that Stalin’s policy in Spain “was unequivocally directed towards a Republican victory” and that to ascribe any “sinister, machiavellian motives” to it was “largely fantasy”. In order to sustain his case here, Roberts lumps together Soviet and International Brigade forces into a collective total of 40,000 men (p.78), thereby obliterating the vital distinction between the combatants of the brigades and the small and, from a military point of view, largely token Soviet personnel, who were expressly forbidden by Stalin to perform anything other than an advisory and instructional role to the Republican forces. The price the Republic had to pay for Stalin’s aid is so well documented that one can only gasp at the comment, on page 79, that NKVD terror apart, Stalin’s intervention in Spain was an “otherwise creditable episode” in pre-war Soviet foreign policy. Then in a puerile section (of less than two pages) on the reaction of the Comintern to the Pact, the new line is presented as “defeatist” (p.175). That was true (though not in the classic Leninist sense) only of those countries still fighting Nazi Germany, where the line was to make peace on the terms proposed jointly by Stalin and Hitler in October 1939, but not of those countries already conquered by the Nazis. Here the Comintern played a Quisling role, hiring itself out to Hitler in competition with home grown Nazi traitors. This policy met with some startling initial successes, notably in Belgium and Norway. [14]
For German itself, a third policy was adopted, one of a thinly veiled and utterly shameful ‘defencism’, together with demands that anti-Nazi opponents of the Pact be denounced to the Gestapo. Needless to say, this policy was advanced from the safety of neutral Sweden. In the immortal words of Walter Ulbricht, “if Germany were conquered [by Britain and France] the German workers would be treated in the same way” as were the workers in those countries – “the muzzling of the workers’ press, the establishment of concentration camps” [15], the inference being that by defending the Third Reich against the Western Allies, the German workers would prevent the establishment of censorship and concentration camps in their own country. (In fact, it was Hitler’s defeat that brought their abolition, at least in the Western zone. In the East it proved to be business as usual.) Of all Stalinist utterances, this must surely rank as not only the most perfidious, but also the most stupid. Roberts’ failure to recognise or come to grips with such nuances suggests that the Comintern is alien territory. But then so are Stalin-style elections. On page 189 we are informed, dead pan, that in the Baltic states, “elections were held to the new peoples’ assemblies which voted on 21 July to seek incorporation into the USSR, a wish which was duly granted by the Supreme Soviet in early August”, neglecting only to add that in each case the vote was unanimous. No mention is made at all of the hideous deportations and exterminations carried out by Stalin in the territories granted to him by his Nazi allies, the victims of which run into millions. In fact, so greatly appalling was the NKVD terror that there were recorded instances of Jewish refugees from the Nazi zone fleeing, or being driven, back to their near certain deaths under the lash of Stalinist pogroms. (See, for example, Nazi-Soviet Relations, p.128.)
The treatment of Stalin’s military assistance to Hitler during the Pact is likewise very sketchy, filling barely a single page. Mention is made of navigational aid provided by a radio station at Minsk for German aircraft attacking Poland from 1 September, but not of the joint Nazi-Soviet military headquarters stationed at Bialystock which coordinated the final annihilation of Polish armed resistance following Stalin’s stab in the back of 17 September. [16] The security Stalin provided for Hitler’s eastern front, enabling him to strike uninhibitedly in the West against Scandinavia, the low countries and France, is well known (though not evaluated by Roberts). But Stalin also rendered Hitler direct and active military assistance. German warships were equipped in Soviet yards (chiefly Murmansk) and allowed passage via the summer northern route into the Pacific, there to attack Allied shipping. [17] At a crucial moment during the Nazi naval landings in Norway (April 1940), a German tanker arrived from Murmansk, laden with Soviet oil, to refuel Hitler’s warships and landing craft. [18] And all this in addition to substantial, and in some instances indispensable, supplies of raw materials and fuel to the Nazi war machine right up to the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941.
Just why Roberts chose to write such an astonishing book is, I must confess, something of a mystery. All one can say for certain is that he elected to follow a path other than that dictated by the vast body of evidence available to him. I became convinced of this on reading his review, written for The Independent nearly a year after the appearance of his book on the Pact, of a new Soviet biography of Maxim Litvinov. Naturally, the purge of 3 May figures prominently in the review. But once again, Roberts cannot accept the possibility that Litvinov’s fall could have anything at all to do with changes in Stalin's policy towards Nazi Germany. “The problem with this view is that Soviet policy towards Nazi Germany did not change until that summer.” Once again he assumes what he is obliged to prove. He forces his opinions onto the facts, instead of basing his arguments upon them. The ghost of Beria is invoked once again to explain the elimination of the entire Litvinov team of diplomats. (Where have we heard that before?) As for his successor, Molotov’s “pursuance of Litvinov’s policy of alliance with the West was so successful that by August, the USSR had opened negotiations for a military pact with Britain and France. It was only when these failed that Stalin finally turned to Hitler.”
This is, quite simply, untrue. These negotiations began in Moscow on 12 August. So even if we were to concede Roberts’ arguments that the Pact was born later than all the sources suggest, and that only in “the first two weeks of August” did “Soviet foreign policy begin to make an appreciable shift in favour of an accommodation with Germany” (p.151), it remains to be explained how it was that even as War Minister Voroshilov conducted these “successful” negotiations with British and French military officials in Moscow, a yet more successful Ribbentrop was preparing to fly to the Kremlin to sign his Pact with Stalin. [19] Could it not be that Stalin’s dalliance with Britain and France was a cover (and a spur to Hitler) for the consummation of his Pact with the Nazis? Trotsky certainly thought so, and nothing in this book persuades me that he was wrong.
As far back as the period of the Nazi rise to power, Trotsky considered Stalin’s collaboration with the Nazis in such enterprises as the Prussian Red-Brown Referendum of 1931 [20] evidence of a Kremlin foreign policy aimed at “keeping alive German-French antagonisms”. [21] When the issue of Stalin’s German policy arose at the 1937 Dewey Commission investigation into the Moscow Trials (understandably in view of Stalinist accusations that Trotsky was a Nazi agent), Trotsky recalled how Isvestia greeted the Hitler Nazi regime in Germany ... “the USSR is the only state that is not nourished on hostile sentiments towards Germany ...” It was Hitler who repulsed Stalin, not the other way round. [22] Pressed on this point, Trotsky insisted that “Stalin declared and it was repeated in the press, that ‘we never opposed the Nazi movement in Germany’ ...” [23] All these observations, it should be remembered, were made at the high tide of the ‘People’s Front’ episode, when Litvinov’s pro-Western policy appeared to predominate. They suggest that almost alone amongst serious commentators of the day (and even now historians like Roberts, who with the supposed wisdom of hindsight and access to archives, should know better) Trotsky never took very seriously Stalin’s policy of ‘collective security’ against Nazi Germany, deriding it as a “lifeless fiction” and predicting, even before the conclusion of the Munich agreement, that “we may now expect with certainty Soviet diplomacy to attempt a rapprochement with Hitler ...” [24]
Trotsky pursued his hunch (for he lacked any tangible proof) on 6 March 1939, wondering whether a Stalinist boycott of a New York anti-Nazi demonstration was simply “conservative stupidity and hatred of the Fourth International” (for amongst the rally’s sponsors was the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party) or evidence that orders had gone out from Moscow to “muzzle” all anti-Fascist activities “so as not to interfere with the negotiations between Moscow and Berlin diplomats ... the next few weeks will bring their verification ...” [25] In fact it took four days, for on 10 March Stalin made his first public signal to Berlin. The very next day, Trotsky described the “chestnuts” speech as a sign of Stalin’s “new turn towards reaction”. While unsure as yet of the tempo or prospects of this new orientation, Trotsky nevertheless concluded that on the strength of this speech alone, “Stalin is preparing to play with Hitler”. [26] And that at a time when the Western Allies, taking fright after the consequences of their capitulation at Munich became clear, had begun to court Stalin!
Here too Trotsky’s estimation diverges totally from that of Roberts (not to speak of all Stalinist, and most leftist inclined historians and commentators): “Today all the efforts of the British government are concentrated on concluding an agreement with Moscow – against Germany.“ Hitler, fearing encirclement and a possible war on all fronts, likewise looked to the Kremlin for insurance. As for Stalin, “from the first day of the National Socialist regime” he had “systematically and steadily shown his readiness for friendship with Hitler”.[27] Only when met with hostility did Stalin pass over to “collective security” and its political counterpart, the People’s Front. But even then, it was possible to detect “more intimate notes intended for the ears of Berchtesgarden ...” Consequently, in the scramble for partners, “if at last Hitler responds to Moscow’s diplomatic advances, Chamberlain will be rebuffed ... Stalin will sign a treaty with England only if he is convinced that agreement with Hitler is out of the question”. [28] Roberts’ entire book revolves around the contrary thesis that Stalin turned to Hitler because he felt let down by London and Paris.
Once signed, the Pact was roundly denounced by Trotsky. He failed to find in it any of the virtues detected by some of his more recent epigones. The Kremlin “preferred the status quo, with Hitler as its ally” to any advances for the workers’ movement. As for the rudely discarded ‘People’s Front’, it had proved to be nothing but a “low comedy”. Although unaware of the Pact’s secret protocols, he correctly predicted that “in exchange for Poland, Hitler will give Moscow freedom of action in regard to the Baltic states”. [29] And in view of his earlier and repeated declarations on the subject, he was surely entitled to point out “since 1933 I have been showing and proving to the world press that Stalin is seeking an understanding with Hitler”. Brushing aside apologists for Stalin's ‘treason’ (and they are amazingly still in business today), Trotsky damned the Pact as “a capitulation of Stalin before Fascist imperialism with the end of preserving the Soviet oligarchy”. Not, it should be noted, the “gains of the revolution”. The Pact’s only “merit” was that “in unveiling the truth it broke the back of the Comintern”. [30] Trotsky found “completely absurd” the idea that Stalin’s seizures of territory involved any challenge to Hitler. (Muffled echoes of this argument can still be found in Trotskyist publications.) “It is much more probable that Hitler himself inspired Stalin to occupy eastern Poland and to lay his hands on the Baltic states.” The documentary evidence here proves Trotsky completely correct, as it does also in the case of Stalin’s “shameful war” against Finland. [31] Finally – and here too in defiance of contemporary ‘progressive’ opinion – Trotsky foresaw that Stalin’s diplomacy, far from averting Hitler’s long announced crusade against the USSR, had instead enabled Hitler to eliminate the Polish ‘buffer’ protecting Russia from a Nazi invasion. [32] Perhaps part of the difficulty in assessing Stalin’s reasons for concluding his alliance with Hitler comes from assuming that his motives were purely political. In his uncompleted biography of Stalin, Trotsky argues that “Stalin’s union with Hitler satisfied his sense of revenge ... He took great personal delight in negotiating secretly with the Nazis while appearing to negotiate openly with the friendly missions of England and France ... He is tragically petty”. [33] (Lenin – amazingly late for one normally so shrewd – also discovered spite to be one of his General Secretary’s mainsprings of action.)
Going back over Trotsky’s writings on German-Soviet relations, one cannot but be impressed at the way in which his step-by-step analysis of events is, not only in outline, but often in the smallest details, borne out by documentary materials to which, in contrast with Roberts, he could not possibly have had access. One wonders what he would have been able to achieve with them.
Robin Blick
Notes
1. Engels to Marx, 27 May 1851, K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Volume 38, p.364. Evidently inspired by his notorious theory of ‘counter-revolutionary nations’, Engels describes the Poles as a ‘finished nation’, to be contrasted unfavourably not only with Germans but Russians, whose racial virtues were such that as a result of interbreeding with them, “even the Jews acquire Slav cheekbones”. (ibid., pp.363-4)
2. See for example the documents presented in Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, OUP, 1958, and Pearson, The Sealed Train, Macmillan, 1975.
3. For this and other instances of early Soviet collaboration with German nationalist forces, see Adam Westoby and Robin Blick, Early Soviet Designs on Poland, in Survey, Volume 26 no.4 (117), Autumn 1982.
4. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 31, p.300.
5. Westoby and Blick, p.124.
6. For more detail, see Robert Black (Robin Blick), Fascism in Germany, London 1975.
7. Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy (Ed. Jane Degras), Volume 3, p.305, OUP, 1953. On Stalin’s indifference to the fate of Czechoslovakia, see Erich Wollenberg, The Red Army, London, 1940, pp.284-5.
8. A. Rossi, The Russo-German Alliance, London 1950, p.6.
9. Ibid., p.8.
10. Nazi-Soviet Relations, p.76.
11. Op. cit., p.1.
12. Op. cit., pp.2-3.
13. Op. cit., p.3.
14. See F. Borkenau, European Communism, Faber and Faber, 1953, pp.253-7.
15. Quoted in op. cit., p.249.
16. Rossi, op. cit., p.60.
17. Rossi, op. cit., p.96.
18. D. Irvine, Hitler’s War, Macmillan, 1985, p.98.
19. On Stalinin’s double dealing see: Rossi, op. cit., pp.37-8, Documents on Polish-Soviet Relations, Volume 1, London 1961; Wollenburg, pp.290-2.
20. See Black, op. cit., for details and background.
21. Documents of the Fourth International, Pathfinder, 1973, p.25.
22. The Case of Leon Trotsky, Merit, 1968, p.293.
23. Op. cit., p.311.
24. L.D. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, Pathfinder, 1974, p.29.
25. Op. cit., p.203.
26. Op. cit., pp.216-9.
27. Op. cit., p.350.
28. Op. cit., pp.350-5.
29. L.D. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, Pathfinder, 1973, pp.76-7.
30. Op. cit., pp.81-3.
31. Op. cit., pp.113, 116.
32. Op. cit., pp.79, 97.
33. L.D. Trotsky, Stalin, London 1947, p.415.
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