Russian experience of the First World War, when the industrial mobilisation of a poorly integrated agrarian economy for modern warfare had ended in economic collapse and the overthrow of the government. The possibility of a repetition could only be eliminated by countering internal and external threats simultaneously, in other words by executing forced industrialisation for sustained rearmament while bringing society, and especially the peasantry, under greater control. Thus, although the 1927 war scare was just a scare, with no real threat of immediate war, it served to trigger change. The results included Stalin's dictatorship, collective farming and a centralised command economy.
In the mid-1930s the abstract threat of war gave way to real threats from Germany and Japan. Soviet war preparations took the form of accelerated war production and ambitious mobilisation planning. The true extent of militarisation is still debated, and some historians have raised the question of whether Soviet war plans were ultimately designed to counter aggression or to wage aggressive war against the enemy.[23] It is now clear from the archives that Stalin's generals sometimes entertained the idea of a pre-emptive strike, and attack as the best means of defence was the official military doctrine of the time; Stalin himself, however, was trying to head off Hitler's colonial ambitions and had no plans to conquer Europe.
Stalinist dictatorship and terror left bloody fingerprints on war preparations, most notably in the devastating purge of the Red Army command staff in 1937/8. They also undermined Soviet efforts to build collective security against Hitler with Poland, France and Britain, since few foreign leaders wished to ally themselves with a regime that seemed to be either rotten with traitors or intent on devouring itself. As a result, following desultory negotiations with Britain and France in the summer of 1939, Stalin accepted an offer of friendship from Hitler; in August their foreign ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop signed a treaty oftrade and non-aggression that secretly divided Poland between them and plunged France and Britain into war with Germany.[24] In this way Stalin bought two more years of peace, although this was peace only in a relative sense and was mainly used for further war preparations. While selling war materials to Germany Stalin assimilated eastern Poland, annexed the Baltic states and the northern part of Romania, attacked Finland and continued to expand war production and military enrolment.
In the summer of 1940 Hitler decided to end the 'peace'. Having conquered France, he found that Britain would not come to terms; the reason, he thought, was that the British were counting on an undefeated Soviet Union in Germany's rear. He decided to remove the Soviet Union from the equation as quickly as possible; he could then conclude the war in the West and win a German empire in the East at a single stroke. A year later he launched the greatest land invasion force in history against the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union remained at peace with Japan until August 1945, a result of the Red Army's success in resisting a probing Japanese border incursion in the Far East in the spring and summer of 1939. As war elsewhere became more likely, each side became more anxious to avoid renewed conflict, and the result was the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact of April 1941. Both sides honoured this treaty until the last weeks of the Pacific war, when the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and routed the Japanese army in north China.
The eastern front
In June 1941 Hitler ordered his generals to destroy the Red Army and secure most of the Soviet territory in Europe. German forces swept into the Baltic region, Belorussia, Ukraine, which now incorporated eastern Poland, and Russia itself. Stalin and his armies were taken by surprise. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops fell into encirclement. By the end of September, having advanced more than a thousand kilometres on a front more than a thousand kilometres wide, the Germans had captured Kiev, put a stranglehold on Leningrad and were approaching Moscow.6
and The Soviet Union and the Threat from the East, 1933-41: Moscow, Tokyo and the Prelude to the Pacific War (London: Macmillan, 1992); Geoffrey Roberts, The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War: Russo-German Relations and the Road to War, 1933-1941 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995); and Derek Watson, 'Molotov the Making of the Grand Alliance and the Second Front, 1939-1942', Europe-Asia Studies 54,1 (2002): 51-85.
6 Among many excellent works that describe the Soviet side of the eastern front see Werth, Russia at War; Seweryn Bialer, Stalin and his Generals: Soviet Military Memoirs of World War II (New York: Pegasus, 1969); Harrison Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (London: Pan, 1969); books and articles by John Erickson including The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918-1941 (London: Macmillan, 1962), followed by Stalin's War with Germany, vol. i: The Road to Stalingrad, and vol. ii: The Road
The German advance was rapid and the resistance was chaotic and disorganised at first. But the invaders suffered unexpectedly heavy losses. Moreover, they were met by scorched earth: the retreating defenders removed or wrecked the industries and essential services of the abandoned territories before the occupiers arrived. German supply lines were stretched to the limit and beyond.
In the autumn of 1941 Stalin rallied his people using nationalist appeals and harsh discipline. Desperate resistance denied Hitler his quick victory. Leningrad starved but did not surrender and Moscow was saved. This was Hitler's first setback in continental Europe. In the next year there were inconclusive moves and counter-moves on each side, but the German successes were more striking. During 1942 German forces advanced hundreds of kilometres in the south towards Stalingrad and the Caucasian oilfields. These forces were then destroyed by the Red Army's defence of Stalingrad and its winter counter-offensive (see Plate 15).
Their position now untenable, the German forces in the south began a long retreat. In the summer of 1943 Hitler staged his last eastern offensive near Kursk; the German offensive failed and was answered by a more devastating Soviet counter-offensive. The German army could no longer hope for a stalemate and its eventual expulsion from Russia became inevitable. Even so, the German army did not collapse in defeat. The Red Army's journey from Kurskto Berlin took nearly two years of bloody fighting.
The eastern front was one aspect of a global process. In the month after the invasion the British and Soviet governments signed a mutual assistance pact, and in August the Americans extended Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, followed by a German declaration of war, brought America into the conflict and the wartime
to Berlin (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975 and 1983); his 'Red Army Battlefield Performance, 1941-1945: The System and the Soldier', in Paul Addison and Angus Calder (eds.), Time to Kilclass="underline" The Soldier's Experience of War in the West, 193 9-1945 (London: Pimlico 1997); John Erickson and David Dilks (eds.), Barbarossa: The Axis and the Allies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994); three volumes by David M. Glantz, From the Don to the Dnepr: Soviet Offensive Operations, December 1942-August 1943 (London: Cass, 1991), When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler with Jonathan House (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), and Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Richard Overy, Russia's War (London: Allen Lane, 1997); Bernd Wegner (ed.), From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the World, 193 9-1941 (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn, 1997); Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (London: Viking, 1998), and Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 (London: Viking 2002); Geoffrey Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad: The Battle that Changed History (London: Longman, 2000). For a wider perspective see Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
23
The Russian protagonist of the latter view was Viktor Suvorov (Rezun),
24
On Soviet foreign policy in the 1930s see Jonathan Haslam's two volumes,