It is easy to understand why Stalin's dislike for the Social Democrats— for socialists in general—was particularly keen with regard to the German Social Democrats. Stalin's leaning toward the conservative elements in Germany can be explained not only by their support for a pro-Soviet orientation but also by the general secretary's partiality for anyone who favored firm, authoritarian rule. The Soviet Union's relations with Fascist Italy, for example, were excellent from the moment Mussolini came to power. Alek- sandr Barmin writes that in 1924 the Soviet ambassador to Italy, Yurenev, invited Mussolini to dinner. The day before the dinner, Giacomo Matteotti, a socialist and leader of the opposition, was kidnapped (and subsequently killed) by the Fascists. Italian Communists and liberals demanded that Yurenev withdraw his invitation. The Soviet ambassador refused to do this and ceremoniously received И Duce.93 During the First Five-Year Plan, Italy received huge orders from the Soviet Union for industrial equipment, and Italian industrialists in turn offered the Soviet Union long-term credits guaranteed by their government.94
The "second-floor" aspect of Soviet foreign policy—involving the Comintern—centered on one main task, the implementation of the decisions of the Sixth Comintern Congress, held in the summer of 1928, especially the decision that the main enemy was "the social fascists." This phrase, first put into circulation by Zinoviev in 1922, referred to the Social Democrats and implied not only that they were the main enemies of the working class but also that the real fascists were not a great danger. Moscow viewed the growing power of the Nazis (who won 6.5 million votes in Germany in 1930) as a rather positive phenomenon. It showed, according to the Comintern leaders, that the masses were losing their illusions about parliament and democracy. Besides, the Nazis were enemies of the Western democracies and, as Stalin saw it, would not be able to maintain a pro-Western orientation. In 1931 Stalin asked Heinz Neumann, a leader of the German Communist party (KPD), "Don't you think that if the nationalists came to power in Germany they would occupy themselves solely with the West, so that we would be able to build socialism freely here?"95 The KPD was given orders from Moscow to wage a relentless struggle against the Social Democrats, particularly against the left wing. In submitting to these orders, the Communists not infrequently joined forces with the Nazis to fight the socialists. This meant an abrupt change of tactics for the German Communists. Just the day before, the party had still followed Neumann's slogan: "Hit the fascists wherever you meet them." Stalin, who had decided on this change of policy, summoned three members of the German leadership to Moscow, Thaelmann, Neumann, and Remmele. After their return, they announced the new orders: the Social Democrats are the enemy.
Many historians have accepted the view that in paving the way for Hitler's victory Stalin was following the formula: a victory for Hitler today means victory for the Communists tomorrow. This notion was widely accepted in Communist circles in Germany in the early 1930s. Actually Stalin's policy with regard to Germany was shaped by three factors. The first was hatred for the Social Democrats. But this feeling was not a personal phobia. All the Bolsheviks shared it, including Trotsky. True, he opposed the term social fascist, but at the same time he opposed any alliance with parties and organizations that refused to break with reformism or wanted to revive social democracy.
The attitude of Stalin and Trotsky toward social democracy and nazism in the 1930s clearly shows the difference between the two heirs of Lenin and no less clearly shows that Stalin was the genuine Leninist. From 1931 to 1941, without any shame or hesitation, Stalin carried out at least four 180-degree turns in foreign policy, guided solely by his own interests. In June 1933, after Hitler had come to power, the magazine Communist International ridiculed a suggestion by the "Austro-Marxists" (as the Social Democrats of Austria were called):
The Austro-Marxists suggest that the USSR make an alliance with the "great democracies" on an international scale in order to fight fascism.... The
social fascists advise the Soviet proletariat to enter into an alliance with "democratic" France and its vassals against German and Italian fascism. The social fascists seem to have forgotten the existence of French, British, and American imperialism.96
Within less than a year the "Soviet proletariat" did precisely what the Austro-Marxists had advised. But Trotsky stuck to the old position. Even in 1938 he argued:
What in fact would a bloc of the imperialist democracies against Hitler mean? The shackles and leg irons of Versailles in a new form, but even heavier, bloodier, more difficult to bear. ... To be allied with imperialism in a struggle against fascism is the same as being allied with the devil against his horns and claws.97
By 1938 Stalin was an ally of the democracies and Trotsky criticized him unmercifully for betraying the cause of the proletariat and the world revolution. In June 1940 Trotsky still insisted on his position: "A socialist who advocates defense of the capitalist 'homeland' plays a role just as reactionary as the peasants of the Vend6e who fought to defend the feudal order, that is, their very own chains."98 This time Trotsky found himself in the same camp with Stalin, who had managed to change camps again by concluding an alliance with Hitler in 1939. Trotsky gave the impression of a clock that had stopped working in 1917 and Stalin one of a clock that runs in whatever direction its owner wishes. Each claimed, of course, that his was the only correct time, since it corresponded to the laws of history.
Hostility toward the Social Democrats was the first element of Stalin's policy vis-^-vis Germany. The second element was the conviction that the Nazis were nationalists whose main concern was to oppose the Versailles system. In 1923 Karl Radek had tried to use the rising Nazi party as a force to help destroy the Weimar Republic and thereby contribute to a Communist revolution. Radek gave the Nazis their first hero, Schlageter, who was shot by the French in the occupied Ruhr, by making a famous funeral speech in his honor, a speech approved by Stalin and Zinoviev. Radek expressed the conviction of the leaders of the Comintern that the "vast majority of the nationally minded masses will belong not to the capitalist camp but to the workers' camp," that "hundreds of Schlageters" would come over to the camp of the revolution.99 Hitler, in turn, expressed the belief to his comrades that a Communist could always make a good Nazi, but a Social Democrat never could.
Finally, the third element was fear of seeing the Communists come to power in Germany. At the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Zinoviev said: "We know very well that in only a few years, many of the industrial countries will outdistance us and occupy first place in the Comintern and then, as Comrade Lenin said, we will become a backward Soviet country among developed Soviet countries." Zinoviev apparently had nothing against this prospect. Stalin was categorically opposed. He had no intention of yielding first place in the Comintern.
In the 1930s a new and important factor appeared on the world political scene: pro-Soviet public opinion. The cultivation of Western public opinion began right after the October revolution. Its effects were described by the American journalist George Popov in his book The Cheka, which tells of his arrest in 1922: "One of the greatest political successes of the Moscow despots is to have conditioned world opinion in such a way that anyone who dares to discuss the shortcomings of the Soviet state, even though they are undeniable, is declared 'anti-Bolshevik' and accused of lacking objectivity."100