Mehring
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Joined: 1/25/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Speedy
In August 1939 Stalin was in a position in which he could prevent Hitler's invasion of Poland, the invasion that started World War 2, and he knew it well and said so. But at that decisive point in history, instead of preventing war, Stalin did the opposite. He cleared the way and provided guarantees for Hitler to invade, after he knew for sure that this will start a war not just in Poland but also in Western Europe, a war that the Communist ideology expected, planned and prepared for, and desired. Then, with Germany at war with Britain and France, Stalin's Russia moved to the 2nd phase of its long term preparations. Russia moved to a maximum effort war regime in which it enormously expanded its military force and military production rates, expanded its territory westwards, by force, which also gave it a long common border with Germany, and finally in 1941 began to mobilize millions and transferred its enormous attack-oriented forces to the German and Romanian borders, and prepared to enter the European war in a gigantic attack that would:
- Immediately cut Germany's main source of oil in Ploesti, in southern Romania, just about 120 miles from the Russian border, in order to paralyze Hitler's armed forces for lack of oil (as eventually happened in 1944).
- Defeat the exhausted Germany and its allies across the entire front from the Finland in the North to the Black Sea in the South - a mirror image of the German attack that eventually started in June 22, 1941.
- Continue with the Communist "liberation" of the entire Europe, by advancing all the way first to Germany, then to France, and Spain, bringing all of Europe under the brutal totalitarian regime which the Russian people already "enjoyed" then, that made Russia one big prison with countless prisons in it.
Hitler's Germany managed to be the first to attack, by a narrow gap of a few weeks at most (Suvorov's conclusion, based on various evidence, is that Russia's Red Army was going to attack on July 6, 1941, so Hitler got ahead of them by exactly two weeks).
You speak with the benefit of hindsight and attribute certain knowledge of particulars to Stalin which nobody had. How did he know the invasion of Poland would lead to world war? Did Hitler's previous invasions lead to war? How did he come to deal with Hitler, anyway? Having delivered the Spanish revolution to Franco to prove his counter-revolutionaryness to Britain and France, the latter would not deal with him. He had to make a deal with Hitler. On what basis, then, could he depend upon Britain and France to go to war to defend Poland?
Stalin could have prevented WW2 long before the splitting of Poland. Having subordinated the Third International to 'left' trade unionists and nationalists then seen the consequences in the defeat of the British general strike and the Shanghai massacre the next year, he swung from right to ultra left. He divided the German working class with his 'social fascism' policy which declared that since Social Democracy was bourgeois, it was the same as fascism. Thus denied a united front between communists and social democrat workers, the German working class was defeated without a shot being fired. How does this figure with 'Communist ideology?" It doesn't.
Having abandoned 'social fascism' Stalin hurtled from ultra left to ultra right, to the 'popular front,' an essentially Menshevik idea which subordinated the working class to the very forces which had previously been declared 'social fascist' as well as overtly capitalist parties such as liberals. Socialist revolution was thus put on the backburner to a long distant future which of course would never come. How does this figure with 'Communist ideology?" Again, it doesn't.
Why, as a communist, did Stalin sabotage socialist revolution in Germany, Spain, China, France and elsewhere? Was he just stupid? Well, more than a little, but he was also shrewd, the two are not mutually exclusive.
You say that a new world war is "a war that the Communist ideology expected, planned and prepared for, and desired". Really? Where do you get that from? Marxism declares that the antagonism between competing national economies and the imbalances between them at certain stages of history create the conditions both for war and revolution. Revolution is desirable because it is necessary, but, no more than war is it something to be chivvied along. If it does not occur of its own accord, the conditions for socialist revolution are not ripe. The purpose of Marxism is to give conscious direction to the historical process.
Why, assuming Stalin really did know or even believe war was inevitable, did he not promote socialist revolution? Because socialist revolution was not something he could control or something that served his interests. On the contrary, if there was one thing that could re-ignite socialist consciousness in the Russian working class and prove the fallacy of his 'theories' of 'socialism' in one country and peaceful coexistance, it was new revolution abroad. Likewise, a new world war made Stalin look very stupid politically. it would only prove that the peaceful coexistance at which he worked so hard by ingratiating himself to, and stregthening his most mortal enemy, was a sham, nothing more than an interlude between war.
A couple of years after decapitating the Red Army, Stalin then witnessed the hopeless unpreparedness of Russia's armies in the occupations of Poland and attack on Finland To suggest that Stalin was preparing for a war for which Russia had no economic or even ideological need, can only be the product of the most appalling selective use of material not worthy of an historian. Sadly, such 'historians' abound.
As Lord Palmerston pointed out, “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.” Stalin, as the Russian nation, or representative of the nascient bourgeoisie, would make and change any friend he deemed necessary, but since the 1920s he consistently opposed socialist revolution in every situation and context because it was never in his interests.
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“Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.”
-Leon Trotsky
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