Heller and Neckrich present a devastating attack on Stalin's foreign policy before and during World War II. Much of their attack is to the point, but sometimes, I believe, they fail to give the devil his due. Surely Stalin was an extremely nasty and even evil man running a terrible and even criminal system. But he was steeped in European realpolitik. And he knew how to defend the interests of his regime, if not those of the Russian nations. Stalin made his pact with Hitler not because he underestimated him or because of ideological similarities, but because the pact best supported the interests of the regime in the circumstances of the time.
As overlord of a totalitarian system, there was no reason to expect Stalin to place the aims of humanity, or of democracy, over those of his regime. To have expected otherwise, as many political leaders, intellectuals, and media experts did, earned only Stalin's contempt as "useful idiots," a term coined by Lenin. I still remember a professor making fun of me to his amused audience after I predicted a Nazi-Soviet pact, by explaining that I did not "know the first thing about socialist foreign policy." Things are not much different in the current era.
Stalin did admire Hitler, at least at times. And Hitler at times admired Stalin's revolutionary thoroughness. But that admiration was always ambivalent, and for good reasons. Stalin was prepared to deal with Hitler. But he would have been even more pleased if he could have arranged for Hitler and the West to devastate each other. And the West had an interest in throwing Hitler against Stalin. What was there to choose between them except comparative evil and comparative menace? Even during the alliance of World War II, Stalin understood this, and it was our defect that we did not. Our common interests were situational, not intrinsic.
But let us not make too much of Stalin's evil, or his preference for dealing with Nazi Germany, in explaining Stalin's foreign policy. Surely Stalin was capable of making mistakes, but he was never unaware of the instrumentality of his deals or of the dangers in them.
One must be careful of quotations. The revisionists used quotations to make the misleading claim that the purpose of the Marshall Plan was to bolster American capitalism, when the administration was merely trying to sway a conservative, business-oriented Congress to support its strategic designs. Stalin may have believed some parts of some of the things he said, but he was also a master of deception and disorientation. He told even his closest associates only what it was useful for them to believe.
The West, as Nekrich and Heller themselves note, was responsible for the circumstances that created both the opportunity and need for a Nazi-Soviet pact. Hitler would have been brought down if England and France had opposed him at the time of the Rhineland occupation. There is some reason to believe that the Wehramcht would have deposed him if England and France had frustrated his intentions at Munich.
The leaders of the two countries did neither for a variety of reasons. In part, they believed Hitler's demands to be just: an irrelevancy given the evil nature of his regime. In part, they failed to understand his menace, unlike Churchill, who was regarded with disdain by political leaders and intellectuals, and who also
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