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The Icebreaker Controversy: Did Stalin Plan to Attack Hitler?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Teddy J. Uldricks*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of North Carolina, Asheville

Extract

Historians have had a great deal of difficulty accounting for the debacle wrought by Operation Barbarossa. How could the Red Army, a large and heavily equipped force, be so thoroughly decimated by the Wehrmacht, especially when evidence of the impending attack was plentiful? Most commonly, explanations have focused on the unexpectedly rapid success of the Blitzkrieg in western Europe, the impact of the Great Purges on the Soviet officer corps, the problems of reequipping the Red Army with modern weaponry and protecting newly expanded borders, the lack of adequate training for the rapidly growing Soviet armed forces, the confusing nature of available intelligence, and, most of all, the nearly fatal self-delusion of Iosif Stalin, which prevented the implementation of proper defensive measures. Although Stalin certainly realized that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was no more than a temporary truce and that a German attack was ultimately inevitable, he deluded himself that Adolf Hitler could be appeased until Soviet forces had grown strong enough to meet the Nazi assault. Soviet shipments of petroleum products, various raw materials, and foodstuffs were critically important to the German war machine and, thus, the key element in Stalin's strategy of appeasing Hitler.

Type
Review Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1999

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References

1. Viktor Suvorov, “Eshche raz o soobshchenii TASS,” Russkaia mysl', 16 and 23 May 1985; and “Who Was Planning to Attack Whom in June 1941, Hitler or Stalin?” Journal of the Royal United Service Institution 130, no. 2 (1985): 50–55. The book-length version of the argument was first published in France in a Russian-language edition, Ledokol: Kto nachal vtoruiu voinu? (Paris, 1988). The following year it appeared in a widely distributed German-language edition, Der Eisbrecher: Hitler in Statins Kalkül (Stuttgart, 1989), and the next year an English-language edition was published, Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? (London, 1990). The Russian-language edition was reprinted in Moscow in 1992 by Novoe vremia in a very large press run. It has since been translated into some eighteen languages and reprinted in scores of editions.

2. Suvorov's contention that Stalin had long sought an intraimperialist war that might be turned to Soviet advantage is similar, though much less sophisticated and well documented, to the interpretation advanced by Tucker, Robert C., “The Emergence of Stalin's Foreign Policy,” Slavic Review 36, no. 4 (December 1977): 563–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tucker, , Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York, 1990), chaps. 10–21.Google Scholar

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10. E.g., David MacKenzie, From Messianism to Collapse: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1991 (Fort Worth, 1994), 101–8; Adelman, Jonathan R. and Palmieri, Deborah A., The Dynamics of Soviet Foreign Policy (New York, 1989), 9099 Google Scholar; and Ulam, Adam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–73 (New York, 1974)Google Scholar, chap. 6. Certainly none of these authors can reasonably be accused of being “apologists” for Soviet policy. MacKenzie and Ulam, in particular, are sharply critical of Stalin's policies.

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15. Also see Grigor'ev, S. O., “O voenno-tekhnicheskii aspektakh knig V. Suvorova,” in Bordiugov, G. A., ed., Gotovil li Stalin nastupatel'nuiu voinu protiv Gitlera? (Moscow, 1995), 1323.Google Scholar

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17. Mark von Hagen, “Soviet Soldiers and Officers on the Eve of the German Invasion,” Soviet Union/Union Soviétique 18, nos. 1–3 (1991): 79–101. These problems were referred to collectively as shapkozakidatel'stvo, the literal meaning of which is “hat tossing,” but which carries some of the meaning of the American slang term “half-assed” and also of what Paul Fussell describes as “chickenshit.” See Fussell, Paul, Wartime (New York, 1989), chap. 7.Google Scholar

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25. Günther Gillessen, “Der Krieg der Diktatoren: Wollte Stalin im Sommer 1941 das Deutsche Reich angreifen?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 August 1986.

26. The fact that many American and British journals did not review Suvorov's book has led some of his defenders to posit a conspiracy of silence or even a campaign of intellectual “cleansing” allegedly being waged by “traditional” or “official” historians against the work. See Raack, R. C., “Stalin's Role in the Coming of World War II,” World Affairs 158, no. 4 (Spring 1996): 198211.Google Scholar

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28. Weinberg, A World at Arms, 198. “The perception of a weak Soviet Union could not be remedied by accurate intelligence. The Germans had very little, and they would not be dissuaded by those whose estimates of Soviet strength were more perceptive, primarily because the prejudices against Slavic peoples were reinforced by the euphoria of victory in the West.” On the Nazi ideological wellsprings of Barbarossa, also see Rich, Norman, Hitler's War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion (New York, 1973)Google Scholar, chap. 18.

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30. The details of this and subsequent strategic plans are available in Zakharov, M. V, General’ nyi shtab v predvoennye gody (Moscow, 1989)Google Scholar.

31. These ideas had been developed by V. K. Triandafillov and M. N. Tukhachevskii, and they remained embedded in Soviet military dogma even after the purges swept away their authors. See R. Savushkin, “K voprosu ozarozhdenii teorii posledovatel'nykh nastupatel'nykh operatsii, 1921–1929 gg.,” Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1983, no. 5: 77–83.

32. The full text of the “Considerations” was published by Iu. A. Gor'kov, appended to his article, “Gotovil li Stalin uprezhdaiushchii udar protiv Gidera v 1941 g.,” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 1993, no. 3: 29–45; and is available in English translation in Russian Studies in History 36, no. 3 (Winter 1997–98): 22–46. See also Gor'kov and Semin, Iu. N., “O kharaktere voenno-operativnykh planov SSSR nakanune velikoi otechestvennoi voiny i novye arkhivnye dokumenty,” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 1997, no. 5: 108–29.Google Scholar

33. On the correlation between plan recommendations and actual deployments, see Shimon Naveh, “Soviet Military Doctrine: The Clue to the Deployment of the Red Army in June 1941” (paper presented at the conference, “The Soviet Union and the Outbreak of War, 1939–41,” Russian Academy of Sciences and Tel Aviv University, Moscow, 3 February 1995).

34. V. D. Danilov, “Gotovil li general'nyi shtab krasnoi armii uprezhdaiushchii udar po Germanii?” in Bordiugov, ed., Gotovil li Stalin, 82–91.

35. M. I. Mel'tiukov, “Spory vokrug 1941 goda: Opyt kriticheskogo osmyleniia odnoi diskussii,” Olechestvennaia istoriia, 1994, no. 3: 22.

36. Mel'tiukov, M. I., “Ideologicheskie dokumenty maia-iiunia 1941 goda o sobytiiakh vtoroi mirovoi voiny,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1995, no. 1: 7085 Google Scholar.

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50. Ibid., 208.

51. Ibid., 321.

52. Documentary evidence indicates that the Soviets did have an accurate knowledge of the magnitude of the German threat. See, for example, “Voenno-vozdushnye sily Germanii i SSSR,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1998, no. 1: 63–86.

53. As the late Valentin Berezhkov, translator for Stalin and Molotov, put it, “The idea was to gain time, to appease Hitler, and at the same [time?] to demonstrate to him that it made no sense for Germany to go to war with the Soviet Union since this would effectively cut it off from a rich source of supplies.” Berezhkov, , At Stalin's Side (New York, 1994), 102.Google Scholar

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58. Leonhard, Betrayal, 69–72; and Berezhkov, At Stalin's Side, 42.

59. Werth, Alexander, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (New York, 1964), 270.Google Scholar

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