STALIN AND THE INEVITABLE WAR 1936-1941

 
Silvio Pons


This book is a study of the responses of the Soviet Union to the European crises which led to World War II. It is based on a substantial body of political and diplomatic documents that has become accessible to scholars since the opening up of former Soviet archives in 1992. The author highlights the influence that the doctrine of the inevitability of war exercised on Soviet policy making during the second half of the 1930s, receiving new legitimacy from the collapse of the Versailles system caused by Hitler’s foreign policy. Seen in this perspective, Soviet foreign policy appears less a reaction to Western appeasement towards Nazi Germany (as historians have often understood it) than the autonomous outcome of a specific political culture, obviously interacting with the foreign and domestic contexts. Contrary to a largely established image of policy making under Stalin, this interaction ultimately provided less ground for planning than for contradictions and conflict between the main personalities of Soviet foreign policy, especially between Litvinov and Molotov. Accordingly, any attempt to privilege ideology or realism as the primary source of Stalin’s foreign and security policy, following a classical polarization that still divides historians, proves scarcely convincing. The alternatives overlapping and opposing each other in the USSR on how to respond to the Nazi threat - whether by confrontation (antifascism and the ‘collective security’ approach) or by appeasement (the anti-Versailles tradition and an undifferentiated approach to the ‘capitalist world’) – contained varying doses of ideology and realism. The combination which prevailed at the time of the pact with Hitler in 1939-1940 was probably the one most closely reflecting traditional Soviet culture and vision of the outside world – a world dominated by permanent conflict and menace. Stalin’s strategies of a ‘war of attrition’ between the other powers and of appeasement towards Hitler were a complete failure in the face of the Nazi threat. Nevertheless, the peculiar notion of security forged in the aftermath of the European crises and of the Great Terror became the basis of Stalin’s foreign policy.

Silvio Pons is Professor of East European History at Rome University 'Tor Vergata' (Rome II) and the Director of the Gramsci Institute Foundation, Rome. Among his publications are The Cominform: Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949 (co-editor, 1994), The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War (co-editor, 1996), and Russia in the Age of Wars (co-editor). He is also the editor of the Italian edition of Georgi Dimitrov's Diary (2002).