Stalin's Secret War Plans!

Stalin's Secret War Plans, supposedly why Hitler Invaded the Soviet Union.

When the German armed forces invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941, Berlin described the
offensive as preemptive in the face of imminent Soviet aggression. The claim was generally
dismissed as Nazi propaganda. Recently disclosed evidence from Soviet sources, however,
suggests that Moscow's foreign policy was not governed by neutrality when Europe went
to war in 1939.



Stalin's Secret War Plans: Why Hitler Invaded the Soviet Union. Richard Tedor.

 

Wow! Very interesting article, thanks for posting Spaniard.

It would be interesting to know how Leon Trotsky would have thought about all this if he knew, as he was totally against Stalin making "peace" with the Reich.

Would he be proud of the army he created secretly being readied to strike out against fascism and head the communist domination of continental Europe?

 

After having studied this conflict for about 40 years now, that explanation strikes me as more truthful then almost all the history books printed in the West in the post-war period.
In almost every other book, Hitler is portrayed as a megalomaniac, attacking the peace-loving Soviets in the east only to pursue the ancient "drang nocht osten" undertaken by the teutonic knights, and in a greedy grab for more "lebensraum". I'm not suggesting Hitler was some kind of Saint by any means - but very few authors ever suggest that Hitler probably launched Barbarossa pre-emptively.

You only have to look at Stalin's actions on taking power. He murdered and imprisoned millions of his own people, and almost his entire officer corps for practically no reason at all - all because he thought one of them might try to overthrow him one day! When the Germans attacked, this mad-man actually recalled many of the very officers he had imprisoned for years in squalid, freezing Gulags on trumped-up charges, and gave them commands to help fight for him - and almost all of them did!

Even before Barbarossa, Stalin revealed his true nature as he was basically nothing more then a Russian Hitler. His unprovoked attack on little Finland, his simultaneous invasion and occupation of Eastern Poland with the German attack in 1939, his annexation of Latvia, Lithuania and many other states - all these show that, far from Russia being a victim, the Stalinist Russians were every bit as bent on conquest as Hitler was.

The article points out that Hitler's forces hit large Russian forces in the west almost as soon as they crossed the frontier - but what were these forces doing there? There were too many russian troops to be there solely for defensive purposes (indicated by the millions of troops the wehrmacht quickly surrounded and captured in the Western areas of the Soviet union). And possibly the reason the Red Army collapsed so quickly in 1941 is that maybe they were indeed, trained, equipped and organized for an offensive into the West, and were totally unprepared for a defensive war (not spending much time building fortifications, laying minefields etc. that an army defending its frontiers would be doing.)

 

You have a point there, although I have not seen personally any books that called the Soviets peace loving (but who knows what they are teaching in all the public schools today).

The world does tend to forget the genocide caused by Stalin and the NKVD. Its almost incredable how many people are ignorant of Stalin's murders. Almost as incredable as how many people tend to disregard and or forget the clash of the Nazi and Soviet empires (and I admit, there is more I do not know when it comes to that part of the war).

 

Most people don't even know that Stalin killed almost as many russians as Hitler, and treated his own countrymen with almost the same level of contempt. But just mention the name "Hitler" and everyone has the same thought in their mind "Hitler = Evil = Bad". Why Stalin has never been seriously demonized in the same way (since in truth Hitler and Stalin were basically the same type of despot) is a mystery - but i suspect it pertains entirely to politics and the media.

 

Real good article, in most scenarios I think it would have been a disaster for the Russians if they attacked first. The Germans had proven in WWI their capability to fight an expert defensive campaign. The Russians would probably suffered massive setbacks, encirclements of large numbers of troops, then once the Red Army had been destroyed in Polannd, the Germans would have made it to Moscow in a counterattack. Not to mention, a Soviet aggressive move would have undermined Soviet morale, no longer could they claim to be fighting a patriotic war.

 

I would say the two biggest reasons are:

1. Russia was a victor in WWII

2. Unlike the Holocaust, which came to be known full blown after the war to the general public, the Soviet famines from collectivizing, the purges of the military, and the murders on just paranoid suspicion were kept relatively buried until Stalin died (and even hidden by foreign reporters, who were wooed by planned tours of the Five Year plans). From what I can understand, Khrushchev was the first to come out and denounce Stalin and the atrocities he committed. I would say that this is a big reason that Stalin is not ingrained as being as "bad boy". Hitler was relatively always disliked and feared by the west, so he had a big lead time in being truly despised.

However, (if I may jump on the "crazy train" for a minute), I would not doubt that there are devout communists out there in high places around the world that continue to try to whitewash soviet crimes against humanity, in order to soften the history of "workers struggle". Heck, as powerful and worldwide as the KGB was, I am really not surprised. I don’t think we will ever know the extent of the disinformation they have spread throughout the years.

But, on the other hand, I'm sure the CIA has played the same ballgame in that respect. That’s the simple history of the world. Power fighting against power.

 

Excellent-though I would add that the West was allied with Stalin during WWII and there was always this sense of grudging respect. Some might argue that we picked the wrong tyrant to ally ourselves with during the period in question but I would disagree; Stalin's agenda did not include the mass murder of all those determined to be untermenschen-which in Hitlerian ideology was nearly all the peoples of the world.
JeffinMNUSA
PS. Plus there was the personality factor-Stalin was a drunken bandit king while Hitler was a psychopathic creep.

 

LOL nice description, you are right, Stalin probably was slightly less evil

 

Exactly. And Churchill was also a good example of sideing with uncle Joe with grudging respect. It would be interesting to see what would happen if Chamberlain's government made a pact with the Russians before the war broke out and before the Russians made one with Germany (As Churchill wanted and pushed for but did not get). That would seem to put a kink in Stalin's plans in regards to this article's point.

As far as siding with the wrong tyrant, I'm with your logic, although there are many out there it seems that have the Pat Buchanan view.

 

The way I see it, Stalin was not too bright in regard to collectivizing for food production. That killed millions, but it was for a want for the Soviet ideals, not for ethnic cleansing, so to speak.

I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that Stalin was less evil in regards of killing because he was paranoid nutjob scared about keeping his butt in power.

But, this is such a fine line, its trivial. They were both bad dudes in the end!

As Churchill said " If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give the Devil favorable metion in the House of Commons".

 

So you think it was Stalin's stupidity that led to genocide and not population control?

 

Hitler also had his hands on some much more advanced technology and was much more of a threat on this account. Buchanan? Well he just sort of naturally hates "leftist" anything and is more comfortable with Hitler's brand of tyranny. I don't think he would have liked living with NAZI though.
JeffinMNUSA

 

You can make a argument for population control I guess, in regards to trying to destroy the big land farmers (I think they were called the Kulaks). As far as Stalin's stupidity on the matter, I don't know if thats the correct word, and I don't know how much he personally was involved with the collective farm stuff, but the result was apparent.

When you takes vast lands like the Ukraine (Russians Bread box), re- distribute and uproot land and families, actually kill off some big land owners, and make people work under conditions they don't like, you dont always get impressive results of production.

If there is anyone who knows more about this, please chime in to correct me!

 

Sohlzhenitsyn is of the opinion that "de kulakization" permanently crippled Soviet agriculture by killing off the very people who were the best at the game-similar to the purges of the Red Army that left that Russian institution decapitated. I do believe Sohlzhenitsyn's parents were "kulaks".
JeffinMNUSA

 

It was Not very different to Hitler´s racism. Was it?

Hunger as a political weapon

IMHO:It was a deliberate genocide and was not limited to the kulaks. There weren´t millions of big land owners.

 

cannibalism, that's pretty intense.

 

Good points!

Well, like I said in my previous post, its a fine, fine line between shades of evil, and it becomes almost trivial when we try to compare who is most.

 

Back to the Original subject, Stalin's Secret War Plans!

These next statements aren’t all my own, I read them elsewhere; that said any secret war plans of Stalin, and a preemptive strike flies in the fact of numerous truths, i.e.:

Marxist Theory:

In traditional Marxist theory, militarism is normally seen as a form of social control and a component of imperialism, delaying the emergence of a class-conscious international working class or proletariat. The activities of the Communist International in the period preceding the First World War show clearly that Communist parties and the political Left in general were opponents of militarism. Once the first communist regime took political power in the Russian Revolution and survived the Russian Civil War, a major line of debate in the USSR during the 1920s was how the world's first socialist state should relate to other nations.

The view of Trotsky was that a communist revolution could succeed only by continuous revolutionary activity in other nation-states. The notion of socialism surviving in a single nation-state was considered ridiculous and self-contradictory. The remaining capitalist powers would swiftly move to crush the USSR in those circumstances (the experience of western intervention on behalf of the Whites in the civil war was not forgotten).
Since the bourgeois nations would be more powerful, they would probably succeed in destroying socialism. However, if the working classes of these countries could understand that a war of conquest in support of capitalism was not in their class interests, they would not support such a war and socialism would survive through the process of revolution abroad.

Stalin, on the other hand, argued that 'socialism in one country' was feasible if properly managed. His subsequent program of militarizing the whole Soviet economy was simultaneously a means of maintaining his totalitarian power and ensuring the survival of the Soviet state without regard to the internal politics of other nations.

It is important to note that Stalin's approach flew in the face of most Marxist thought up till that point, but that neither the Trotskyist view nor the Stalinist view can be reconciled with a preemptive strike. Neither approach envisioned the use of conventional armed forces to wage an aggressive "first strike" or preemptive strike war of aggression.

Soviet Diplomacy Under Stalin:

Under Stalin, Soviet foreign policy in the late 1920s through at least 1939 was essentially defensive and very cautious. The USSR sought alliances with western powers, in particular seeking to re-establish the traditional anti-German alliance with France. For a multitude of reasons, these efforts failed. One of the main reasons was that the USSR was considered a pariah state prior to June 22, 1941, and the other European powers were reluctant to enter into any serious negotiation with the Stalin regime.
Also, one effect of the Great Purge was that western militaries came to regard the Red Army as a worthless ally. They were thus not eager to reinstate the traditional east-west coalition against Germany which had existed during the "Great War".

Prior to the rise of the Nazis, joint military training facilities existed in the USSR, in which German and Soviet soldiers developed nascent versions of the tactics and weapons that would come to prominence in WW2. However, these joint endeavors occurred during a period when Germany was weak, under the Weimar Republic, and were shut down once the Nazis came to power.

The Soviet view was that as efforts to 'surround' Hitler failed, and as the western powers seemed to allow Nazi expansion in Central Europe (as long as it was not aimed westward), some accommodation had to be reached with Germany in order to buy time. Stalin knew the USSR was not ready to fight Germany, but the massive rearmament and reorganization programs begun in 1939 might begin to bear fruit by 1942. Stalin’s embarrassment in Finland in the Winter War convinced him that the Red Army wasn’t ready for any large scale aggression until a true rebuilding was finished. I’m sure that the goal of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was primarily to buy time and space which the USSR could use to prepare for the German invasion they feared was inevitable, not to "beat them to the punch" and launch one first.
This was not (of course), fundamentally different from the Franco-British approach toward Nazi Germany up until Munich. Consequently there is little in the basically opportunistic diplomatic record to support a Stalinist first-strike thesis, and much to contradict it.

The Historical Record:

The view that a Soviet invasion of Germany was imminent in 1941 is not shared by the vast majority of the historian community, from the east or the west. A noteworthy refutation of that position is contained in Col. David Glantz's work Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War.

 

Brndirt1:a very good post,as always,but,some points
1)there is no proof at all of a Soviet invasion of Germany in 1941,unless one is sticking by the "theories",better phantasys from Suvurov .
2)there are some mysterious things,as the SU forming 47 new divisions in june 1941 and one Polish division,but I don't think these are proving "Suvurov'.
3)If there was a Russian plan to invade Germany,one could argue that this was a plan for a preemptive war:attacking Germany,before Germany attacked the SU.