The Great Terror

When such tactics resulted in the victory of Hitler,fn6 the crushing of the German Communist party was represented, according to the new Stalin style, as a victory. A new concept of Hitler as the “icebreaker of revolution”—the last desperate stand of the bourgeoisie, whose failure would lead to the collapse of capitalism—came into vogue.

When it became apparent that Hitlerism was not

going to collapse—a conclusion Stalin seems to have reached at the time of the Nazi Roehm Purge in June 1934—Stalin was not to be inhibited by doctrinal reasons from coming to an arrangement with the new dictator. The difficulty was rather that Hitler appeared to be quite intransigently anti-Communist. As Hitler built up Germany’s military and economic power, Stalin began a complex approach. Hitler’s evident military threat could be blocked in two ways: by force or by agreement. If force was to be necessary, then a powerful antifascist alliance needed to be built. If agreement were possible, it could best be achieved from strength. So from the mid-1930s, Soviet foreign policy, and Comintern tactics, were directed to creating a system of Party and State alliances against German power.

In 1936, following this shift in foreign policy orientation, Foreign Commissar Litvinov, long an advocate of alliance with the West, received every sign of support. Leaving a discussion, Stalin put his arm around Litvinov’s shoulder and said that now it appeared they could agree. Litvinov (or so he later told Ehrenburg) answered, “Not for long….”⁶³

It has often been suggested that one of Stalin’s motives for the Purge, and especially for the Army purge, was to give him the freedom of maneuver which finally produced the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. The old pre-Nazi pro-German orientation had not been an ideological one, and alliance even with a very reactionary Germany against the “have” powers was in principle long since accepted by the Army and most of the Party. Only when Nazism was seen as an overt threat to the Soviet Union did a change come, with the Popular Front campaigns of the Comintern, the Franco-Soviet Pact, and so forth. But when it came, it was warmly accepted. The Rightist mood in country and Party saw in these State and Party alliances the possibility of an “opening to the Right,” a reconciliation with democracy. Meanwhile, Tukhachevsky and the soldiery worked enthusiastically at a true modernization of the Army, to make it capable of facing not merely the Poles or Turks, but also the high military potential of a mobilized Germany.

But for Stalin, the fronts and pacts were matters not of conviction but of calculation.

As long as any qualms were able to make themselves felt in the Communist International, Stalin’s freedom of action to come to an arrangement with the Germans was limited. The ideological conceptions, the socialist sentiments, were directed firmly on antifascist lines. As far as the international field was concerned, the crushing of all independent, undisciplined motivations was necessary if Stalin was to make the best bargain. Prisoners were predicting the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1938 on the basis of the categories being arrested—in particular, the foreign Communists.⁶⁴

When the Pact came in August 1939, the effects of years of hard organizational and propaganda work in the Comintern became visible. All over the world, with negligible and temporary exceptions, the Communist Parties accepted the switch and began to explain its necessity—sometimes in the later editions of papers which the same day had been urging a fight to the last against Nazism. Only individuals among the leaderships dropped out.

Even at the XVIIth Party Congress in 1934, Stalin had hinted of the alternative policy of agreement with Germany: “Of course we are far from enthusiastic about the Fascist regime in Germany. But Fascism is beside the point, if only because Fascism in Italy, for example, has not kept the U.S.S.R. from establishing the best of relations with that country.”⁶⁵

A pessimistic estimate was presented to Stalin by the NKVD Foreign Department in August 1935 about the strength of elements in Germany favoring settlement with Russia. But the officer making the report noted that it made no impact on Stalin’s feeling that accord could be achieved.⁶⁶

For Litvinov was right. From 1936, and on the basis of the threat of his alternative anti-German policy, Stalin began to put out feelers to the Nazis, through his personal emissaries.