Garibaldi Never Came

...Not until they saw this face at close quarters, and experienced the bestiality of German Hitlerism, did the Russians in the great majority grasp the actual situation...

...Hyde...

...Not European civilization but Ostpolitik was what the overlords of Nazi Germany brought to Russia...

...As between the German and other European-born invaders and the peasant people they encountered in the limitless Russian spaces, Europeanism was represented in the latter...

...Though Garibaldi did not come, the Emancipation Edict was issued and a series of Europeanizing reforms of Russian society followed in its wake...

...But it was not a civilized Europe which had come to Russia...

...Each had a "line" to pursue...

...This people had always stood outside of Europe...

...When the German armies invaded in the summer of 1941, they were enthusiastically welcomed by very many people in the newly-annexed Baltic and Polish territories on the Western fringes...

...One would like to think that we in the West had pondered these events and comprehended their deep meaning, and that we had translated this comprehension into the realities of foreign policy, including the planned strategy in event of future aggression against the West...

...Then, if the Soviet rulers should ever order their divisions to cross the Elbe, they would soon find that the true Europe stretches eastward to the Volga and beyond...

...But the moral factor certainly played a crucial part...

...They were never in any doubt about this, never fooled for a moment into thinking that the kolkhoz had something to do with "socialism...

...Embassy in Moscow, 1944-1953 Prince Kropotkin recalls in his memoirs that not until the Emancipation Edict actually came out in 1861 did the mass of Russian peasants take fully seriously the Tsar's long-announced intention to abolish serfdom...

...As all this suggests, deep in the consciousness of the overwhelmingly peasant population of Russia lived a myth of liberation by Europe...

...They vied with one another in attempts to define its spiritual and material meaning...

...And over the whole scene of bickering and confusion loomed the arch proponent of the policy, Hitler...

...What it all boiled down to was the idea of treating the Russians as Untermenschen and perpetuating a system of organized German brigandage in the conquered spaces of the East...

...As they penetrated deeper, into areas of the country which had been under Soviet rule from the beginning, the popular attitude was more restrained, but nevertheless optimistic...

...Raise a good army for the defense of Europe...

...On the latter point, incidentally, an old freedom-fighter such as Garibaldi, were he alive in the West today, would very possibly be saying: Stop placing first reliance upon nuclear war strategies...

...Russians in very large numbers wanted to believe that the Germans called "Nazi" were actually just Germans, as they themselves, the Russians called "Soviet," were actually just Russians...

...Dallin has given us the documented chronicle of Ostpolitik, based upon an exhaustive study of all available materials...

...There was Martin Bormann and the Nazi Party machine, Alfred Rosenberg and the Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories, Joseph Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry, Ribbentrop and the Foreign Office, the Armed Forces, and finally Heinrich Himmler and the abominable SS empire...

...Freedom, however, was too slow in evolving to guarantee the country against the subsequent establishment of Lenin's dictatorship and the great relapse into national thrall-dom which Russia experienced in the reign of Stalin the Terrible...

...It is a masterly work of historical scholarship...

...Nothing will be done unless Garibaldi comes," was the peasant's reply...

...Jekyll of a Europe lingering in Russian ancestral memory...

...Germany had become Public Enemy Number One...

...Moral forces were set in motion which more or less ruled out the possibility of a German victory...

...There is not very much that needs to be added to this conclusion, except to say that the book affords impressive documentation of it...

...He fancied future Russia as "Germany's India...

...Another pungent expression of their attitude came out in a conversation between one of Kropotkin's friends and a peasant to whom he spoke about "freedom coming...

...The truth was, in some curious way, precisely the reverse of this...

...At that moment, the Germans in some deep sense lost the war...

...The face Europe showed to Russia was that of its hideous monster, Mr...

...Mow that Europe had finally come to Russia, would it not encourage or at least permit the Russian people to make its country European...

...Not the decent, mannerly, freedom-loving Dr...

...What Stalin's dramatic appeals and draconic measures had been unable to evoke," writes Dallin, "was coming to pass: a temporary identification of purposes of the Soviet regime and its people...

...Pravda off and on had written disquieting things about Nazi Germany...

...This, of course, had nothing whatever to do with a failure of nerve or lack of courage...

...It revealed the preference of the familiar, even though unhappy, native rule to that of the oppressive stranger...

...Upon the peasants, still composing the vast majority, Stalin reimposed serfdom...

...Even on the very eve of emancipation, they still tended to doubt that it would take place without pressure from abroad—from Europe...

...In these circumstances, it is not surprising that echoes of the historical myth of liberation by Europe reawoke in the popular mind...

...He skilfully reconstructs from these materials a connected account and analysis of the thing as a whole, the total amalgam of personalities and passions, purposes and cross-purposes, organizations and their rivalries, German actions and Russian reactions, starts and stops and retreats in the colossal criminal fiasco...

...People who have lived closer to the soil live closer to the past...

...They fought bureaucratic battles in Berlin to determine whose agency would have what role in carrying it out...

...Concluding it, he writes of the German invasion of Russia: "It aroused high hopes and led to greater despair than if these hopes had never been fired...

...But have we...

...Dallin states the first premise of Ostpolitik as follows: "Nazi Germany rejected from the outset the traditional concept of 'limited war.' " Proceeding from there, Hitler decreed that the goal was "to deprive [the Eastern peoples] of any form of state organization and consequently keep them on as low a cultural level as possible...

...Only when they saw it did they believe that men calling themselves "Europeans'" could make war after the fashion of primitive barbarians, murdering prisoners of war, maltreating women and children, perpetrating cruel and senseless acts, robbing and exploiting...

...And Germans, they knew, were Europeans, and Europeans were people who led civilized lives in well ordered lands...

...It indicated that, by and large, the Soviet population was not so firmly wedded to the cause of its regime as to reject all alternatives...

...Why else would it bother to come...

...But then Pravda was always telling gross untruths about Russia, as any Russian could see...

...Yet it also had long been looking in and had wanted, in its way, to be in...

...Perhaps, though, this should be added: The ultimate lie of Ostpolitik was the claim put forward by Hitler that his Germany was entrusted with the "salvation of European culture" from the "Bolshevized population" of Russia...

...Apart from circumstances, traditional attitudes are often very tenacious among the Russians...

...Alexander Dallin sums it up in the present volume with the carefully qualified statement that "the attitude of the population varied from 'watchful waiting' to hopeful friendliness toward the new authorities...

...The ineffable tragedy of 1941-1945 is that this belief was deceived, and that the Russian people, having risen in wrath against a false Europe, was prevented by history from making common cause with the true Europe which it mightily helped to liberate...

...During the collectivization drive, they ironically read the initials of the Ail-Union Communist Party (Vsesoyuznaya Kommunisti-cheskaya Partiya) as standing for the Second Serfdom (Vtoroye Krepost-noye Pravo...

...many thought, should it have been telling the truth about Germany...

...Its peculiar Europeanism was expressed in its belief in Europe...

...Nor was it so ardently and blindly hostile to it as to accept whatever alternative was offered by a cruel and disdainful conqueror...

...According to one rumor which circulated among them on the eve, Napoleon III had required of the Tsar, in the recent treaty of peace, that the Russian peasants be freed...

...Lend-Lease and Allied military action were, of course, tremendously important in the final outcome...

...Old General Winter helped, too...

...All strata of the people were bound again in compulsory service to the autocracy...

...It was a question of the old Russian belief in Europe...

...The Russian people made its historic choice: not for Stalin but against Hitler...

...Our guiding principle must be that these people have but one justification for existence—to be of use to us economically...

...If it is not exactly new, it is nevertheless exceedingly important, and Dallin's work helps to remove it from the realm of controversy...

...It was probably at some point early in 1942 that these facts burned themselves into the Russian national consciousness...