The Man Who Trusted Hitler

...Our fundamental picture of how the system worked does not have to be drastically revised, which is no small satisfaction to people who have made their careers trying to interpret what went on behind the Kremlin's walls...

...European diplomacy in the months between August 1939 and June 1941 was not a prelude to the Grand Alliance, but a three-cornered game of hatred and suspicion among the Germans, the Soviets and the British (left alone after the fall of France in June 1940...

...The latest and most probing effort to understand Stalin's near-fatal miscalculation is this one by Gabriel Gorodetsky, professor of history at Tel Aviv University and an internationally recognized scholar in the field of Soviet foreign policy...

...It became the decisive issue in Hitler's decision (by November 1940) that, like Napoleon, he would have to move east in order to cement his "Continental Bloc...

...This, of course, had no better chance of getting past Stalin than more sensible defensive measures...

...Ivan Maisky, the Old Bolshevik with an English wife who was Soviet ambassador to London, actually shared Stalin's suspicions about British intentions...

...It was Stalin's obstinate refusal to acknowledge a mass of intelligence even greater than has been supposed up to now, the author concludes, that set the Soviets up for a near-death experience...

...On the German side, Ambassador Count Werner von Schulenberg was horrified upon learning of Hitler's invasion plans and did his best to avert them, to the point of trying to hint to Molotov the evening before the attack that the worst was coming...

...The new documentation, however, does not resolve one longstanding controversy among Russia-watchers, namely the role of Communist ideology in Soviet policy making...

...In 14 densely packed chapters based on archival materials, he provides a blowby-blow chronicle and analysis of the nervous jockeying between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany from the time of their infamous Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 to the day of the invasion...

...This was not unreasonable, Gorodetsky holds, considering that prior to the fall of France the British were so cocksure as to contemplate bombing the Soviet oil fields at Baku to cut off Hitler's fuel supply...

...But this is the extent of practically all the documentary revelations since the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991...

...The then Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov comes across as a competent diplomat within the constraints that Stalin set for him...

...Stalin distrusted the British more than he feared the Germans, and his nightmare was a deal between London and Berlin, or some kind of British provocation, that would turn Hitler eastward...

...It was too late...

...As George F. Kennan wrote years ago, Stalin in his whole life trusted no other person—except Adolf Hitler...

...At 2:30 A.M...

...Even more than the well-known warnings by Winston Churchill (actually rather ambiguous) and by the master Soviet agent in Japan, Richard Sorge (unmistakable), Soviet moles well-placed in the German government and military provided exhaustive detail on the build-up of forces along the Soviet border in the spring of 1941...

...Soviet-German relations were never easy during the years of the Pact...

...The debate about Joseph Stalin's role in 1941 emerged more slowly and is still being fueled by newly opened archives in Moscow...

...Studies like Gorodetsky's or the much broader Cold War International History Project now under way in Washington show repeatedly that Soviet decisions were primarily based on pragmatic considerations...

...Marshals Georgi Zhukov and Semeon Timoshenko repeatedly went to Stalin with pleas to issue the necessary defensive orders, but the dictator would only fly into a rage...

...Against Stalin's insanity the Red Army command tried to step up defense preparations to the extent the dictator would accept...

...Even as the Germans were attacking, he imagined that this was the Wehrmacht acting on its own without orders from Hitler, or that the British were getting ready to join the Germans in the Baltic...

...Allegations of Franklin D. Roosevelt's dereliction of duty were immediate and have long since died down...

...Gorodetsky's explanation: "Stalin simply refused to come to grips with the reports, challenging as they did the wisdom of his policies in the preceding two years...

...Marshal Timoshenko recounted Stalin's outbursts four days before the German invasion: "If you're going to provoke the Germans on the frontier by moving troops there without our permission, then heads will roll, mark my words...

...The story Gorodetsky tells has long been well known in its overall outline...

...There was no lack of intelligence available to Moscow about Hitler's intentions...

...on June 22 Soviet forces on the Western frontier were finally ordered to man their fortifications and disperse their aircraft...

...and the USSR have heeded intelligence warnings and put their forces on more urgent alert...

...simply attacked basely like thieves...

...Stalin was little affected by sentiment or ideology in the pursuit of foreign policy," Gorodetsky concludes...

...Both of those national traumas gave rise to controversy, though: Should the leaders of the U.S...

...These threats came a scant four years after Stalin's bloody purge of the military command, along with every other Soviet institution, so it was not surprising that Soviet intelligence chiefs constantly felt compelled to make their summaries palatable to the leader (a familiar enough practice in any government...

...author, "Russia's Transformation: Snapshots of a Crumbling System" On June 22, 1941, the Soviet Union suffered one of the worst military disasters in modern times...

...the Soviet Air Force was almost completely destroyed on the ground, and the German panzers quickly broke through everywhere...

...He perceived the 1938 Munich Agreement in this light...

...Indeed, they provided the exact date of the expected attack...

...Hoping for rifts among the German leadership, he kept his guard up against British disinformation that might lead him to antagonize Germany and give Hitler an excuse to attack...

...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor emeritus of history, the University of Vermont...

...At most, the Soviet military entertained the idea of a pre-emptive strike, especially by air, if and when a German invasion appeared inevitable...

...Ironically, German intransigence about Russia's historic interests in the Straits raised concerns that neatly echoed those of one of the Bolsheviks' great bêtes noires, Pavel Miliukov, Foreign Minister of the 1917 Provisional Government...

...True, he adds pungent illustrations about the thinking of the various parties, and confirms previous explanations that before were only conjectural...

...Pearl Harbor was a fireworks exhibition compared with the German invasion of Russia, a massive surprise assault that took place along a thousand-mile front...

...Stalin was never diverted by Hitler's schemes for dividing up the world and giving Russia a free hand in the Indian Ocean...

...This was the ultimate mindset behind all Stalin's skepticism about intelligence information...

...Dimitrov was cautioned by the Kremlin in 1940 not to think that World War II would be revolutionary, and was advised —Lenin's conviction notwithstanding— that the Bolsheviks had been mistaken to think the same of World War I! In the light of such surprising details, historians will have to rethink basic assumptions about Soviet motives that guided Western policy makers during the Cold War...

...His statesmanship was rooted in Russia's Tsarist legacy, and responded to imperatives deep within its history...

...In his diary, preserved in the Bulgarian archives, the Communist International Chairman Georgi Dimitrov recorded Stalin's words: "The Germans just descended on us, without using any pretexts, not carrying out any negotiations...

...Gorodetsky offers much new archival material detailing the frictions between Berlin and Moscow over the Balkans and the Turkish Straits, a re-enactment of the 19th-century "Eastern Question" and the great-power rivalries leading up to World War I. Southeast Europe was not big enough for both Germany and Russia...

...From their bowdlerized reports Stalin was then able to draw confirmation of his own preconceptions...

...More broadly, the author observes, "Soviet foreign policy was marked by a gradual but consistent retreat from hostility to the capitalist regimes toward peaceful coexistence based on mutual expediency...

...Even the 1939 pact with Hitler, Gorodetsky notes, merely "marked a change in the grouping of forces but not in the general aims of Stalin's foreign policy...

...Personalities loom large in Gorodetsky's account, and not merely those of the top leaders...

...Gorodetsky discounts the theory (popular in Germany) that the Soviets plotted a preventive war against Hitler...

...Germany's assault reduced the Soviet monster of cynicism and duplicity to a blubbering lament...