Why Stalin did nothing wrong, and how, part IV: Molotov-Ribbentrippin'

One of the big things the ultraradicools like to throw in our faces about Stalin is that he signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler. It's absolutely true; this is a thing, and he did it. However, Stalin's adroit diplomatic maneuvering absolutely saved the world.

To begin with, in Mein Kampf, Hitler openly declared his intention to grab the Russian steppe as lebensraum for the German people. Stalin was not naive about Hitler's intentions. When Operation Barbarossa finally came, it came as a surprise not because Stalin didn't believe Hitler was incapable of duplicity, nor because Stalin was unaware of the contents of Mein Kampf. Barbarossa caught Stalin by surprise because he couldn't seriously believe that Hitler was actually stupid enough to open a front against Russia with Britain still fighting.

Knowing a Nazi invasion was imminent, Stalin first appealed to the liberal powers of Britain and France for an anti-Hitler alliance. He was rebuffed, as capitalist policymakers in the mid-30s entertained the thought of using Hitler against the Soviet Union. It was in this spirit of an unspoken liberal-fascist alliance that Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich and gave Hitler Czechoslovakia in exchange for sweet fuckall. The British weren't even actively rearming at this point (Robin Higham, A Guide to the Sources of British Military History, 453).

Considering that the capitalists were cravenly caving over Czechoslovakia, the communist-in-chief chose to cavort with the crazed corporal too. But unlike Neville Chamberlain, Stalin played Hitler like a fiddle. The terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact gave the USSR a free hand in Finland, the Baltic states, and a big chunk of Poland. The first two secured Stalin critical naval bases and coastal defenses, while the last was a buffer against the Wehrmacht.

The westward push of the Soviet border was retrospectively of the utmost importance: various organs of the American government considered the Soviet Union's a lost cause in the first few weeks after Barbarossa. In particular, the War Department felt that the Soviet Union couldn't last six weeks against the Nazis. Combined with isolationist and anti-communist sentiment in Congress, this could well have blocked American Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet government. Stalin told Roosevelt that without Lend-Lease, "victory would have been delayed." To his worst hire ever Nikita Khrushchev, and to FDR's unofficial ambassador plenipotentiary W. Averell Harriman, Stalin confided that the war would have been lost without this aid. Granted, taking the word of a liberal revisionist and a liberal with economic interests in the Soviet Union is dodgy at best, and even capitalist historians are uncertain if he actually said it, or if it actually was true. But the fact that I can't categorically deny it as an honest historian and a communist speaks volumes too. In any case, American aid to the Soviet Union was minimal until another plenipotentiary of FDR's, Harry Hopkins, reported back after a conversation with Stalin that he believed the USSR could win (Albert L. Weeks, Russia's Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the USSR in World War II, 110-111). That aid didn't shift into full gear until Soviet resilience was materially demonstrated after the Battle of Stalingrad. Without the buffer of half of Poland between the Wehrmacht's Army Group Center and Moscow, Moscow surely would have fallen, and Lend-Lease may have been curtailed, severely weakening the Soviet position.

The division of Poland wasn't enough for Stalin, however. In the early days of the Soviet Union, Stalin had been required by the Party to command Red Army forces against revanchist Poland. The Poles, led by a staunchly reactionary Polish officer class, had inflicted an early defeat on the Soviet state. Though this defeat strengthened Stalin's position of socialism in one country in internal Soviet politics against Trotsky's ultraradical position of permanent revolution, it was still a defeat for the Soviet state. Trotsky had already set his begging bowl before fascists abroad, and if Polish military reaction had ever been useful to Stalin, it was no longer. So Stalin used Hitler to do his dirty work for him, and the Gestapo helped the NKVD round up the Polish officer class and execute them. Even in these dark times, Stalin was thinking ahead to after the war, and trying to create a Poland that would not threaten the Soviet state nor be internally inclined to reaction itself. And he let Hitler be his fall guy to the proto-Amnesty International crowd as he did it. Later Western investigation during the war uncovered all of this, and FDR and Churchill purposely had these reports buried in order to further Allied cooperation.

More than anything, however, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact gave the Soviet Union almost two years to build up their military-industrial complex, while charging Hitler extortionary prices as his last foreign source of raw materials (Edward E. Erickson, Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933–1941, 134). And by waiting a week before taking his half of Poland, Stalin dragged the Western Allies into the war against Hitler that he had wanted them to fight in the first place, while avoiding them from declaring war on the USSR too. Hitler was naturally upset at this maneuvering, but after the war was joined he was not immediately in a position to do anything about it. Also, by giving Stalin a free hand in Finland, he got an opportunity to discover that the Red Army wasn't up to snuff, and needed reorganized. Without that lesson, perhaps the US War Department's six-week expiration date for the USSR might have been closer to the mark.

All in all, Stalin played a bad hand incredibly well. With the entire capitalist world out to wreck his revolutionary state, he deftly played them against each other, first taking everything he could from the Axis and then everything he could from the West. It may not have been morally "pure" to shake hands with Nazis and toast Hitler's health, but Stalin's performative axisship materially strengthened the Soviet Union and weakened Nazi Germany while every other treaty with Hitler had done the opposite. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the correct line.