The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II. A review of a book of that title by Viktor Suvorov, by a Politically Incorrect Australian.
Having been a Soviet intelligence analyst prior to his defection to the West in 1978 gives Suvorov the ability to examine the ins and outs of Soviet policy from the points of view of both an insider and an outsider. Suvorov approaches his subject from the point of view of an intelligence officer rather than a professional historian. …
While historians have to view their source materials with a certain degree of healthy scepticism Soviet history is a special case. This was a regime based from the outset on lies and deception to such an extent that even the most sceptical historian might be led astray. Intelligence analysts are trained to assume that nothing is what it seems to be. A military exercise might be simply a military exercise, or it might be a preparation for an invasion. A diplomatic initiative apparently aimed at peace might in fact be intended to bring about war. Suvorov believes that this training is essential in order to penetrate the web of lies that was Stalin’s foreign policy …
Suvorov’s starting point is the mystery of the events of June 1941. In the opening weeks of the German invasion the Red Army suffered disasters on a scale that beggar the imagination. This is common knowledge. …
One thing he discovered that puzzled him a good deal was that the supposedly incompetent Soviet generals who were responsible for the deployment of the Red Army in June 1941 were not shot by Stalin as the result of the catastrophes that overwhelmed the army. They were not sent to the GULAGs. They were not even demoted. They were in fact promoted and most ended their careers as Marshals of the Soviet Union. How could this be? Stalin was not noted for being forgiving of failure. …
Suvorov’s conclusion is that these men were not punished for their failures because they did not actually fail. Their deployments were militarily sound. The problem was that the Red Army was not deployed to defend the Soviet Union, with most of its strength held back from the frontiers in deep defensive formations and with airfields well back from the borders where they were safe from being overrun by an invading army. The bulk of the Red Army was right on the frontiers and the airfields were within a few kilometres of the border. The Red Army’s deployment was not a defensive one – it was deployed to launch an invasion. An army deployed in such a manner is incredibly vulnerable if the enemy does not wait to be attacked but strikes the first blow. Which is exactly what Hitler did. The Soviet generals were not incompetents – they were simply beaten to the punch. …
The key to understanding Word War 2:
Suvorov’s thesis is that the Soviet leadership never abandoned, even for a moment, their intention to spread their revolution throughout Europe and then throughout the world. The doctrine of Socialism in One Country was a short-term tactic, not a long-term strategy. Stalin intended to achieve world revolution. More importantly, he intended to achieve it through war.
The Russian Revolution had taught the Bolsheviks one very important lesson — revolutions are almost impossible to achieve except in the chaos created by defeat in war. Every attempt to foment revolution in other European countries failed. Communism would have to be imposed on Europe by war. Stalin needed a general European war, and he set out to start one.
The main obstacle was Germany. Another vital lesson the Russian communists had absorbed was that Germany was militarily formidable but Germany could not win a war on two fronts. A war on two fronts meant certain defeat for Germany. A German defeat was the only way to impose communism on Germany. If Germany fell to the communists the conquest of the rest of western Europe would be child’s play.
Therefore Germany had to be manoeuvred into fighting a war on two fronts. The trick was to persuade the Germans to become involved in a war in the west, which meant a war with Britain and France. Once Germany was committed to such a war, and once both sides had exhausted themselves, the Soviet Union would invade Germany from the east.
All of this proved to be surprisingly easy to do. Germany’s ambitions in Poland provided the opportunity. Hitler could not risk an invasion of Poland without an insurance policy. Stalin provided the insurance policy in the form of the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939. The alliance with the Soviet Union persuaded Hitler that the risks were now acceptable, and he struck. In fact he had fallen into a brilliant trap prepared for him by Stalin. Stalin was confident that, contrary to Hitler’s expectations, Britain and France would go to war over Poland. This was exactly what Stalin wanted. Once Britain and France declared war Hitler was doomed. All Stalin had to do was await his chance to deliver the stab in the back.
Then Hitler saved western Europe from Soviet conquest:
There was one minor problem with Stalin’s otherwise brilliant plan. By June 1940 Hitler had realised that he had fallen into a trap. He had realised Stalin was going to attack Germany. Hitler intended to get in the first blow. And he did.
Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union was an insane gamble but it was Hitler’s only option. Operation Barbarossa was a preemptive strike. Despite spectacular initial successes it failed, but had he not struck first Stalin would have done so and Hitler would have lost anyway. As it turned out Stalin lost as well. He won the war but he only got half of Europe as a result. Had he been able to attack first he would have taken the whole of Europe.
Historians overwhelmingly lean left, because they are academics. Their first big lie about WW2 is that the Nazis were right wing, despite the “socialist” in their name. (The full name of the Nazi party was “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei,” or “National-Socialist German Workers’ Party.”)
Yes, the Nazis were more right wing than the other main electoral choice at the time in Germany, the communists — which is why many conservative Germans reluctantly voted for them. But on the spectrum from individualism on the right to collectivism on the left, the Nazis were obviously way over to the left.
The Nazis were left wing, so it was lefties who killed the Jews. Uh-ohhhh. Hence the need for the first big lie.
The left’s historians built Hitler into the bogeyman. But, Hitler was assisted into power on two critical occasions by Stalin — who had long recognized that Hitler was the man to lead Germany into a war with France and Britain. Stalin killed more people and was generally nastier and more brutal than Hitler. Yet those leftist historians give Stalin a mainly clean bill of health, deflecting the blame for WW2 onto Hitler. To the historians, Stalin was a foremost communist and a man of the left, and therefore a good guy.
Nope, it now emerges that it was Stalin’s war, fair and square. This has been known for a while outside the English-speaking world, but now it is making its way into the politically censored world of English speakers. Blaming it all on Hitler and absolving Stalin and his stated aim of conquering western Europe is the second big lie about WW2 by the leftist historians.
There is a strong case that Hitler, to save his own skin, saved Europe from the planned Soviet conquest. Hitler as savior of the West? It turns a lot on its head, but it’s kind of true in a way.
