The Second World War was a continuation of the first imperialist war. German imperialism needed to carry through a redivision of the world. In the dictum of Clausewitz: war is the continuation of politics by other (violent) means. As early as 1931, Trotsky had predicted that if Hitler came to power, then Germany would declare war against the Soviet Union. Despite joining the League of Nations (the ‘thieves’ kitchen’ to use Lenin’s words), the diplomatic efforts of Stalin to reach an agreement with the Western ‘democracies’ came to nothing. After the Munich accord in 1938, and with the minimum of force, Hitler carried through Anschluss with Austria, annexed the Sudetenland and then occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939. In a desperate bid to avoid war with Germany, Stalin undertook a complete volte face and signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler on 23 August 1939. The commissar of foreign affairs, Maxim Litvinov (who was Jewish) was replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov.
“In point of fact,” declared Trotsky, “the signing of the treaty with Hitler supplies only one extra gauge with which to measure the degree of degeneration of the Soviet bureaucracy, and its contempt for the international working class, including the Comintern.” (Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, pp. 4-5, New York, 1970.) In addition to the Pact was an ‘Additional Secret Protocol’ whereby Poland was divided into German and Soviet spheres of influence and ceased to exist as a unified country. This policy would obviously have been embarrassing for the Polish Communist Party. Fortunately for Stalin, the Polish CP had been dissolved in 1938 on the pretext that it had been penetrated by fascists! Nearly all its leaders, in exile in Moscow, were shot. On 9 September 1939, the Soviet foreign minister sent the following message to the Nazi ambassador in Moscow: “I have received your communication regarding the entry of German troops into Warsaw. Please convey my congratulations and greetings to the German Reich Government. Molotov.” Britain and France were prepared to accept German aggression as long as German imperialism’s interests lay eastwards. The attack on Poland, however, provoked war with these imperialist powers.
Trotsky had predicted that the Second World War would decide the fate of the Soviet Union: it would either lead to a successful political revolution against the Stalin regime, or the victory of capitalist counter-revolution. The former variant would flow from the revolutionary upheavals arising from the war – as took place in 1917. The latter was likely if the capitalist powers succeeded in conquering Russia. This prognosis was falsified by the unforeseen developments of the war, which resulted in the victory of the Red Army. The process of the revolution had been far more complicated than even Trotsky’s genius had foreseen. The revolutionary tide that followed the war was derailed by the Stalinist and reformists leaders.
Despite the slanders against Trotsky by the Stalinist press, which accused him and his followers of being fascist agents, Trotsky was far from holding a neutral position in the imperialist war. While standing for a political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy, he raised the need for the unconditional defence of the USSR in face of imperialist attack. Some leaders of the American Trotskyists, most notably the advocates of the theory of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’, Max Shachtman and James Burnham, came out against defence of the Soviet Union. They reflected the pressures of petty bourgeois public opinion, which had swung against Stalinism after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Burnham was shortly to abandon the Trotskyist movement completely, proclaiming in his book The Managerial Revolution, that the world was moving towards a new form of society ruled by a managerial elite, of which Stalinism, Nazism, and New Dealism were simply “different stages of growth” of “managerial ideologies”.
On 25 September 1939, a month after the signing of the Pact and the opening of the Second World War, Trotsky made his position absolutely clear:
Let us suppose that Hitler turns his weapons against the east and invades territories occupied by the Red Army. Under these conditions, partisans of the Fourth International, without changing in any way their attitude towards the Kremlin oligarchy, will advance to the forefront, as the most urgent task of the hour, the military resistance against Hitler. The workers will say: ‘We cannot cede to Hitler the overthrowing of Stalin; that is our own task.’ During the military struggle against Hitler, the revolutionary workers will strive to enter into the closest possible comradely relations with the rank and file fighters of the Red Army. While arms in hand they deal blows to Hitler, the Bolshevik-Leninists will at the same time conduct propaganda against Stalin preparing his overthrow at the next and perhaps very near stage… We must formulate our slogans in such a way that the workers see clearly just what we are defending in the USSR (state property and planned economy), and against whom we are conducting a ruthless struggle (the parasitic bureaucracy and its Comintern). We must not lose sight for a single moment of the fact that the question of overthrowing the Soviet bureaucracy is for us subordinate to the question of preserving state property in the means of production in the USSR. (Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, pp. 20-1, emphasis in original.)
The Hitler-Stalin Pact, which Trotsky had predicted as early as 1934, was undoubtedly a betrayal of the international working class. But the outrage of the governments of London and Paris was entirely hypocritical. Anyone who studies the diplomatic papers of this period will see at a glance that the policy of British and French imperialism was to isolate the Soviet Union and make concessions to Hitler in the East (Czechoslovakia) in the hope that he would forget about them and attack Russia instead. They dreamed of a position where Germany and the USSR would exhaust themselves, whereupon they could step in and mop them both up. Stalin merely pre-empted them by signing a deal with Berlin, thus freeing Hitler to turn west instead.
As a general rule, even a healthy workers’ state would have to engage in manoeuvres with capitalist regimes, making skilful use of the contradictions between them. In order to avoid a war, it might be necessary to sign an agreement even with the most reactionary regime, while continuing to support and encourage the movement to overthrow it. That was the case, for example, with the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. But in the first place, it was the policies of Stalin which allowed Hitler to come to power and placed the USSR in grave danger. In the second place, the way in which Stalin carried out this policy had absolutely nothing in common with the internationalist methods of Lenin. Yet again, the international working class was sacrificed to the narrow national interests of the Russian bureaucracy. Moreover, as we shall see, this tactic did not save the Soviet Union, but only placed it in still greater danger.
Ilya Ehrenburg in his memoirs recalls his shock when, on returning to Moscow from France, he discovered that any critical reference to the Nazis was censured and that he was expected to deliver lectures on the premises of the German embassy. Nothing was said about Nazi atrocities. Trade with Germany was booming and everyone was given to understand that relations with Berlin were good and friendly. (See A. Nove, Stalinism and After, p. 81.) From the autumn of 1939 there was a complete halt to anti-fascist propaganda by the USSR. France and Britain now became the enemy. As Molotov put it:
During the last few months such concepts as ‘aggression’ and ‘aggressor’ have acquired a new concrete content, have taken on another meaning… Now… it is Germany that is striving for a quick end to the war, for peace, while England and France, who only yesterday were campaigning against aggression, are for continuation of the war and against concluding a peace. Roles, as you see, change… Thus it is not only senseless, it is criminal to wage such a war as a war for ‘the destruction of Hitlerism,’ under the false flag of a struggle for democracy. (Quoted in Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 730.)
Stalin and his clique went to the most incredible extremes to ingratiate themselves with Berlin. The following extract from the diary of a German diplomat describing the banquet which celebrated the signing of the Pact shows the lengths to which Stalin was prepared to go to conciliate Hitler:
Toasts: In the course of the conversation, Herr Stalin spontaneously proposed to the Führer, as follows: “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer; I should therefore like to drink to his health.” Herr Molotov drank to the health of the Reich Foreign Minister and of the Ambassador, Count von der Schulenburg. Herr Molotov raised his glass to Stalin, remarking that it had been Stalin who – through his speech of March of this year, which had been well understood in Germany – had brought about the reversal in political relations. Herren Molotov and Stalin drank repeatedly to the Non-Aggression Pact, the new era of German-Russian relations, and to the German nation. The Reich Foreign Minister (Ribbentrop) in turn proposed a toast to Herr Stalin, toasts to the Soviet government, and to a favourable development of relations between Germany and the Soviet Union… Moscow, 24th August, 1939. Hencke. (A Nazi diplomat) (Nazi-Soviet Relations, pp. 75-6, reproduced in Robert Black, Stalinism in Britain, p. 130.)
This goes far beyond what would be permissible for a genuine Leninist government in its dealings with a reactionary foreign regime for the purpose of self-defence. Far worse was to follow. To show his ‘good will’ Stalin obligingly handed over German anti-fascist fighters, Jews and Communists to the tender mercies of the Gestapo. At least one of them, Margarete Buber-Neumann, survived by some miracle, to write books comparing the concentration camps of Stalin with those of Hitler. Lavrenty Beria, head of Internal Affairs, even gave a secret order to the Gulag administration forbidding camp guards to call political prisoners fascists! This was only rescinded after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in 1941. All this was no way to prepare the Soviet people and the workers of the world for the terrible conflict that was to come.
In what was clearly a defensive move to secure its Western borders, the Soviet Union swiftly moved to incorporate Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina. But it failed to take Finland in a disastrous campaign, which revealed to the whole world how the Red Army had been weakened by the Purges. Hitler took due note of this fact, which he commented on to his generals. He was already preparing to attack Russia. But Stalin refused to admit this even as a possibility and continued to collude with Germany. When Hitler marched into Yugoslavia, Stalin closed the embassies of Yugoslavia, Greece, and Belgium, which signalled his approval to the German authorities.
When Germany invaded France in 1940, Stalin was convinced that his manoeuvring had induced Hitler to turn West instead of attacking the Soviet Union. Molotov even sent the Führer a message of congratulations! All sections of the Comintern were ordered to follow the same line. This policy led the French Communist Party leaders to hope for a legal existence and the publication of L’Humanité in occupied France. This was only dispelled when rank and file Communist Party members were rounded up and shot en masse. Meanwhile, Pravda quoted statements from the Nazi press saying that the accord with Russia had allowed the German “offensive in the West to develop successfully”. (Pravda, 26/8/1940.)
The masters of the Kremlin really thought that they were going to sit back and enjoy the spectacle of Germany and Britain slugging it out. Having abandoned every trace of a revolutionary internationalist perspective, they were drunk with illusions, while Hitler was preparing a devastating blow against them. This is what disarmed the Soviet Union in the face of its most terrible foe. From the outbreak of the Second World War right up until June 1941 when Hitler attacked Russia, Nazi Germany received a large increase in exports from the USSR. Between 1938 and 1940, exports to Germany rose from Rbs85.9 million to Rbs736.5 million, which greatly assisted Hitler’s war efforts.