23d: The Great Patriotic War

Thanks to the First and Second Five-Year Plans, Soviet industrial production had literally exploded. For the first time, the Soviet Union was one of the world's superpowers. The human costs were terrible: millions of people starved to death, others worked to death, others murdered as Stalin took control of the USSR. Yet the final bill was just coming due in the form of the Second World War. Even as the NKVD was purging the Red Army in late 1938, Stalin played European power politics. Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany on a program of hatred. Hatred of Jews, hatred of the Allied Powers, and hatred of Communism. No surprise then, that in November 1936 Hitler set up the "Anti-Comintern Pact" between Germany, Italy, and Japan - the so-called "Axis." The Germans and Soviets were already backing opposite sides in the Spanish Civil War. Japan directly threatened the Soviet Far East through its satellite state in Manchuria. In 1938 and 1939 Japanese and Soviet troops skirmished on their frontier. To the west, only Poland separated Germany and the USSR. If forced to choose between its two hated neighbors, whom would Poland support? Not even the Poles knew. As from the beginnin, the Soviets felt surrounded on all sides by capitalist enemies.

The Western powers' conduct didn't exactly inspire Soviet confidence. The United States was too busy fighting the Great Depression to take off its isolationist blinkers. In September 1938, Britain and France allowed Hitler to annex most of Czechoslovakia through the Munich Pact; in March 1939, they stood idly by while he grabbed the rest. Their attempt to reach an anti-Fascist pact with the Soviet Union was a farce. Their delegation, led by Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, took literally weeks to arrive in Leningrad by steamboat and was met with a chilly reception. While the good Admiral Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax and his delegation were being returned to their steamboat, a plane from Berlin was landing at the Moscow airport. It carried the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. On August 24, Germany and the Soviet Union shocked the world by signing the "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact," named after the two foreign ministers who negotiated it.

In a way, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made sense. In effect, Germany and the Soviet Union would re-partition Poland among themselves; Germany would also gain a "sphere of influence" in Lithuania, while the Soviet Union would  get a "sphere of influence" in Latvia, Estonia, and Bessarabia. "Sphere of influence," of course, is a code word for ownership. Russia has always lacked natural lines of defense like wide rivers and impenetrable mountain ranges. Therefore Russian leaders like Peter the Great and Alexander I had always depended on defense in depth: lure the enemy in, let him extend his lines of supply to an intolerable length, and devour him. The more territory Stalin acquired, the safer he felt. Hitler, too, was quick to take what he was after. On September 1, 1939 (after a staged "Polish" attack on a German radio station), Germany unleashed a "Blitzkrieg"  or "Lightning War" upon Poland from the West. Stalin first had to clean up his nasty border war with the Japanese, but sent the Red Army into Poland from the east. Although Great Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany, no help was forthcoming. By October 6, Poland had vanished from the world map yet again. In return for granting Germany a slightly more favorable borderline in Poland, the Soviet Union added Lithuania to its "sphere of influence." Soon, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had all supposedly "volunteered" to join the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. To further pad the Soviet Union's boundaries, Stalin offered to swap some Arctic tundra along the north of the Finnish-Soviet border in return for some densely settled Finnish territory near Leningrad. When the Finns balked, the Soviets invaded with an army of 400,000 men. Miraculously, the grossly outnumbered Finns held their own and then some. Since most of the best Soviet generals had been sent to the GULag or shot, the idiotically led Red Army played right into Finnish hands. Eventually Soviet superiority in numbers and resources wore the brave Finns out. On March 13, 1940  Finland signed a peace treaty giving the Soviets what they asked for. But not before showing the world that the Red Army was a paper tiger.

Stalin realized that drastic changes were needed. But would there be time? By Spring 1940, Germany had conquered Denmark and Norway. On June 25 Germany forced France to surrender after a Blitzkrieg campaign of just six weeks. The only question was where Hitler would turn next: Great Britain or the Soviet Union? Stalin could not say he wasn't warned. Although the Soviet Union promptly sent shipments of raw materials to Germany, the Germans were already finding excuses not to send the Soviets the manufactured goods they had promised. Soviet patrol flights reported huge groups of German troops stationed along the German-Soviet border. Spy networks in Switzerland, Sweden, and Japan funneled the word to Moscow that the Germans were going to invade. German surveillance flights over Soviet territory increased. Yet Stalin refused to believe it. His military commanders were terrified of contradicting Stalin about anything. When "Operation Barbarossa" began on 22 June 1941, and the Blitzkrieg was unleashed upon the Soviet Union, Stalin was utterly flummoxed. As the Red Army melted into scattered pockets of ineffective resistance, and the German tanks rushed for Moscow, all looked lost. Supposedly Stalin experienced a nervous breakdown, but came back to the national spotlight on July 3, 1941. In a famous speech broadcast on nationwide radio, Stalin called upon his "brothers and sisters" to save... Russia. The devout Marxists of the anti-nationalist Soviet Union werr now fighting a Great Patriotic War for the sake of Holy Russia.