Tuesday, July 21, 2020

The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact and Putin's article on the Second World War

I recently posted about a June article by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II The National Interest 06/18/2020. Taking pride in and defending the role of the Soviet Union in defeating Hitler Germany in the Second World War was a feature of the national narratives of the USSR and then of post-Soviet Russia.

Here are a few paragraphs from a 1979 English-language pamphlet published by the Soviet Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Lessons of World War Two 1939-1945 by Soviet historian Oleg Rzheshevsky. In the very first paragraph, he addresses the beginning of the war:
In the early morning of September 1, 1939 the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein suddenly opened fire on the Polish garrison of Westerplatte on the Baltic Sea coast. Simultaneously Nazi planes bombed aerodromes and communication and administrative centres in Poland, and ground troops of Hitler's armed forces, the Wehrmacht, invaded its territory. Two days later in answer to Germany's attack Britain and France declared war; Australia and New Zealand followed, and a bit later the Union of South Africa and Canada.
Rzheshevsky was objecting to Western views of the war that minimized the Soviet role in beating Germany. This is an argument that is consistent with the one Putin is giving in 2020. Though some of the wording, e.g., "reactionary bourgeois historians," is not the same as contemporary official Russian prose like that we see in Putin's article.
Many years have passed since the end of that bloodiest of wars. Yet its history, its results and impact on postwar developments in the world remain a question that is much discussed. People try to understand the causes of the war, the events that took place during the war and its lessons. Bourgeois historiography, as a rule, fails to define the political content and social role of the war and tries to evade the question of imperialism's responsibility for unleashing it. It is silent on the anti-Soviet trend of the prewar policy of the Western countries-the policy of "appeasement" whose essence was to encourage the fascist aggressors-and even tries to put the blame on the USSR for the outbreak of the war.

Reactionary bourgeois historians of the Second World War have constructed a theory of "decisive battles" designed to "prove" that the Armed Forces of the United States made the crucial contribution to victory over the aggressors. One of the authors of this theory, Hanson W. Baldwin, maintains that the outcome of the war was determined by eleven battles, and that only one of them - the Battle of Stalingrad - took place on the Soviet-German front. In the absolute majority of crucial battles victory is ascribed to Anglo-American troops, and victories on the Soviet-German front are given a secondary place. In fact, many reactionary historians keep silent about the Battles of Moscow and Kursk and other battles which marked a turning point in the Second World War and determined its final outcome.
The Soviets and now the Russians are understandably attentive to having the Soviet Union receive full credit for their role in that war. And, like any other country, its officials would generally prefer to have their successes remembered and their missteps and misdeeds forgotten. As I noted in the earlier post, Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin, also of the Hoover Institute argues rightly that Putin's account of the Second World War in his article is basically correct. Kotkin does take issue with some of Putin's arguments about the prewar diplomacy, which was also part of the dispute in 1979.

The Munich Agreement of 1938 in which Britain and France agreed to allow Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia is what made "appeasement" a dirty word, a synonym for a foolish or feckless concession, even cowardice. Jeffrey Record did an excellent analysis of the agreement for the US Army's Strategic Services Institute (SSI), in which he looked at the actual problems with the agreement and how the Munich analogy not only misunderstands them but also encouraged threat inflation on the part of foreign policy officials and intellectuals: Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (2005). He expanded it somewhat for his book, The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007).

One of the important points Record makes is that Britain and France didn't make the concessions at Munich out of cowardice, as the neocon cliché version would have it. The basic problem was that they had made a defense treaty with Czechoslovakia with the idea of containing Germany. But their military policies did not match with the political policy of committing to defending Czechoslovakia. Their military policy was heavily oriented toward defense against a German invasion in the West. They were making, not promises they couldn't keep - Neville Chamberlain, for instance, was prepared to go to war over Czechoslovakia - but promises for which their military policy was not set up. Jeffrey Record in his paper also emphasizes these points:
But for both Britain and France, more than French honor was at stake. Czechoslovakia may not have been sustainable as a national state over the long run, but in 1938 it was the only democracy in Central Europe and formed a significant strategic barrier to German expansion into Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Indeed, a major failure of British diplomacy during the run-up to Munich was its almost willful disregard of Czechoslovakia’s formidable military capabilities. During the Czech crisis of September 1938, the German Army fielded 37 divisions (5 of them facing France) to Czechoslovakia’s 35 divisions (plus 5 fortress divisions). Moreover, the Czechs enjoyed three strategic advantages: they were on the defensive, operated along interior lines of communication, and possessed formidable defensive terrain and fortifications along the German-Czech border. Czechoslovakia also had the largest armaments production complex in Central Europe (the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939 boosted Germany’s arms production by 15 percent, and the arms and equipment of the disbanded Czech army were sufficient to fit out 20 new German divisions). [my emphasis]
Record also notes that, despite the German advantages, military resistance would have been possible:
[A]s the Soviet Union was also a nominal treaty ally of Czechoslovakia though the two states shared no common border, a fighting Czechoslovakia, especially if joined by France, almost certainly would have delayed, if not altogether eliminated, the emergence of any incentive on Stalin’s part to cut the kind of strategic deal he made with Hitler in August 1939. [Czechoslovakia's] President [Edvard] Benes’ decision not to order the defense of his own country for fear that a vengeful Hitler would slaughter the Czech nation may have been a more fateful one than the Anglo-French capitulation to Hitler on the Sudetenland issue. [my emphasis and link]
The leadership of the USSR knew that Hitler wanted to invade the Soviet Union. The two central themes of Hitler's political career were (1) exterminating or expelling Jews from Europe and (2) conquering Russia. What they took from the Munich Agreement was that the deal greatly boosted Germany military production possibilities and gave Hitler a nudge toward invading the USSR. And that was a realistic assessment. In the Soviets' official view, the Western powers were hoping that the Soviets and Germany would exhaust each other in a war. How much the positions of Britain and France were motivated by anti-Communist ideology and how much by regular foreign policy realist thinking would be hard to say. No doubt, plain blundering was part of it.

However objectionable one might find the division of Poland or other aspects of the secret protocols to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact - both Germany and the USSR had coldly pragmatic reasons based on their foreign policy goals for entering the pact. The idea that some ideological affinity of Nazism and Communism had anything to do with the motivations for the agreement is imaginative. Defending the agreement did do political damage to some Communist parties in the West.

This is the historical background against which Putin's article addresses present-day arguments over the beginning of the Second World War.

This video from The Independent (Samuel Osborne, Putin accuses Poland of colluding with Hitler in the Second World War 12/25/2019) deals with one of the main items of controversy in the Putin letter:


A few related articles:

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