Stalin at War - Stephen Kotkin

so welcome to the Institute from Vance study every year the school of historical studies has an ST Lee lecture which is followed by closed seminar conference discussions in a particular area of study and since it falls to me it's my turn this year which I was delighted to hear to be able to invite somebody not just somebody somebody of great quality and to invite other colleagues in the same area to discuss and debate key issues in Russian history so it's my pleasure to introduce you Stephen Kotkin whom you may have heard of you may have seen you can find him on the web fairly easily giving speak speaking engagements and Stephen is an extraordinary person I met him when he was a graduate student at Berkeley many years ago and even then he was he was sort of doing great things history of magnetic orsk and I thought well that's interesting but the fact that he actually went and lived there for a year I thought was probably bordering on crazy but he is the middle of Siberia you know Factory more than a mile long and and with the most horrendous environmental conditions so he survived it and he came back and for some reason didn't drop out of the study of Soviet history as a consequence and and and since then he's moved on he hasn't moved on from Princeton his first appointment but he's done stunning work on a biography of Stalin and those who have begun biographies of Stalin some of them haven't survived writing biographies darling that isn't isn't because Stalin's fanclub is still alive and well except some people in Britain probably subscribe quietly but they may yet be Prime Minister so I better not say anymore and Steve is going to talk on the subject of volume three effectively so you're getting an insight into what is to emerge the other two volumes are so large so massive that the job of reviewing them is a task in itself and I expect the coverage of Stalin at war to be equally challenging so [Applause] Thank You professor Haslem thank you to the Institute as well for the honor of the invitation I've been at Princeton University for thirty years now and this is the first time I've spoken at the Institute and so I knew it would happen one day they said that Stalin had a sense of humor it's kind of that's a controversial subject for example if he was meeting somebody he hadn't seen for awhile he would say something like what you haven't been arrested yet I don't know is that a sense of humor is that something else something else entirely it's a subject that has a complexity that's hard to capture in a short lecture but I'm going to try the Stalin at war theme the question would seem pretty simple the Soviet Union won the largest or the greatest war in world history and Stalin was in power during the war not only that he was a despot so he was responsible for absolutely everything good and bad now one could argue and some people have argued this that the Soviet Union won the war despite Stalin rather than because of stone which can argue is that the Soviet Union lost the war or that Stalin was not in charge so they won and he was there in power so seems very simple of course the victory was a little bit peculiar the Soviet Union was relatively poor compared to the other great powers and in gigantic Wars like the Second World War the richer nations are the ones that prevail the US and the UK at the time were wealthier than Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan but the Soviet Union wasn't our despite the relatively lower GDP per capita and much lower productivity much much lower economic productivity the Soviet population was much larger and also younger so Germany was 90 million including Austria sue Dayton lon occupied Poland then memo 90 million and the Soviet Union was greater than 200 million in addition 45% of Soviet inhabitants were under 20 years of age in 1941 that number was 33 percent in Germany so Germany was a young country also but the Soviet Union was a much younger country so he had a gigantic pool of people whose lives could be wasted in winning a war like World War two which is more or less what happened of those who were physically fit between the ages of 20 and 30 in Germany in the summer of 1941 85% were already in the military as of summer 1941 physically fit age 20 to 30 85 percent were already in the military which meant that Germany didn't have a lot of room if it took losses whether dead wounded frostbite run away it could replenish only with small numbers of people aged 20 to 30 or people much older which is what happened in the case of Germany what happened was the Vera op that entered the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 was essentially destroyed and was replaced by a different fair market the Red Army was also destroyed and it was replaced by a similar young army okay so this is a it's a peculiar victory because the country is poorer and much lower productivity but then there's this population factor nonetheless the destruction suffered by the victor is nearly unfathomable as many of you know John Armstrong one of the great historians of this region in this time period quote rarely if ever has an invading force maintained itself on enemy territory for so long a period of time when it was so enormous Lee inferior in manpower and military equipment on court so it is in many ways of peculiar victory some people have even called it a defeat in victory because of the losses that the Soviet Union suffered in human lives and in materi GDP nonetheless the USSR did win this explains while Stalin will always be a very significant person in Russia they won the war and he was in power and that's forever people keep asking me how come Stalin is still a popular figure in Russia despite everything he did and this is the answer he was there when they won this colossal war that you cannot take away however these facts these elementary facts the fact of the victory in Stalin's despotism have not translated into a consensus on Stalin's role so I'm not sure we're gonna reach a consensus here today in this room but I'm gonna try to attack this problem now having set it up I'm gonna start with what the lecture is not going to be about it's not going to be about the winter war with Finland in 1939-40 this is a very important episode that doesn't receive sufficient treatment in discussing Stalin as a warlord Stalin performed very very poorly in the Winter War however he also showed he could learn he sacked incompetent people including his defense commissar or a Shilla and he privately that is Stalin privately admitted mistakes which is something he very rarely did so the Winter War is an important episode but we're not going to hear about that today you're also not going to hear about the fiasco of the intelligence on the eve of the war Stalin being warned about the imminent German attack in fact this question has been settled more or less since 1974 since Whaley's book which have been confirmed by new archives that Whaley of course had no chance to read whale he showed that the Germans put out the lie that they were going to issue an ultimatum and that the pressure of building up the troops on the frontier were connected to this coming ultimatum it took in a great many people it took in British intelligence for example the ultimatum ruse not just Stalin Stalin fell for it as well we're not going to talk about this however we're not going to talk about the fact that Churchill did not issue a warning we're not going to talk about regards orga did not get right the invasion we're not going to talk about the fact that most of the dates were wrong we're not going to talk about the fact that all the intelligence was here say Stalin never received documentation on the German invasion until 1945 when yodel who survived the war handed over his packet of super secret documents and this was the first time Stalin saw the plan for Barbarossa no intelligence service captured written documents on Barbarossa before it was launched everything Stalin received was hearsay I overheard this I heard this I heard somebody say that that's what his intelligence on the eve of the war consisted of moreover it was completely contaminated by disinformation on purpose by the Germans the ultimatum ruse being the key piece but other pieces there as well we're not going to hear about this in the lecture we're not going to hear about Stalin's supposed failure on the eve of the war to move troops up to the front in order to be ready for the German onslaught he was urged to do so by his two top commanders Zhukov and Timoshenko and that's because they were idiots they didn't understand blitzkrieg blitzkrieg was not about capturing territory it was about destroying the fighting capacity of your enemy so the more troops you move to the frontier the more of those troops are destroyed in the initial onslaught the less fighting capacity you have and the more likely you'll be defeated so Stalin's refusal to move even more troops to the frontier zone was absolutely correct however you're not going to hear about this today you're not going to hear about Stalin's supposed failure to prepare for the war never mind that the Soviet Union was armed to the teeth yes it had the world's largest army yes it had the world world's largest tank park yes it had the most aircraft in fact the Soviet Union had too much stuff because it had been building for war for an incredibly long time essentially a decade and so not only did it have too much but a lot of the stuff was built earlier when the technology was less sophisticated and had accumulated so Stalin was over preparing for war in some ways rather than not preparing for war you look at the materials from the military-industrial complex and it's just incredible how much war preparation there was but you're not going to hear that in the lecture today finally the fifth thing you're not going to hear besides a good lecture that's taken for granted but the fifth point that you're not going to hear is that Stalin murdered his officer corps this is true he did murder his officer corps this was gratuitous it was not necessitated by any security dilemmas inside his regime there was no military conspiracy against Stalin the military conspiracy was by Stalin against his own military we have now corrected numbers of the scale of this terror against his own officer corps the previous numbers were a little higher we now more realistic numbers both in terms of the number of officers who were removed and in terms of the overall percentage because the officer corps was much bigger we now understand than we thought previously moreover not all the officers who were removed and in many cases executed were competent that's no justification of what happened to them but the loss in human capital it was partially exaggerated previously however you're not going to hear about that either what are you gonna hear about well if you've ever seen my lecture before you know you're gonna hear a litany of banality and we're gonna start with the battlefield we're gonna go through the factories after the battlefield we're going to go to geopolitics if there's time we'll see how this is gonna go so and we're going to confine ourselves to 1941-45 for the most part even though this question is hard to confine Stalin at war just to those years so we're confronted by two dominant tendencies when talking about Stalin in the years 41 to 45 both of them are problematic the first dominant tendency was that the u.s. occupation authorities in Germany anticipated that they would have to confront the Soviet Union after the war and so they enlisted surviving German military brass that is German higher officers who had served in the Nazi regime and survived were enlisted in a project to help the Americans understand how they could fight confront the Soviet Union if necessary and so what the Germans did was to issue under chief of staff Halder who was in charge put in charge of this project chief therefore the beginning part of the war 38 through 42 for Hitler they then conducted a kind of mass memoir ization of their experience under holder on behalf of this American project and lo and behold they discovered that they that is the German officers were geniuses and that what happened was there was this thing called Russian winter vast spaces and Hitler blundering and so their explanation for what happened was not that the Soviet Union won but that Nazi Germany lost because of the winter because of the vast spaces but primarily because Hitler kept intervening contravening the genius of his military officer corps because Hitler himself was such a poor military leader so this produced arguments which are enduring about how the Soviet Union didn't win the Germans lost or it was general winter or was just that they had two and a half times the size of France that they could lose in territory and still be able to fight on this persists in the literature today it is false the German officers made enormous mistakes and Hitler was not a complete idiot as they portrayed him to be no so inevitably this gets in the way of writing about the subject because if the Germans lost the war Stalin's role itself becomes almost immaterial after all it was a winnable war the German military men would have wanted had they been given the chance and not been sabotage by their own Fuhrer okay the other tendency we see in the battlefield questions for the 41 to 45 are the memoirs not of the Germans but of the Soviet officers who survived they didn't begin to write their memoirs until Stalin was dead and lo and behold with Stalin buried on the ground and the mausoleum they began to discover that they too were geniuses just like the German officers and that Stalin was a military dilettante and that all the early defeats and problems of the war were because Stalin was intervening and sabotaging the military men but over time Stalin learned and he was able to defer more and more to the military men who managed to win the war in the end this is what we call an oversimplification but nonetheless the most that they would say about Stalin was that he got a little bit better over time because he listened to them never mind that the military men themselves were not very impressive never mind that it was in Stalin making the mistakes all the time Stalin made plenty of mistakes and so did these military men who then wrote their memoirs after the fact so I won't go into the details but we have quite a number of episodes that have been the focus of this a tendency right one tendency makes the Soviet victory irrelevant because the Germans lost the war and the other tendency makes Stalin a learner over time thanks to his generals who taught him or to whom he deferred there's the Kiev encirclement in September 1941 which is considered the great example of Stalin's blunders and his failures to listen to his military men and to overrule them we can talk about this in the Q&A if you're interested this episode is particularly important because Khrushchev that during the D Stalin ization as we sometimes call it the thought period the secret speech 1956 as an example of Stalin's poor leadership Khrushchev was in the Ukraine when the key of encirclement took place Stalin lost four armies 43 divisions were encircled 750,000 casualties so we could talk about that and then there's another story we could also talk about which is the story of the 1944 and 1945 operations there were 10 colossal operations in 44 and a couple really big ones in 45 that were much better executed by the Soviet side and this is the evidence that they give for the fact that the Stalin was listening more deferring more to the generals evidence of Stalin's improvement the Manchurian campaign in 45 was the best campaign mounted by the Soviet Union during the war in terms of military art but also the Japanese were not as fearsome a foe at this point in that 1945 period okay the problem with this view that Stalin made the blunders and but came around to listening to the Germans is a deeply empirical problem it's not true it's a really good story but it doesn't work however we all have the documents in some cases to prove this because the documents on battlefield plans and execution of operations have only been partially released they're still under lock and key for the most part a handful of people have gotten very important documents so there are case studies of individual battles that give you the detail like the V asthma for example camp that love Bukovsky has done a brilliant job on the best book in print it's in English translation as well via asthma catastrophe which shows just how difficult a time the Soviet commander is not just Stalin had in understanding modern warfare on this scale so but we have many issues that we require deeper documentation on including the Kiev encirclement we don't have the documents they're hiding them from us in the military archive but also a lot of them were destroyed the field documents which were in the possession of the commanders the commanders were in many cases captured taken prisoner or killed and the documents were lost or destroyed those commanders who escaped from some of the encirclements destroyed the documents after they escaped because the documents were just as dangerous in some ways as the encirclement because they showed the ineptitude of the commanders they reported to and now they were out escaped with those documents in hand which were a threat to their superiors so they destroyed them sometimes they were told to destroy them and they wanted to keep them anyway so we have some document problems in addition we have this amazing character David glance it's hard to describe the scale and the importance of his contribution and American the soldier who became an ass torreón of war after many documents not all but many became belatedly available glance went on a mission to correct the German documentation German memoir impression that the Red Army was incompetent and glance has been writing book after book after book after book my New York apartment is in some ways under occupation by glances work yep the Red Army fought and it fought well Glantz argued Red Army resistance and Red Army generalship won the war and he's not content to just write two or three or five or ten or twelve books on the subject he has to write many more to make the same argument it's in some ways a corrective certainly to those German memoirs but it's way too indulgent of the Red Army's performance you can argue that the Red Army won the war but if you the documentation that is available shows you how poorly it fought in many cases and how wastefully it fought courageously it fought heroically it fought in ways that no other army fought in difficult circumstances and it also fought poorly you're probably aware that the Battle of course the famous tank battle where the Soviets defeated the Germans you're probably aware that some people see this as the turning point in the war the Soviets seemed to have lost four times more tanks than the Germans did at the Battle of course even though they won the tank battle and that gives you an indication that glance is onto something that the Red Army could fight but also that he's a little bit too indulgent given the scale of the losses and the destruction that the Soviets endured because of the way they fought now an even bigger complication for assessing Stalin's role in terms of ignoramus who learned is the fact that the German historiography of the past 15 years has now argued with tremendous empirical force that the Soviet failed counter-offensives were in some ways successful so the things that Stalin is blamed for at the beginning of the war the vast encirclements the counter offensives that look like suicide missions that ended in catastrophe time after time the historiography on the German side using German documentation even more than previously has now shown that this lunatic counter-offensive stuff massively degraded the vert mock and German fighting capabilities and so all of these lost battles and all of these you must be kidding counter-offensives were critical in slowing the German advance but especially degrading its offensive capability even more quickly whenever an army moves it loses a great deal of its offensive capability in winning it doesn't have the same offensive capability it had at the start but the Soviets degraded the Germans even more than we understood previously so what Stalin is blamed for in much of the literature which then gives him credit for learning now on the German side he's actually being given a kind of grudging credit for the way they fought the war the consequences for the German army of the failed counter offenses by the Soviet Union were very far-reaching in fact much of the Vermont as I said earlier was destroyed in the Soviet Union during the first year of fighting the ver Mach that resumed the attack on Moscow in the fall of 41 was not the same Vermont that had initiated the invasion and that's in large part because the Soviets absorbed millions and millions of losses to degrade the Germans so this is another complicating factor in assessing Stalin the argument that he made all these mistakes at first and then learned is now as it were losing its force we need a more complicated story to replace it the lunacy of Stalin's early war command which was shared by his upper officer corps might actually have been crucial for blunting the germans and ultimately for the soviet victory overall Stalin took forever to learn this defense in depth or strategic defense approach and even after he had learned it he still made glaring operational mistakes all through 44 once again the documentation is not full but that's a conclusion that I have reached on its basis and what I have been able to see as well the commander's even the ones who got much better also made tremendous operational mistakes the Soviets lost so much they were just able to replace which the Germans were not to the same extent able to replace all right so so much for the battlefield story now we're going to go to the factories war in the factory Stalin correctly understood that this was a war about not only the battlefield but almost as much a war of the factories and Industry it's just breathtaking the Soviet Union lost all that territory to occupation all of those industrial plants all of those railroads and other infrastructure and moreover the planned economy was tied together so loss of one thing created a chain reaction just like when you're on an airplane and you're trying to make the connection and planes miss they're late and it destroys everything at O'Hare Airport I have nothing against Chicago but O'Hare Airport reminds me of the Soviet economy in 1941 moreover the story of the evacuation is a mythology that 1500 industrial enterprises were quote evacuated it's very interesting when you get into local archives as I've done in region X or region Y to see what was evacuated and what was put back up into play when you see what happens it's ten thousand rail cars to evacuate a single factory some were only eight thousand but that's because they left behind the most important equipment to run the factory and some were as many as twelve thousand the tank factories were as many as twelve thousand railroad cars you ever been in wartime piecing together the equipment of 12,000 railroad cars how about if the destination is written in chalk on the side of the car and it rains there are these gigantic heaps of industrial equipment all over the Soviet Union and the factory managers are sending representatives to forage for equipment can you find me the turbine from this Factory and there at these giant outdoor heaps there kind of railroad junctions that have become choke points looking for stuff and then if they find it there are two thousand rail cars in front of it and so how are they going to get it off the rail cards on and put it onto one that they can then bring to their factory so the evacuation story is a very interesting story when you get down to the nitty-gritty part of it so this makes the Soviet performance even more enigmatic and difficult to discover what how did they manage not to collapse how did this economy not completely collapse in 1942 you know what it did it did this is what I've discovered Harrison is onto this mark Harrison unfortunately we have so many luminaries in the room but he's not one of them who's present today but he's a probably leading person on this question in terms of having studied it and understood it but when you get down to the local archives it becomes even more enigmatic the 1942 story of the economy harrison postulated in his work that there were really two economies the improvisation economy of 4142 where everything was just ad hoc emergency ism and chaos and then a kind of return of a planned economy in the period of 43 45 this seemed a reasonable hypothesis and then Harrison undermined his own hypothesis by saying well you couldn't have the improvisation without the centralized allocation and you couldn't have the centralized allocation without the improvisation so they really went together so first he said they were sequential then he said they were together this is the same the same chapter this comes across which is not a reflection of Harrison's lack of understanding butter's a reflection of the fact that this problem has still not been understood by anybody we have in the literature a massive resent realization or hyper centralization story that Stalin tighten the screws even more we also have in the literature that there was this incredible decentralization and improvisation which as I said Harrison was on to and so we have not resolved this problem did the system become more centralized or did it become less centralized once again when you drill down empirically to the local level you can begin to trace this story and you can begin to see that in priority sectors very high priority sectors there was extreme centralization which is control over priority resources in there l but there was also improvisation even greater than before so in fact both of them went on at the same time just as Harrison suggested when he backed off the sequential argument but how did they work in practice in specific cases where did those tanks come from where did those aircraft come from moreover Soviet tanks were superior to the German tanks the t-34 is and the kV ones except when they broke down which was all the time and so you just have one paradox after another superior tanks that are all disabled on the battlefield because not because the Germans have taken them out but because the gearbox didn't work because you know what it was the Soviet Union this was the Soviet economy so we got a lot of stuff a lot to go yet on the economic story that were still far from even though we've had some great work not only Harrison of course there are many others including John Barbour who's in the audience but still it's a puzzle okay let me get I'm almost done let me get the course the the issue of the political system right we did the battlefield stuff we've done the economy stuff now we're going to get to Stalin and the political system so the reason the Soviet Union won the war is because the regime didn't collapse that's it that's the answer Russia lost World War one it had an army about 15 million total and it lost about a third of its army in the first war and the regime fell the capital was never even occupied by the foreign power and the regime fell that's how they lost the war remember the Germans won World War one on the Eastern Front they just had the bad luck of having two fronts and they lost it on the other front in World War two the Soviet one it had an army 32 million 33 million not even the Defense Ministry today can say for sure because the documents are a mess again they lost about a third 11 million 11 and a half million some say as high as 13 million I think 11 and a half looks looks like the ballpark figure so losses proportionately similar to World War one but this time the regime held the Soviet state the regime itself did not collapse in the war German strategy was entirely predicated on a Soviet collapse they won almost every battle on the battlefield till the big reversal and mosque outside Moscow in December 41 there had been smaller reversals before then in these counter-offensives that fail but actually partly succeeded but the big reversal was outside Moscow as you know in December 41 the regime didn't collapse so Clausewitz quote we maintain that the 1812 campaign failed because the russian government kept its nerve and the people remained loyal and steadfast unquote yep clouds of its writing about 1812 could if Clausewitz were alive today that same statement would hold as the explanation for world war ii we could go on with this about developing the bomb and you can say well the soviets it was espionage rather than science yeah but somebody organized that espionage and they got the bomb not anybody else besides the US had the bomb so we could extrapolate further about the achievements here the regime held and the regime held because of Stalin and this is where the contribution becomes much much larger the battlefield contribution is exaggerated this learning story the economic contribution is very hard to measure because a lot of the decrees at the top of the regime were not real important at the bottom where stuff actually happened the state Defense Committee that Stalin headed had a local plenipotentiary everywhere the local printed potentially was the local party boss who was not very good before the war and didn't get any better now during the war so when you see the state Defense Committee materials locally as opposed to at the top level of the regime that is the centralized command structure that Stalin used to run the war the farther down you go the more problematic it becomes about implementation stories now let's talk about the fact that the regime didn't collapse though and this is the big one there's a really big so we have the infamous incident of June 29 30th 1941 Stalin had visited the Defense Commissary a-- discovered that the germans were on the eastern side of minsk used unprintable expression to describe the situation they were in and then drove off by himself uncharacteristically without the minions to the dodger and didn't appear for work the next day June 29 30th he thought that [ __ ] was up the minions not being summoned as you know if you know the story went out to try to meet him at the dacha because they couldn't they felt they couldn't run the war without him there's Mickey Yuans memoir which says that they went out there to Stalin fear that they went out there to demand his resignation of course we know that that line was inserted by McKellen son and was not ever written by McKellen himself so that's made up and that's because the minions never entered their mind that they might replace this guy he was so far ahead of them above them they didn't think they could survive the war without him and none of them imagined that they could replace him so when they went out they went out to beg him to return to be Stalin again that's when the state Defense Committee as you know was created the system was his evil creation and he was the system with respect to our Khrushchev biographer professor Taubman who's in the room Khrushchev was not going to fill Stalin shoes you can argue that their different personalities and you can make all sorts of arguments about the lack of comparability there but the system without Stalin was a very different proposition after 53 but also in that summer of 41 potentially not Molotov not Baria none of them not Voznesensky Nagy Don off none of the minions Mullen cough Stalin was the head of everything the head of the State Defense Committee the head of the government the general secretary of the party his own defense commissar his own supreme commander no other wartime leader had this kind of authority every major order to the Soviet armed forces bore Stalin's signature every single one every speech he delivered every editorial he wrote was a command from God Stalin worked the system incredibly but guess what he built it it was his system he had placed all the personnel and the positions they were in the people were not there against his will he had mentored them and he had very long experience in 1941 Stalin turned 63 he had been a dictator since 1923 and he had been a despot as Professor Reese is shown since 1937 38 collectivization the terror the military-industrial complex the war in eastern poland the warren finland the diplomacy with hitler's representative the diplomacy with britain this was all him was the regime in some ways or to put it another way the regime without Stalin was a very difficult proposition it was the most murderous regime in history up to that point but Stalin was the world's most experienced leader he had the longest time in office in addition to the biggest portfolio he was in office longer than Hitler by a lot longer than Roosevelt longer than Churchill and across a greater number of domains now this does not mean that he managed the system well he managed it in his Stalinist way with the charm and the viciousness with the skill and with the incompetence with the perspicacity and with the hyper suspiciousness with the geopolitical shrewdness and with the stupid blinkered ideology all that were manifest during the war he had the work ethic he had the memory recall he had the long hours massive strain of the war it destroyed his health physically he was destroyed by the war he had what looks like to be a mini-stroke in 45 and took a three-month vacation he was on and off for the next eight years of his life not the same Stalin as before then but let's remember yes the grit the stamina the willpower the self belief but the whole time he was still Stalin discouraging truthful reportage they were afraid to bring him the truth who wouldn't be he intimidated the hell out of people what you haven't been arrested yet the terror during the war was severe severe people say well he relaxed and he allowed people to do their jobs and people who say that haven't read the documentation closely enough the big secret about Stalin during the war he was Stalin that's the story it was him the same guy okay all right I think I'm just about done let me take this moment in the lecture to step back for a second here so the Soviet Union was a bunch of pathologies as well as functioning institutions we just have to keep this paradox equality in the paradoxical quality in mind the whole time we described it we can't get lost in the binaries skilled or not incompetent we got to be able to hold these two things simultaneously incredibly skilled and incredibly incompetent at the same time in similar instances not in one instances of that in the other right while they're winning they're losing while they're losing they're winning this is the story you're hearing from me and it's the story that the glimpse we've had into the archival material is giving me there's an insufficient material on some questions but there's an overload of material in general the material is vast and impossible to assimilate all of it but at the same time on certain questions that I have in my mind they won't give me the documentation that they have I'd final point on the geopolitics I spent more time on the domestic regime than I did on the geopolitics but the geopolitics is also one of the critical dimensions for understanding Stalin at war so lo and behold there is a wartime a pre-war alliance the axis and you know what it fails it doesn't work it's a phony alliance there is no military alliance between Germany and Japan during World War two the axis doesn't work they have kindred regimes they supposedly have similar goals and they can't form a genuine military alliance and then the u.s. the UK and the Soviet Union they do form an alliance we have to be careful not to go too far because there is no coordination of combat operations in allies side the UK US and Soviet Union so the Alliance has very severe limits built in the British won't stationed troops on Soviet soil even on the British command the Americans won't stationed troops on Soviet soil even under American command they don't open up the second front you know that whole story but nonetheless there is an alliance especially when it comes to supplies absolutely critical for the war effort and so in in informing the Alliance Stalin looks quite shrewd but he expected the UK to side with the Germans after the Germans attacked to sign a separate peace with the Germans and then to join the German attack on the Soviet Union so he shocked to discover that the British want to join with him against the Germans it takes him a long time to believe this it also takes the British establishment a long time to overcome things like the Baltic States conquest and incorporation into the Soviet Union so the formation of a strategic alliance during the war is very very difficult from both sides but nonetheless it happens but here's the punchline to all of this despite what looked like geopolitical achievements potentially on scale like the domestic political achievements I was talking about earlier Stalin loses the peace the Soviet Union wins the war and they lose the peace they lose the peace it takes a long time a very long time it's not really till 1994 and the troops leave East Germany the rest of Eastern Europe Baltic states and go back on the same roads that Hitler that Napoleon went retreated out and now Russian troops retreat in back to Russia in early 90s 94 predominantly they lose the peace the entire edifice takes a long time but the entire edifice of victory is undone and unravels in the fullness of time so whatever he achieved in the wartime victory however you want to evaluate that if you want to follow my argument and hold the paradoxes together he actually lost ultimately and deservedly so thank you for your attention [Applause]

Channel: Institute for Advanced Study

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Length: 54min 0sec (3240 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2019