Stalin Waiting for Hitler 1929 1941

thank you thank you for the kindness of the introduction and thank you for the honor of the I was here 12 years ago in Abu Dhabi and obviously this campus did not exist so I congratulate you on this and I shudder to think what things will look like here if I don't come back again for another 12 years it's pretty remarkable so that's very uplifting I'm going to leave the stage so to speak if that's okay it Stalin had arthritis a kind of rheumatic problem and for him he had to pace which helped reduce some of the pain he also had a he had been hit by a horse-drawn buggy when he was young so he couldn't really walk properly he had a swing his hip his right hip around in order to walk and so there's no footage of Stalin walking or moving extant in any Soviet archive it was forbidden to film it there are only a few tiny clips of him in Potsdam where they show him walking very slowly so you can see the hip movement when he was in his office especially when he was agitated he was always up there was in his working office he had two offices his working office in the Kremlin had a very big table sat about 20 or so a big piece of felt on the top of it his seat was not the head of the table but the first seat on the side of the table but he was rarely ever sitting in it everyone else was seated but he paced and he would do his pacing sometimes he would stop right in front of somebody's face sometimes he would stop not in front of their face but right behind them and of course they would have to continue speaking or not moving while he was standing behind them it was unnerving for them you was just common practice for him I'll necessarily think he was trying to do something with these movements or with standing and or stopping in front of people or behind them it was just something he developed so since I started writing this book I bring up the pace I'm gonna pace a little bit today I know they're filming this on camera and I'm causing them great difficulty but that's not intentional and anyway we'll see whether it's worthwhile all the filming efforts that they're undertaking only 906 page text is difficult to deliver in a 45-minute talk and I'm not going to try to do that you'll be relieved that I won't try to do that so instead I'm going to present a few episodes from the book which I consider interesting and we'll see if you share that view when I'm done but any question is open for discussion if I don't mention it in this short presentation so if you want to talk about how Stalin managed the culture if you want to talk about the collectivization of Agriculture if you want to talk about the terror the mass terror of 1936 38 or if you just want to ask personal questions about what type of person he was well I'm not going to speak to those issues here in the presentation but once again for the Q&A period any of that and more so now I'm doing the talk a little bit about the geopolitical aspect of the book and the argument in the book first let me set the stage before I get into the book and then let me deliver a few pieces of this from the book and then we'll do the Q&A so there is a big story in world history which has to do with the rise of British power the British in the and fought about a hundred years war more or less for supremacy and the British one this was very unexpected at the British won the victory the British was sort of symbolized by the defeat of Napoleon especially the second defeat of Napoleon so by 1815 you have a clearly British dominated world the British then go on to form a global economy which is pretty remarkable a global trade first globalization pound sterling is the more than 90 percent of reserve currency and global transactions the British lay the cables under the sea they are responsible for the global communications and we give other examples of the British dominate the nature of the British dominated world but then a few things happen eruptions in this British dominated world one is the Bismarck's unification of Germany which is how of the first volume which I'm not talking about tonight the first volume opens up with Bismarck certification of Germany this creates a new power on the continent which deeply alters the balance of power and the German state as you know and after 1870 71 goes on to a fantastic industrialization spurt and becomes better than the British at certain high and industrial manufacturing processes the other piece the other eruption is meiji restoration in japan unlike the german case this is not the creation of a new state but this is the consolidation of a centralised state which as in the german case goes on to this fantastic industrial story and is clearly now in the ranks of the first powers major power in the world but which japan wasn't a prior to the meiji restoration so these two eruptions in the british dominated world create very significant challenges for British power because British power is global it has aspirations to be major power not just in its neighborhood but also throughout East Asia and it's worried as I said about the balance of power on the European continent so the German and Japanese story are things the British feel they need to confront in some fashion there is a piece I'm leaving out which is the trajectory of the United States after the victory of the north in the Civil War this destroys the slave based economy of the South for the most part which was far richer than the north and opens the way to a railroad driven industrial manufacturing model for the u.s. which is the model that's going to spread across the continent and this is going to be the largest economy in the world at least by the 1890s but not yet a major arbiter of the international system a global trade is a small percentage of u.s. GDP maybe 5 percent in 1900 even though the u.s. is the biggest economy the US has this huge continental market and is able to aggrandize predominantly without interacting in a big way with the rest of the world there are important episodes that you'll know about Philippines and other things but nonetheless these are not the dominant the dominant thing is the u.s. is not significantly trying to manage or interfere in global affairs the way it will later on so they're looming the US power is looming over the international system already by 1916 the u.s. begins to build a navy both for the Atlantic and the Pacific simultaneously which tells you just how powerful this looming US presence is going to be the idea of building that Navy to compete on both sides of the world anyway but for right now it's a story of a British dominated world which will eventually give way to the United States and then this eruption of German power and eruption of Japanese power this is especially salient for Russia because Russia obviously is flanked by Germany and Japan so to the extent that Russia has aspirations to be a great power itself as well as security challenges it's now much a great the challenges are now much greater because of the German and Japanese stories one on either side of Russia so that's just by way of introduction this sort of forgive me how simplified that is there's a lot I'm leaving out you know that's the kind of geopolitics 101 in its most simplified fashion are there's a lot of more nuance that's necessary there are a lot of other pieces that I need to introduce in that I need to talk about global political economy commodity prices who's feeding the world where the minerals are being extracted from there's a whole lot of other stuff that I just don't have time to fill in but could fill in if this were for example the entire year or semester course where I normally give these kind of lectures ok so now let's bring in I'm setting up for this Stalin and geopolitics stuff now let's bring in another piece another piece is World War one and as you know Germany austria-hungary eventually Turkey so-called Central Powers Ottoman I'm sorry Ottoman Empire not Turkey Ottoman Empire versus Britain France Russia and eventually the United States right and then the Germans win the war on the Eastern Front in March 1918 they signed the brest-litovsk Treaty which just this month is having its hundredth anniversary German victory on the Eastern Front the Germans however lose the war on the Western Front coming within 37 miles of Paris they're unable to finish the job on the Western Front as a result of which the brest-litovsk treaty is repudiated in any case then there is the Versailles peace treaty of 1919 you're all familiar with the Versailles peace of 1919 and that treaty is about is a subject to tremendous criticism you can almost never find anybody who's going to defend the Versailles peace and there are two arguments against the Versailles peace one argument is that it was a punitive peace singled-out Germany as the only culprit for world war one blamed everything in other words on Germany and then Mae Germany pay reparations this excessively punitive quality to the piece then contributed to the destabilization of the vemma republic the rise of Hitler Nazism and World War two it's a very powerful critique it's very widely shared there's another critique of the Versailles Treaty which is less widely shared which is about how this is more conservative critique which is more about how the British and the French shrank from imposing the treaty in other words if the British and the French just that had more resolve more willpower to uphold the treaty that wouldn't have been this world war 2 they would have cut that off before it happened and so the blame is on not the the the peace treaty being too punitive but the failure to enforce it so my argument is that both of these views of the side treaty are wrong and the reason I argue that is because the Versailles Treaty was an anomaly it happened in 1919 only because this was the only time since Bismarck's unification of Germany where both German power and Russian power were flat on their back you could predict confidently that either Germany or Russia would rise again to be a great power and in fact both of them rose again to be great powers within a single generation and so the Versailles peace treaty could not have been enforced no matter what it could only have been imposed at that moment and could not be imposed again or enforced later on ok we have something like that with the 1991 of the solution of the Soviet Union there was a post 1991 settlement which was imposed imposed on Russia Russia could do nothing about that settlement in 1991 but it can do something about that settlement now right okay so anyway the Versailles Treaty so now let's move to the period in between World War one and World War two where we have a British dominated world the rise of German power and Japanese power this has led to this anglo-german antagonism which has helped produce World War one the Japanese are really not major participants in World War one not in the battle sense but they are participants in the sense of benefiting from the need new geopolitical order in any case now we enter the interwar period and the most remarkable thing about the interwar period I'm going to talk about British geopolitics and Soviet geopolitics and then bring the Hitler Stalin peace after that the most remarkable thing about British policy is that the British began to revise the Versailles Treaty themselves almost immediately if you know the General Conference from 1922 Genoa was already an attempt to alter the terms of Versailles to bring the Germans back into a settlement right remember the Versailles peace treaty was imposed on the Germans dictated to them and excluded Russia now Soviet Russia they weren't even invited to the table and so the 1922 general conference but was this attempt you can argue that it was cynical it was only partial it was confused it was poorly executed but nonetheless it shows a recognition on the British side that the Versailles order was not itself stable and they needed to have an order where Germany was actually on the inside rather than a pariah state and in fact another goal of Genoa was maybe even to feel out Soviet Russia to see if they could be included and further stabilized the order after World War one what happened instead was that Germany and Soviet Russia cut a deal on the sidelines of Genoa at a place called Rapallo if you know your italian geography it's not that far from genoa that's in fact where the and delegation was based and so just outside of Rapallo and so they cut this deal as the two pariah States against Versailles but the British didn't cease attempting to revise the Versailles Treaty the entire interwar period the British attempted to get to a better place to get to a settlement that involved Germany accepting the peace or the settlement in a way that they wouldn't try to revise break it but Sarah okay I'll finish that thought I want to just break now to the Soviet version of this and then show you their interaction so these are arguments in in the book on the Soviet side we have a poor understanding in my view of Soviet geopolitics Soviet geopolitics was followed and how do we how do we know this because Stalin wrote in December 1924 sort of published in January 1925 an article called socialism in one country you've probably heard the slogan socialism in one country and you've heard it because Trotsky denounced the slogan of socialism in one country two years after Stalin first published it an Trotsky is mischaracterized tendentious Lee mischaracterized Stalin's argument and then Trotsky's version of Stalin's argument has entered into the literature the the argument of socialism in one country was should we build socialism in one country now given that the world revolution hasn't happened yet or should we surrender to the capitalists and give up the attempt to build socialism in one country the answer is that I was obvious it was a rhetorical question the answer was of course we should build socialism in the one country in which it's happened in fact Lenin had said this himself before he died in January 1924 and Trotsky is on paper saying the same thing who would surrender and give up the revolution the world revolution hasn't happened yet should we surrender no let's build socialism in one country first or now as we wait or try to instigate the world revolution so Oh Trotsky then two years later there was a fiasco over China policy where Chiang kai-shek began to murder communists in the United Front which humiliated Stalin this is in Volume one of my Stalin book in any case I'll skip that but the upshot of that was Trotsky then began to dredge up all the tools he could use against all Stalin had many more tools than Trotsky had at his command Stalin had censorship and control over the public sphere Stalin was a master at the smear and the tendentious mischaracterization of others arguments so it's kind of ironic that Trotsky is using this against Stalin and that we now have this perverted notion of socialism own country that's not why this is important however why I think this is important is because Stalin laid out a theory of Soviet geopolitics in the same little article it was a preface actually to two other stuff and what he said was it wasn't just class struggle that produced socialist revolution it was also imperialist war and without the special imperialist war factor you might not have got socialist revolution in the Russian case and so therefore Soviet geopolitics or Soviet foreign policy is as follows prevent the capitalists from forming a coalition and ganging up on us and instead try to instigate them fighting each other and if they would fight each other they might destroy each other and socialist revolution might happen in the capitalist world while we the Socialists in one country would be protected so anything we could do to prevent an anti Soviet all capitalist or what Stalin called imperialist coalition is a simple idea and he held to this idea throughout the 1930s this is the governing idea of Soviet geopolitics we have multiple evidence about how a Stalin understands this theory and how he elaborates this theory over time sticking to the fundamentals so this meant that if the British goal was to bring the Germans in to stabilize the Versailles order the Soviet goal was to keep the Germans out as pariahs so as to prevent in the Soviet mind all the Versailles powers all those imperialists getting together and attacking the Soviets so there's a kind of contest for Germany's attention the British want Germany not because they want to attack and destroy the Soviet Union but they're afraid of Germany being outside the system destabilizing the Versailles order and potentially overturning it the Soviets as they say Stalin articulated this the Foreign Affairs commissar Georg eg Sharon articulated this Maxim Litvinov articulated the same theory it's throughout the Soviet documentation Soviet documentation are saturated with this okay and so from the Soviet side trying to like that Rapallo treaty trying to bring the Germans over to their side not necessarily because or not only because the Germans and the Soviets might have things in common like trade a deep economic relationship but just to prevent Germany France and Britain all ganging up all forming one side all right so lo and behold Hitler comes to power in January 1933 this is a big story we're going to skip the reasons for that story today but we can discuss those in the Q&A if you're interested because Stalin makes an unwitting contribution to the rise of Hitler he's not predominantly responsible by any stretch of the imagination but he makes his contribution in any case the rise of Hitler the rise of Nazism the Nazi regime does not alter either British geopolitics or Soviet geopolitics the British continued the same policy under different governments of trying to make a deal with the Germans and keep the Germans inside the order this leads as you know to the infamous Munich pact in 1938 but it's a continuous policy that you can see in Genoa in 1922 once again it's not identical because the you know Lloyd George and Neville Chamberlain are different people different parties right there are important nuances here but in in general terms even the rise of Hitler doesn't fundamentally alter British geopolitics in the interwar period moreover from the Soviet side that's also true the rise of Hitler a Nazi regime proclaiming itself right as the scourge of quote Judeo Bolshevism Jewish Bolshevism proclaiming itself as wanting living space to take away the territory and the livelihoods of Slavs living to the east of Germany proclaiming all of this and yet Soviet geopolitics remains to try to do a deal with Germany to prevent an all imperialist coalition ganging up on the Soviets this is breathtaking because on the one hand the British who are a parliamentary system are trying to get in bed with the Nazis and on the other hand the Soviet Union which is communism and completely antagonistic to the Nazi regime and vice-versa are trying to get in bed with Nazism but from a geopolitical standpoint it does have a logic and it is continuous with this problem of Versailles as I've set it down right the 1919 being a moment in time an anomaly that was not going to last and wouldn't repeat okay so you've I think we're okay on time just let me check here I'm not good sometimes when there's no clock in the room all right we started at around 640 you said and it's 707 so I'm gonna do a little bit more before the Q&A if that's all right okay so there's great drama this is fantastic drama this story there are bigger pieces I'm leaving out here now we have the Japanese case right which I haven't talked much about as you know Japan seizes those northeastern provinces of China that used to be called Manchuria and creates a puppet state Manchu quo this happens in the seizure happens in fall 1931 a Manchu quo was formed in early spring 1932 this changes fundamentally changes the balance of power in East Asia and the Soviet Stalin begins and Express a militarization of his economy which David Stone has proven in his magnificent book on the first five-year plan that the Soviet economy was already geared up to be able to produce the industrial base right that undergirded a military industrial complex but now Stalin begins to build an express military industrial complex and he's goated by the Japanese a seizure of Manchuria and creation of the puppet state Manchu also I've left that up but that's a really big piece because in the anti-soviet all imperialist coalition you got to also keep the Japanese out of that coalition and the British are stretched and unable necessarily to protect their possessions in Asia and so the British are trying to do a deal with Japan and it kind of split the responsibilities for Asia with Japan and so this is an another interesting wrinkle once again it would be necessary to go into further detail about this in order to flesh it all out I'm leaving out the Spanish Civil War and all the mythologies about the Spanish Civil War I'm leaving out to Chiang kai-shek in the Communists in China also another important contributing factor at the forefront of decision-making and all elaborated at length in the book with the primary documents and available for queuing but I just want to do this Hitler Stalin pact and then the invasion the onset of the invasion and a little time that I've got left since that's what I've set up all right no so it's not a shock that Stalin is trying to do a deal with Hitler because once again the British are trying to do the same thing so you actually have a kind of Neville Chamberlain Joseph Stalin competition for Hitler's favor and attention we make fun of Chamberlain he's the easiest person in the world to mock first of all he's a Tory that is to say he's conservative so there's all the material you need right there secondly he has a giant beak nose he's got that ridiculous top hat that they wore in Britain in the old days and he's got that umbrella right which he uses as a cane as he walks and then he comes back from handing over Czechoslovakia sue Dayton lond for free with no compensation to Hitler handing it to Hitler on a silver platter and he comes back from that and says we've now achieved peace in our time all right so that's immortal you can't wipe that away that sustain you know Trump isn't there yet that's how big that stain is of Chamberlain but here's the interesting thing about Chamberlain of all the mistakes he made of all the oversights and stupidities and opportunities he missed he had this to say in 1938-39 his critics was saying you know we need to do a deal with the Soviet Union to combat this guy Hitler and defeat him in a war that's what Chamberlain's critics were arguing was a better policy than trying to do a deal with Hitler come to an understanding a policy known as appeasement which has become an infamous word but it wasn't an infamous word back then and so the opposite of Chamberlain's policy of appeasement of doing the deal was do the deal with Stalin and crush him and Shane Berlin said fine to his critics fine if I do that explain this to me if we if we do that and we win we're success which would be the aim how do I then get communism at a Central Europe that's Chamberlain 1938-39 and you got to say to yourself yeah that's a really good question in fact that's called the cold war and if you are alive during the Cold War you know it was serious business so Chamberlain may have been a nincompoop and we may make fun of him as much as we want but there was a fundamental dilemma here which Chamberlain at least understood and his critics didn't and so okay now let's move to the Stalin Hitler piece so in in all the dealings where Stalin is trying to get Hitler's attention a Hitler is not interested really Hitler's economists his economic ministers are interested because they're seeing the build-up of Germans power and they need raw materials they need grain they need oil they need minerals manganese and bauxite and you name it like the whole periodic table and the Soviet Union's got all that and moreover the Soviets are thirsty for high-end manufacturing precision engineering goods as well as armaments and Germany is state-of-the-art on that kind of stuff not always as good as Britain and France in for example aircraft manufacturer but still pretty good and so there's sort of mutual mutually beneficial trade possible between the two countries so this economic team Hitler's economic team is interested in these feelers from the Soviet Union and moreover there are some Anglo folks in Hitler's inner circle who also hate Germany I hate England so much that they would even prefer a deal with the Judeo Bolsheviks but Hitler himself is not very interested but all of a sudden after all Stalin's feelers Stalin has killed a lot of the people he had a extend the feelers by now all of a sudden in July 1939 Hitler's interested and the reason is is because he's given the order to attack Poland to invade and destroy Poland and and the British and the French finally have publicly stated that they will defend Poland's sovereignty and so they'll declare war on Germany of Germany invades poll Hitler is not quite sure if the British and the French are for real on this do they mean it but nonetheless it's a gamble because if the Soviets join with the British and the French the Germans now have the problem of the two front war that they lost in World War one so all of a sudden with the war plans already green-lighted and the invasion date already set for Poland Hitler decides that the feelers from Stalin he's now going to respond to this is July 1939 before July 1939 Stalin's got nothing almost no response the responses from Germany are contradictory because as I say parts of the bureaucracy are interested but Hitler himself is against it so the bureaucracy engages in a couple of talks here and there with Soviet representatives Hitler finds out and cuts the talks alright but now all of a sudden it's Hitler who's the motivator who's the driver of this and so Stalin who is privy to Hitler's attack plans of Poland because of the Soviet spy network and understands that Hitler now has a timetable and for the attack and and doesn't want to change the timetable and therefore doesn't have a lot of leverage Stalin plays it slow oh really now you're interested well I'm going to play hard to get if you've done any negotiations in business or for marriage or whatever you understand how these things work and it's a we understand how one side tries to use leverage these are view the other right okay so Hitler has handed leverage to stalled that's what he's done so Stalin plays it slow and Hitler then begins to get very agitated I need a deal I need a deal I mean the invasion of Poland is coming up it's set for late August it's now early August is now mid August so Hitler asks Stalin if he would receive his foreign minister Nazi foreign minister yogi fun Ribbentrop in in Moscow and finally Stalin agrees yes and so the meeting takes place in late August 1939 and the invasion of Poland is put off for a little bit of time like a week so for Ribbentrop is now coming to the Soviet Union to negotiate a non-aggression pact with the Soviets in order to keep the Soviets out of a potential war with the British on the French against Germany over Poland and if the Soviets are out maybe the British and French won't have the resolve to take Hitler on so maybe he'll get Poland and the British and the French will just be bluffing so looks looks like a deal for Hitler children anyway so Stalin tells almost nobody that this is going on the whole thing is a secret he's a conspirator and he's conspiring this deal with Hitler and so there at the dacha where they gathered in the evening as you know if you've seen the films and there's this little guy who's a protege of Stalin fantastically loyal worship Stalin Stalin has a perverse sense of humor however so he says to this guy whose name was Nikita Khrushchev he says he says Makita which is what he called him because that's the Ukrainian version of Nikita it's a condescending way to say Khrushchev's name because Khrushchev is not ethnic Ukrainian just happened to me party boss that anyway since the makita of a Ribbentrop is coming to Moscow tomorrow and Khrushchev with the Stalin perverse sense of humor you know ha ha ha and maybe he's going to defect right Estelle says no actually River trough is coming here to Moscow tomorrow and Khrushchev Tain's doesn't say anything more because he doesn't know if Stalin is joking or testing Khrushchev's loyalty or whatever it might be but there's a very narrow circle in which this is revealed so River trough flies on Hitler's personal plane known as a condor and actually two planes because of the entourage and they they're crossing the Soviet border and of course Stalin hasn't told the Soviet border guards and so as ribbons fall flying on Hitler's plane which is obviously not registered with the Soviet border guards and is clearly not a Soviet plane even if you can't read the markings on it it's the Soviets don't make condors like the plane that Ribbentrop is on so Soviet anti-aircraft fires at the plane yes it fires at the plane and it misses it missed the plane and so Ribbentrop continuing on his way and he landed safely in Moscow let's think about this for a second let's think about if Soviet anti-aircraft had hit the plane Stalin says the rivotril I'm Tula Taylor I'm so sorry I killed Ribbentrop it was an accident I forgot to tell the border guards and Hitler's gonna believe this right he's going to assume that Stalin is telling the truth and hadn't set him up in order to murder his foreign minister I don't think so I how do you explain that it was an accident anyway so this is this the way history works right through all these contingencies and accidents built into the bigger structures so then a ribbon trough Lance in Moscow they do this deal and Stalin dictates the terms of the deal he changes some of the terms Hitler is called on the phone Hitler agrees to the changes and the deal is wrapped up very very quickly and Ribbentrop Hitler has sent his personal photographer so there are photographs from the Soviet side and from the German side and Hitler sent his personal photographer because he asked him to photograph Stalin's earlobes to see if Stalin had Aryan blood or not so this is this regime this gigantic regime of German power run by this guy and so they do the deal and the deal consists in I mean you know the deal it consists in a non-aggression pact a deep economic exchange and then spheres of influence in a so-called secret protocol and the Germans are now going to invade Pollan which takes place September 1st 1939 and then the Soviets are going to get a shock of Poland Germans are going to get Western Poland Soviets going to get eastern Poland that's the deal meanwhile we have this notion that Stalin trusted nobody but he trusted Hitler well now we're going to work through that so Hitler invades September 1st 1939 and Stalin doesn't know how this is going to go Poland has an army Poland has an Air Force Britain and France might declare war they do declare war they might die don't send troops or start bombing Germany so Stalin's kind of waiting to see what happens he's hanging out and Ribbentrop says where's the Soviet invasion of Poland from the east how come that's not happening not because the Germans need the Soviets to destroy help destroy Poland but because Ribbentrop is trying to drive the wedge deeper between the British and the French and the Soviets god forbid the British and the French now should do their own deal with the Soviets and Stalin should go back on his word with Ribbentrop and now be incorporated into an alliance against Germany right so get the Soviets in there to make the breach between Britain and France on the one side in the Soviets deeper the Stalin is stalling he's fighting a war with Japan at the time there is a gigantic border war underway in the Far East and this border war is going very well for the Soviets but nonetheless Stalin is at war with Japan so there's an order for the Soviets to go into Poland September 12th doesn't happen the order is not implemented that is to say it's written it's drafted but it's not assigned and set and executed then another order two days later and so clearly they were thinking about when they should go in so finally September 17th the Red Army goes into eastern Poland by now Poland has been overrun in the West by the Germans and the British and the French have declared war but done nothing so far moreover the day before Stalin has signed a truce with the Japanese the day after the truce he then sends the army in to Poland so let's think about this right so for a time both the German army and the Japanese army were in motion towards the Soviet border now they've drawn this line on a map down Poland which is you know we each sphere Germans sphere and Soviet sphere but lo and behold a couple of days after the Soviets go in September 18th 19th 20th the Germans are on Stalin's side of the line yeah that's right the ver macht is hasn't stopped where Stalin and a Ribbentrop agreed but it's on the other side of line moreover Stalin sends a minion into Berlin to meet with the German military intelligence and when the minion shows up on the table is this huge map which shows the dislocation of forces in Poland and it shows that the Germans know that they are on Stalin side of the line you know they have the little stick pins if you know those old-style maps right showing where the tanks and the artillery and the planes are so imagine Stalin's thinking right the Germans know his minion is coming so if they don't want the minion to see this they can fold up the map and kind of put it in the drawer or they can receive him in another room where there is no map but they happen to receive him in the room with the map and the map happened to show that the ver macht had violated the agreement so Stalin calls in the German military attache in Moscow Lieutenant General Aires crystalling who is a fluent Russian speaker and he says to him you're on you guys are on my side of the line and the Lieutenant General says yes but that's it's only temporary you see what's happening is we're killing the poles and the poles are fleeing and as they flee we're chasing them and so in order to kill them we had to cross the line but as soon as we kill them we're going to go back to our side of the line everything is cool so think about this Stalin has a piece of paper with a line drawn on it signed by this guy Ribbentrop who in an earlier life was a Champaign salesman and it's now the Nazi foreign minister moreover before they've gone into the negotiations Stalin has ordered up a dossier he's ordered up a dossier of writings Stalin is a very document focused person that's how he prepares things he's ordered up a dossier he got translation of mine Kampf from German into Russia not published but just for his purposes he has all his own minions in his regime Regis wine cough translation Khrushchev says he couldn't barely get through it that's in part because he was not literate but it also could be because he was offended there are these passages which say for example Slavic subhumans there on the lines in Stalin's colored pencil on the Slavic subhumans there's this passage called march to drive to the east wrong nach osten on the lines under those passages that's pretty clear Stalin's read Mein Kampf and he's underlined those passages which are directed you know threats directed at him from Hitler so could he really be trusting or fooled moreover there's other stuff in the dossier there's a biography of Hitler by Conrad Hyden written in Swiss immigration excellent biography there are other documents about how Hitler other analyses of Hitler in German translated into Russian for Stalin about how Hitler signs all these deals and he never keeps his word checkmark so this is the Hitler he knows he's got this piece of paper with the border and the fair market is on the other side of the line so there's your trust I no guarantee that the Germans will stop at the line that they drew no guarantee that the Germans will stop at the Soviet at the Polish Soviet border maybe the whole pact itself was a ruse to sucker Stalin in and maybe the Germans are going to bash him too I mean how do you know so Stalin says the lieutenant-general answering he says to him you know we're gonna go in and we're gonna take the territory and it's on our side of the line by force and Lieutenant General says you you can't do that we don't need to do that so we're going to just let us finish and we'll evacuate and then we'll hand it over the so Stalin says dismissed so several hours later the Red Army goes in to the province and the German army the ver macht and the Red Army a clash we have a military clash in Poland around the city of La Valle l'viv Levu Lembeck which is the same city it just has these many names in Polish Ukrainian Russian German and Yiddish and so the there are casualties on both sides and the Germans are evicted and in the middle of it Hitler is informed he's in Poland himself adding to the drama he's in Zell pote which is on the Baltic Sea it's a little resort outside of the Gdansk it's now been absorbed into that Gdansk edenia complex he's in Sopot Sopot and so Hitler then gives the order that they should withdraw but as they're withdrawing the JED the vemma continues to fire and there are further casualties so this area by the way that was on Stalin side and that he's taken retaken by force with casualties these are the drohobych oil fields and so is it a coincidence in Stalin's mind that the Germans would take those old oil fields on his side of the line or was it something they did on purpose anyway so this is the way we understand this pact with them the actual nature of the regime's and the mentalities now you can argue that we don't know for sure on some of these questions and I would agree with you some of these questions we don't have full documentation on but nonetheless we have pretty good documentation on most of the stuff that I'm outlining for you so let me conclude I'm just about there I think I'm like I have one minute left of time or two minutes left of time Oh what does this meant what have I been trying to say what's my point if any we have to do a version of history which takes into account these larger structures right for example German power Russian power British power the nature of that power the institutions of that power the ideas that drive that right and then we have certain actors who by various circumstances come to power and our decision makers within big things like German power or Russian power of British power and so that's kind of my argument of how history works history is this big structural landscape a gigantic structural landscape which is determined by very big structures and as I said everything from state to state relations to global commodity prices to the productivity of your peasantry to you name it you fill in the blank and within that structural landscape historical actors right perceive or fail to perceive opportunities they see or don't see places that they can seize opportunities that they can seize to try to affect that structural landscape most of those opportunities are not created by them they're created by accident circumstance contingencies things that they don't foresee and so historical agency is about opportunities that you don't create that you don't foresee but that you perceive in real time and you try to bend to your will and if you succeed in seizing such an opportunity if you manage to do something like that you can alter the structural landscape for others because structure landscape is a system and it has system effects including unintended consequences you know knock this and something falls over there even though you knocked it this way because they're interrelated they're connected in some systemic fashion so sometimes the actors don't understand this and they miscalculate they miss perceived they fail to see the opportunities or they see opportunities that their delusions they delude themselves sometimes they don't they overestimate their power they overestimate their legitimacy they overestimate the nature of their society whatever it might be so this process of connection between these big forces or the structures and then this individual agency right this is the challenge of all the history that we write and some of the agents can be people who make decisions about a global commodity prices right they can sit there in London at a commodities market and make a big bet and it can affect the lives of coffee growers all throughout South America who have no idea who this person in London is they've never met this person they never will meet this person but this person has tremendous influence on the lives of these people similarly the coffee growers themselves can adopt or fail to adopt certain ways of growing the coffee which can have tremendous consequences for the size of the crop that particular year or for even the nature of the of the crop itself right anyways so this challenge which I feel heavy burden of connecting the structures and the individual agency when you write a biography of somebody normally you just assume they can do what they want and that they're the cause or the motivator behind everything and you see this with Churchill biographies you see this with George Washington or Abraham Lincoln biographies right there in every sentence there on every page they're the subject of every sentence they're the main act they're whatever they do it then happens all right this is a conceit biography and then you see kind of foreign policy history which is all the big structural forces that are too big for any one individual and there are no there are no people it's devoid of people and then you can't see how the individuals interact with that and so I this is maybe banal but then again that wouldn't be the first time but this challenge of relating the structural forces to the agency can be done in these episodes and in these episodes you can see that people whether they perceive or miss perceive these opportunities whether they seize them whether they turn them to advantage whether in fact is their short-term gain and long-term miscalculation and then how this ripples how the consequences of power and decision-making ripples through the system and then how the system ripples back onto the decision-maker for the next series of mistakes or miscalculations or seizure of opportunities anyway thank you for your attention

Channel: NYUAD Institute

Views: 19,016

Rating: 4.6451612 out of 5

Keywords: NYUAD

Id: MgHUn9wqEoA

Length: 52min 15sec (3135 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 14 2018