Encircled by enemies: Stalin's Perceptions of the capitalist world, 1918 – 1941

Abstract

The article examines Stalin's intelligence on the capitalist world, including materials from military archives, diplomatic archives, and Stalin's private papers. It explores how these materials were collected, interpreted and shaped by Stalin's prejudices. It concludes that, from the end of the Civil War to the Nazi invasion, Stalin and the Soviet leadership believed that the Soviet Union was under a nearly constant threat of invasion from shifting coalitions of capitalist powers. No such threat existed until the late 1930s, but Stalin's perceptions have important implications for our understanding of Soviet foreign and domestic politics in the interwar period.

Key words:

• Intelligence
• Ideology
• Stalinism

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant 111817) and by the British Academy. The author wishes to thank Peter Jackson, Anthony Best, William Chase, Kevin McDermott, Lorna Waddington and Sven Holtsmark for their comments on early drafts.

Notes

¹Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) f. 558, op. 11.

²On Stalin's perceptions of the capitalist world and the danger of war in the late 1930s, see Silvio Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 1936 – 1941 (London/Portland, OR: Frank Cass 2002).

³The manuscript of ‘Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline’ was completed in 1916. It remains the single best-selling work Lenin wrote.

⁴Michael Jabara Carley has written extensively on anti-Communist sentiment in the interwar. See his articles, ‘Episodes from the Early Cold War: Franco-Soviet Relations, 1917 – 1927’, Europe-Asia Studies 52/7 (2000), 1275 – 1305; ‘Down a Blind Alley: Anglo-French Soviet Relations: 1920 – 1939’, Canadian Journal of History 29/2 (1994), 147 – 72; ‘Behind Stalin's Moustache: Pragmatism in Early Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917 – 41’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 12/3 (2001), 159 – 74.

⁵As far as I am aware, there are no unclassified British sources that would support the claim that the British government directly supported the terrorist activities of the Whites. Sidney Reilly, to use the most prominent example, was an adventurer, working with the Whites and occasionally passing information to British intelligence. He was not a British agent as such, though Soviet intelligence agencies did not see it that way. It also cannot be ruled out that wealthy individual Britons financed ‘anti-Soviet organisations’. This would have reinforced the impression of Soviet intelligence agencies (inclined to see the ‘bourgeois’ government as dominated by the capitalists) that their subversive activities had ‘official’ approval.

⁶See for example RGASPI 558/11/29/116-ob for a coded telegram from the Central Asian bureau to Stalin on British support for the Basmachi. Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) 25895/846/2 has intelligence from the Central Asian Military District on British support for the Emir of Bukhara.

⁷RGASPI 558/11/1180/53 from an unpublished collection of Stalin's writings on military issues. See also Pravda, 25, 26 May 1920.

⁸See for example Stalin's commentary in Pravda (18 Dec. 1921).This was reprinted in I.V. Stalin Sochineniia , 13 vols. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat 1947 – 51) Vol. 5, 118 – 20.

⁹This was a common theme of communications from the political police and military intelligence in this period, but even the normally sceptical Foreign Ministry was warning of the imminence of war with Poland and Romania in the early part of 1922. See Maxim Litvinov's correspondence with members of the Politburo, RGASPI 359/1/3.

¹⁰The existing cooperation between Germany and Soviet Russia made the Polish very nervous given that neither state had an interest in the continued independence of Poland. A revolution would leave Poland surrounded and doomed to a communist takeover.

¹¹G.M. Adibekov, Zh.G. Adibekova, L.A. Rogovaia, K.K. Shirinia (eds.), Politbiuro TsK RKP(b)-VKP(b) i Komintern, 1919 – 1943: Dokumenty (Moscow: ROSSPEN 2004), 185 – 202.

¹²See V.I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii (PSS) 52 vols. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat 1959 – 69) Vol. 43, 4.

¹³Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919 – 1933 (Oxford: OUP 2005), 283 – 5.

¹⁴N.S. Simonov, ‘The “War Scare” of 1927 and the Birth of the Defence Industry Complex’, in John Barber and Mark Harrison (eds.), The Soviet Defence Industry Complex from Stalin to Khrushchev (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan 2000), 35.

¹⁵RGASPI 76/3/364/23-31.

¹⁶RGASPI 76/3/362/3.

¹⁷On 14 April 1926, G.G. Iagoda, OGPU deputy chairman, wrote to Stalin about ‘materials in our possession which confirm beyond doubt that on the instructions of the English, the Polish and other general staffs of countries on our western borders have begun broad subversive work against the USSR and have increased their espionage network on our territory … Measures are being taken’. V.N. Khaustov, V.P. Naumov and N.S. Plotnikova (eds.), Lubianka: Stalin i VChK-GPU-OGPU-NKVD ianvar’ 1922-dekabr’ 1936: Dokumenty (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond demokratiia 2003), 117.

¹⁸RGASPI 76/3/364/57. He had been warning about the anti-Soviet links between England and Poland since the spring of 1925.

¹⁹Ibid., l. 70.

²⁰Ibid., l. 58.

²¹The Leningrad OGPU claimed to have uncovered a British – White Russian network trying organise anti-Soviet activity in Ukraine in advance of an invasion A.M. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 1921 – 1928gg. (Moscow: X-History 2003), 285, citing materials from the FSB archive. Stalin's quote is from V.N. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin, 133 – 5, 795.

²²Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 285 – 6.

²³Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin, 148 – 61. See also Stalin's comments to the April plenum of the TsK and TsKK, Sochineniia, Vol. 11, 53.

²⁴‘O rabotakh aprel'skogo ob'’ edinennogo plenuma TsK i TsKK”, Sochineniia, Vol. 11, 27 – 64; ‘Chlenam Politbiuro TsK. Otvet Frumkinu’, ibid., 116 – 17; ‘Ob industrializatsii i zernovaia problema’, ibid., 157 – 96; ‘Ob itogakh iiul'skogo plenuma TsK’, ibid., 197 – 202.

²⁵RGVA, 33988/2/682.

²⁶Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 286 – 7.

²⁷ Dokumenty Vneshnei Politiki SSSR (DVP SSSR), 22 vols. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat 1957 – 77) Vol. 12, 66 – 70. Stalin was not inclined to think that the signatories would hold themselves to these pacts, but he knew that they would deepen the challenge for the signatories of gaining public support for the idea of war against the USSR.

²⁸‘Politicheskii otchet TsK XVI s'’ ezdu VKP(b)’, Sochineniia, Vol. 12, 247 – 56.

³²L. Kosheleva, V. Lel'chuk, V. Naumov, O. Naumov, L. Rogovaia and O. Khlevniuk (eds.), Pis'ma I.V. Stalina V.M. Molotovu, 1925 – 1936 gg.: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: Rossiia molodaia 1995), 209 – 10.

²⁹Anti-communist demonstrations had followed news of the suffering of ethnic Finns in collectivisation. The significance of the 12,000-strong ‘peasant’ march on Helsinki and the adoption of anti-communist legislation called the Protection of the Republic Act was exaggerated in Moscow. Adibekov et al., Politbiuro i Komintern, 234 – 41.

³⁰Ibid., 604 – 5.

³¹V. Mitskevich-Kapsukas, ‘Ekonomicheskii krizis, Pol'sha i limitrofy’, Bolshevik 13 (15 July 1930), 105 – 24.

³³O.N. Ken, Mobilizatsionnoe planirovanie i politicheskie resheniia, konets 1920 – seredina 1930-kh (Sankt-Peterburg: Evropeiskii universitet 2002), 209; Lennart Samuelson, Plans for Stalin's War Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925 – 1941 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan 2000), 119.

³⁴Stalin appears not to have taken an interest in the quality of Ramzin's ‘confessions’. While Ramzin was clearly implicated in the counter-revolutionary plot, he was subsequently released and continued his career. It is likely that he told his interrogators what they wanted to hear in exchange for leniency. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin, 804.

³⁵Ibid., 257; RGASPI 17/162/9/53 – 4.

³⁷Kvashonkin et al., Sovetskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska, 161 – 2.

³⁹Kvashonkin et al., Sovetskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska, 167 – 8.

³⁶RGASPI 558/11/76/76 – 76ob; Adibekov et al., Politbiuro i Komintern, 645 – 6; A.V. Kvashonkin, A. Ia. Livshin and O.V. Khlevniuk (eds.), Sovetskoe rukovodstvo: Perepiska, 1928 – 1941 (Moscow: ROSSPEN 1999), 116 – 17.

³⁸RGASPI 558/11/185/1 – 9.

⁴⁰R.W. Davies, ‘Soviet Military Expenditure and the Armaments Industry, 1929 – 1933: A Reconsideration’, Europe-Asia Studies 4 (1993), 594. The figures are from Table 3 ‘Military orders financed from the state budget appropriations to NarKomVoenMor (million rubles at current prices)’.

⁴¹Kvashonkin et al., Sovetskoe Rukovodstvo: Perepiska, 171.

⁴²See Stalin's correspondence with Voroshilov on the fulfilment of military orders in the summer of 1932. Ibid., 175 – 80.

⁴³Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin, 298 – 308, 807.

⁴⁴RGASPI 558/11/185/65 – 70.

⁴⁵ DVP SSSR v. XV, 214 – 17.

⁴⁶RGASPI 558/11/206/39 – 41.

⁴⁷RGASPI 558/11/43/116; Kvashonkin et al., Sovetskoe rukovodstvo: Perepiska, 135, 141, 220 – 1.

⁴⁸Ibid., 173 – 4; O.V. Khlevniuk, R.U. Devis (R.W. Davies), L.P. Kosheleva, E.A. Ris (E.A. Rees) and L.A. Rogovaia (eds.), Stalin i Kaganovich: Perepiska. 1931 – 1936 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN 2001), 136, 143, 156 – 7.

⁵¹Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich. Perepiska, 274.

⁴⁹Jonathan Haslam, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1930 – 1933: The Impact of the Depression (London: Macmillan 1983), 98.

⁵⁰Ken, Mobilizatsionnoe planirovanie, 286 – 9, fn.11.

⁵²Shortly after the Bliukher incident, Stalin found out that the Far Eastern OGPU had been sending its agents on sabotage missions to Manchuria without permission of the Politburo. When one of these was exposed, Stalin demanded that categorical denials of involvement be issued to the Japanese, and ‘draconian’ measures against the members of the Far Eastern OGPU who had approved the missions. “To whom is that sort of thing useful, except to the enemies of Soviet power?” he wrote to Kaganovich. Ibid., 208.

⁵³Ibid., 121 – 2.

⁵⁴Ibid., 139 – 40.

⁵⁵He also accepted interviews with foreign journalists if he thought he could positively influence public opinion. See for example his interview with Emil Ludwig 13 December 1931, and with Ralf Barnes 3 May 1932. Stalin, Sochineniia, Vol. 13, 104 – 23, 137 – 9.

⁵⁶Adibekov et al., Politbiuro i Komintern, 694.

⁵⁷Davies, ‘Soviet Military Expenditure’, 580 – 1.

⁵⁸Kvashonkin et al., Sovetskoe rukovodstvo: Perepiska, 161.

⁵⁹For Stalin's assessment of the progress of negotiations in June 1932, see ibid., 182.

⁶⁰At one stage they took the risky step of fabricating a story for in the press about meetings with American officials, but it backfired when the article generated a denial.

Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich: Perepiska, 199 – 200, 222. See also DVP SSSR v. XV, 392 – 3; Kvashonkin et al., Sovetskoe rukovodstvo: Perepiska, 215 – 16.

⁶¹Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich: Perepiska, 192 – 3.

⁶²M. Lechik, ‘Vo frantsuzsko-pol'sko-rossiiskom treugol'nike. 1922 – 1934’, in E. Durachinskii and A.N. Sakharov (eds.), Sovetsko-pol'skie otnosheniia v politicheskikh usloviiakh 30-kh godov XX stoletiia (Moscow: Nauka, 2001), 120 – 3.

⁶³Haslam, The Impact of the Depression, 98. Stalin would have shared these suspicions though Edouard Herriot, who occupied the posts both of President and Foreign Minister, was a strong advocate of a rapprochement with the USSR.

⁶⁴Daladier was a radical, and Paul-Boncour was an independent socialist who had been evicted from the Socialist Party for his views on defence and international relations.

⁶⁵Stalin, ‘Itogi pervoi piatiletki’, Sochineniia, Vol. 13, 162 – 8, 182 – 5.

⁶⁶This was the gist of a (less public) speech Voroshilov made a couple of weeks later. RGASPI 74/2/19/90.

⁶⁷ Pravda, 24 Jan. 1933.

⁶⁸L. Kosheleva, V. Lel'chuk, V. Naumov, O. Naumov, L. Rogovaia and O. Khlevniuk (eds.), Pis'ma I.V. Stalina V.M. Molotovu, 1925 – 1936. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: Rossiia Molodaia 1996), 245.

⁶⁹V.V. Dam'e, N.P. Komolova and N.L. Petrova (eds.), Komintern protiv fashizma: Dokumenty (Moscow: Nauka 1999), 291 – 7.

⁷⁰For advice given to Stalin on the matter, see RGASPI 558/11/790/23 – 5, 42, 45 – 50, 52 – 6, 59 – 63.

⁷¹Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Threat from the East (London: Macmillan 1992), 8.

⁷²Ibid., 45.

⁷³Among other things, Stalin received intercepted correspondence between the British ambassador in Tokyo and the Foreign Office in London observing that the Japanese military build-up was too great to be directed solely at China. The ambassador speculated that this was probably evidence of preparations for war against the USSR. He went on to observe that Japanese military officers considered such a war inevitable in the next few years. RGASPI 558/11/185/97 – 102.

⁷⁴See for example RGVA 9/39/5c/2 – 21, 76 – 82, 109 – 116.

⁷⁵Karakhan to Enukidze, Kvashonkin et al., Sovetskoe rukovodstvo: Perepiska, 235 – 6. On the progress of those negotiations, see Ibid., 288, 296, 297, 303, 309; DVP SSSR, Vol. 16, 837 – 8.

⁷⁶Kvashonkin et al., Sovetskoe rukovodstvo: Perepiska, 342, 361, 363, 375, 383 – 4, 396, 401 and RGASPI 558/11/791/33 – 38 for decisions on the publication of brochures, books and further articles.

⁷⁷A version of the interview was published in Stalin, Sochineniia, Vol. 13, 276 – 81; A fuller record can be found in RGASPI 558/11/374/1 – 6.

⁷⁸Ibid., 558/11/185/126 – 32.

⁷⁹Once again, Soviet convictions were misplaced. The Poles remained dedicated to keeping an independent foreign policy. Ken, Mobilizatsionnoe planirovanie, 269; Oleg Ken, Collective Security or Isolation: Soviet Foreign Policy and Poland, 1930 – 1935 (St Petersburg: Evropeiskii Dom 1996), 121 – 2, 146 – 7; S.V. Morozov, Pol'sko-CHekhoslovatskie otnosheniia, 1933 – 1939 (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Moskovskogo universiteta 2004), 9, 27, 504; DVP SSSR, Vol. 17, 133 – 4; Izvestiia, 20 April 1934.

⁸⁰Haslam, Threat from the East, 43.

⁸¹See Kuusinen's speech to the 17th plenum of Comintern, Komintern protiv Fashizma, 313 – 14; ‘England and the Anti-Soviet Bloc’, Bolshevik 9 – 10 (1934); D.Z. Manuilskii's speech to the 17th Party Congress. According to Oleg Ken, the British were baffled by the suggestion that they were, as Manuilskii put it, ‘the real force behind German and Japanese fascism’. Ken, Mobilizatsionnoe planirovanie, 267 – 8.

⁸²Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation (AVPRF) 5/14/101/94/11.

⁸³RGASPI 558/11/187/28 – 44.

⁸⁴Weygand was one of the few French senior army officers who favoured some kind of military relationship with the Soviets. While neither he nor Tardieu were especially well disposed towards the USSR more generally, they were also hostile to Nazi Germany, making any alliance improbable. And though the Germans were courting the Poles, the latter remained convinced that the only way to protect Polish sovereignty was to avoid taking sides between Germany and the USSR. See for example Anthony Adamthwaite, Grandeur and Misery: France's Bid for Power in Europe, 1914 – 1940 (London: Arnold 1995), Ch. 11; S. Demski, ‘Pol'sko-sovetskie otnosheniia v otsenkakh Berlina B 30-e gody. Nekotorye voprosy’, in I.I. Kostiushko, P.N. Olshanskii, I.A. Khrenov (eds.), Sovetsko-polskie otnosheniia, 1918 – 1945 : sbornik statei (Moscow: Nauka 1974), 191 – 218; Graham Ross, The Great Powers and the Decline of the European States System, 1914 – 1945 (Harlow, UK: Longman 1990), 85.

⁸⁵RGASPI 558/11/187/81, 111 – 17.

⁸⁶AVPRF 05/14/101/93/23, 05/12/86/64/12.

⁸⁷Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin, 494 – 500, 501 – 5, 517 – 18, 520 – 1; RGASPI 558/11/186/118 – 27; 558/11/187/62 – 79.

⁸⁸Britain was actively engaging Germany at this time in an attempt to commit her to a series of multi-lateral pacts that would make aggression more difficult. Graham Ross, Great Powers, 88 – 9.

⁸⁹G.M. Adibekov, K.M. Anderson, K.K. Shirina (eds.), Politbiuro VKP(b), Komintern i Iaponiia: dokumenty (Moscow: ROSSPEN 2004), 131 – 8, 143, 159 – 60; Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich: Perepiska, 448, 470, 506, 517; DVP SSSR, Vol. 17, 562 – 70, 624 – 8, 815 – 17.

⁹⁰RGASPI 17/162/17/54; 558/11/87/20 – 30, 558/11/51/37 – 8, 43.

⁹¹See for example RGASPI 17/162/17/47. In late September 1933, Stalin instructed Litvinov not to rush to sign an eastern pact that did not include Poland and Germany. The two had formally rejected the French offer of a pact only two weeks before, but that did not put an end to efforts to negotiate one.

⁹²Morozov, Pol'sko-CHekhoslovatskie otnosheniia, 165.

⁹³This constituted approval for a rearmament that was already in progress. RGASPI 558/11/187/120 – 3; Morozov, Pol'sko-CHekhoslovatskie otnosheniia, 179.

⁹⁴RGASPI 558/11/188/31 – 51. On the British, see also AVPRF 010/10/48/8/30-38 for Soviet ambassador Ivan Maiskii's report of his conversation with Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden. On Hermann Göring's meeting with Beck, see AVPRF 05/15/109/67/5.

⁹⁵Soviet agents in Germany confirmed the substance of these reports. RGASPI 558/11/188/55-56; 558/11/446/130 – 44. The Soviet estimates of the size of the German Army contained in this document were for public consumption.

⁹⁶AVPRF 010/10/48/8/10 – 11. Maiskii nevertheless observed that rumours of an end to hostilities were premature, and indeed, the Americans continued the arms trade with the Nationalists.

⁹⁷Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin, 594 – 7, 661 – 2.

⁹⁸AVPRF 05/14/101/94/12.

⁹⁹Together with the Germans. AVPRF 05/14/101/93/34.

¹⁰⁰AVPRF 05/15/109/67/5/6.

¹⁰¹This was something they never seriously considered in the first instance.

¹⁰²In the spring of 1936, the Germans proposed a non-aggression pact with France and Belgium, but the French were still publicly expressing an interest in broader arrangements for guaranteeing peace in Europe. For an expression of Soviet scepticism that the French and others would resist such deals, see for example, A.E. [sic], ‘Diplomatiia voiny’, Bolshevik 10 (31 May 1935), 83 – 90.

¹⁰³AVPRF 05/16/115/6/16.

¹⁰⁴Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin, 671 – 2, 679 – 81, 693 – 8, 705 – 10, 712 – 14, 735 – 5.

¹⁰⁵William Chase, Enemies within at the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934 – 1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 2001), 163 – 74; Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin, 738 – 41.

¹⁰⁶Karl Radek in Izvestiia, 1 Aug. 1936. The text was approved by Stalin.

¹⁰⁷This article can add little to Silvio Pons' superb scholarship on this period except to observe that, for Stalin, the events of 1936 to 1941 only deepened his convictions that had taken shape in the previous two decades. By 1936, if not well before, Stalin had little doubt that war was inevitable. It was only a matter of when, and against whom the Soviet Union would fight.

¹⁰⁸See Stalin's opening speech to the 17th Party Congress, Sochineniia, Vol. 14, 328 – 35.

¹⁰⁹Christopher Andrew and Julie Elkner did anticipate the centrality of this issue in their ‘Stalin and Foreign Intelligence’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 4/1 (2003), 69 – 94, though the article was written just as the intelligence material was being released.

¹¹⁰See for example, Michal Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism: The USSR on the Eve of the ‘Second Revolution’ (Bloomington: Indiana UP 1987); Oleg Khlevniuk, ‘The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1936 – 1938’, in Julian Cooper, Maureen Perrie and E.A. Rees (eds.), Soviet History, 1917 – 53: Essays in Honour of R.W. Davies (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan 1995).

¹¹¹Leonid Nezhinskii has argued that because there was no danger of war in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin must have invented the threat for his cynical political ends. ‘Byla li voennaia ugroza v kontse 20-kh – nachale 30-kh godov?’, Istoriia SSSR 42/6 (1990).