Icebreaker Redux: The Debate on Stalin's Role in World War II Continues

The effort to characterize the overall objectives of Soviet foreign policy in the 1930s and, particularly, to place the 1941 German attack on the USSR in a broad interpretive context has become a growth industry among scholars in the last three decades. The orthodox or traditionalist interpretation portrays the Kremlin response to Adolf Hitler's rise to power as a determined campaign to create a powerful coalition to prevent or defeat Nazi aggression. The Nazi-Soviet Pact, in this view, was the regrettable result of the failure of this strategy. The devastating impact of Operation Barbarossa is blamed on the weakening of Soviet armed forces caused by the Great Purges and on Iosif Stalin's nearly fatal delusion that a German attack could be forestalled, at least until 1942, by appeasing Hitler. In general, researchers of this orientation characterize Soviet foreign policy as cautious and defensive. Some revisionist scholars, in contrast, have depicted Soviet policy in these years as aggressive—seeking to provoke a mutually destructive war among the Western powers to pave the way for revolution and/or Russian conquest. The collective security campaign is dismissed as merely a ruse, hiding Stalin's real aim of forging an alliance with Hitler which would foster the supposedly desired war. A few revisionist writers have even suggested that the USSR was caught by surprise on 22 June 1941 because its forces were preparing to attack Germany and not properly deployed to defend their own country.¹

Bogdan Musial seeks to reinforce the revisionist perspective in Kampfplatz Deutschland: Stalins Kriegspläne gegen den Westen. The author was a member of Solidarnosc before emigrating to Germany, where he trained and worked as an historian before returning to Warsaw to join the German Historical Institute. Musial is already well known for his attack on the "Crimes of the Wehrmacht" photo exhibition and for his controversial suggestion that Polish and Ukrainian Jews in some sense provoked the outrages committed against them during the Holocaust.² Recently he participated in a campaign of denunciations of left-of-center Polish academics, including Wlodzimierz Borodziej and Zygmunt Bauman, for their alleged complicity in communist-era repressions.³

In the work under consideration here Musial argues that an unquenchable, unalterable desire for global revolution was always the wellspring of Soviet foreign policy from the founding of the regime. Germany played the key role in Bolshevik aspirations. Its geopolitical centrality and industrial might meant that success there would ensure the victory of communism throughout Europe and the world. But anticommunist Poland stood in the way. The near collapse of Russia by the end of the Civil War, combined with its defeat in the Russo-Polish War, forced the Soviets to put their plans on hold but certainly not to abandon them. The 1923 upheaval in Germany briefly revived Bolshevik hopes, only to dash them again by the end of the year. The failure of the German revolution, combined with the 1926 coup by Marshal Jozef Pilsudski in Poland, provoked a "political-ideological crisis" (129) in Moscow and triggered a...