The Decent War: Stalinism’s Impact on World War II

The New York Sun's Adam Kirsch reviews Norman Davies' No Simple Victory, an Apollonian nose-thumbing to the conventional Homeric takes on World War II. No longer, concludes Davies and Hirsch, can the struggle between Fascism and Stalinism be seen as "good" but only "decent." For one thing, the largely self-inflicted military* death toll on the Soviet side was 11 million. Four years of fighting, 11 million dead. Stalin took more than twenty years to murder 20 million through purges, assassinations and de facto death sentences to Siberia. Here's Kirsch:

After Stalin's own incompetence prevented the Red Army from anticipating the German invasion, the Soviet Union could only compensate for huge initial losses by treating its soldiers as cannon fodder, overwhelming the Germans with sheer numbers. Soviet commanders wasted lives in a way that no American general would even have considered. It was necessary to deploy "blocking regiments" behind the front lines, expressly tasked with shooting any comrade who tried to retreat.

Worse, because totally irrational, the Soviet state continued to destroy its own people even when the war was at its height. During the first year of the invasion, the Red Army issued 800,000 death sentences to its own soldiers. Every unit had its commissar, who had to countersign all military orders, and who could condemn anyone to death for an impolitic word. No wonder that, as Mr. Davies writes, "the front-line zone of maximum physical danger" became for the Red Army troops "a zone of psychological liberation, even of gay abandon, which no doubt contributed to the willingness of the ‘Ivans' to rush to their deaths with a hurrah on their lips."

The recent spate of revisionist histories of World War II, and of Stalin himself, attempt to show that the man who inveigled Churchill and Roosevelt was obviously less than a buffoon, was very nearly an intellectual, and was most certainly a great statesman. A few problematic facts obtrude in this thesis:

1. Stalin's so-called "Third Period" of international Communism ordered German party leaders not to ally with the Social Democrats in blocking Nazi electoral gains in the Reichstag in 1932. According to Stalin, National Socialism was the last gasp of capitalism and must be allowed to run its course. One German Communist, Remmelle, was given to remark, “Let Hitler take office – he will soon go bankrupt and then it will be our day.” Trotsky, to this day Stalin's most astute political critic, labeled this non-Marxist policy "sham ultra-radicalism," which failed to "make any distinction between fascism and bourgeois democracy." Indeed, Stalin's tactic of more or less allowing Hitler's rise to power was to assail the Social Democrats as "social fascists." In Trotsky's description of this nonsense designation, "All cats then were equally brown: Hitler was a fascist, but so were the leaders of the traditional bourgeois parties, right and center; so in particular was Bruning, who already ruled by decree; and so even were the Social Democrats who formed the ‘left wing of fascism.’"

2. Stalin was repeatedly warned about Operation Barbarossa by his own spies in Berlin, whom he suspected of being double agents and crypto-fascists. (His paranoia knew no bounds). In fact, one spy even provided the Kremlin with the exact date of the Wehrmacht invasion, though Stalin refused to mobilize the Red Army to prepare for it. The catastrophic loss of Russian lives — both military and civilian — could thus be blamed on the incompetence of generalissimus. All the while, Stalin believed that his old ally Hitler would be slower to betrayal; Stalin thought he'd be the one to end the "friendship" pact first.

3. Stalin murdered his best military commanders like Tukachevsky and Yegorov. The British Sovietologist Robert Conquest once asked his friend Tibor Szamuely, the great Hungarian-Russian dissident, why Stalin had killed Yegorov. Tukachevsky's murder was explicable: he had been appointed by Trotsky in the Civil War. But why Yegorov? Szamuely's response was: "Why not?" It was such totalitarian caprice that vitiated the Red Army, requiring the sacrifice of so many more soldiers' lives than should have been necessary.

* Thank to commenter below for spotting the need for clarification.