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Competing Images of the Soviet Union

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Barry R. Posen
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Extract

Two American debates on foreign policy and national security. The Reagan administration and those who share its ideology see today's Soviet Union as not much different from yesterday's, and yesterday's Soviet Union as not much different from Nazi Germany. Like its progenitors in the 1930s, the modern Soviet Union is a “totalitarian” state, and therefore by nature expansionist, armed to the teeth, disposed to violence, fond of diplomatic tests of political will, and—as a consequence of all these factors —hard to deter and harder to beat. A different view prevails among most of the arms control community, the NATO allies, and some American academics. In its foreign policy, the Soviet Union is seen as a fairly typical great power whose behavior in international politics can be explained by the mixture of fear, greed, and stupidity that has characterized most great powers in the past as they have tried to secure their borders and pursue their interests in a world without law. It does not like to take great risks, it fears war, and it is, at worst, opportunistically expansionist. In sharp contrast to Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union is more conservative than reckless; if anything, nuclear weapons have reinforced this conservatism.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , July 1987 , pp. 579 - 597
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1987

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References

1 This point is tidily developed by Blumenthal, Sidney, “We Still See Hitler in All of Our Adversaries,” Washington Post, May 5, 1985, pp. C1–2Google Scholar.

2 May, Ernest, “Lessons” of the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), esp. 19–51Google Scholar.

3 Waltz, , Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 161Google Scholar–76.

4 Evera, Van, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” in Miller, Steven E., ed., Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 58–108Google Scholar.

5 Posen, Barry R., The Sources of Military Doctrine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984Google Scholar); Wolfers, Arnold, Britain and France Between Two Wars: Conflicting Strategies of Peace Since Versailles (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940Google Scholar).

6 Tucker, , “Stalin, Bukharin and History as Conspiracy,” Introduction to Tucker, Robert C. and Cohen, Stephen F., eds., The Great Purge Trial (New York: Grosett & Dunlap, 1963), xxxiii-xlGoogle Scholar. Hilger's brief discussion seems to propose that the purge of the foreign office ultimately served the policy rather than that it was consciously designed to do so. See Hilger, Gustav and Meyer, Alfred G., The Incompatible Allies: A Memoir-History of German-Soviet Relations 1918–1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 292Google Scholar–93.

7 In a later essay, Tucker further develops the hypothesis that Stalin saw cooperation with Hitler as a useful means to improve the prospects for successful Soviet expansion; he traces this policy back to Stalin's veto of a united front of the German Communist Party and the German Social Democratic Party against the Nazis. See Tucker, , “The Emergence of Stalin's Foreign Policy,” Slavic Review 36 (December 1977), 563CrossRefGoogle Scholar–90; also the commentaries by George Kennan, Philip S. Gillette, Alexander Dallin, and Teddy Uldricks (pp. 591–603), and Tucker's reply (pp. 604–7). Both Dallin and Uldricks challenge Tucker's analysis.

8 Tucker (fn. 6), xxxviii. Tucker cites no source for this conclusion.

9 Adam Ulam and many others simply disagree with the hypothesis that the purge was conducted with an eye toward rapprochement with Hitler. See Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence (New York: Praeger, 1968), 238, 240. Gerhard Weinberg agrees with Hochman's thesis that the purges profoundly influenced Russia's attractiveness to the West as an ally, but believes that the purge “had its roots in domestic not foreign, policy issues.” Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Starting World War II, 1937–1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 213Google Scholar.

10 Seaton, Albert, Stalin as Warlord (London: Batsford, 1976), 85Google Scholar.

11 George F. Kennan relied on the opinion of the German military attache to Prague to the effect that the Rumanian railroad network would not have permitted the passage of more than one Soviet division (perhaps 20,000 men, including support troops) in three months. See Kennan, , Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (New York: Mentor, 1961), 304–5Google Scholar.

12 Hochman makes much of this note in his effort to show that the passage issue was basically resolved during the crisis. This is unwarranted. The quantitative (100,000 men) and temporal (six days) restrictions placed on the Soviets are so narrow that no military organization would conceivably commit itself to battle the German army under those conditions. The note i s as peculiar as it is revealing. It does suggest, however, that the Rumanian military had a much less pessimistic view of the capacity of their railroad network than did subsequent historians.

13 Seaton, Albert, The Russo-German War 1941–45 (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 58Google Scholar, n. 16. Rumanian railroad builders chose the standard European gauge in the 1870s when they began building their first railroads; it is still used in Rumania. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, s.v. “Railroads and Locomotives” (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 1976), Vol. 15, 477Google Scholar, 482.

14 Although I have been unable to turn up more details on the Rumanian railroad network, I doubt that 200,000 men, their weapons, supplies, and ammunition, could have been moved in twelve days. But the Rumanian note does suggest that Rumanian staff officers believed that militarily meaningful numbers could have been transported. In footnote 9, p. 214, Hochman cites estimates of the railroad line's capacity that range from a low of 6 to a high of 30 divisions in 30 days. This large band of uncertainty implies that as few as 50,000 or as many as 240,000 troops could be moved in 12 days. The smaller number would not have done much to improve the Czech situation. Moreover, once combat began, much of the line's capacity would have had to be given over to resupply.

15 The Germans had about 71 first- and second-class divisions, the Czechs about 36 first-and second-class divisions. If 200,000 Soviet troops could have been moved overland and continuously resupplied, they might have added 9 or 10 divisions to Czech strength. This would no doubt have been a great help and might well have tipped the scales against an initial German breakthrough. Over time, however, massive French intervention in the west would have been required to prevent the Germans from building new divisions and deploying them to the Czech border.

16 The Poles had designs on Lithuania and on parts of Czechoslovakia, and indeed received a piece of the latter when the Germans took the Sudetenland. See Haslam, 160–62, 197; Weinberg (fn. 9), 203–9.

17 Ibid., 417–18, 427, 449.

18 This is the conventional wisdom. See, for example, Seaton (fn. 13), 6–7.

19 The Soviets have had plenty of time to doctor the evidence; several historians with whom I have discussed this possibility believe, however, that the Soviet documents that are released are generally reliable. It may or may not be significant that Haslam only cites messages from Moscow to the military districts; he does not cite any responses that would confirm that the messages had been received or that they had been acted upon.

20 It is by no means clear that foreign intelligence services in 1938 had an easy way to assess the degree of activity in the military districts. Military communications in the Soviet Union moved largely over land lines at this time. Stalin sent almost all his personal communications by telegraph-printer. Radios were primitive, unreliable, and scarce. Foreign intelligence would have had to tap the telegraph lines if military orders were to be intercepted—no mean feat in the Stalinist police state of 1938. Similarly, one suspects that it was not easy to gather intelligence directly in the Soviet Union at that time. On the Soviet military communications system, see Seaton (fn. 10), 102–3. He discusses the general inadequacy of German intelligence on the Soviet Union in The Russo-German War 1941–45 (fn. 13), chap. 3, pp. 43–49. F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, Vol. I (London: HMSO, 1979), explains that one cause of the sparse British intelligence on the Soviet Union was “her rigorous security measures” (p. 451). He also implies that the Russians were not generating much radio traffic in the late 1930s, relying mainly on land lines (p. 54). Seaton and Hinsley agree on these points.

21 Haslam cites two Pravda editorials that appeared during the crisis (September 27 and 29, 1938) to support this proposition. He attributes the first to Litvinov, although it appeared under a pseudonym: “Even a struggle against Czechoslovakia alone would not be easy for her [Germany] and would drag on for months” (pp. 190–91). He attributes the second, “The Defense Capability of Czechoslovakia,” to the Defense Commissariat: “In all caution and despite widely held opinion, one can draw the following conclusion: if Germany starts a war against Czechoslovakia, then this war could continue for an unforeseen period as has the war in Spain” (pp. 192–93). Hilger reports that Stalin persisted in this belief in a strong defensive advantage, expecting that Poland, France, and Yugoslavia would do a better job holding up the Germans than they eventually did. See Hilger, in Hilger and Meyer (fn. 6), 312, 318, 326.

22 In terms of active and reserve divisions and major items of ground weaponry, it is unlikely that the Germans outnumbered the Czechs by more than two to one in the fall of 1938. Hauner, Milan, “Czechoslovakia as a Military Factor in British Considerations of 1938,” Journal of Strategic Studies 2 (September 1978), 194–223CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seaton, Albert, The German Army (New York: New American Library, 1982), 92–95Google Scholar; Rich, Norman, Hitler's War Aims (New York: Norton, 1973), 118Google Scholar.

23 According to Hochman, Soviet aid similar to that which had been provided to the Spanish Republic was exactly the outcome feared by Czech President Benes (pp. 162–63). Like everyone else in Europe at the time, the Czechs had no interest in fighting Germany by themselves. But it seems improbable that fear of Soviet free-riding was the dominant concern of the Czechs, since their alliance with France was tighter and longer-lived, and the French were—contrary to Hochman's judgment—far better placed geographically to make war on Germany than was the Soviet Union. Had the Czechs decided to fight alone, after a French betrayal, and had the Soviets limited their assistance to logistical support, the Soviets would have merited no special honor. Nevertheless, the expectation of even this limited amount of foreign assistance would have made an independent Czech decision to resist Germany militarily a more reasonable one. In view of the demographic and industrial disparities between Czechoslovakia and Germany, one can hardly condemn Benes for the choice he made. Nevertheless, the willingness to wage war has been the price of national independence in the modern international political system. The leaders of Czechoslovakia declined to pay that price; a year later, under equally hazardous conditions, the leaders of Finland chose to pay. Even in the absence of assured allies, the ultimate Czech decision was not self-evidently correct, and the prospect of even limited Soviet aid made it less so.