The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact
Seventy-five years ago today, Red Army troops smashed into Poland. Masters of deception and propaganda, they encouraged locals to believe that they were coming to join the battle against Hitler, who had invaded two weeks’ earlier. But, within a day, the true nature of the Nazi-Soviet collaboration was exposed.
The two armies met at the town of Brest, where the 1918 peace treaty between the Kaiser’s government and Lenin’s revolutionary state had been signed. Soldiers fraternised, exchanging food and tobacco – pre-rolled German cigarettes contrasting favourably against rough Russian papirosi. A joint military parade was staged, the Wehrmacht’s field grey uniforms alongside the olive green of the shoddier Soviets. The two generals, Guderian and Krivoshein, had a slap-up lunch and, as they bade each other farewell, the Soviet commander invited German reporters to visit him in Moscow “after the victory over capitalist Albion”.
These events are keenly remembered in the nations that were victims of the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty: Romania, Finland and, most of all, Poland and the Baltic States. But they don’t occupy anything like the place in our collective memory of the war that they deserve.
Almost everyone in Britain knows that the Second World War started when Hitler sent his panzers into Poland. Stalin’s mirror invasion 16 days later, while not exactly forgotten, is not nearly so central in our narrative.
Which is, if you think about it, very odd. The Nazi-Soviet Pact lasted for 22 months – a third of the duration of the entire conflict. We remember, with pride, that we stood alone against Hitler. But in reality, our fathers’ isolation – and commensurate heroism – was even greater than this suggests. I can think of no braver moment in the war than when, having already declared war on Hitler, we prepared to open a new front against Stalin, too. British commandos were on the verge of being deployed to defend Finland, while the Cabinet toyed with various schemes to seize the USSR’s oil supplies in the Caucasus.
In the event, such plans were overtaken by developments. Still, for sheer, bloody-minded gallantry, it was an unbeatable moment, beautifully captured in the reaction of Evelyn Waugh’s fictional hero, Guy Crouchback: “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”
Why do we downplay that memory? Largely because it doesn’t fit with what happened later. When Hitler attacked the USSR – to the utter astonishment of Stalin, who initially ordered his soldiers not to shoot back – it was in everyone’s interest to forget the earlier phase of the war. Western Communists, who had performed extraordinary acrobatics to justify their entente with fascism, now carried out another somersault and claimed that the Nazi-Soviet Pact had only ever been a tactical pause, a moment when Stalin brilliantly stalled while building up his military capacity. Even today, the historiographical imprint of that propaganda lingers.
To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.
The full extent of their conspiracy is exposed in The Devils’ Alliance, a brilliant new history by Roger Moorhouse. Moorhouse is a sober and serious historian, writing with no obvious political agenda. Calmly, he tells the story of the Pact: its genesis, its operation and the reasons for its violent end. When recounting such a monstrous tale, it is proper to be calm: great events need no embroidery. What he reveals is a diabolical compact which, if it stopped just short of being an alliance, can in no way be thought of as a hiccup or anomaly.
The two totalitarian systems traded in all the necessary commodities of war: not just oil and vital chemicals, but arms and ships. They exhibited each other’s cultural achievements, performed each other’s music and films, stressed their joint hostility to Western capitalism.
The idea that there was an unbridgeable gap between Soviet Communism and National Socialism, which is nowadays so widespread, would have seemed curious at the time. To be sure, there were some in Moscow, and a few more in Berlin, who believed that there must eventually come a reckoning with their “real” enemy. But theirs were minority voices. Many more gladly went along with the idea that the two socialist systems were joined in battle against “decadent Anglo-Saxon liberalism”.
The coincidence in doctrine between the Nazis and the Soviets was obvious to the “decadent” Anglo-Saxons, too. The day after the Soviet invasion of Poland, a Times editorial observed that “Only those can be disappointed who clung to the ingenuous belief that Russia was to be distinguished from her Nazi neighbour, despite the identity of their institutions and political idiom, by her foreign policy”.
Nor was it only the “decadent liberals” in the Anglo-Saxon world who took this view. The first Briton to be tried for espionage was a Newcastle communist named George Armstrong, who had supplied German agents in Boston with information on the Atlantic convoys. He had been motivated by Molotov’s appeal to Leftists serving in Allied navies to desert as soon as they reached a neutral port.
Why, then, have we, if not exactly denied the episode, crammed it into a corner of our minds? In his Sword of Honour trilogy, Evelyn Waugh, largely through gentle subtext, told the story of how Soviet sympathisers in the West used the alliance with the USSR to rehabilitate its doctrines. Hayek, writing in 1944, devoted the greater part of his Road to Serfdom to refuting the idea that Nazism and Communism were opposed ideologies, well aware of how fervently this idea was being promoted.
He was right; but he made little impact. If you want to see how successful the propagandists of the time were, look at the reaction you get today when – as I did recently – you recite a few unadorned facts that point to the socialist nature of fascism.
Why did the Molotov-Ribbentrop carve-up come to an end? Not, as you might think, because of any doctrinal incompatibility between the two participants but, as Moorhouse demonstrates beyond doubt, for strategic reasons. Hitler had hoped that Stalin could be encouraged to turn his energies southward, falling on India “to co-operate with us in the great liquidation of the British Empire”. But Russia, then as now, was focused on her western rather than her southern neighbours. It was Stalin’s hunger for Bulgaria that Hitler found intolerable and that led to Operation Barbarossa.
Does any of this still matter? Yes, it matters immensely. First, and most obviously, it matters to the countries that were the victims of the carve-up. It was protests on the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that led to the ultimate independence of the Baltic States. It is important, too, to understand the shameful consequences of the pretence that Stalin was somehow not in the same league as Hitler. As late as the 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, governments around the world, including in the West, were using a mealy-mouthed formula to regret the deaths of the Polish officers murdered at Katyn without directly blaming the Soviets.
Even today, we are so fixated on Hitler that we miss what was happening elsewhere at the time. How many journalists have lazily compared Putin’s annexations in Georgia and Ukraine to those of the Nazi leader? Putin is attacking neighbouring states, this is bad, so he must be like Hitler, right?
Except that there is a far, far better parallel. When Hitler seized his half of Poland, he didn’t pretend to be other than a conqueror. Part of his zone was incorporated into the Reich, the rest placed under military occupation. But Stalin? Here the story becomes eerily apt to our present age. Stalin claimed to be acting to protect the Ukrainian and Byelorussian minorities in Eastern Poland. Having seized his portion of land, he organised rigged elections, which produced new parliaments, which promptly petitioned to be allowed to join the USSR. Sound familiar?
It’s this lop-sidedness in our folk memory that we need to address. While Nazism is well understood as the monstrosity it was, there is often a lingering sense that Communism was well-intentioned, even though it went wrong. The merest connection with fascism bars a politician from office; yet those who actively supported the USSR are allowed to become ministers and European Commissioners. Wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt is not regarded in the same light as wearing an Adolf Hitler tee-shirt; but it should be.
Don’t get me wrong. Every atrocity is unique in its own terrible way. The Nazi Holocaust haunts us for good reasons. Years after I saw it, I still find this image rising, unbidden, in my mind. Happily, though, no one, beyond a deranged fringe, denies the nature of Nazism. The same is not true of the Soviet tyranny.
Even now, Russia refuses to accept that its annexation of the Baltics was an “invasion”. Forty-seven per cent of Russians have “a positive view of Stalin” (just imagine how we would react if 47 per cent of Germans had “a positive view of Hitler”). To deny the magnitude of the Nazi genocide is, in several countries, a criminal offence; but to signal, with your idiotic Che tee-shirt, that you are all for breaking a few eggs to make an omelette, is radical chic. Germany has come to terms with its past and become a valued ally. But Russia?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100286702/the-greatest-cultural-victory-of-the-left-was-to-disregard-the-nazi-soviet-pact/ |
