Stalin's Hyper-Realism
2001; Oxford University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/0145-2096.00253
ISSN1467-7709
Autores Tópico(s)Eastern European Communism and Reforms
Resumo“Stalin's policy appears to have been rational and level-headed – an unscrupulous Realpolitik serving well-defined geopolitical interests” (p. 316). This is one conclusion of Gabriel Gorodetsky's riveting work. Another is that Stalin was profoundly deluded. Gorodetsky does not theorize the incongruity, but the two propositions are not as contradictory as they seem. Stalin, in being altogether too realist, ceased to be realistic and lost the plot. Ten days before the German invasion on 22 June 1941, he was lecturing Georgi Zhukov, his excellent and skeptical chief of staff, that “Hitler is not such an idiot” as to open “a second front by attacking the Soviet Union” (p. 279). But Hitler was such an “idiot” and indeed almost got away with it. Thus it was Stalin's hyper-realism that led him disastrously astray. His error, more particularly, was to have imputed the rationality of Wilhelmstrasse to Adolf Hitler. Ernst von Weizsäcker may represent the traditional view of the Foreign Office here: “‘It is argued that without liquidating Russia there will be no order in Europe. But why should it not stew next to us in their [sic]damp Bolshevism? As long as it is ruled by bureaucrats of the present type, this country has to be feared less than in the time of the tsars’” (p. 70). A war, even if successful, would require enormous resources and create chaos in Russia. Better then to pressure the Soviet bureaucrats into deliveries of raw materials while allotting them decidedly junior status in a German-led continental bloc. Stalin could understand that logic but he could not understand Adolf Hitler. He could not understand statecraft conducted in the spirit of gambling. This is the Bolshevik, after all, who considered the Bolshevik Revolution premature and almost “missed” it.
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