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.

But if the penny never dropped for Stalin, it took almost as long for some other notable realists to grasp the Austro-German’s intentions. For yet another of Gorodetsky’s themes is the extent to which the British, Churchill included, kept thinking placidly, almost up to the invasion, that the German buildup on the Soviet border was meant to pressure Moscow into submission in the negotiations that London imagined, entirely wrongly, to be taking place. Mired in a mishmash of nineteenth-century prejudices about Russia and more recent anti-Bolshevism, the British clung stubbornly to the idea that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had essentially become, or was about to become, a full-fledged alliance; and that, consequently, there was little space for serious diplomacy with Moscow.

Gorodetsky, an Israeli historian, has written this book in part to combat “the preposterous and unsubstantiated claim that ...Stalin had been meticulously preparing a revolutionary war against Germany” (p. 1), a claim first put forth by a defector from the GRU, “Suvorov” (actually V. Rezun), in the 1980s and soon eagerly adopted in the ferocious German Historikerstreit by the quasi-apologists for Hitler’s war effort. The argument has also been given wide attention in Russia. Given the fertile ground for mythology and conspiracy in the matter, it is fortunate that Gorodetsky has managed to gain access to an astonishing array of new archival materials, some of which have since been removed from scrutiny. On the Soviet side, he has examined the presidential archives and the records of the Foreign Ministry, General Staff, NKVD, and GRU. Thus, he was able to view for the first time the whole spectrum of intelligence presented to Stalin. He has also used Bulgarian sources along with the important Yugoslav archives. The result is a remarkable account of the year between, roughly speaking, the end of the Phoney War in the spring of 1940 to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. This is a year during which, as the author reminds us, Europe went through unprecedented political changes because of German aggression: the occupation of Norway and Denmark; the conquest of much of western Europe; the inclusion of Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria into Berlin’s sphere; the conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece. It was an expansionist success story of world-historical proportions and gut-wrenching to watch from within the Kremlin.

What, then, were Stalin’s “well-defined geopolitical interests” at the outset of this horrific sequence? Essentially control of the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea and the entry points of the Black Sea, coupled with a band of buffer states between the two waterways. To these goals, Moscow remained faithful throughout. The tactical means varied depending on the lay of the land, and the land was mostly situated in or around the Balkans, where the interests of the Soviet Union and Germany would increasingly clash, always against the backdrop of Britain’s moves, real and imagined. Until the calamitous Yugoslav events in early April 1941, Stalin tried adamantly to maintain the Soviet claims through a combination of pressures on the various individual regimes, negotiations with Berlin, and unilateral actions. After issuing demobilization orders in the wake of the Finnish Winter War (one day before Germany was about to crush France), there was also an effort, woefully inadequate in the end, to invigorate the Red Army. But Stalin paid much less attention to military matters than to “the subtle political game” (p. 176), as he referred to it. But there was no such game and the result was a humiliating and devastating failure.

Read with the hindsight of the ensuing invasion and Grand Alliance, one tends to forget that in this period Britain and Germany were perceived in Moscow as equally hostile. Indeed for a long time Stalin himself thought the British threat more immediate – one reason for his preoccupation with the Black Sea, the straits, and the Balkans. Again and again he would return to the incursions here by the British, from the Crimean War to the intervention in the civil war that he himself had experienced. The danger, however, was not a mere figment of his imagination. He was aware of the British plans to bomb the vital oil fields of Baku, a project aborted only by the fall of France. Winston Churchill, while still at the Admiralty, had advocated submarine actions against Soviet and German ships alike in the Black Sea. When 1941 came around, the Foreign Office was still speculating that there would be no change in Russo-German relations until “the British Fleet were able to patrol the Black Sea and British bombers were able to fly over the Caucasus” (p. 93).

Stalin also suspected, quite rightly, that Britain wanted to embroil the Soviet Union in war with Germany or at least drive the proverbial wedge between the two. There was less of this (again in “rational” terms) than there might have been; but Stanley Cripps, the leftist ambassador to Moscow, and Winston Churchill certainly adhered to this principle, if for different reasons and with different degrees of intensity. A low estimation of Soviet power combined with the assumption of a de facto alliance between Moscow and Berlin made the British reluctant to engage in any serious bargaining. Stalin’s acid test here, recognition in some form of his Baltic annexations, was typically evaded. Because of the putative alliance, relations with Moscow were of less moment to Britain than those with, say, Turkey. What mattered was the eastern Medi-terranean, the Middle East, and North Africa, the arena where Hitler was to be beaten. Churchill, contrary to his retrospective stories, showed negligible interest in Soviet matters until April and then only fleetingly so and only in light of the disastrous developments around the Mediterranean. Again, Stalin imputed a little too much realist rationality to his opponent: the expectation of an objective British interest created in his mind an ingrained tendency to misconstrue information about the German buildup and other threatening events as British plots to destroy his vital relations with Berlin.

Though Hitler had outlined the project of assaulting the Soviet Union already in the summer of 1940, the final decision was not taken until December, that is, after his talks with Molotov in November and subsequent Soviet assertiveness in Bulgaria and Romania had convinced him that Moscow would not take proper instruction in the Balkans. It was in the period, then, between the fall of France in June and Hitler’s Directive no. 21 in December “to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign” (p. 85) that Stalin overplayed his hand. Nothing after that could probably have eliminated the attack, only alleviated its impact. Whence the “mistake”?

Stalin’s main premises can be enumerated, I think, as follows: (i) Germany and indeed Britain, if given a chance, are likely to attack the Soviet Union at some point; (ii) but Germany will not engage in a two-front war; (iii) in view of the German successes, there might well be a negotiated peace in which case the Soviet Union must see to it that its claims are properly established; (iv) Germany has an objective need for Soviet raw materials and trade that gives the USSR a certain leverage; (v) it is vital for geopolitical reasons of security to control the Black Sea and its entry points; (vi) it is, ipso facto, vital to prevent Germany and Britain from gaining control of the various regimes in the area. His first moves after the fall of France were to annex officially the Baltic states and to acquire by intimidation Bessarabia from Romania. The latter operation made sense as regards control of the Danubian entry points; but it also pushed Romania firmly into the German camp. Hitler acquiesced in the Bessarabian annexation because he was more interested in Romania proper and was still set on the Battle of Britain. Yet as that battle was petering out, Hitler began to gaze with increasing interest at the east and his so-called hinterland. Romania and by extension Hungary were thus brought under German supremacy. At the same time, Berlin refused to recognize any Soviet right to control the Danubian exit on the Black Sea. Moscow responded by seizing islands in the delta. Bulgaria was the next area of contention. By the time Molotov arrived in Berlin in early November 1940, Hitler had already decided to control it. So far, however, he had failed to browbeat the Bulgarians into submission, a failure he attributed to the nuisance of Soviet counterpressure.

At that moment, Stalin had good knowledge of Wehrmacht movements: a hundred divisions were already in the eastern zone. More pleasingly, however, he also knew that Hitler and Ribbentrop had recently reconfirmed among themselves the strategy of a continental bloc, putting pressure on the Soviet Union but essentially aiming to isolate Britain in the expectation of subsequent peace negotiations. Thus, Stalin’s instructions to Molotov, written out in longhand, assumed wrongly that there was room for maneuver and for pressuring Hitler on Bulgaria. It even seemed possible to haggle about the German control of Romania. The central aim with Molotov’s trip was otherwise to determine the German view of where the delimitation of spheres would be drawn in the Balkans. To this end, Molotov, on Stalin’s instructions, not only expressed displeasure with Germany’s position in Romania but insisted that Bulgaria should be in the Soviet sphere. Stalin’s directive, notably, said almost nothing about Soviet interests beyond Europe. Indeed, he explicitly told Molotov to exclude topics regarding the British Empire. Berlin, it was rightly expected, would try to fob Moscow off with grandiose scenarios of expansion toward the Indian Ocean and so forth. What mattered to Moscow was the Balkans.

On the mistaken supposition that Moscow would come hat in hand, Hitler refused any such deals and offered only minor concessions on the Danube. The meeting was thus a failure, but the Kremlin assumed that this was merely a stage in a continuing game of pressure and counterpressure. The German Foreign Office, ultimately never fully informed about the invasion, tended to think likewise. Hitler had other ideas. This was not to be a negotiation but a recognition of German supremacy in the Balkans. Servile concessions to the point of abnegation might, in retrospect, have been the “correct” policy; but this, as Gorodetsky points out, would also have made the “western front vulnerable” and excluded the Soviet Union “from European affairs for the first time since the reign of Peter the Great” (p. 82). A fatal period ensued. Hitler proceeded mercilessly to squeeze the Bulgarian regime and Moscow countered with claims of its own. As Gorodetsky summarizes Stalin’s policy: “Russia continued to demand ‘immediate withdrawal’ of the German troops from Finland and a change in the regime of the Straits ‘within the next few months’ through a conclusion of a mutual assistance pact with Bulgaria and the allocation of naval and land bases ‘within the range of the Bosphorous and the Dardanelles”’(p. 82). In the resumed negotiations about the Danube, the Soviets also insisted on joint control with Romania. None of the above squared at all with Hitler’s view of a desirable order. The negotiations deadlocked. The following morning, Hitler issued Directive no. 21, better known as Operation Barbarossa.

To confuse Moscow, Hitler also let the Foreign Office engage in extensive trade negotiations. An agreement was reached in early 1941. It coincided, significantly, with the final integration of Bulgaria into the German system. Stalin could do nothing but protest. Two Soviet wargames in January, mean-while, demonstrated with ample clarity the deficiencies of the Red Army. There remained “the subtle political game” – always Stalin’s inclination anyway. But the room for maneuver was narrowing considerably, as Hitler was about to take over the bungling Italian war effort against Greece and expand his Balkan position. Conceived originally as an anti-British operation, this Greek thrust now became a move to secure the right flank before the main project, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Consequently, Yugoslavia too became an area of dispute, a situation rendered all the murkier because of the British attempts to form a counterforce, a little entente, in the region. Moscow, unaware that Hitler had already decided to liquidate Yugoslavia, chose this moment to begin treaty negotiations with Belgrade, the logic being that some form of agreement would serve to deter Hitler from aggression and also to bring him back (Moscow was fondly hoping) to serious negotiations. If, alternatively, Hitler were to attack Yugoslavia, he might well get bogged down and have to postpone any aggression he had in mind for the Soviet Union. In early April, after highly charged and tragicomic negotiations, a friendship treaty with Yugoslavia was indeed concluded with great fanfare. The event coincided exactly with the German bombardment of Belgrade. The Wehrmacht went on to pulverize the Yugoslav forces. A few weeks later the Swastika was raised at Acropolis.

It was a shattering blow to Stalin’s policy. What had seemed a clever move to restrain and delay Hitler had done nothing of the sort. It merely annoyed him further. The Soviet Union was now facing alone the huge and virtually unscathed Wehrmacht. Any mistake now could be catastrophic. Stalin’s response from April to June was to avoid punctiliously anything that could cause provocation or misunderstanding. Again, he was mistaken: Hitler’s decision had of course been made months earlier. The fascinating question thus arises as to what Stalin knew and when: the problem, in short, of intelligence and how to read it. My abstract will not do much justice to the abundance of what Gorodetsky has to say on this topic.

Soviet military intelligence first thought it had detected German preparations for an attack a whole year before it happened, before indeed Hitler had initially declared it to his own military. Throughout the following twelve months, however, Moscow received precise information about the German buildup and the dispositions. There was never any mystery as to the military preparations. The difficulty arose in deciphering the intentions. Here Gorodetsky punctures a cherished myth about ignored Western warnings: “the Soviet intelligence community preceded its Western counterparts in providing precise and accurate information on German intentions” (p. 130). Eleven days, indeed, after Hitler had ordered Operation Barbarossa, Stalin had a fairly good account of it. By mid-March, he even knew the concrete German war plans. Alas, he also had conflicting information that for various reasons made more sense. Troop dispositions, for example, could be interpreted in terms of Hitler’s thrust southward through the Balkans to the straits and Turkey, in other words as a move against the British. In any case, to attack the Soviet Union before Britain had been defeated made no sense. Berlin reinforced this mistaken notion with disguising moves such as the resumption of the air raids against London and disinformation that rumors of an eastward attack were British disinformation. Furthermore, the massive buildup that began in December did not accelerate until March and was not absolutely undeniable until the latter part of April. And at that stage, another appealing scenario came forcefully into play: the idea of a split within the German ruling order, Hitler himself still being undecided. Consequently, there had to be room for political maneuver and bargaining. Meanwhile, extreme caution in every military matter was imperative. The radar screen was also put on even higher alert for any British attempts to induce the Soviet Union to enter into conflict.

At this electric moment in early May 1941, Rudolf Hess saw fit to fly to Scotland. Hess acted alone and turned out to be unknowledgeable about Hitler’s plans. Moscow, of course, was bound to interpret the extraordinary event not only as a sign of deep conflict among the German leadership but also as some sort of British plot to conclude a separate peace. (When Stalin finally understood the invasion as an invasion, he was surprised that the British were not in fact participating.) The British, taking negotiations between Moscow and Berlin as a given, then acted to prevent the phantom alliance by using, lamentably, the Hess incident in a campaign of rumors to intensify the Soviet misconception about a split and a possible separate peace.

Meanwhile, the well-intentioned, free-lancing efforts of the German ambassador to Moscow, Werner von Schulenburg, also served to fortify Stalin’s belief that Hitler might still want to deal. Schulenburg, opposed to any war, had gone back to Berlin in April to state his case to Hitler. He came back to Moscow with nothing. Yet he approached the Kremlin on his own, suggesting that Stalin take some initiative. Schulenburg’s clandestine move was taken as another clear indication of intra-German conflict and indecision. Another scenario now became highly persuasive: the German buildup was part of an intricate “war of nerves” that would lead up to an ultimatum. Stalin came to expect firmly that any German move would take that familiar form of a set of drastic demands. Thus, he tried hard in May and June to figure out their possible range and content. And so the image of a split and the wavering Hitler mutated into the scenario of the “ultimatum” – which of course never came.

It is easy to ridicule this as wishful thinking of the most irresponsible kind. Churchill, famously and self-servingly, did so afterward. It is indeed true, as Gorodetsky writes, that “the wish to avoid war rendered Stalin susceptible to any information which suggested that Hitler was prepared to convert the military solution into a political one” (p. 187). It is also true that Stalin had no capacity to imagine what would happen if he turned out to be completely wrong – an essential part, I should think, of sustained success in statecraft. Here the autocratic and repressive nature of the Stalinist system worked powerfully to solidify his misconceptions. The problem of policymaking everywhere, that information is framed to fit the views already favored at the top, was immensely amplified, as everyone knew the potential cost of being wrong. Dissonant information was thus presented in a way that reinforced Stalin’s ingrained tendency to see what he wanted to see. Yet it remains that the British misunderstandings were almost identical: the same belief in a split, the same belief that the German buildup might somehow be a fake, the same belief in a war of nerves, the same belief in an ultimatum. The difference, in a way, was that while Stalin was hoping for a political deal, the British complacently assumed it was just about done. Thus, on 23 May, the Joint Intelligence Committee estimated “that a new agreement between the two countries may be nearly complete” (p. 283). Three days later, military intelligence suggested that the agreement was in fact about a division of spheres in the Middle East and German troop transits to Iran. Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, tried in vain to persuade Anthony Eden that no negotiations were in fact taking place.

Stalin’s posture thus became one of groveling appeasement coupled, in a minor key, with attempts at deterrence (showing Germans, for example, an inflated view of Red Army strength). The neutrality treaty with Japan in April was perhaps meant to be both, indicating association with the Axis but also covering the rear. All proved utterly futile. The chief effect was in fact to impair military readiness. Because of his understandable but misplaced fear of provocation, Stalin resolutely refused to go beyond the defensive mobilization plan he had reluctantly accepted in March. He refused, moreover, to allow any strikes against the innumerable German reconnaissance flights. In early June, Zhukov learned that the mobilization was failing anyway. As the final weeks advanced, the culture of denial in the Kremlin became neurotic. The real became surreal. Several hours into the invasion, Stalin still thought it might be a provocation by the German army, acting without Hitler’s knowledge. It is not surprising that he suffered a subsequent breakdown.

Gorodetsky notes that Stalin had few options but was misled by his fixation on political solutions into severe errors. These were then exacerbated by “muddled instructions which responded to changing circumstances” (p. 239) – typical, one might say, of Stalin’s tendency to concentrate on tactics. Zhukov’s lapidary verdict seems just: “Counting on his ‘wisdom,’ [Stalin] proved to be too clever by half” (p. 244). But how exactly was Stalin too clever by half ? We have thus arrived at the perennial question of Stalin’s relation to communism, realism and national interests. Gorodetsky’s position here is unequivocal. Soviet foreign policy was from the beginning and necessity moving “from hostility to the capitalist regimes towards peaceful coexistence based on mutual expediency” (p. 1). In the sullied world of international power politics, “Moscow’s policy, like that of the democracies, was neither pure and noble nor diabolically cunning” (p. 9). Stalin himself, meanwhile, “was little affected by sentiment or ideology in the pursuit of foreign policy” (p. 316). The despotic nature of his regime certainly had effects on methods but his policy was neither “the whims of a tyrant” nor “relentless ideological expansionism.” On the contrary, he adhered to “Russia’s tsarist legacy, and responded to imperatives deep within its history” (p. 316).

The scholarly aim is clear. Armed with formidable archival evidence, Gorodetsky wants to expose the flimsy character of the recent attempts to reinvent Stalin as a revolutionary expansionist. His book achieves that aim in no uncertain terms. The analytical frame, however, has some shortcomings. In revealing the empirical emptiness of his adversaries, Gorodetsky tends to invert their arguments. Thus, he reproduces their categories and unproductive way of looking at ideology. On what grounds, for instance, can it be argued that “the tsarist legacy” is any less ideological than “ideology”? The inscription of various spaces as geopolitically and strategically important in the national interest is of course an ideological product, no matter how “historically” or “geographically” anchored. It is hard, meanwhile, to imagine anything more ideological than a realist. The relentless condemnation of the ideal and the ideological, enemy twins, in the name of the real, is a profoundly ideological move. So, I might add, is the condemnation of the ideological in the name of self-evident truth, especially when that truth parades as the timeless and ahistorical ideals of the United States.

Ideology, then, becomes a codeword for revolutionary Marxism in the conventional way of understanding Stalin and Soviet foreign policy. The usual result is a false either/or: was Stalin a Marxist revolutionary or was he a Russian realist operating within the traditional security concerns of tsarism? Had he been confronted with the question, he would not have recognized any necessary contradiction between realism and defense of the faith, or for that matter between the Leninist and tsarist “legacies.” Most orthodox strands of Marxism are indeed “realist” in spirit. The world is deemed to be governed by “interests” that are in turn products of a certain position in a given social structure. Interests give rise to ideologies, whose meaning and significance are ultimately explained by the nature of the former. Politics, analogously, is essentially a calculation of objective forces behind the surface of events. Conceptually, the step to “national interest” is not big. Politically, however, it is enormous. One cannot emphasize enough that it was Stalin himself who was responsible for this monumental shift. Condensed in his slogan “Socialism in One Country,” it was later given theoretical grounding at the end of the 1920s when the governing vertical contradiction between capital and labor was replaced by the horizontal one between the Soviet Union and its outside enemies (coupled, notoriously, with their subjective and objective “agents” inside). The particular, horizontal state, in short, was substituted for the universal, vertical class by the identification of the latter with the former. Henceforth, and contrary to Lenin’s understanding, there could be no discrepancy between what the Kremlin did and the interests of the international revolution. The space had opened up for the typical Stalinist tactical opportunism for the sake of protecting his rule.

Another, interested, way of being toward the world thus attained paramountcy as a guide to action. Realists mistake this for the end of ideology and the beginning of national interest; whereas national interest is in fact a concept dripping with ideology. The question, accordingly, is not whether Stalin was ideological but how he was ideological. There is, as Gorodetsky illustrates repeatedly, his geopolitical conventionality, a nineteenth-century conventionality to be more precise. There is his lack of any wider Marxist culture, in which regard he differed from his own generation of leading Bolsheviks (whom he largely liquidated). There is his extreme reductionism, extreme in the distillation of politics to a pure technology of power, to a conflictual game of cynical maneuvers by rational actors representing objective interests. Stalin had a special translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince prepared for him and marked it up diligently. He certainly preferred to be feared rather than loved. Perhaps he should have read The Eighteenth Brumaire instead. Marx’s brilliant analysis of class and politics under Napoleon III might, for one thing, have given him some hints on how to improve his limited understanding of fascism.

Zhukov, then, was right. Stalin was too clever by half and gravely misread Hitler, who was not a nineteenth-century politician. To Stalin, Hitler’s thrusts had been unexpectedly and alarmingly successful. They had looked remarkably risky. Strategically, however, they made sense: attack the west and get rid of the British before striking eastward, thus avoiding the curse of a two-front war. It made sense for Hitler, as the battle was stalling elsewhere, to drive through the Balkans to hit the British in the eastern Mediterranean. It made sense, too, for Hitler to make tough bargains with the Soviet Union in areas of conflicting interests and for the Soviet Union in turn to stake its irreducible security claims. Finally, it made sense as well for the British, when hard pressed in the region, to cause maximum trouble between the Soviet Union and Germany, and, if possible, to trick them into war. “A subtle political game” indeed: deadly, to be sure, but rational and fairly predictable. Who would be crazy enough in this situation to risk everything by attacking the Soviet Union alone? Who would be crazy enough to risk his enormous gains by opening up a second front? Who would be crazy enough to disregard the graphic lessons of history, the somber lessons of Charles XII and Napoleon? Surely, Hitler was not such an idiot – and so on.

This view was not based on any misplaced “trust” in Hitler on Stalin’s part, as is sometimes argued, usually with the aim of establishing their essential similarity. Stalin did not “trust” Hitler: he trusted his own knowledge and understanding of Hitler. Stalin had great faith in the combined “realities” of historical precedence and rational action. He also had great faith in his grasp of these realities. What devastated him, as the morning of 22 June became day, was precisely that he had been wrong. And he had been wrong in a way that could never be corrected by a suitably rearranged party line. Hitler’s “betrayal,” then, did not lie only in his breach of outstanding agreements but in his “idiocy” with regard to his own objective interests. The very transparency of the strategic setting had created room, seemingly, for the tactical maneuvers Stalin preferred and actually enjoyed. But the strategic transparency turned out to be a delusion. Hitler’s imprudence, his willingness to take extraordinary risks or his very unwillingness to see risks as risks, was profoundly transgressive, going far beyond the bounds of Stalin’s remarkably conventional sense of geopolitical rationality and interest (not to mention that of the British). Stalin’s tactical moves to minimize risks and maximize security achieved the exact opposite. He annoyed Hitler.

Stalin’s hyper-realism, his reductionism and tactical preoccupations would later lead him astray in a totally different set of circumstances. For in the postwar epoch he proved unable to understand the refusal of the West, the United States in particular, to iron out a rational agreement on spheres of influence in Europe. His realism could not accommodate within its rationality the peculiar dynamics of U.S. politics. He annoyed Truman, who also found him threatening. The president, never an adherent of proper nineteenth-century realism, then misread Stalin for Hitler, thinking that dictators are dictators and their intentions are all alike. This profound error resulted in a most successful strategic expansion of U.S. interests, much to the detriment of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s attempt to minimize risks and maximize security again achieved the exact opposite.