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STALIN’S BIG MISTAKE

A mutual-destruction pact.

Despite what his own propaganda and, recently, some Russian revisionists have said, Joseph Stalin made a lot of mistakes. His greatest mistake was not Lysenkoism, which destroyed Soviet science and agriculture. It wasn’t ignoring his own intelligence service’s warning that Hitler was about to attack in 1941. Nor was it panicking and hiding when the Nazis did attack, though his mental collapse at that time cost hundreds of thousands of soldiers their lives. The Russian dictator Joseph Stalin’s greatest mistake was a deal he made with Germany—long before the Nazis even took control.

The Treaty of Versailles was forced upon a defeated Germany after WWI. Many of the provisions in the treaty were designed to prevent any resurgence of the German army. Among the things explicitly forbidden to Germany were doing any tactical training, developing new doctrines, researching new weapon systems, and training in modern aircraft and tanks. Their officer corps and the entire army were limited to a size that was much smaller than those of any of their neighbors. Other treaty terms, particularly the economic ones, were also designed to keep Germany poor and unprepared for war. The resentment of this treaty by the German people and their elected government (which was closely tied to what remained of their army) was intense, and the German government made every effort to get around the restrictions. They found a strange ally, who proved vital in the revival of the Reichswehr.

Stalin’s Soviet Union had its own problems. In 1918 and 1919, parts of Russia were still controlled by the White Russian armies. His military technology was primitive, compared to that of the rest of Europe, and his officers were experienced only in fighting equally badly armed and trained Russians. The dictator had long coveted the skill and technology of the German army. When a neutral observer, Enver Pasha, suggested that Germany and Russia share information on the Polish army and defenses, it opened a door. A joint committee was formed in 1921 to identify other ways they could cooperate and it found many. Under the cover of offices whose purpose was purportedly to help repatriate Russian and German POWs from WWI, the two nations began to cooperate on a number of levels. In 1922, the Rapallo Treaty was signed. The key element of this agreement concerned the cooperation between the two armies.

The German army needed two things: military equipment that was forbidden to them by the Versailles Treaty and a place to train and rebuild their army in secret. They also needed the raw materials of war: oil, steel, minerals, and chemicals. The Soviet army needed German technology, weapons designs, and the much superior German machine tools. Both armies quickly saw the benefits of cooperation. The Germans got all they needed: military bases suitable for training officers and men, air bases, and large areas in which to develop their armored doctrines and even experiment with chemical weapons. Both sides agreed to exchange the ideas and techniques as they developed. This arrangement allowed the Reichswehr not only to accomplish its goals, but to do so in near-complete secrecy. Great efforts were made to disguise what officers and men were going east to train for on Russian-built armored vehicles and airplanes. Some German technology was transferred to Russia, but much was withheld. Germany developed everything from tanks and aircraft to better artillery and machine guns in Russia, though trust between the two nations was never complete. As much as the Soviet officers admired the German armored fighting vehicles, the panzers, they never mentioned they were developing, and then beginning to build, their own less sophisticated (but far hardier) T-34 tanks.

The first time anyone in the rest of Europe learned about this cooperation was in 1925, when the liberal German government announced it. But details were lacking and the Allies did not press the issue. By 1926, the Germans had their own panzer training school at Kama in Kazan, and by 1924, they had established their own air base at Lipetsk. Such officers as Guderian, Model, and Thoma were trained to command a modern, armored German army on bases in Russia. Such close cooperation continued into the early 1930s, but faded quickly after Adolf Hitler became reich chancellor. There is no question that the German Army benefited much more greatly than did the Russian. Worse for Russia was that the many well-trained officers who had studied in Germany were considered later to be politically unreliable and most died in Stalin’s 1938 officers’ purge, simply because they had trained there.

Stalin literally allowed the revival and development of the Wehrmacht. He did this, and then squandered most of what the Red Army gained from that cooperation. There were doubters. Neither side ever trusted the other. Both were right not to. Had Joseph Stalin listened to those who remembered fighting the Germans in WWI, and not agreed to the joint cooperation or signed the Rapallo Treaty, there might never have been a WWII. The Reichswehr would never have been able to develop the panzer corps within Germany. There would have been no Luftwaffe, because the hundreds of pilots trained on the Lipetsk field would not have been ready to step into Willy Messerschmitt’s new designs. Germany would have remained starved for raw materials as well, which would have further slowed its return to militarism. Stalin, to gain some technology and training for men he later killed, allowed the recovery of the German army that the Treaty of Versailles tried to prevent. Had he not done so, there would have been no Blitzkrieg, no London Blitz, no German army to threaten Austria and then Czechoslovakia. More directly, in 1941, the Wehrmacht would have been in no position to invade Russia. Without the war, communism would have been limited to industrially and economically backward Russia and never have become the world-threatening power that the looting of Eastern Europe allowed it to become. No World War II, probably no Hitler as Führer, and at least twenty million lives saved, if Stalin had not helped train the army of his nation’s traditional and worst enemy.