The West vs Stalin before W.W.2

 An interesting historical point occurred to me recently. It concerns the practical reasons why Stalin signed off with a treaty with Hitler before the start of the Second World War. Of course the treaty didn’t last very long as Germany invaded Russia in 1941 in Operation Barbarossa costing three quarters of a million Russian soldiers their lives to repel. Americans often use the treaty made by Stalin as an excuse or justification for putting Russia down morally in the modern world.

So I considered the circumstances of the treaty. Some of the west denied diplomatic recognition of the Soviet government of Russia and the United States had even sent 2000 marines to fight in Russia for the White Armies versus the Red Army in the Russian civil war. In short the west was antipathetic to the existence of the Russian government so when Germany offered a treaty Stalin was perhaps quick to take it; it was better to have one neutral party to the west rather than face a unified block of opposition to communism in Russia.

Pragmatism was thus the primary motive of Stalin in seeking to find peace to the west. Joseph Stalin was of course a ruthless dictator; one of the foremost of world history, yet he was also a realist. Maybe the treaty bought him some time before the Nazis would decide to invade. Plainly Stalin had no prospect or possibility of a rapprochement with the west before the Nazi invasion, when thereafter England and the United States sought Stalin as an ally in order to combat the Nazi expansion east and west. So in the final analysis I won’t hold the treaty as a negative point against Russia. Stalin made peace with the only neighbor nation that it could amid a solid neighborhood of haters to the west. Germany had yet to demonstrate the kind of people the Nazis were to the world, and that is a point to remember. Generally Americans blame Stalin for signing off with Hitler before the war as if he knew what the Nazis would be like in the future, and obviously that is absurd.

Should a nation not try to be at peace with its neighbor nations generally? Stalin was wrong with his choice to invade Finland morally speaking, yet that I a different issue and one concerning the problems of communism and dictators rather than Russians as a people. Russians did not elect a communist government to replace the Kerensky government and legislature (the Duma). Instead a revolution by cadres of well organized communists accomplished a takeover and never looked back through most of the 20^th century.