Thomas777 and Pete Quinones - The Revisionist Dialogues

Vol. VII: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Stalin's Planned War for Global Domination

THOMAS

Today, I wanted to delve deep into Operation Barbarossa, a term familiar to most, though perhaps not to everyone. It served as the code name for the German assault on the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941. This marked an absolutely cataclysmic event, involving a clash of literally millions of men on both sides across a thousand-mile front, resulting in devastating losses. It was the kind of clash, both in terms of arms and men that, without exaggeration, had never been witnessed before and likely will not be witnessed again, at least not for a thousand years. This topic has occupied my thoughts significantly.

As we were discussing just before starting this recording, I am by no means a military historian. However, there is a military dimension to revisionism, as a substantial portion of it involves delving into conflict literature and addressing the entirety of the political landscape. This, undoubtedly, includes a major military aspect.

But as this unfortunate Ukraine war unfolds, a conflict that need not have happened, these place names and battle spaces are the same settings of hostilities during Barbarossa, and that's quite fascinating to me. I'm not at Google. I'm not saying, "Oh, this is exciting." I'm here to act as a remote spectator of hostilities, but it is fascinating how these places, which have been quiet for three-quarters of a century, are once again aflame with the dogs of war. Anyway, I want to delve deep into that today.

But first, considering it's such a vast topic, I don't believe we'll need to dedicate as much time to it as we did to the career of Mr. Churchill. However, we must delve into the theoretical foundations of the ideologies that gave rise to this clash. When examining the Second World War, your perspective may differ depending on your nationality and where you are located.

Not just in terms of the narrative, but also in what you emphasize. If you were to speak with a Russian person, he or she might share insights about the Great Patriotic War, emphasizing that it didn't truly unfold until June '41, as that was the pivotal moment. On the other hand, conversing with an Englishman who has embraced the mainstream historical narrative, they might present a hero narrative of Mr. Churchill and discuss events like Dunkirk.

For Americans, the introduction to the Second World War often occurs at a young age. In my case, it happened when I was a little kid because my mom's brother, who was 22 years older than her due to being her half-brother (thanks to her father, something of a ladies' man), played a role. When my mom was born, he was around 50 years old, and his wife was 21. Quite an age difference, but props to him.

My uncle Harold, after whom I am named, fought on Tarawa against the Japanese. When I was a little kid, he shared stories with me about his experiences fighting the Japanese, and not inappropriately, I might add. It was quite common to have a grandpa or an uncle who had fought against the Japanese, and that was a prevalent topic. It seemed odd to me in school how, due to the demographics of where I grew up and the political climate of the 1980s, we heard a lot about "Holocaust theology" and such, as that didn't loom large in our discussions.

My point is that, in all conflicts and historical events, certain aspects are emphasized. In revisionist terms, objectively speaking, I find myself agreeing with Ernst Nolte. He discussed the European civil war, spanning from 1914 to 1945, viewing it as akin to the 30 Years' War.

If the listeners are familiar with that, it's a kind of terrible, ongoing sectarian conflict between kingdoms and duchies, characterized by shifting alliances. I don't wholly accept Nolte’s metaphysical description of the concepts, but I do accept Nolte’s metaphysical description of the concepts and kind of the, because he's very much a Hegelian, or he was; he's dead now, in terms of, the kind of, for lack of a better word to characterize it, metaphysical causes - in terms of ideas and how ideas animated people to war. I think of World War II basically as a war between Hitler, Roosevelt, and Stalin.

Prior to that - there was a kind of typical modern era power-political collision between France and Germany , largely conforming to conventional understandings of geopolitics. And that's one of the reasons France, after being defeated militarily, basically made real peace with Germany.   - we'll get into that later in the series too, but some people might be surprised to learn that when the Americans landed in North Africa in '43, the first forces that engaged were French who were fighting on the side of the Axis.

The UK's war against Germany, which began in 1939 when the UK declared war on Berlin, in my view, saw the UK being defeated at Dunkirk. After that, the war seemed essentially over until the terror bombing was initiated by the British bomber arm. However, I perceive the UK as liquidating not just its assets but also its sovereignty to the United States, essentially becoming a client regime. So, I see the UK as losing its war against Germany, much like France lost its war in 1940 and, in the aftermath of defeat, became a client of the United States. In this truly global conflict involving the Soviet Union and the United States against the German Reich, which by that point had a million non-Germans under arms in the Waffen-SS and had truly evolved into a European army.

Leon DeGrelle discusses this, and many right-wing individuals interested in Third Reich history are familiar with Leon DeGrelle. So, that's my perspective. I won't bore people to death with more elaborate introduction - but now I want to delve into the origin of the German-Soviet war and why it occurred. I also aim to address some myths that need to be confronted before diving into it. There's this misguided notion, often perpetuated in popular history, that even some barstool types and individuals who should know better, like history teachers, express. They suggest things like, "Oh, Hitler's big mistake was assaulting the Soviet Union”. In reality the only way Germany wins World War II is by defeating the Soviet Union. That's how you defeat Churchill. That's how you defeat Roosevelt. That's how you create fortress Europe. That is how Europe becomes a superpower.

That's how you make Europe a superpower that can compete on the world stage in the era of great space politics.  . Regardless of what you consider the primary war ambition in objective terms, and whatever you consider to be the correct military and political orientation of Berlin, the only way to achieve that is if the Soviet Union is defeated.  The idea that Hitler was merely choosing from a menu of potential attack locations and made the wrong decision is not a meaningful understanding of the strategic landscape.  Why do I say that? First of all, everything about the Third Reich in military terms, its structure, its doctrine, and the anticipated deployment of forces, as well as Hitler's geostrategic vision for securing Europe and enabling it to compete on the world stage in power-political terms, all of that is tied to the reality of the Soviet Union as a burgeoning superpower, with its productive capacity potentially surpassing every other state on the planet except the United States.

PETE

You're saying it sounds like what you're implying is that Hitler was fighting for basically all of Europe, where a lot of people will say Hitler just wanted to take every country in Europe and make it part of Germany. He wanted to make Europe all basically under his power. So, when you say it like that, it can sound like that, and that's not at all what happened.

THOMAS

Well, there's a couple. Here's the thing. I made the point before that, Hitler was a Habsburg Austrian, as everybody knows, but he thought like a Prussian. Yet somehow he also appealed to these Munich Bavarian types. Hitler had to be somewhat cosmopolitan to facilitate his ascendancy. And I don't think that was just a cynical ploy. I think he believed that. Also, Hitler made the point again and again that nationalism was dead, cabinet warring was a dead end.

It wasn't going to lead to anything, and he was constantly talking about great space paradigms as the future of power-political hegemony.  Other than the state of Croatia, which really was kind of a mirror of the national socialist state, albeit with its own indigenous characteristics, Germany had very much opposed exporting some kind of National Socialist paradigm to other political cultures. That's why Romania, we were talking about, I made the point that Antonescu was, I believe, Hitler's best ally in a lot of ways. He wasn't as close personally to the Fuhrer as Mussolini was. But Romania committed, relative to the size of the population, a huge contingent of men to the Eastern Front. Antoniscu was a war hero in his own right.

He was a holder of the Knight's Cross and had a great understanding of military and strategic matters. Hitler favored Antonescu over the Iron Guard. He did not want some radically Fascist or Fascistoid regime, or some National Socialist-type regime, taking power in Romania. Nor did he in Slovakia, nor did he in Bulgaria, nor did he in France. I don't hear people talk about Vichy France. It's notable that until it became clear that there was going to be no concord and no peace between the UK and Germany, the Germans scrupulously avoided occupying France outside of the essential coastal areas , they didn't do that because they were nice guys. The point being that if the Germans were hell-bent on destroying Europe and restructuring it in the image of the fear of National Socialism, that's not the way you go about that.

PETE

And you can say that. Franco and Salazar would have had something to say about that, just using two examples.

THOMAS
Yeah, exactly. So, it's more complicated, it's not a question of whether Hitler was a good guy or not. But in objective terms, that's not really the sensibility that guided him. And, yeah, there were men in the OKW, and certainly, there were men in the National Socialist Party who had a very chauvinistic view of things, in racial terms and in ethnic terms. But, that's just characteristic of Europe. And, regardless, even Germany today, which is this occupied state and a shadow of itself, Europe - it orbits around Berlin.

 That's inevitable, in some basic sense. So, yeah, if the Germans got their way – and when I say the Germans,   the Third Reich – definitely, nothing would have happened on the continent within their sphere of influence and dominance without their say-so. But this idea that they would have just created puppet regimes everywhere, like – as was characteristic of the Warsaw Pact vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, that's not the case. And what I'm going to dive into in a moment is how it wasn't just military exigencies in the reality of power politics that led the Führer and the party, as well as the military apparatus and the kind of industrial national economic elite, to structure the state and its productive capacities to combat the Soviet Union in material terms. But really, even if you're not a Hegelian like I am, you've got to understand the emergence of National Socialism – that it can only be understood in dialectical conflict with Communism. What animated people to fight against the Soviet Union wasn't that they loved the Führer so much or they loved Berlin, or they all wanted to be dominated by Germany. It was because they didn't view another path to European survival as a discrete cultural form and way of life, to say nothing of politically sovereign and independent states within what could be considered a European structure without a – without a confederation of sorts.

PETE

Confederation?

THOMAS

Yeah, yeah, for better or worse. But the point is that , you wouldn't have had millions of literally a million non-Germans in the Waffen-SS, a good portion of which were volunteers if they were just fighting for, on behalf of, bringing the German boot heel down on their neck or something. It's not a gross oversimplification. German racialism, we might find it off-putting in the 21st century - but I make the point again and again that's the way everybody on the planet thought. Not everybody thought in terms of being so aggressively and dialectically hostile to Jews and what they viewed as Jewish power. But you better believe that in America, eugenics was what everybody thought was the correct kind of application of anthropology. You better believe everybody in the UK and everybody in Japan viewed a hierarchy of races. So it's not weird that the Germans viewed nationality in terms of race or had this kind of strange idea that , your blood, or in our terms, DNA - but in those days, obviously, the human genome hadn't been mapped, and people didn't understand those kinds of things.

But even people who are relatively traditional-minded and even people who still had some affinity for religion (and believe me, religion took a huge hit in the 20th century, thankfully that has abated, and that's a subject for another show) , it's another thing that's mischaracterized as an idea that, oh, the Germans were these crazy guys who had this kind of biologically determinative view of human behavior. Again - that's the way everybody thought. I'd argue that Germans were somewhat less fixated that way than the Americans. Like America literally had – people like Francis Galton and guys like Lothrop Stoddard – who was was a journalist, they were literally fixated on this idea that morphological characteristics were indicative of behavior and potential. Don't get me wrong, I believe race is a significant biological characteristic. I'm not saying otherwise, but they were foolish about it. They talked about it in ways that don't make sense. Your culture is not biologically programmed or something, it's not. That's nonsense. So that's important to understand. But getting back to, there's a quote I wanted to drop. It's about one of the only things that I think remains timely about Mein Kampf.

I made the point before in our own discussions, as well as, I think, on the record, Mein Kampf is really an election-year treatise. It's not supposed to have this perennial and enduring significance. Hitler didn't really get into either metaphysics or kind of deep historicism. It's really an appeal, an election-year appeal to Weimar voters, explaining why the National Socialists are going to pursue policy that's the correct path forward. But there is, and was, I think in most editions, it's on page 60. If I'm wrong with the edition you or anybody has, forgive me for that, but I'm going to read this in a moment. And I try to avoid direct quoting text here. But it's timely. Let me find what I'm looking for.

 It's something not enough talked about – what was the fear of what Nolte called practical transcendence, that's somewhat, there's not so much lost in translation as there's not a deep metaphysical tradition in American political theory - owing to the fact that, America is so kind of bound up with the rationalist tradition and such that America doesn’t have kind of a metaphysical tradition in its indigenous philosophy. It's basically Aristotelian and Bible Protestant, which is my own heritage. I'm not in any way suggesting that's bad, but it doesn't really shed light on the European mind.

 Practical transcendence, in the terms we are talking about, is kind of a Heideggerian concept. It refers to conceptual horizons of the past being destroyed by collision with modern institutions, ideas, and ways of interpreting and experiencing the world around us. So, whether we're talking about beloved institutions of culture, or social organization, or labor becoming outmoded, and people being ripped out of environments that have provided them not just with identity but with a kind of historical rootedness and consciousness that endures across generations, the process by which that sort of thing becomes remote, if not outright abolished, can be understood as practical transcendence within Nolte’s and to some lesser degree Heidegger's paradigm.

Now, Hitler was not a philosopher and did not purport to be, but he acknowledged in some basic sense that some of this is inevitable because that's just one of the crosses, proverbially  of which European man is the bearer - not just as he experiences hypermodernity, but European man, enamored with the Faustian ethos and spirit, and being enamored with techniques and technology, runs a real risk of losing himself in these things.

But, of course, Hitler pointed out that one of the most insidious iterations of this tendency towards practical transcendence was Marxism. Marxism was a deliberate perversion of these concepts, a weaponized iteration emerging from the Jewish world of social existence. Now, Hitler wasn't suggesting a conspiracy, but he was asserting an intrinsic hostility of Jewish culture - and the way it expresses itself politically is always in a formally hostile discourse. So, the way he described Marxism and what it represents to European man, in Mein Kampf, he said, and I quote, "The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the massive numbers and their dead weight. Thus, it denies the value of personality in man.

It contests the significance of nationality and race and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and culture. As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any intellectually conceivable order. And as in the greatest of all recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only be chaos on earth. It could only be the destruction, the destruction of the inhabitants of this planet. If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity.

And this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether of the void of space, without culture of men”.  That sounds very melodramatic, and it is. You can even say its overwrought language, but, I feel or believe this 100% to be accurate. And that is the end result of the Marxist enterprise. Even if you don't accept that it's a Jewish idea or that it was born of a Jewish world of social existence. I'm not here to argue with that point or unpack that, but it's indisputable that the removal of man from history - Marxism, by its own postulates, seeks to literally end history and remove man from the kind of intellectual slavery in their view of these conceits of metaphysics or of God or of anything because in the Marxist paradigm, these things are all contrivances of the rationalized power dynamics relating to labor and capital and authority and hierarchy that's imposed to satisfy the demands of those things. It's an ideology of cultural annihilation, masquerading in some basic senses as economic science. Now, that's not to say that Marxists all were rubbing their hands together and saying, "Oh, I want to destroy Europe or Christian civilization." Certainly, some of them did think that, but probably most of them didn't, but we're talking about the way man instinctively responded to - a lot of them still do – the ongoing crisis of modernity.

And I'd say more do so now in terms of overall representation than before before, but, the problem, the reason why this idea has developed this kind of monumental power to animate people is that people are taken in by such ideas, cast in apocalyptic terms. When people are confronted by crises, not just a physical, mortal crisis, but at the same time, a kind of psychological crisis of their conceptual horizon, not just to them personally, but the entire culture - once they're mired in this, this whole conceptual horizon imploding on itself, and values that preceding generations could take for granted no longer have a context, and man no longer has any polestars to orient himself and his life individually or among a community in which he lives,  people become desperate to make sense of these chaotic circumstances. They get very much taken in by paradigms that seem to make sense and seem to reflect the concrete circumstances in which they're found.

So, that's essential to understand why the National Socialists were not just making a boogeyman of Marxism or something. They weren't just trying to rationalize what amounts to a racial or tribal prejudice against the Eastern Slavs under the veneer of ideology or something. Now, there may have been an aspect of that because there certainly wasn't love lost between the Germans and the Eastern Slavs, and particularly a man like Adolf Hitler who would have viewed Serbia essentially as responsible for the Great War. And opposite Hitler within his coalition, these Prussian officer types who would have viewed the Eastern Slavs not only in the way like a white man in the West would have viewed the Apache or something in the frontier days.

And I'm not saying that to cast shade on either Indians or Slavic people, talking about how they were viewed as this fearful other that was somehow savage and dangerous. But if you want to understand National Socialism, yes, there were positive characteristics, positive in the sense that this is laudable, like I'm not issuing a value judgment – I mean proactive, spontaneous characteristics that gave rise to the ideology. But an equal percentage of its content was ethically, conceptually, reactive due to the conceptual challenge posed by Communism. And this was not just something remote. Like we talked about in one of our first episodes, look quite literally in Berlin and Munich, especially, the Bavarian Soviet, for a brief period, was the reigning government. Albeit, they captured sovereign power through violence. And to say nothing of what happened in the Baltics, where you had many German refugees who faced the fear of being ethnically cleansed when the Bolsheviks attempted to export the revolution there. So, this was something that the German people had firsthand knowledge of, not just something they were fearful about - as something remote or that they read in the papers or whatever.

Moving on to the concrete circumstances, one of the big myths of the German-Soviet war and Stalin's intentions, opposite Adolf Hitler's, was this idea that the Soviet Union was this inward-looking kind of state and that the Soviets were just primitive, and Stalin declared socialism in one country because he had no interest in a truly global power politics. And also, within that kind of fatuous narrative, there's a claim that Germany was this aggressive power assaulting all its neighbors, like Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland - while the Soviet Union was pursuing a path of relative peace, overlooking badly treated people within its own borders. That's a bold-faced lie.

And we're going to talk about that. As of 1940 not only due to aggressive invasion and conquest, as well as as was the case with the Baltic and Romania, but also by coercion and threat - by 1940, the Soviet Union had expanded its territory by 426,000 square kilometers.   For reference, that is the size of the entire surface area of what the German Reich had been as of 1919. This is a huge amount of territory.  The Soviet Union spontaneously invaded Finland. It had invaded Poland, days, weeks after the Wehrmacht did. And, as we talked about last episode, when Joe Kennedy posed to John Simon, like, "Why doesn't it bother Mr. Churchill or Mr. Chamberlain that the Soviet Union assaulted Poland too?", nobody can answer this question. But, so you have, in addition to the kind of foundation that we already established with respect to the German political mind, for better or worse, viewing not just Germany but the entire European way of life coming under threat from Marxist-Leninism, you had quite literally what was becoming the world's first superpower in the Soviet Union.

 Despite having soundly defeated the British Army at Dunkirk, Germany was still engaged in a state of war with the UK, which still possessed an incredibly powerful navy in relative terms. They still had a prolific capacity to reconstitute a strategic air arm, which they certainly did to devastating effect; we're going to get into that in a later episode. But by 1940, not only did Germany have the Soviet Union, which, as we just discussed, had aggressively annexed a huge amount of territory, Germany was essentially engaged with a hostile front stretching from Norway to the Pyrenees as a potential battle space. They were in grave danger of losing access to Romanian petroleum, which was the only source of fuel for their war machine. If Stalin had given the order to formally annex Romania and proceed to embargo any access Germany had to essential commodities there, what I'm getting at is that Germany was in a position of abject inferiority in material, military, and geostrategic terms. So the idea that the Soviet Union was benign is laughable; Germany was in a very critical position.

Now, something interesting happened—not just interesting, but critical in my opinion. On November 12, 1940, Stalin transmitted a series of demands to Molotov. As I think people probably know, Molotov was not just a man who invented a particular kind of cocktail that people light on fire and throw at the British police in Northern Ireland and such; he was the Soviet foreign minister. And within the paradigm of Soviet power, from 1917 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was very little leeway that people had in the foreign policy establishment to negotiate on their own terms or according to their own instincts, and particularly Stalin rigidly controlled what was said, what was guaranteed, and what official terms were from Moscow. So whatever Molotov conveyed to Berlin—whether he was talking to Ribbentrop, whether he was talking to the Reich Chancellery, whoever he was talking to—it was as good as coming from Stalin, that's not a myth. It's not me simplifying certain sentences to shore up a point or something.

It's inarguable, and pretty much everybody agrees on that, revisionist or not. The demands that Stalin transmitted were basically this: the Non-Aggression Pact that Hitler had signed, that Ribbentrop and Molotov had signed, that had been at Hitler's behest—the 10-year Non-Aggression Pact between the Soviet Union and Germany - Stalin periodically was issuing demands as to whatever was required for it to be honored. Of course, he was very sly about the way he phrased this. He wasn't saying, “You'll either abide by these demands I have, or we're going to attack you." But the inference was obvious, and it was the only inference that could be drawn. This will become clearer as we get more into this conversation.

On November 12 and 13, what the demands were, Molotov said that in order for the Soviet Union to be able to peaceably coexist with Germany, provide for its own security, and facilitate its ability to deploy in depth, it would need to increase its sphere of influence to include Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Greece, Yugoslavia, and all of Finland. Not just Archangel, but all of Finland. Hitler had, albeit frosty, but reasonably friendly relations with Gustav Mannerheim, the Marshall of Finland. Obviously, this was Stalin basically demanding that Germany abandon any pretension of Finland as some sort of line in the sand against Soviet expansion. This is incredibly brazen, and you've got to ask yourself: if, supposedly, Stalin was this man living in fear of the Third Reich, or the Soviet Union was somehow weak in material terms, in forces in being relative to the Third Reich. How could he be issuing these demands?

That doesn't make any sense. Also, if Hitler was this kind of reckless maniac who just gave attack orders without thinking, why wouldn't this be inviting an immediate assault? Like none of this makes sense, obviously, unless one's willing to kind of reject the prevailing narrative. Now, obviously, these Molotov demands, which, effectively are Stalin's demands, there are really only two options here; Germany could have opted to fight. In the case of Germany, that would have meant, and did mean, a preemptive assault or simply accept Soviet hegemony. In the 20th century, with the advent of strategic arms—not just nuclear weapons, which, of course, didn't exist yet, but there was not a full understanding in 1940 of how strategic arms could be applied and what the outcome would be in military terms. But it was understood that battlefield techniques were going to be able to create absolutely devastating catastrophes for the state under assault if they did not have any countermeasures, so what I'm getting at is that if Germany had remained dormant and just kind of demurred to Soviet demands, the Soviets would not, I think in my mind, have planned to assault Germany in 1940. We're going to get into that in a minute. But even if the Soviets had not, just by virtue of the fact that they would have been so exponentially more powerful than their next strong strategic rival in Germany, it wouldn't have mattered.

They would have, in power political terms; Moscow would have dictated what was going to transpire in Europe and Europe's orbit. Now, I rely a lot on direct testimony, I think people have noticed now, I've been told that that's a conceptual bias of mine because I was a lawyer. I don't think that's the case. I think that direct testimony is one of the only ways we can get inside the minds of people who lived in these apocalyptic moments and understand what their perceptions were.  Obviously, there's an issue of how credible the declarant is, but if you're discriminating and I think over time, you see patterns and a kind of quorum emerges of what people and in governmental roles thought. We can get to the truth of what perception was. Joachim Hoffmann – he’s a German historian, very highly esteemed. I highly recommend his book called, "Stalin's War of Extermination." Within the book are a lot of testimonies from people in the Soviet government and the Soviet military apparatus. And people from all walks, everybody from the security apparatus, where primarily political commissars, to officers and NCOs in the Red Army, to people who were defectors to the German side.

And there's a basic agreement here. There's a woman named, I'm probably butchering this pronunciation, I know I always add that caveat, and I'm sorry if that's the case once again, but a woman named Wanda Vasilevska. She was the chairwoman of what was called euphemistically the Union of Polish Patriots. Now, this was the expat communist league in the USSR , during the Polish military junta , and a lot of these people went on to form kind of the core of the Warsaw Pact client state after the war. Now, what she attested to in 1964, I believe the first historian she disclosed this to was Robert Conquest, but it's become - you'll find this in a lot of different treatments, not just revisionist treatments, but her statement was this about the orientation on the eve of Barbarossa within Moscow.  

She said, "I remember that we communists, regardless of the official position of the Soviet government, were all of the opinion that the apparent friendly attitude towards Germany was only a tactic of the Soviet government, and that in reality, the situation was entirely different. After all, I want to not forget that it was already clear to us even at that time that a German-Soviet war was approaching. Regardless of the official announcement, we believed the war was drawing near, and we waited for it every day. Stalin told me at that time there would be war with the Germans sooner or later. This means that indeed, at that time, we already had the assurance of and confirmation from the highest authority that we were right to expect war”.

I'm not going to endlessly relay all these testimonials, but there are probably half a dozen declarations from everyone ranging from men in Molotov's orbit to defectors from what became known as the Vlasov Army. These were not a homogeneous group of people, and it's obviously not itself absolutely persuasive. However, what I think is indisputable in terms of its persuasive weight is the Red Army's deployments as of June 22, 1941, the date of Barbarossa. The Red Army had 24,000 tanks deployed on the western frontier, with over 1,800 of them being T-34s—considered by many as the best all-around tank platform of the war. Notably, 1,500 of those T-34s were manufactured in the first six months of 1941. That's an incredible production schedule, frankly, for the time. They had 23,245 military aircraft amassed since 1938, close to 4,000 of which were of the latest design and inarguably not obsolescent. They had 148,000 artillery pieces and close to 300 submarines. I realize the distinction between offensive and defensive war is dubious, and we'll get into that a little bit too, but I really don’t think anybody can claim that submarines are a defensive measure. Toward the end, even the Soviet models that were viewed as inferior—and again, I'm not a military expert at all, and it's not my forte—but platforms like the T-34 and the T-26 were specifically designed as countermeasures to earlier German Panzer models. They were categorically superior to the Panzer III, if not superior to the Panzer IV, and they all had heavy armament tailored to kill German tanks. This is why they were developed.

In the weeks immediately prior, on May 15, 1941, the Soviets had 303 divisions. 258 of those, infantry, armor, artillery, in other words, ground combat elements, were arrayed offensively - deployed on the frontier against the German Reich. They were supported by 165 flight regiments mobilized in direct support of the ground element. The General Staff reported after the onset of hostilities, in August 1941, even with the losses incurred, which were catastrophic in the opening weeks of Barbarossa, Soviet forces in being were between 330 and 350 divisions. They were facing off against just over 1800 non-obsolescent German tanks and self-propelled assault guns, and the Luftwaffe threw essentially everything it had at the Soviet Union. We'll get into this later too , the German, again, I don't want to get too much into the nitty-gritty of military hardware and minutiae, but it's relevant to perception of forces in being, and what we can extrapolate from those forces in being to intent. The Reich deployed 2500 contemporary German aircraft, but overwhelmingly, the Luftwaffe did not have a strategic capability.

It really did not. That's all the reason why the Battle of Britain, even though it's talked about in these catastrophic terms, was nothing compared to the area bombing raids that killed tens of thousands in one day, carried out by the Allies. It [the Luftwaffe orientation] was a completely different orientation towards air war, and it was almost exclusively dedicated to ground attack and tactical exigencies. But what I think is more significant is Red Army doctrine. I think it was, in some ways (and I'm not trying to be corny), as the original revolution in military affairs. The Red Army, beginning with Lenin—Lenin fancied himself a political soldier and he really was. He wasn't just, some partisan type who declared himself a general or something.

He had great aptitude for a certain kind of warfare. And what became Red Army doctrine, from 1917-18, the Revolutionary days until the last days of the Soviet Union, came from Lenin. Lenin declared that the Red Army was the armed element of the party, and its purpose was to bring about socialist aims by armed force. That's the only reason it existed, because within the Marxist paradigm, warfare is just a means by which capitalists profit or sustain their dominance or sacrifice surplus labor and lumpenproletariat elements that can't be disposed of in more profitable ways. Stated simply, the only correct use of a standing army in a Communist state would be to implement revolutionary aims and aggressively export those aims.

Towards that end, what became official Soviet military doctrine, or theory rather, which translated to doctrine, was the assumption that modern war is just no longer declared. Not only is this a capitalist contrivance, and why should we participate in these fictions related to treaties and the appearance of lawfulness, but the nature of combined arms and technology-driven warfare suggests that surprise has a paralyzing effect. This is what the Red Army Field Duty Regulation declared in the 1939 edition: "Surprise has a paralyzing effect on the enemy; therefore, all military action must be carried out with the greatest concealment and greatest rapidity." If you want an example of this translated doctrine, both the Soviet attack on Poland and the Soviet assault on Finland in 1939 had no declaration of war, no communication of a diplomatic nature, and no announcement by which Finnish or Polish representatives were banished from Moscow.

It was just a massive assault, bolt from the blue. So there you go, this wasn't something that was put to paper as – by fevered, revolutionary types, but didn't have any real-world precedent. So, what everybody learned really quick is that when the Red Army assaults, it is a bolt from the blue assault, they, there's not going to be early warning, there's not - there's not going to be a formal declaration. There's not going to be some communique, some cryptic communique even that says there's no longer ‘’good offices’’ between diplomatically. Rather, you're going to know you're at war with the Soviet Union because they're going to be assaulting in mass numbers across the board. Joachim Hoffman translated a lot of this literature, not just in the field duty regulations, but from other official dispatches of the Red Army High Command. And I don't speak a Russian, but Herr Hoffman certainly did. He's dead now and what he translated was these five points. The first was the Red Army is an offensive army, the most offensively oriented of all armies, them speaking of themselves. Always conduct the Red Army will always conduct war and operate on enemy territory with few as possible friendly casualties, and it will always aim to annihilate the enemy completely, politically, and militarily.

The proletariat in the hostile country is always a potential ally of Soviet power, and they will support the struggle of the Red Army by bolstering pressure to the rear of the enemy army. This must be cultivated through war preparations - specifically preparations for attack. Defensive measures serve solely to protect preparations for attack and the execution of an offensive attack. Finally, the Red Army must, at all costs, preclude any possibility of the penetration of hostile forces into the territory of the USSR.

Now, again, this isn't just my niche interest, like military sociologists or people studying Soviet history might emphasize. If this is you’re declared military doctrine taken together with all these other variables, how probable and credible are the claim that the Soviet Union was this kind of fearful, garrison state just waiting for the Germans to attack but hoping they would not?   That is preposterous. I noted the cliché, and it's rarer that the enduring cliché doesn't bear out somewhat in truth. Operationally, the reputation of the Prussians and later the Germans was that they jumped the gun and assaulted too soon. The reputation of the Russians and later the Soviets was that they waited too long. I'd argue this bore out in the Ukraine situation.

But that's not what we're talking about. The claim, basically, of court history is that Stalin may have been a bad man, an intriguer, and a Machiavellian brute, but he somehow had no designs on aggressive conquest of Europe, despite these massive swaths of territory that the Soviet Union had captured with hostility. The claim is that Stalin was somehow fearful of Adolf Hitler, both as a historical person and as a force, despite the fact that the German Reich was grossly disadvantaged in terms of forces in being, material assets, and resources. But also, most incredibly, is the claim that, “Well, yeah, maybe the Soviets were anticipating war, but they were just waiting to be attacked”.  That's totally at odds with not just their stated doctrine but with the entire organizational structure and ideological culture of the Soviet Union at the time, to say nothing of their actual deployments!

I don't want to get too deeply into military minutiae. Not because it's not interesting, but it's - first of all, not my wheelhouse. But also, it does have to be said, though, even accounting for that , why the Soviets were so devastated in the early weeks of Barbarossa? Yeah, they had problems with command and control. They had some officers - they had some General officers who owed their role to political reliability rather than aptitude, yes - and the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS were incredibly tough, incredibly game, and incredibly brutal. But the Red Army was in an offensive deployment. This is key. They weren't arrayed to absorb a heavy, killer combined arms blow across a massive front from the Wehrmacht.

They just were not - and that's one of the reasons this happened. If the Soviets were hunkered down and dug in and fearfully awaiting a Wehrmacht assault, we know how the Russians deploy when that's what they're anticipating. And they deploy like they did at Kursk. And it's textbook “Deep Battle”, and it's devastating to the attacker.  You don't need to be a military man or some kind of armchair general to perceive this.

PETE

 Just look at the Spanish Civil War. Franco's forces were killing commies. The communists were killing everyone. They're flying priests and nuns, they are basically, they're not just trying to take over; they're also trying to punish.

THOMAS
Yeah, definitely. Awful stuff was carried out. And yeah, that's not to go too far off on a tangent, but that's one of the things that really stiffened world opinion, particularly in Europe against the Communists. You can aim to dismiss these events in Spain as propaganda tales – as people do, but nuns really were being raped - and, you had these Cheka types going into the cemeteries where clergy people were interred in and defacing their mortal remains.

The sort of stuff that would only occur to somebody if they were animated by real hatred of the national culture. And yeah, so there's not, that's the key important point, not only, as we were talking about earlier, was it with the Germans, not only was Communism and revolution not this remote thing that they only knew of as this abstraction that might threaten them in the future, but these guys in the Party, like Rosenberg, and like Richter (who fell at Munich in 1923) . Like these guys basically were refugees from the Baltic because they were being ethnically cleansed.

These guys – these Baltic Germans - who constituted the kind of backbone of some of the most dedicated Freikorps elements that ended up taking up the National Socialist banner - they fought the KPD in the street and they fought against the Munich Soviet. And yeah, the experience of the war in Spain, it wasn't some mystery as to how the Red Army fights. These so-called Spanish “Republicans”, they were - they weren't Republicans, they were Communists. They were Communists no matter what some of the literature promoted in English-speaking newspapers said. They were cadres trained and outfitted by Chekists and by Red Army officers and cut their teeth fighting in service of Revolutionary ambitions. So, there wasn't this big mystery in chambers of OKW or in the minds of Wehrmacht war planners and nascent Waffen SS officers as to how the Red Army fights and what their doctrine was. Their ideological commitment wasn't separable from their tactical orientation, in other words. But I'll wrap up soon; I realize we're coming up on an hour.

Something that I think Mearsheimer got into this in one of his more recent books. I like Mearsheimer, and I don't know the man, but - I like his work product, and I think he's, I think some of his stuff is kind of middlebrow, deliberately. He's trying to appeal to a more mass audience than some political scientists are, but there's some pretty heavy stuff even that's said in some of his more polemical works.

And one of his books is called "Why Leaders Lie?" And he made the point that, states that are, regardless of political culture or official ideology, regardless of their formal political apparatus, whatever its declared structure is - whether it holds itself out as a ‘’democracy” , whether you're talking about a Fascist state of old, whether you're talking about these retrograde Arab monarchies - whatever the state you're talking about, states that are mired in existential emergencies, conditions approaching outright war or states that are actually mired in conditions of total war. One thing leaders really don't do is just tell lies publicly, you can particularly rely upon the truth of the matter asserted when they're talking to people who constitute the control group, either the military or the political apparatus, of the adversary because if they tell lies in that circumstance not only could it lead to great consequences in terms of existential national security outcomes, but it also means that – look,  a man who's not going to tell the truth in life or death conditions is not a man who's fit for leadership. So you can rely pretty much on what Hitler and Stalin said on the eve of Barbarossa and certainly when it was underway.

And on May 5, 1941, I don't know exactly how this was organized. And I'm sure some Russian fellows or ladies were listening if they want to weigh in in the comments later. I believe there was a unitary military Academy in the early Soviet days that everybody went to, whether they were Navy or whether they were Army, I don't know that for certain. So whatever the Red Army Military Academy was where Army officers went, Stalin appeared to much fanfare at the graduation ceremony on May 5, 1941. Obviously, that's only a few days after May Day - which was the big Gala day for Communists. Stalin addressed a speech to this graduating class. Now, mind you, this is all young officers about to get their commission and a bunch of party honchos and generals. So it's not properly secret, but Stalin's not addressing the Soviet people, and he's certainly not going on the radio. He stated that these men were ‘’astride history’’, these young officer graduates, because the Red Army Doctrine was now, to quote, ‘’To abandon defensive tactics and adopt the military policy of attack operations.’’ And Stalin came back to this point again and again throughout the speech – emphasizing to the new officers, ‘’You are this spear point - or the sword of the Communist Party. And we are exclusively a Revolutionary apparatus, we are not a defensive army, so you men are astride history because you're literally going to bring socialism to the planet’, essentially. And this was not hyperbole, it's not some kind of motto that appeared under the heraldic hammer and sickle in the Politburo , this is something that was taken very seriously.

 And this was really, truly validated by the cohesion and enthusiasm of the new, ‘’Communized’’ officer corps. I'll wrap up with this kind of final testimony. And again, forgive me if I'm butchering the name, Zelenkov, I believe the pronunciation is Zelenkov. He was a Communist Party official of some prominence. He rose pretty rapidly in the hierarchy. He became a commissar in the Red Army. He then became the commander-in-chief of the 32nd Army on the ground. And finally, he ended up defecting to the Wehrmacht, and he served with the Vlasov army. Vlasov was a Lieutenant; I believe he was equivalent to a Lieutenant General in the modern NATO rank structure. But he pointed out he was a big defector, and there are some hardline Orthodox people who consider him a hero. Obviously, people sympathetic to the Soviet Union of history view him as a traitor like Benedict Arnold. Other Russian peoples – Old Believers, Russian patriot types have talked about – let’s just say they have mixed feelings about him.

But Vlasov defected. Vlasov led a kind of doomed force of Russians who, to their credit, these guys were very game and they fought to the end. Then they got slaughtered to a man, and Vlasov himself was executed. But Zelenkov, who served under the Committee to Liberate the Peoples of Russia – which was the political apparatus attached to the Vlasov army. He recalled that on the day of Operation Barbarossa, June 22nd, he was in Moscow, and when news first arrived that the war was underway, he said he and others were certain it was the Soviet Army on the offensive – he said his first thought was,  "Oh, of course, finally, we've gotten the attack order! How far are people from Warsaw?

How far are they from Bucharest?’ He said, without exaggeration, the impression of everybody was that,  “We [Russia] have assaulted, we finally struck the blow against the fascists. We're finally moving on Europe. And God be with our people!’’, proverbially. “And what's the news from the front? Are we winning and how are we advancing?”

I know you could say that Zelenkov, the rebuttal to all of this is , "Oh, those guys were liars." But it's like, but why? Why would they say these things? Particularly a guy who knows he's going to the gallows. Or, particularly a guy who had no particular truck with either the National Socialists or the Soviet Union that he defected from. Like, what?  Maybe I'm naive. I just, maybe I'm just worldly in all the worst ways. Most of the people I know don't just lie about stuff of that kind of importance.   Why would they? What? So, I consider it basically credible, particularly because again, this kind of testimony comes up again and again and again. And we're not talking about hapless privates in the Red Army or some random villagers in Ukraine that the Wehrmacht stopped and interviewed on the spot. These are general officers and people who were political commissars who had an audience with Stalin.

I can't see that, I can't see that all these people are lying. And that's not Stalin was just kind of trying to , what they said, some of them matches up with what Lenin declared was , Red Army military doctrine. And then what? He was only kidding? Or then Stalin, what he said about the Red Army being an exclusively offensive apparatus of revolution. But oh, he was just trying to rile up these young officers. Like that's not how reality works.