Josep Stalin - Ruthless and Paranoid

There is an old saying that it is not love of the same thing that makes allies, but hated for the same thing. And so it was in World War II. Joseph Stalin, a tyrannical dictator, would surely have been seen as the least likely person to be allied with Franklin D. Roosevelt (Number 2) and Winston Churchill (Number 3), the leaders of the Western world. Before the war, Stalin had been responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people. Churchill had once referred to him as “Genghis Khan with a telephone.” Yet as part of the Allied forces, the Red Army and Russian partisans behind the lines fought with both courage and daring.

When the Nazis first invaded the Soviet Union, some peasants greeted the German conquerors with bread and salt, the traditional gifts of welcome. Then the Nazis began their mass executions, and Stalin appealed for the defense of Mother Russia. It was the intense hatred of Adolf Hitler (Number l) and all he stood for that became the key issue for the Russian people, and the Anglo-American Allies.

The war on the Russian front was bloody and brutal. The Germans used Red Army prisoners as guinea pigs for medical experiments. On the other side, many Germans taken prisoner never survived the war.

Stalin’s Red Army carried the brunt of the land war in Europe for nearly three years. The cost in Russian lives, both military and civilian, was staggering. The German army also suffered heavy losses.

Stalin’s Rise to Power

The son of a shoemaker, Joseph Dzhugashvili was born in 1879 in Georgia, a province of southern Russia. He would later change his name to Stalin, “man of steel.” Stalin studied for the priesthood at a seminary but was expelled for his radical views. He became a revolutionary, bent on overthrowing the czar. By 190l, Stalin was organizing street demonstrations; he was arrested and spent several years in exile in Siberia.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin worked his way up in the Communist Party hierarchy. Upon the death of Party Leader Nikolai Lenin in 1924, Stalin competed with other Communists for key leadership roles and emerged as absolute dictator of the Soviet Union. However, his economic policies proved disastrous. Millions of Russians starved while the Soviet Union exported wheat to the rest of the world. Independent landowners, called kulaks, were murdered by Stalin’s forces because they were considered rich farmers whose land was valuable to the state.

Under Stalin’s rule, Communist Party members who aroused any suspicion of disloyalty were put on trial and executed. This paranoia was successfully exploited by the Nazis in 1937 when German intelligence agents framed Russian army officers, leading to a bloody purge of the Red Army officer corps, supposedly for treason. Stalin could order murders at will. In 1940, from thousands of miles away, Stalin arranged the assassination of Communist rival Leon Trotsky in Mexico City long after Trotsky had been banished from the Soviet Union.

Late in 1938, Stalin brooded over the consequences of Adolf Hitler’s meeting with England’s Neville Chamberlain (Number 66) and France’s Eduard Daladier in Munich. The two had agreed to hand over the Sudetenland, a piece of Czechoslovakia, to Hitler. Was it possible that they could help Hitler against Russia some time in the future? Stalin may have been unwilling to take the risk. Although it is not certain whether Russia or Germany made the first move, Stalin and Hitler shocked the world by making a non-aggression pact. In August 1939, the two dictators agreed to divide Poland. Ger-many attacked Poland from the west, and two weeks later, the Soviet Union did the same from the east. Each country’s army occupied the specific territories that had been mapped out, and Germany found itself at war with England and France.

In 1940, as Hitler moved against Norway, Denmark, and the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands), Stalin annexed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

In the United States, the American Communist Party was taking its lead from Moscow and campaigning against any American involvement in the European war. Demonstrators in Communist marches chanted, “The Yanks are not coming!” That cry would change. 

Hitler Betrays His Pact with Stalin

By the spring of 1941, Stalin had grown uneasy about a Nazi military buildup and air flights along Soviet borders. Then, on June 22, 1941, German armies launched a massive invasion. At first, Stalin was too stunned to issue orders for defense. His officers at the front waited for the signal to counterattack, but Stalin hesitated. He thought that there was some misunderstanding, but when Stalin recognized the truth, he called for all-out effort against the German invaders: “Not one step backward!”

The Russian winter came early, and German forces in front of Moscow were caught without winter clothing or equipment. Hitler would not move them back, fearing that any movement away from Moscow might bring comparisons with the retreat of Napoleon.

Stalin sought weapons and supplies from the West. After the United States entered the war, he wanted a second front in Europe to relieve the pressure on Soviet armies. The greatest sieges of the war took place at Leningrad and Stalingrad. In both cases, the cities held out; in Stalingrad, the German army was trapped and forced to surrender. The greatest tank battle in the history of the world was fought at Kursk.Stalin ensured that his forces would not retreat by having bridges blown up and arranging for special forces stationed behind his armies to prevent retreats. But Stalin’s main tactic was scorched earth. The Nazis would invade a village, town, or city, only to find it burned to the ground. Industry was shipped east of the Ural mountains, where it was safe from German bombing.

Despite his request for Allied assistance, Stalin would not permit American or British planes to land on Russian airfields following long aerial missions against German military installations. Thus, planes from the West often had to fight their way back to base without a stop to rest or refuel.

The Final Days

As the war in Europe began winding down, difficult decisions were being negotiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Stalin about such things as borders, occupation zones in Germany, and the use of Russian forces against Japan. Stalin demanded and received a piece of Polish territory. Poland, in return, was to receive a piece of German territory. Russia’s occupation zone would include Berlin, which was itself zoned. The Russians would enter the war against Japan 90 days after the war ended in Europe.

As the Red Army pursued the Germans, they occupied large areas of eastern Europe, which succumbed to Communist rule. When World War II finally ended, the Soviet Union dominated half of Europe.

Toward the end of his life, Stalin became ill and believed that he was being poisoned by his doctors. When he died in 1953, his body was first put on display with that of Lenin in Moscow’s Red Square. But after his excesses were revealed by Nikita Khrushchev and others, the body was removed and placed elsewhere.

Could World War II have been won by the Western Allies alone, without the Soviet Union? Perhaps. But it would have taken much longer, been much bloodier, and prob-ably involved a negotiated settlement rather than unconditional surrender. Stalin’s role was crucial in the final outcome of the conflict.