The great mafia wedding - Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939

National Review, Sept 1, 1989 by John P. Roche

In the 48 years since Hitler broke up the Hitler-Stalin pact

the world has mostly forgotten how much those two ideological gangsters had in common.

But now, as glasnost permits open discussion of the Thirties purges for the first time, Stalin takes his rightful place ahead of Hiller on the list of twentieth-century mass murderers.

FIFTY YEARS AGO, on August 23, 1939, the two top ideological gangsters of this century agreed on a satisfactory division of Eastern European loot and triggered the outbreak of World War II. This was not unpredictable: the ousted Soviet capo, soon to be executed, Leon Trotsky, had forecast Stalin's move-and in the event approved of it. And for his part, the Nazi godfather had told his (hostile) biographer Herman Rauschnigg that most of Stalin's "soldiers" would make ideal SS types.

Hitler's statement is worth quoting: "There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates from it, There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will." This sentiment was confirmed by Foreign Minister Ribbentrop after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: at the Moscow festivities, which included the Horst Wessel Song and a toast by Molotov to Germany's beloved Fuhrer, Ribbentrop said he felt as though he were in the company of old Nazi comrades.

At the time, the Pact stunned Western Communists and the numerous fellow-travelers they had picked up during the Popular Front era, when the Soviet Union seemed the only vigorous opponent of Nazi Germany. I was not particularly surprised: I had spent a good deal of my political adolescence at the "Levitas Salon" on 15th Street in New York-the office of the New Leader, the Social Democratic journal presided over by Sol Levitas (the one-time Menshevik mayor of Vladivostok), which was the home away from home of a number of democratic Russian amigres. (Indeed, it was from them tbat I first got the insight that Marxism-Leninism was a Mafia operation rather than an effort to liberate the wretched of the earth.) In the spring of 1939 these remarkable, often volcanic characters were predicting a deal between the two capi. (In Europe, Boris Nicolaevsky and Boris Souvarine made the same call.) They knew the nature of the enemy-had they been alive this summer, none of them would have dreamed for a

minute that Deng Xiaoping, a capo of the old school, would immolate "the family" on the altar of democracy.

For years, Stalinist apologists tried to justify the Pact, their main argument being that with it Stalin bought time. However, revelations over the past few years by Soviet historians, including suppressed portions of Marshal Zhukov's memoirs, provide us with an entirely different version, one that reinforces the conviction of the old Russian democrats of my youth that Hitler was the only man Stalin ever trusted.

To RECAPITULATE briefly, between March 10 and 16, 1939, Hitler, in total violation of the Munich agreement, dismembered the rump Czechoslovak state. The British and French governments, with the irrational fury of honest men who realized they had been not only duped but defecated upon, responded by issuing military guarantees to Poland and Rumania. When they emerged from this id spasm they looked at the map and decided Soviet support was crucial.

Simultaneously, Stalin, seeing the opportunity to make a killing while the Nazis mixed it up with the British and French (Zhukov said Stalin vastly overestimated Western military power), announced to the 18th Congress of the CPSU that he was not going to pull any British and French chestnuts "out of the fire," and on May 3 he replaced his Foreign Commissar, Maksim "Collective Security" Litvinov, with Vyacheslav Molotov-an apparatchik without opinions, even when Stalin threw his wife into the Gulag. Meanwhile, a member of Stalin's secretariat, Kandelaki, who had been a "sleeper" in Berlin since 1937 as head of a Soviet trade mission, went into motion.

Kandelaki was not the only person in motion: in the summer of 1939 an Anglo-French military delegation arrived in Moscow to explore terms for an alliance with the Soviets against Germany, which was by then pre-positioning stockpiles for an invasion of Poland. Stalin's old accomplice Marshal Klementi Voroshilov-a key figure in purging the top military in 1937-8-was put in charge of the negotiations and (as we know from a September 15, 1984, article, "Guarantees of Freedom," in Sovyetskaya Rossia) asked for a free hand in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Rumania. The British and French were appalled by

these openers and kept trying to find options. Voroshilov stonewalled while Stalin and Hitler took over the action.

Four years after this article with its Aesopian hint, military historian V. M. Kalish gave the readers of Komsomolskaya Pravda (August 24, 1988) the inside story. Asked why the British and French hadn't jumped at Molotov's offer of a possible military alliance, Kalish was a bit evasive: the French and British "did not want to bind themselves with specific obligations." Then he added: "On August 20, 1939, when the Soviet-Franco-English negotiations were already under way in Moscow, Hitler sent Stalin a telegram saying that in relations between Germany and Poland a crisis could break out any day in which the Soviet Union would also become involved if it did not immediately agree to conclude a non-aggression pact with Germany."