Corresponding to the Great Turn of the late 1920s, the Comintern directed communist parties to expel ‘Right opportunists’ from their ranks and abandon tactical alliances with Social Democrats, henceforth labelled ‘social fascists’. This ‘class war’ strategy, which persisted until the mid-1930s, disorganized working-class opposition to fascism and proved particularly disastrous in Germany. The call by the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel) for total disarmament evoked nothing but scepticism in European capitals, but the Soviet Union did succeed in normalizing relations with neighbouring countries and establishing full diplomatic relations with the United States in 1933.
The triumph of the Nazis in Germany and the consolidation of a Japanese puppet state (Manchukuo) on the Soviet Union’s eastern borders precipitated the Comintern strategy of Popular Fronts with all ‘progressive forces’ and an intensification of Soviet efforts to achieve collective security with the European democracies. These policies bore fruit in the form of mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia (in 1935) and the election of a Popular Front government in France (in 1936). But the great test of the European commitment to contain fascism—the chief aim of the popular fronts—was the Spanish Civil War. Despite Soviet assistance to the Republic—or perhaps because European statesmen feared a ‘red’ Spain more than one ruled by Franco—the Western powers failed the test. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich (September 1938) confirmed Soviet suspicions that neither Britain nor France were unduly concerned about Nazi expansion to the East.
For the Soviet Union, the decade of the 1930s lasted until the Nazi invasion of 22 June 1941. The increasing likelihood of war in Europe precipitated a radical shift in foreign policy away from seeking collective security with the Western democracies and towards an accommodation with Hitler. Acting on secret provisions of the Soviet–German Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939, Soviet armed forces occupied eastern Poland, the three Baltic republics, and the Romanian province of Bessarabia. Finland resisted territorial concessions along its eastern border; in the ensuing ‘Winter War’ (1939–40) the Red Army triumphed, but with difficulty and only because of superior numbers.
In the mean time, the regime moved to restore the authority, if not security of cadres in state and industrial management—badly shaken by the Great Purges and wary of denunciations from below. Laws stipulating a longer working day and draconian punishment for tardiness and absenteeism put teeth into demands for labour discipline. The Stakhanovite movement continued to celebrate high achievers among workers; but as the regime sought to close ranks with managerial and technical personnel, it now tended to attribute innovations to engineers. A steady diet of Soviet patriotism—psychological preparation for war—accompanied a massive build-up of the armed forces and defence industries.
Ten years earlier, in the midst of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin told a conference of economic officials that they could not afford to slacken the pace of industrialization because to do so ‘would mean falling behind. And those who all behind get beaten’. He thereupon recited all the beatings ‘backward’ Russia lad suffered—by ‘Mongol khans’, ‘Turkish beys’, Swedish feudal lords, the Polish and Lithuanian gentry, British and French capitalists, and ‘Japanese barons’. ‘All beat her—because of her backwardness … military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness’. But, he added, correlating gender with political transformation, ‘Mother Russia’ has since become the socialist fatherland. ‘Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under’.
