But how could Stalin translate these principles into action? In the early 1930s he had no constructive programme of foreign policy except for his aim to enable the USSR to survive. He did not shape events but instead reacted to them. This remained true while few options for alliance were available to a Soviet state whose very existence was a challenge to the world’s other powers. The best Stalin could hope for was to neutralise the threats of a crusade against the USSR. He was agitated by signs of expansionism on his borders. To the north and south there was little menace, but the omens were dire to the east. In December 1931 the Japanese invaded Manchuria and installed the puppet state of Manchukuo under the heel of the Kwantung Army. Militarism held sway in Tokyo. The Kremlin was concerned lest this might be the prelude to an attack on the USSR through Siberia.
During the First Five-Year Plan Stalin saw reasons to be hopeful about developments to the west. There was in fact much congruence between policy at home and policy abroad: at the beginning of the 1930s it was extremely radical in both cases. Communist parties across Europe were encouraged to go on to the political attack against their governments. Ultra-leftist campaigns were approved. The Comintern, which had tended towards caution in Germany after the failure of revolution to occur there and had eliminated leftist leaders who sympathised with Trotski, started to campaign against those whom it accused of ‘rightism’. The basis for Stalin’s optimism was the acute trouble in the world economy. The Wall Street Crash in 1929 created havoc in every capitalist country. While the Politburo and Gosplan planned and achieved a massive increase in Soviet industrial output, the markets in North America and Europe fell into disarray — and no country was more economically disrupted than Germany. Communists in the main German cities took political advantage, claiming that the Great Depression signalled the final crisis of capitalism around the globe. Stalin agreed with this interpretation, which fitted Bolshevism’s long-standing predictions and analyses.
Thus it came about that during the Reichstag electoral campaign in July 1932 he instructed the Executive Committee of the Comintern to order the German Communist Party to treat the social-democrats rather than Hitler’s NSDAP as the main enemy. Hegemony over the political left was to be given precedence over struggling against Nazism. This egregious mistake is taken as evidence that he had no serious perspective on the general situation in Europe. German communist leaders were alarmed by his instruction and a delegation was sent to him. When they pleaded that the danger from the Nazis was a most urgent one, he retorted that he had taken this into account. Stalin understood that Hitler might do well in the elections. His riposte to his visitors, who included Franz Neumann, was blunt. He argued: ‘Don’t you think, Neumann, that if the nationalists come to power in Germany, they’ll be so completely preoccupied with the West that we’ll be able to build up socialism in peace?’ By this he seemed to mean that the Nazis as fundamental adversaries of the Treaty of Versailles would cause havoc in Europe. He appeared to believe that the result would probably be to the advantage of the Comintern in the cause of spreading revolution westwards from Russia.6
In fact the defeated leader of the Right Deviation, Bukharin, had anticipated that Hitler would be a much more aggressive and effective leader than Stalin supposed; and this prognosis was vindicated when the Führer, building on his electoral success, became German Chancellor in January 1933. He tore up the Treaty of Rapallo. He withdrew the Wehrmacht from its collaboration with the Red Army. He fulminated against the Bolshevik political and ideological menace to Europe. The contents of
