Stalin’s observation of the world since the Wall Street Crash confirmed his set of ideas. To him, capitalism appeared inherently unstable. It was also, however, still dangerous. Until such time as the Red Army was an unchallengeable force on two continents it behoved Soviet diplomacy to manoeuvre towards agreements with foreign powers. Even Germany, despite being ranged on the opposite side in the Spanish Civil War, was not necessarily irreconcilable. Like Japan, Germany was a constant geopolitical factor to be taken into account in his calculations. But increasingly he felt that the USSR’s industrial and military achievements were allowing a more active foreign policy. In the 1920s, when military commanders Mannerheim and Piłsudski held power in Finland and Poland, the Politburo was perpetually worried about their depredatory intentions. In the following decade these fears diminished. The Red Army was a power to be reckoned with. In 1939 its forces were at war with Japan and holding their own. The People’s Commissariat of External Affairs could deal with bordering states — Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria — from a position of strength. Their potential to cause damage to the USSR would only be realised if they concerted their efforts. But after Hitler’s rise to power they were more concerned about being conquered by the Germans than exercised by thoughts of bringing down Bolshevism in Moscow.
Germany, though, could act independently. Its successive campaigns of expansion had been condoned by the United Kingdom and France. Soviet diplomatic attempts to organise resistance had been rebuffed. Stalin had offered assistance to Czechoslovakia before its destruction in March 1939. Whether he was seriously intending to commit the Red Army is doubtful. He was making a public statement of the USSR’s anti-fascism in the knowledge that the British and French were most unlikely to take a stand against Hitler. The Czechoslovaks themselves were reluctant to have Soviet armed units on their soil. In spring and summer 1939 Hitler increased the pressure on Poland. He evidently had his eyes on Danzig on the Baltic coast. Poland was under military threat, and yet its politicians refused to ally with the USSR. Soviet–Polish enmity was an irremovable feature of Warsaw’s calculations. In these circumstances it was hardly surprising that Stalin began to consider whether a deal with Hitler might be preferable to standing wholly outside developments in eastern Europe.
Stalin relied primarily upon military power, intelligence reports and diplomatic finesse to see him through. The Comintern was a weak source of assistance. The Chinese communists were incapable of defeating the Japanese and had yet to crush the Kuomintang. The German communists were dead or in concentration camps — and a few were émigrés in the USSR. Communism as a political force in central and eastern Europe was on its knees. In Spain and Italy too it was battered. In the rest of the world, including North America, it still counted for little. In the United Kingdom it was a minor irritant to the status quo, mainly to the British Labour Party. In only one country, France, did the communist party retain a mass following. But the French communists were but one party on the left. Although they could organise industrial strikes and political demonstrations, they were chiefly a disruptive factor in national politics. Stalin was often criticised, especially by Trotski’s Fourth International, for turning away from the Comintern in the 1930s. The reality was that the world communist movement offered little hope of making revolutions.
Even if a revolution had broken out, there would have been complications for Soviet military and security policy. The USSR had few options in the last years of the decade. Stalin, who had always been sceptical about forecasts of a European revolutionary upsurge, reposed his immediate confidence in the activity of the Soviet state. This did not mean that he had abandoned belief in the inevitability of socialist revolution around the world. The global ‘transition’, he thought, would eventually take place as had been predicted by Marx, Engels and Lenin. But he was realistic about the current weakness of the world communist movement; and being a man who liked to operate with a broad programmatic scheme at any given time, he put his trust in his army, in his intelligence agencies and — above all — in himself and his subordinate partner Molotov.
