During the all-out preparations for blitzkrieg against the USSR, Hitler continued to order that resources be devoted to preparing for a long naval and air war against the UK and the United States. May–June 1941 was the blackest period yet for Britain: its ships were being sunk and its cities bombed, while its position in the Balkans had been lost to Nazi domination. After German paratroopers had captured Crete, in late May 1941, the British position seemed grievously imperiled. Eleven days before the scheduled launch of the Soviet invasion, Hitler had dictated a draft of Directive No. 32, “Preparations for the Time After Barbarossa.” It envisioned subdivision and exploitation of Soviet territories, as well as a pincer movement against the Suez Canal and British Near East positions via Bulgaria-Turkey, the Caucasus, and Iran-Iraq-Syria; the conquest of Gibraltar, northwest Africa, and the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic islands, to eliminate the British in the Mediterranean; the building of coastal bases in West and possibly East Africa; and the creation of a German base in Afghanistan for seizing British India.96 Had Hitler thrown all his might into this “peripheral strategy” rather than invading the USSR, Britain might not have survived.97 The war with the Soviet Union would have gone ahead at some point, but with Britain knocked out of the picture. There would have been no British beachhead to assist an eventual U.S.-led Allied landing in Western Europe.98
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HITLER, ONE SCHOLAR HAS REMINDED US, cannot be explained in terms of his social origins or his early life and influences, a point that is no less applicable to Stalin.99 The greatest shaper of Stalin’s being was the building and running of a dictatorship, whereby he assumed responsibility for Russia’s power in the world. In the name of socialism, Stalin, pacing in his Kremlin office, had grown accustomed to moving millions of peasants, workers—whole nations—across a sixth of the earth, on his own initiative, often consulting no one. But his world had become intensely constricted. Hitler had cornered the Soviet despot in his own Little Corner.
Stalin’s dealings with Hitler differed from British appeasement in that he tried significant deterrence as well as accommodation, and he took as much as he gave. But Stalin’s policy resembled British appeasement in that he was driven by a blinding desire to avoid war at all costs. He displayed strength of capabilities but not of will. Neither his fearsome resolve nor his supreme cunning—which had enabled him to vanquish his rivals and spiritually crush his inner circle—were in evidence in 1941. He shrank from trying to preempt Hitler militarily and failed to preempt him diplomatically.100 In the end, however, the question of who most miscalculated is not a simple one. “Of all the men who can lay claim to having paved the way to the new Reich,” meaning his Reich, Hitler liked to say, “one figure stands in awe-inspiring solitude: Bismarck.”101 Bismarck, of course, had built his chancellorship on avoiding conflict with Russia. When the bust of Bismarck was transferred from the old German Chancellery to Hitler’s new Nazi Chancellery, it had broken off at the neck. A replica was hastily made, aged by soaking in cold tea. The omen of Bismarck’s broken neck was kept from the Führer.102
SOVIET ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE
ONCE PRIVATE PROPERTY WAS ELIMINATED, in 1929–30, all institutions in the Soviet Union effectively became statized. At the same time, Communist party organizations expanded inside every institution. The result was an intensification of the party-state dualism, structurally akin to a theocracy, that had been born with the revolution and the civil war. The state, in turn, was variegated, such that one part essentially had no power but another had a great deal.
Party rule comprised periodic gatherings of delegates to a Party Congress (technically the highest body), a party conference (which possessed none of the powers of a congress), the Central Committee (the ruling body between congresses), the politburo (which usurped the Central Committee’s policy-making function), the orgburo (which handled personnel decisions), and the secretariat (in which sat the secret department, Stalin’s dictatorship within the dictatorship). The secretariat and the orgburo, along with their local equivalents, constituted the “apparatus,” which had innumerable departments and whose functionaries were full-time party workers or apparatchiks. All party members, the vast majority of whom did not work in the apparatus, were duty bound to follow party dictates. To investigate party members, the regime had a Central Control Commission (with local affiliates), which until 1934 was joined with a state body known as the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate.
