Professor Raack contends that Stalin had been actively planning a westward invasion ever since 1938, although the actual timing had not been definitely set. It actual occurrence in 1944-45 was not at a time of Stalin's own choosing, since it had been delayed by the German attack of 1941.
The following is from pages 24 and 25 of the book:
Raack provides the following notes relating to the Soviet invasion plan outlined above:The first recorded revelation so far available of the great diemnsion of Stalin's scheme of war and revolution dates from the summer of 1940, when Foreign Minister Molotov and one of Lavrentii Beriia's henchmen in the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (the Narkomindel) excitedly announced the program, once as a major part of a five-hour harangue, for the information of a would-be collaborator from Lithuania. Following Soviet reoccupation in June 1040, of most of the lands that had once belonged to the tsar [=Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia], Molotov sought to overwhelm this stupified candidate, Vincus Kreve-Mickevicius, for a place in one of Stalin's new Baltic satrapies with a jubilant forecast of a grand Red Army march west bearing the revolution even farther, and of a great battle to be fought hundreds of miles to the west near the Rhine to ensure its final triumph. It seems obvious that stalin and Molotov, and probably others in the inner circle of the Kremlin, had been busy inflating these no doubt long held fancies with immediate expectations, for the scheme went very much beyond sitting back to await a breakdown of capitalism in the aftermath of the new European war.
Hints of this scheme had already been put out in discussions with Comintern chiefs in the fall of 1939, and its major aspects were being mooted in more remote Soviet diplomatic circles as early as 1940, and widely leaked. It seems likely, therefore, that it had been much discussed, and - so it appears - triumphantly announced by Molotov for political underpinning and for the psychological relief that conspirators find in sharing secrets with a widening circle of intimates. Indeed, because Molotov was usually no less secretive, and certainly no less conspiratorial, than Stalin, the fact that he incautiously broadcast wild expectations to at least one other party, who eventually relayed it to others, says something about the hubris already abroad in the Kremlin after the Soviet victories to the west, in 1939 and 1940, and the military victory in the Far East over Japan in 1939. Stalin, who was himself sometimes given to odd outbursts, may have been no more tight-lipped. And because the Soviet domestic party information system depended on the word of the leader being passed down through party echelons from top to bottom, it was certain that many were going to know before long what the vozhd' originally had broadcast. It is well known that much drinking went on in STalin's ambiance, following which words doubtlessly also flowed, but with or without alcohol, agreeing with the vozhd' was almost certainly politically correct, as was passing down his genial thoughts; and the chorus of yeas doubtlessly sustained him and others of the inner circle, and some others far beyond, in their revolutionary hopes.
The German-Soviet pact did bring a temporary resolution of Germany's demands for more territory in east central Europe, and it was even more advantageous to the Soviet Union. It also guaranteed Stalin the major force in the east of Europe that he wanted, if, and when, France and England were to confront Germany over its threatened attack on Poland. It also brought him much, beyond these tangible gains, by way of promise to fulfill his grandest imaginings. It is unlikely that Molotov was not blurting out what he truly foresaw in the future when he told what he and Stalin, and perhaps more than a few others outside the inner Kremlin circle, by then had firmly in mind.
He anticipated a long war, and predicted revolution to follow: when war came, the combatants in the West would squander their resources on each other. Following Marxist-Leninist analysis, they would stay with the imperialist conflict until home fronts moved to the verge of collapse. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, would encourage the continuation of the war by helping the Germans just enough to make certain that the conflict was prolonged to the bitter end.
No doubt Stalin and Molotov had in mind the final scenes in this picture of the war to come, tableaux from inside defeated Russia in 1917 and from defeated Germany in 1918, when they signed the pact with Hitler. In such politically disrupted landscapes, so Molotov predicted, Soviet-spread anti-war, anti-imperialist, revolutionary ideology, violently refurbished by the discomforts and discontents of war, would soon flame up in working-class heads all over Europe. The proletarians of the industrialized Western nations would turn against their "imperialist" governments. Soldiers, perhaps even whole armies, would revolt, as many did in 1917 and 1918. The Red Army, finally prepared and armed to the teeth, could be rushed westward into combat in support of the "revolution" in weakened Europe. The Bolshevik sword would be carried even farther, to help local revolutionaries finish off any European powers that still survived. It would tame both these European survivors and any other state (such as the United States - a "swamp", Molotov called it, "whose [prospective] entrance into the war does not worry us in the slightest") that opposed Red Army control of the European land mass. The West, unified under the Communist International, would be red: "The Soviet system", Molotov said, "....shall reign everywhere, throughout all Europe". That was the plot, a fantasy of war, with military slaughter on the Rhine, Marxist-Leninist law, and World War I precedents combined, that lay behind the Kremlin's breathtaking vision of the future. It was. indeed, so exciting and exhilarating a vision that the obvious risks of the undertaking could easily be brushed aside. In any case, after the years of purges, there was probably no one left to point out the risks.
Finally, in relation to the work of the Russian military historian Semidetko mentioned above, Raack provides the following information in Note 24 to his second chapter (page 194):
Note 21:
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Soviet and post-Soviet historians have recently reported finding Stalin's plan for the war sketched out in several places, with parts or all of it mentioned by L M Mekhlis, E S Varga, and Andrei Zhdanov 9the latter, from 1941: "We have already entered on the path of a policy of attack"), all of whom were part of, or close to, the Kremlin inner circle, between 1939 and 1941. See Volkogonov, p. 10 ["Drama reshenii 1939 goda", Novaiia i noveishaia istoriia, 1989, no. 4: 3-27]; Semiriaga in "17 sentiabria 1939 goda", pp. 14-15 (includes the Zhdanov quote just above), and in "Sovetskii soiuz i predvoennyi politicheskii krizis", pp. 54-61; and Spirin, p. 95 ["Stalin i voina", Voprosy istorii KPSS, 1990, no. 5: 90-105]. Soviet defector Grigorii Tokaev told much of it even earlier: pp. 72-73 [Stalin Means War, London, 1951]; see also Firsov, "Stalin und die Komintern", p. 120; and (on Varga), Duda, p. 159 [Jenoe Varga und die geschichte des Instituts fuer Weltwirtschaft und Weltpolitik in Moskau 1921-1970, Berlin 1994]. Finally, Walter Ulbricht, a German Communist boss close to the Comintern leaders, suggested in a party information meeting in Moscow that the westward thrust of the Red Army after the collapse of the warring powers was one anticipated outcome of the war ("Politischer Informationsabend am 21. 2. 1941", in ZPA, Pieck Nachlass 36/528).
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Important ideological and political background supporting the notion that Stalin's Drang nach Westen was nothing new in 1939 is in Kaplan, pp. 3, 91 (The Short March. Trans. from the German. London, 1987). My article "Stalin Plans His Post-War Germany" established Stalin's determination to move Communist Party influence and control into Western-occupied, post-war Germany; it seems undeniable that this plan represented a continuation of his plans of 1939-41, adapted to the changed circumstances.
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Note 22: .....................................
Several authors, writing earlier, have suggested that Stalin actually had a firm date, or at least a firm military plan, for the attack west, which would be directed against the Germans. Certainly the Soviet military was making contingency plans in the spring of 1941 (see "Schukows Angriffsplan" [ Der Spiegel, 1991, no. 24: 140]). This proves little, however, since all military staffs presumably make contingency plans. On the plan, see Gor'kov, "Gotovil li Stalin uprezhdaiushchii udar protiv Gitlera v 1941 g.?". Some of the most controversial assessments of Stalin's intentions in making the pact are in Suworow (Suvorov), Der Eisbrecher, pp. 61-67; on his findings and other evidence to the point, see chap. 2, n.21 [sic! Actually n. 23]; and Topitsch, pp. 7-8, 14-16. The most substantially researched version of the argument is Joachim Hoffmann's "Die Angriffsvorbereitungen der Sowjetunion 1941", in Wegner, ed., Zwei Wege nach Moskau. See also, Semiriaga, "Sovetskii soiuz i predvoennyi politicheskii krizis", p. 61. Suvorov is challenged, to be sure on the basis of limited sources and research superannuated by other findings and revelations when published, by Gabriel Gorodetsky, in the same Wegner-edited volume mentioned above: "The notion that Stalin had in mind an attack on Germany is 'absurd' " ("Stalin und Hitlers Angriff auf die Sowjetunion", p. 362). But Gorodetsky is praised, and his opinion ratified, at least with respect to 1941 and 1942, by Dallin (pp. 20, 28 ["Stalin and the German Invasion", Soviet Union 18 (1991): 19-37]), who neither cites the recent Russian-language accounts nor deals with the primary sources, many of them available when he wrote; Dallin also omits any mention of Kreve-Mickevicius and Soviet defector Tokaev, who presented the earliest version of Stalin's war plan, Tokaev arguing that Stalin planned to attack Germany and Finland in August 1941 (p. 34 [Stalin Means War]). It therefore appears that the notion of a Soviet attack to the west in 1941, or 1942, is not quite so absurd, even if the date, which perhaps depended on circumstances as Stalin perceived them, remained open. Was the Soviet army in an attack position on June 22, 1941? It is a point well established by other evidence, such as Czech analyst Karel Erban, writing for his exiled foreign minister, London, June 18, 1941, AMZV, 4-70-114; and by military historian V A Semidetko, pp. 29-31 ["Istoki porazheniia v Belorussii", Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1989, n0. 4: 22-31]. Like the notion that Stalin conducted a "defensive" policy before the war (suggested as if there were no possible challenge to the notion by Haslam, p. 106 [The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe 1933-39, New York, 1984], and by others), the idea that he actually planned an attack to the west assaults the received thinking of countless historians and other writers.
So it appears that the jury is still out on the question of whether the Soviet Union was on the point of launching a westward attack in the summer of 1941, an attack that was aborted by the unrelated German attack.Semidetko (p. 30) describes a fascinating discovery: the Soviet troops on the White Russian front in June 1941 were in an attack position. Prechnev, on the other hand, maintains (p. 49 ["O nekotorykh problemakh podgotovki strany i vooruzhennykh sil k otrazheniiu fashistskoi agressii", Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1988, no. 4: 34-42] that the Red Army was rapidly moving toward the German border, implying that this was for defensive purposes, but was not yet, on June 22, in position. See also, on Stalin's dreams of a Drang nach Westen, Semiriaga, "Sovetskii soiuz i predvoennyi politicheskii krizis", p. 61.
