¹ Gareev, M. A., ‘Eshche raz k voprosu: gotovil li Stalin preventativnyi udar v 1941 g.?’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 2 (1994), 198Google Scholar. Hitler also said that Stalin wanted to wait until the West (he meant Germany, as well) bled to death in the current war, then bolshevize the politically collapsed nations (see Reuth, Ralf Georg, Goebbels [translated from the German, New York, n.d.], citing Goebbels' diaries for 16 June 1941), p. 291Google Scholar. In February 1945, Hitler repeated his insistence that Stalin had intended to attack westward. See Alan, Bullock, Hitler und Stalin (translated from the English, Berlin, 1991), pp. 924–6, 939, 941.Google Scholar

² The strange dearth of documentation on the subject of Stalin's war planning establishes the significance of that which follows in the text. Recently, Alexei, Filiatov, in ‘The internal dimension of foreign policy’, in Gabriel, Gorodetsky, ed., Soviet foreign policy, 1917–1991. A retrospective (London, 1994), p. 97Google Scholar, wrote, ‘hardly any historical evidence’ on Stalin's decision-making in foreign policy matters exists. This point was also stressed by his Moscow colleague, Aleksandr Chubarian, at a colloquium in Germany, ‘Das deutsche Problem in der neueren Geschichte’, reported by Manfred, Kittel in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, XLIII (1995), 189Google Scholar. Chubarian: the study of Stalin's Deutschlandpolitik confronts special archival problems bound up with ‘Stalin's style of making governmental decisions within a small circle’ of advisers, without making ‘written notes’. Indeed, the failure to take notes, and not only about Deutschlandpolitik, was deliberate, as the current writer has contended earlier: ‘Stalin plans his post-war Germany’, Journal of contemporary history, XXVIII (1993), 63Google Scholar. See also Viktor, Suvorov, Den' ‘M’ (Kiev, 1994), 49–50Google Scholar, and below, fn. 8. As Filiatov and Chubarian imply, there is no reason to doubt that Stalin made all the important decisions, including the broader choices with respect to placements of the Red Army. Meanwhile the strange dearth of centrally important archival documents out of post-Soviet Moscow has been discussed by Serge, Schmemann in the International Herald Tribune, 27 April 1995, p. 2Google Scholar. Schmemann made the point that many independent historians had already arrived at: the kind of documentation about a relatively distant Stalinist past released from Russian archives is still today politically determined.

³ Vojtech, Mastny, Moskaus Weg zum Kalten Krieg (translated from the English, Munich, 1980), pp. 21–2, 24Google Scholar; Tucker, Robert C., Stalin in power. The revolution from above, 1929–1941 (New York, 1990), pp. 225–37.Google Scholar

⁴ Pavlov, A. G., ‘Sovetskaia voennaia razvedka nakanune Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 1 (1995), 52–60.Google Scholar

⁵ The chaos in the communist movement induced by the pact with Hitler: Wolfgang, Leonhard, Der Schock des Hitler–Stalin Paktes (Munich, 1989), passim.Google Scholar

⁶ Since Stalin had to be consulted on every move made in the Comintern, it had to have been he who initiated the discussion of the German question again: Institut für die Arbeiterklasse, Geschichte der, ed., Die Komintern und Stalin. Sowjetische Historiker zur Geschichte der Kommunistischen Internationale (Berlin, 1990), p. 37.Google Scholar

⁷ The references here and to Ulbricht's remarks below are to Pieck's handwritten notes, ‘Politischer Informationsabend am 21. 2. 1941’, in Stiftung der Parteien und Massen-organisationen der D.D.R. im Bundesarchiv, Zentrales Parteiarchiv (hereafter Z.P.A.), Pieck Nachlass, 36/528.

⁸ Tokaev, Grigorii A., Stalin means war (London, 1951), p. 71Google Scholar, describes the curious, oral method of distribution of information downward developed by the kremlin, a method that may account for some of the lack of Stalin-era policy documents.

⁹ What Ulbricht was reporting was actually a radical shift from the party line resolved just over a year before: see ‘Zum Bericht im Sekretariat am 30. 12. [1939 ] über deutsche Frage [Kommissionsbericht ] 3.00 Uhr’, Z.P.A., Pieck Nachlass, 36/540. See also, in ibid. 36/497, ‘Veränderungen in der internationalen Lage seit Paktabschluss,’ [c. Feb. 1940 ]; and ‘Komintern i sovetsko-germanskii dogovor o nenapadenii’, Izvestiia Ts.K. K.P.S.S., 12 (1989), 210Google Scholar. Vital background on the major change of political direction reflected by Ulbricht's talk is provided in two newer articles in Otechestvennaia istoriia, 2 (1995): Neveshin, Vladimir A., ‘“Rech” Stalina 5 maia 1941 goda i apologiia nastupatel'noi voiny’, 54–69Google Scholar; and Mel'tiukhov, M. I., ‘Ideologicheskie dokumenty maia-iiunia 1941 goda o sobytiiakh vtoroi mirovoi voiny’, 70–85.Google Scholar

¹⁰ For years Moscow had highly estimated the power of the German communists, even under Hitler, and the revolutionary strength of the German working class. See ‘3 Parteien’, 1 Nov. 1939, Z.P.A., Pieck Nachlass 36/540; and ‘Lage in Deutschland in den Massen’, 21 March 1941, ibid. 36/497. The further discussion of conditions for the revolution to come to the west, evidently part of the preparations Ulbricht asked for, was taken up within two weeks in the executive committee of the Comintern's secretariat. Ulbricht is recorded, among others, as a speaker, but only the text of Pieck's remarks in the discussion, with an intervention by Georgii Dimitrov, is preserved in the protocol: ‘Protokoll Nr. 709 der Sitzung des Sekretariats des EKKI vom 7. III. 1941’x, in Z.P.A., 16/10/50.

¹¹ The Soviets were zealously supplying Germany in order to keep the fight going as long as possible: United States house of representatives, select committee on communist aggression, Baltic states investigation. Hearings before the select committee to investigate the incorporation of the Baltic states into the U.S.S.R. Third interim report (Washington, D.C., 1954), p. 459Google Scholar. See also, Pavlov, , ‘Sovetskaia voennaia razvedka’, pp. 52–60.Google Scholar

¹² Stalin did not prepare strong western defences – and not just because Soviet organizational problems made such work impossibly difficult: see Bullock, , Hitler und Stalin, p. 930.Google Scholar

¹³ See the recently published stenographic report of Lenin's speech of 22 September 1920, to the Russian Communist Party (b), ‘la proshu zapisyvat' menshe: eto ne dolzhno popadat' v pechat’, Istoricheskii arkkiv, 1 (1992), 17, 19–20Google Scholar, which fixes at last his schemes for bolshevik expansion to the west, including planting the Red Army on German and Czechoslovak borders, and his obsession with holding secrets closely. Lenin's plans expressed in this long suppressed, in part, 1920 speech were later repeated at the fifth Comintern congress of 1924: see Mastny, , Moskaus Weg, p. 25Google Scholar. Soviet military doctrine for years had broadcast the idea of a Soviet march to the west, to be sure, publicly, only in response to a foreign attack. So it is really no surprise to see the march westward firmly imbedded in Stalin's expectations of 1941 (and, by inference, in those of 1939, and even, by extended inference, in those he might have had from the Sudeten crisis of 1938).

¹⁴ Two slightly earlier, but totally independent sources, both, however, unfriendly, for the same plan, confirm it as a programme widely discussed in Moscow and beyond. First, Molotov and his vice-foreign commissar, V. G. Dekanozov, had spilled out to the then pro-Soviet vice-premier and foreign minister of Lithuania, in Moscow in July 1940, a much elaborated version of the same scheme. Originally reported during the war in Nazi-occupied Lithuania – in Lithuanian – this same story was retold in detail by the same former Lithuanian foreign minister, who had escaped westward after the war, to a committee of the United States congress. The committee then printed an account of its hearings (Third interim report), making the Narkomindel's auguries of 1940 readily available in English since 1954. The story was originally published in Lithuanian, : ‘Bolševikų invazija ir liaudies vyriausybė (The bolshevik invasion and the people's government)’, in Balčiūnas, J., ed., Lietuuių archyvas: bolševizmo metai, III (Kaunas, 1942), 7–16Google Scholar. Moreover, in June 1940, that is, at almost the same time as Molotov's outburst of prognostication in Moscow, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (it, before the wartime founding of the O.S.S., responsible for both domestic federal criminal investigations and foreign intelligence), gave a brief report of the same plan to United States state department official A. A. Berle. Hoover reporteditas deriving from a ‘high Russian source’. See Hoover to A. A. Berle, 17 June 1940, in United States National Archives, M982, R25. These sources suggest that any doubts about the prepossessing validity of Walter Ulbricht's report, with its reliable, and friendly Comintern provenance, can readily be set aside.