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Stalin and the German Specter
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15020 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1988 |
6,999 Words |
| Author
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Alan Levine
Alan Levine is a syndicated columnist and author of Getting
Started in Mutual Funds (John Wiley & Sons). |
In the late 1940s and into the 1950s the Soviet conquest of half of Europe was usually seen, in the West, as an outrageous act of aggression. By itself, and apart from any other Soviet actions, it seemed to refute the favorable views of Soviet behavior so common during World War II.
Over the last two decades, however, a curious tendency has developed to minimize and even explain away this event. It has become popular to explain Soviet policy in Europe during and after World War II as basically defensive in motive, however aggressive it might have been in practice. A "revisionist" school of historians, its most notable members D.E. Fleming and Daniel Yergin, explicitly blamed the West for causing the Cold War, arguing that the Western powers should have accepted Soviet actions in Eastern Europe as limited and defensive in intent. Some even blamed the West for somehow forcing a reluctant Stalin to impose his rule on the area. But even many nonrevisionist writers on the Cold War and related issues bought the idea that security against future attack was a critical factor in Soviet thinking. Louis Halle, Thomas T. Hammond, Lisle Rose, Avi Shlaim, and J. Robert Wegs, to name just a few writers of otherwise quite different points of view, accepted this notion. It was, and is, fashionable to minimize the role in Soviet motivation of either communist doctrine or the lust for power and conquest. Some claimed that the "Russians" have historically been "paranoid," or at least extremely fearful because of a history of being constantly invaded.
This theory runs up against the fact that Russia has generally been an expanding imperial power, not a victim of aggression. The rulers of imperial Russia were not fearful men; they frequently exhibited grandiose self-confidence. While, like every European country, Russia has been attacked, it has been invaded less frequently than most states on the mainland of Europe, and with consistently disastrous results for the invaders. Most observers, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, considered the country unconquerable. Field Marshal Montgomery once joked that the first rule of war was "Don't march on Moscow!" True, Napoleon and Hitler invaded Russia--but only after they had attacked just about everyone else in sight.
Some have argued that Stalin's postwar policies were a reaction to the traumatic experiences of the Nazi invasion. It is not uncommon for writers to cite the Soviet losses of twenty million dead in the war and the ordinary Soviet citizen's well-documented detestation of Germans as "self evident" explanations for Soviet polices after the war, although there is precious little
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