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Comments on Shtromas
| Article
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11783 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1987 |
1,031 Words |
| Author
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Morton Kaplan
Morton Kaplan is editor and publisher of the The World & I. |
Alexander Shtromas is the stepson of the former Lithuanian party secretary who was very close to Suslov. In addition to his excellent scholarship, Shtromas was privy to much of the gossip inside the Soviet regime. Despite his excellent qualifications and experience, I take issue with some aspects of his important article.
Shtromas correctly opines that Stalin's foreign policy was informed by ideology. But, in my opinion, he draws conclusions from this that are much too strong. He asserts that Stalin had the option of an agreement with the West that would have preserved peace but that he deliberately relinquished this option because he wanted a war between Germany and the West.
In one sense, Shtromas is correct. The optimal result for Stalin was one in which Germany and the West bloodied each other. A war between Russia and Germany would have been highly advantageous for the West, though few Western statesmen were perceptive enough to recognize that. The situation in Europe in 1939 was, in any case, more complicated.
Let up suppose that in 1939 Stalin had made an agreement with the West to defend Poland. Unless Hitler had been overthrown - and this was highly unlikely - he would not have been diverted from his plans for conquest for very long. At best, therefore, war would have been postponed until Germany had completed its rearmament in 1942 or 1943. If Germany then attacked Poland, as was likely, the French troops would have remained behind the Maginot Line, where General Gamelin told the Poles they would be in 1939. Hitler as well as Stalin was aware of the French decision. Once Poland was smashed, German forces would have been free to
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