Very few states in the history of the world saw their foreign policy fluctuate as wildly as the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1941. From its very inception, the USSR was a pariah state, considered a hostile existential threat to the traditional order of Europe and the world. This was no truer for any nation than neighbouring Poland, who had recently recovered her independence and successfully fought Soviet Russia to a negotiated settlement regarding their mutual border.
The Bolsheviks sought to bring about a clean break between their new Soviet regime and that of the Romanovs who had ruled Russia for centuries prior. To this effect, soon after stabilizing his hold on power, Lenin officially defaulted on Tsarist Russia’s debts and released several classified diplomatic papers of the prior regime. The Bolsheviks also directed several of their ideologically sympathetic agents in the West to spy on their behalf and work towards subverting their respective governments and societies.
As such, most states were understandably hesitant to normalize diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The first to do so was Great Britain, opening with an economic treaty in 1921, and diplomatically recognizing the USSR in 1924. Most major countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Austria, China, and Japan would follow suit shortly thereafter, while the United States would not do so until the start of the Roosevelt regime in 1933.
Although the Soviet Union always considered the “capitalist” Western Powers of America, Britain, and France as its primary enemies, the rise of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan in the 1930s forced an inevitable re-evaluation of geopolitical strategy in Moscow. In 1935, the USSR would broker military alliances with France and Czechoslovakia, after having previously concluded non-aggression pacts with several otherwise hostile neighbours, including Poland, Romania, and Finland.
In 1936, the Soviet Union would famously support the “Republican” faction in the bloody Spanish Civil War against the “Nationalist” faction of Francisco Franco, which was in turn backed by Nazi Germany. It was also around this time that the “Axis” between Germany, Italy, and Japan would emerge in the form of the “anti-Comintern Pact,” an explicitly anti-Soviet alliance between the three most prominent fascist states.
Ironically, despite the diametric ideological opposition of the far-right Nazis and far-left Soviets, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin shared a common enemy in the Western Powers and their Eastern European ally, Poland, concluding their own non-aggression treaty on 23 August 1939. This “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” agreed upon the re-partition of Poland between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and gave the Germans peace of mind to fight a war against the Western Powers once total victory over Poland had been achieved.
Thus, the Second World War would begin with the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Although the Poles put up a good fight, their allies in Britain and France hesitated to provide direct support and Poland would fall within a month. To the shock of the Poles and the Western Powers, however, the Soviets would join the Germans in invading Poland on 17 September 1939, staking their claim to the agreed-upon regions of eastern Poland they deemed to be rightfully “western Ukraine” and “western Belarus.” Stalin would then promptly annex these regions into their respective existing Soviet Republics.
Beyond Poland, the treaty with Germany also gave the Soviets a free hand in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which were likewise incorporated as three new Republics of the USSR. While Hitler was busy conquering France and bombing England in 1940, Stalin wasted no time in ethnically cleansing the Polish population of his newly conquered territories, systematically murdering the leadership of the Polish army and intelligentsia, and sending hundreds of thousands more to the Gulag.
Although Romania was within the German sphere of influence, Stalin would successfully pressure the Romanian government into conceding the border regions of northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, the latter of which was incorporated into the Soviet Union as a new “Moldovan SSR.” Conversely, Finland would resist Soviet aggression and fight a remarkable defence in the “Winter War” of 1939-40, for which the Finns gained widespread international sympathy and support.
However, the Hitler-Stalin alliance was always built on shaky ground. Whether or not Stalin suspected Hitler would soon break their non-aggression pact – or exactly when – is still the subject of intense historical debate. In any case, the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 – Operation Barbarossa – was one of the most significant events in human history.
In a massive land invasion of 4 million men, 4,000 tanks, 3,000 armoured vehicles, 5,000 aircraft, and 20,000 artillery pieces - unparalleled before or since - the German Blitzkrieg would rapidly strike deep into the heart of European Russia and threaten the very existence of the Soviet state. The front would extend from the Baltic to the Black Sea, across an almost unimaginable scale of 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometres) spanning the entire length of Eastern Europe.
The Germans swiftly conquered eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine, soon surrounding Leningrad and advancing upon Moscow and the Caucasus. Leningrad would subsequently suffer a crippling two-and-a-half-year siege, resulting in over 1 million deaths.
Moscow, meanwhile, would only escape German conquest by a mere 20 miles (30 km). Nonetheless, the failure of the German Wehrmacht to effectively win the war on the Eastern Front before the onset of the first winter would herald their ultimate defeat. Although it would take 4 years of brutal warfare, the Soviets would weather the initial shock of the German invasion and eventually turn the tide of the war.
There is conflicting evidence as to whether Stalin “went into shock” after the initial German invasion, but in any case, to his credit, he stayed in Moscow during the darkest days of the Wehrmacht’s assault on the Russian capital. To rally the Soviet people to fight the German invader, Stalin and his propagandists drew conscious parallels between their present predicament and that of their Russian forebears in the time of Napoleon’s invasion a century prior. Indeed, this second “Patriotic War” in defence of the Russian motherland would prove to be similar to the first, with Hitler’s army - just like Napoleon’s before him - soon victimized by the notoriously harsh Russian winter.
The decisive battle of the war would be fought in and around the ruins of the Soviet leader’s eponymous city, Stalingrad, a key checkpoint in the lower Volga region facing the oil-rich shores of the Caspian Sea. As the tanks of the Wehrmacht were running low on fuel and Hitler understood the propagandistic value of capturing “Stalin’s city,” the Germans made victory in Stalingrad a top priority to their war effort.
In August 1942, the Germans and their allies (mainly Romanians) would launch their grand offensive upon Stalingrad, supported by bombing raids that effectively levelled the city to the rubble. Although the Germans had the initial advantage, Soviet forces valiantly defended every inch of territory, as the battle devolved into an unprecedented brutal struggle of house-to-house urban warfare.
Just at it appeared that the Germans were winning, the Red Army launched a counter-offensive from the north and succeeded in cutting off the German forces surrounding Stalingrad from their main army. The tables had now turned, with the Germans trapped by Soviet forces around Stalingrad, left alone to survive the brutal Russian winter. Despite attempts by the Wehrmacht to break through and rescue their comrades at Stalingrad, the remaining German and allied Axis soldiers would ultimately surrender to the Red Army in February 1943.
The casualties on both sides were staggering. Although determining exact numbers is inevitably difficult, a total of over 800,000 Axis soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured at Stalingrad, while the Soviets suffered casualties upward of 1,000,000 soldiers and civilians. The Battle of Stalingrad would ultimately turn the tide of the Second World War and has since been near-universally acclaimed as one of the single most important military engagements in human history.
After the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, the Red Army was now in a position to begin a long counter-offensive that would repel the German invader and extend Soviet influence deep into the heart of Europe. Leading the charge was Stalin’s top military commander, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who had succeeded both in the defence of Moscow in the early days of the war and in orchestrating the recent victory at Stalingrad.
In the summer of 1943, the Germans would launch their last great Eastern Front offensive of the war at Kursk, leading to a massive tank battle near the Russian-Ukrainian border. Although suffering massive casualties, the Red Army would reign victorious at Kursk and begin its reconquest of Ukraine and other occupied Soviet territories.
It was also around this time that Stalin would begin negotiating the conditions of a postwar peace with his erstwhile Western allies. Although Stalin never trusted Britain or America, the German invasion in June 1941 prompted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to declare his support for Stalin and the Soviet Union.
With the entry of the United States into the war that December, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Stalin now had a second potent ally in U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. Although the Americans, in particular, had poured the entire weight of their industrial capacity into supplying the Soviet war effort since 1941, Stalin resented his allies’ apparent reluctance to open a “second front” in Europe to resist the German war machine.
As such, when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met together for the first time at Teheran (Iran) in November 1943, opening a second front was near the top of the Soviet leader’s agenda. On this point, Roosevelt and Churchill acquiesced, resulting in the later Allied landings at Normandy – “Operation Overlord” – on 6 June 1944.
Stalin correspondingly agreed to launch a parallel offensive upon German-occupied Belarus, code-named “Operation Bagration” after a famous Russian-Georgian general from the Napoleonic era. Interestingly, the Soviet offensive would begin on 22 June 1944, the second anniversary of the initial German invasion of the USSR.
Both operations would prove incredibly successful, and by August 1944, the Red Army had not only recaptured Belarus and Ukraine, but also pushed into the eastern half of German-occupied Poland. As part of Stalin’s wider strategy for the future of Europe, the Soviets would also invade and occupy Axis countries Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, collaborating with local Communists to lay the groundwork for future puppet governments in those states.
Although Stalin’s conquest and rough treatment of Axis countries was perhaps understandable in the context of the war, his “liberated” allies, Poland and Czechoslovakia fared no better. Upon an uprising of Polish patriots in Warsaw against the German occupation in August 1944, the Red Army waited on the east bank of Vistula River for the Polish resistance to be crushed and Warsaw to be razed to the ground before continuing their further advance westward.
At his next conference with Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta (Crimea) in February 1945, Stalin pushed for Allied confirmation of the new Polish eastern border he had drawn up with Hitler in 1939, as well as the annexation of the East Prussian capital of Königsberg (henceforth renamed “Kaliningrad”) into the USSR.
Although Poland would be duly compensated with territories taken from Germany, including Pomerania, Silesia, and the remainder of East Prussia, her political fate was ultimately sacrificed on the altar of the West’s alliance with Stalin, as a postwar Communist Poland under Soviet hegemony was now all but guaranteed.
Coincidentally, Czechoslovakia would suffer a similar fate, along with losing its own eastern territory of Transcarpathia to Soviet Ukraine. Thus, a war that was started in defence of the territorial and political integrity of Poland and Czechoslovakia from Hitler would end in their total conquest by Stalin.
Continuing their fateful march across Poland, the Red Army would finally cross the prewar German frontier in spring 1945, soon encircling the capital of Berlin. Hitler would commit suicide on 30 April, and despite a desperate defence of the city, the Germans would ultimately submit to unconditional surrender to the “United Nations” of Allied forces on 8 May. As the final capitulation was signed on what was already 9 May in Moscow time, the Soviets would celebrate their “Victory in Europe” the following day.
As was agreed upon at Yalta, the reduced territory of Germany (and Berlin) would now be split into four occupation zones, respectively administered by the USSR, United States, Britain, and France. Also pursuant to the Yalta agreements, the Soviet Union would declare war upon Japan in August, not soon after the first of two atomic bombings that would herald the final end to hostilities in the Second World War.
Despite their minimal contribution on this front, the Soviets were duly compensated with the Kuril Islands and southern half of Sakhalin Island, both of which Russia had lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War 40 years prior. It would also be at this time that Stalin gained greater influence in China and North Korea, leading to the later Communist takeover of both countries.
Not soon after the end of the European war, a final Allied conference would meet at Potsdam (Berlin) to confirm the terms of the prior meetings at Teheran and Yalta, finalizing the postwar peace. Roosevelt had died in office prior to the German surrender and Churchill lost his bid for re-election shortly after the start of the conference, such that the United States and Great Britain were now respectively represented by President Harry Truman and Prime Minister Clement Attlee.
Especially considering that Soviet troops had been the ones to deal the final blow to the Third Reich, neither inexperienced leader was in much of a position to now resist Stalin’s demands. Although more radical ideas to “deindustrialize” and effectively destroy Germany as revenge for the war were ultimately rejected, the Allies agreed upon a total dismantling of the prior Nazi regime and wholesale “de-Nazification” of the German population. Millions of ethnic Germans were also relocated from regions they had lived for centuries, such as the Czech Sudetenland and now-Polish Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia.
Finally, plans were laid for a series of trials of Nazi leadership for their numerous unspeakable war crimes, including their infamous mass murder of 6 million European Jews. Although the Nazis certainly deserved their fate at the resulting proceedings at Nuremberg, it is chilling that Soviet delegates shamelessly joined in on the prosecution, while their own war crimes were left unsaid and unpunished.
Notably, in typically cynical fashion, the Soviets accused the Nazis of the massacre of 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn forest near Smolensk – a crime actually committed by the NKVD in 1940. The Germans vehemently denied this accusation, but were convicted all the same, while the Western Allies acquiesced.
Regrettably, there would never be a Soviet equivalent to the Nuremberg Trials, and Stalin would emerge as the greatest victor and beneficiary of the bloodiest war in human history – a war which he himself had collaborated with Hitler in starting in the first place.
The “Great Patriotic War” – as the Soviet war effort from 1941 to 1945 has since been memorialized – was a cataclysmic and epochal event in Russian history. Although the official estimated number of Soviet war deaths – 27 million – is likely exaggerated, there is no doubt that the Soviet Union suffered more absolute military and civilian casualties than any other country in the entire period.
Although Stalin received significant financial and materiel aid from the United States throughout the war, Soviet industry had proven remarkably capable of supporting the war effort – with many factories fully relocating eastward beyond the Urals after the German invasion – and in stark contrast to the abysmal failure of Tsarist Russia against Imperial Germany in the prior war, Soviet Russia performed exceedingly well against Nazi Germany.
Stalin’s victory in the war also helped to legitimize his regime both internally and externally, and collective memory of the war effort was almost immediately mythologized, with Stalin practically deified and Victory Day – 9 May – raised to the status almost of a religious feast day. Although the present Russian regime has a complicated relationship with its Soviet past, Victory Day remains one of the most important national holidays in the Russian calendar.
Even though the Red Army was ultimately unsuccessful in reconquering Finland, the Soviet sphere of influence not only included every other Tsarist territory from 1914, but now encompassed the largest ever “Russian empire” in the history of either the Kievan or Muscovite states, extending as far west as the Elbe River in Germany.
In addition to the fifteen Republics of the USSR – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan – the emerging “Eastern Bloc” would include Communist satellite states in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.
Meanwhile, although not always under the direct control of Moscow, the Soviet Union would promote the rise of several Communist regimes across the globe, including: Yugoslavia, Albania, Mongolia, China, North Korea, (North) Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, Venezuela, and Cuba, among many others.
It would not take long before the wartime alliance between the West and USSR broke down into mutual hostility and suspicion. Unlike his predecessor, President Truman was not particularly fond of Stalin, and mistrusted the Soviet leader from the outset of their relationship.
Meanwhile, Winston Churchill, now leader of the opposition in England, had always had an anti-Communist streak and coined the term “Iron Curtain” in a 1946 speech delivered in the United States to describe Stalin’s political strangling of Central and Eastern Europe after the war. Churchill would ultimately return to office in 1951, although his country had lost serious international prestige in the aftermath of the war.
Indeed, after 1945, the world would have but two massive superpowers – the United States and Soviet Union – who soon led their respective global factions in a bitter “Cold War” for the next 50 years. This was no more striking than in Germany, where a new “German Federal Republic” (West Germany) built on an American liberal-capitalist model and a “German Democratic Republic” (East Germany) built on a Soviet Marxist-Leninist model would emerge as competing alternative realities within the same historic nation-state.
This situation would be mirrored in East Asia, where Korea and Vietnam would both be split into a respective Soviet-backed “North” and American-backed “South.” Meanwhile, in China, the “Nationalist” faction of Chiang Kai-Shek would ultimately lose a brutal civil war to Communist rival, Mao Zedong, with the former’s government forced into permanent exile on the island of Taiwan, where it remains to this day.
A turning point in the early Cold War was Stalin’s production of an atomic bomb in 1947, with plans stolen from the Americans by Communist spies within the United States. From that point forward, the Americans were no longer alone in wielding this powerful apocalyptic weapon. A subsequent nuclear arms race between the United States and Soviet Union would soon force a serious strategic rethinking on both sides on how to carefully manage their geopolitical rivalry without ending human civilization in a horrific nuclear war.
This issue would ebb and flow in importance throughout the Cold War, with phases of nuclear proliferation followed by later periods of mutual disarmament. Unfortunately, the looming threat of nuclear war has never really gone away, and remains a hot topic in the context of the ongoing conflict between the post-Soviet states of Russia and Ukraine.
In the spirit of the Cold War, in 1949, the United States would lead in the formation of an anti-Soviet defensive military alliance dubbed the “North Atlantic Treaty Organization” (NATO), which then included France, Britain, Canada, and Italy among its founding members.
The USSR would respond in 1955 with their own “Warsaw Pact” alliance including the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Europe. While the Warsaw Pact would dissolve with the later fall of the USSR, NATO has persisted, and has since expanded eastward into Poland and other former Soviet satellites.
On the domestic policy front, Stalin turned his focus to rebuilding the shattered Soviet economy with a renewal of his system of Five-Year Plans. Several building projects in Moscow and other major cities were commenced or continued from before the war. Most notable among these are the Moscow “Seven Sisters” skyscrapers built in a similar “Stalinist Gothic” style, the surprisingly magnificent stations of the Moscow Metro (subway) system, and the extensive suburban block apartments – equally ugly and iconic – designed to house the USSR’s exploding urban population.
Although there would not be a return to the acute political persecutions of the late 1930s, several “politically unreliable” elements, including returning prisoners of war, were sent to the Gulag to prevent the possibility of a military coup against Stalin by Soviet citizens exposed to Western influence on the front.
During and immediately after the war, Stalin also became a more fervent proponent of Russian nationalism, downplaying the importance of the very national minorities whose rights he had previously championed during his tenure as “Commissar for Nationalities” under Lenin. Indeed, several “suspicious” ethnicities, such as the Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, and Jews, were now persecuted and subjected to mass deportations or social pressure to emigrate.
Indeed, with the foundation of the State of Israel in formerly British Palestine in 1948, many Soviet Jews took Stalin’s latest wave of persecutions as an invitation to emigrate and start a new life in their Biblical ancestral homeland, never to return. Although several of the leaders of the new Israeli society were of Soviet-Jewish origin, the USSR would support the Arabs in the emerging conflict between Israel and her neighbours, with the United States conversely taking Israel’s side.
In the last years of his life, Stalin’s physical health would start to decline rapidly and he would grow increasingly paranoid and distrustful of those around him. Ironically, the people he mistrusted most were his own doctors, many of whom were Jewish and suspected of an “American-Zionist conspiracy” to assassinate him.
Thus, when Stalin was found half-conscious in his Moscow dacha, having suffered a serious brain hemorrhage, no one could – or perhaps would – save him from the inevitable. So it was that, on 5 March 1953, the man known to history as Joseph Stalin finally died, at the age of 74.
Stalin’s legacy speaks for itself. In one of the bloodiest and most horrifying centuries in human history, he was one of its most chilling authors. Rising from the ranks of petty criminal and rank ideologue in service of the Bolshevik Party, Stalin politicked his way to the top ranks of Communist leadership to gain full control over the largest country on the face of the Earth. He then succeeded in transforming an agricultural backwater into an industrial superpower and won a genuinely apocalyptic conflict against the only comparably evil man of his time.
Successfully playing his erstwhile allies in the West, Stalin would then go on to conquer half of the European Continent and submit it to his will for the next half-century. It is nigh impossible to nail down the exact number of Stalin’s total death toll, or to fully account for the innumerable lives irreversibly traumatized by his totalitarian regime of Terror, but it certainly numbers in at least the tens of millions. Indeed, the shadow of Stalin would loom large over Russia, Eastern Europe, and indeed the entire world, for decades to come.