The Nazi assault on Bolshevik Russia ends one
nightmare and begins another. The sinister prospect of a coalition between the
two wings of world revolution, which haunted the minds of western statesmen for
five years, has now been dissolved by Hitler's panzer divisions. In its stead
rises another frightening prospect -- the possibility that Germany will control
the resources and labor power in the vast territory stretching from Bohemia to
the Himalayas and the Persian Gulf, and that she will use it as a base from
which to gain domination of all Asia.
In the transition from the mediæval period to the modern, the breakdown of the unity of western Christendom and the emergence of the nation-state system roughly coincided in time with the elimination of the strong buffer states which had stood between the Germanic and the Russian centers of power. The result was perpetual instability. Any new solution for this tragic area must be considered in the light of its rôle in history. It is the thesis of this article that the solution of the problem of Eastern Europe is one of the prerequisites to the establishment of a lasting world peace.
I. TEUTON AND SLAV
Eastern Europe attained its maximum usefulness
as a buffer between Teuton and Slav during the first half of the seventeenth
century, when Muscovy was going through the Time of Troubles. The Ukraine then
enjoyed the freedom of Cossack self-government under Polish hegemony, and
Germany was the scene of the Thirty Years War. The buffer states (the
Swedish-Baltic Empire, Poland and the Ottoman Empire) reached the climax of
their power through the traditional policy of the French kings to support
opponents of the Hapsburgs. The arrangement was weakened, and eventually
destroyed, by the elimination of these historic buffers -- the Ukraine by union
with Moscow, 1654; Sweden through defeat by Peter the Great, 1709; Turkey
through defeat by Catherine the Great, 1774; and Poland by the three
partitions, 1772-1795. By these events the Germanic Empires (Germany and
Austria-Hungary) and the Russian Empire became contiguous. Each had a policy
for the area in opposition to the other's. Bismarck, during his thirty years of
office, did try to "keep the wire open to St. Petersburg." But the
policy was abandoned by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The contest between Russia and
Austria-Hungary, supported by Germany, for control of the Balkan heritage of
the Ottoman Empire was the particular stage of the historic struggle for
Eastern Europe which in 1914 precipitated the World War. With the passing of
the four dynasties in that war (Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, Ottoman and Romanov) a
drastic reorganization of Eastern Europe became necessary. To replace the
contiguity of empire between Teuton and Slav two solutions for the area were
expressed in treaty form in 1918 and 1919. Both failed.
The German solution of 1918 was a plan to
reorganize Eastern Europe in the interests of the Central Powers. Poland was
granted independence, and a separate Ukraine was created as an economic
preserve through which Germany might dictate to Moscow. The Germans expected to
recover some of the costs of the war through the advantages they acquired in
the East. These expectations were written into their Treaty of Peace with the
Ukrainian Peoples' Republic, February 9, 1918, and into the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk with Soviet Russia, March 3, 1918. By the latter treaty Russia
recognized the independence of the Ukraine, and renounced sovereignty west of a
line extending from the Gulf of Riga to the proposed Ukrainian frontier. By a
subsequent treaty, August 27, 1918, Germany forced Russia to renounce
sovereignty over Estonia and Latvia, and to recognize the independence of
Georgia. The exploitation of the Ukraine, however, proved to be a false hope.
The collection of grain from the stubborn peasants required the presence of one
million German troops, who in the western theatre of war might well have
insured the success of Ludendorf's offensive in France in March-July 1918. The
Bolsheviks claim further credit for a share in the eventual Allied victory by
their promotion of revolution within Germany, using the Soviet Embassy as a
base for propaganda operations. Germany was, in fact, close to a Communist revolution
in early November 1918. However, the strength of German Communism was a result,
not the cause, of Germany's military defeat in the field.
As a result of losing the war in the West,
Germany was forced to disgorge her Eastern conquests through annulment of the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. General Hoffmann, who had conducted the Brest-Litovsk
negotiations, then proposed to lead an all-European army into Russia to destroy
the Bolsheviks. The plan is reported to have received the favorable interest of
Marshal Foch. Students of German affairs have believed that many German leaders
remained convinced that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would one day be carried
into full execution.
Having defeated Germany and gained control of
the destinies of Eastern Europe, the Allies restored the buffer zone in theory,
but left it weakened by an over-zealous application of the principle of
self-determination. They accepted the separatist forces which parcellated the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. They recognized the independent states which were
established in the limitrophe areas of Tsarist Russia in the Baltic. They
created a large but weak Poland to right the wrongs of the historic partitions.
The result was what has been described, not
quite fairly, as the "Balkanization" of Eastern Europe. In the place
of contiguous empires there appeared on the map a belt of new or restored
states -- what the Germans call the "Teufels Gürtel." It was not a
zone of strong buffer power, but an economic vacuum between the two high
pressure areas of Germany and Russia. These weak states were left to work out
the problems of their agrarian poverty as best they could and to devise means
of meeting what they considered the menace of Bolshevism from the East. In
order to improve their own security they resorted to an exaggerated economic
nationalism which disrupted the natural exchange of agricultural and industrial
goods between Eastern and Central Europe. Only an effective federation of
Poland with the Baltic states, and the close coöperation of this bloc with the
Succession States of the Danube basin, could at that time have restored the
historic buffer between Germanic and Russian power. But the Poles, in their new
nationalism, were still romantically devoted to the hope of a resurrected Rzecz
Pospolita (the Polish-Lithuanian Res Publica after 1569, which
extended from the Baltic to the rapids of the Dnieper). They refused to accept
the Curzon Line as their eastern boundary. By the Treaty of Riga in 1921,
resulting from their expedition to Kiev the previous year, they acquired
considerable Russian lands. This added a Ukrainian minority of six millions to
the German minority in Poland. The Czecho-Slovak state, already burdened with a
German minority and a Hungarian minority, likewise acquired a Ukrainian minority
in Carpatho-Ukraine, an area which came into its possession partly because of
uncertainty as to how else to dispose of it, partly because the Czecho-Slovaks
desired to have a common frontier with Rumania. The multi-national character of
Poland and Czecho-Slovakia proved to be a weakness to each.
As no European Slav power showed the capacity to
organize the buffer zone, it was only a question of time before a revived
Germany, or a strong Russia, would attempt to gain mastery of it. The Allies,
by failing to put their solution of the historic problem of Eastern Europe on a
firm economic basis, and by failing to settle the problem of European security,
created a vacuum. The existence of this vacuum was one of the causes of the
second World War in 1939.
In the given conditions -- a highly efficient
Germany, with surplus industrial capacity and manpower, and a backward,
agrarian "Teufels Gürtel" which blocked her off from the riches of
the Ukraine and the Middle East -- the historic GermanDrang nach Osten was,
and is, to the German mind, as natural as the law of gravity. Even the Weimar
Republic, whose weakness forced it into the Rapallo policy of coöperation with
Soviet Russia, was never willing to accept as permanent the loss of the two
eastern provinces, nor to recognize Germany's eastern frontier of 1919 as fixed
and final. It remained for Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg to advocate marching to
the Urals and to propose a fresh implementation of ideas deeply rooted in
German thought. The Hitler "crusade" is an extension of the Hoffmann
plan.
Bismarck, as a realist, did not want to add a single Slav to Germany's
population. But Hitler, the romantic, had the idea that he could get the
Corridor and Posnania from Poland in exchange for giving Poland a free hand in the
Ukraine. Further, since Austria-Hungary no longer existed, it became necessary
for Hitler to create either another multi-national state or a series of such
states, to serve as the nucleus of the territories won by German arms in the
push to the East. For a time it seemed that Poland was to be cast for the rôle
formerly played by Austria-Hungary. The Nazi-Polish Ten Year Pact of
Non-Aggression, in January 1934, was considered a first step in fulfilment of
the plan for the creation of a Berlin-Warsaw-Kiev-Baku economic axis against
Russia. But after the death of Pilsudski, who held to the dream of a
resurrected Rzecz Pospolita,
Poland's leaders seemed to believe that any solution of the Ukrainian problem
which would benefit Germany would ipso facto be detrimental, if not fatal, to
Poland. Accordingly, from 1936 on, they sought to renew their former ties with
France and to improve their relations with Soviet Russia. The last Nazi attempt
to gain Polish collaboration in their designs on Russia is said to have been
made by Göring in his offer to Colonel Beck during the hunting box party near
Bialowice, in January 1939.[i] What reply Colonel Beck made is not
known. But two months later the Nazi seizure of Prague brought German troops to
Poland's southern frontier.
The Anglo-French answer to Hitler's seizure of Prague in March of that
year was to guarantee Poland. Whether or not Poland might have been forced to
collaborate with the Nazis had that guarantee not been given is not known. Nor
is it known whether the Nazi war machine would then have rolled quickly to the
Russian frontier and faced Stalin with an immediate decision -- either to fight
alone or to request military assistance from other members of the League of
Nations. What seems to be fairly clear is that the Anglo-French guarantee to
Poland forced Hitler into temporary collaboration with Stalin (1939-41) in
order to relieve the anxieties of his General Staff regarding another war on
two fronts along the lines of 1914. The Polish leaders might have chosen to
collaborate with Hitler and to share in the "New Order" at the
expense of Russia. Instead, they kept their pledges to Britain and France, and
opposed the Nazi war machine unaided; in the dénouement the Germans and the
Russians met again over the body of Poland -- the fourth partition.
From this point of view, the war against Britain and France became for
Hitler a necessary interlude, in order that he might destroy the offensive
power of his potential enemies in the West before resuming the march to the Ukraine
and the Caucasus. He kept his timetable in smashing the Low Countries and
France, but he was delayed by the failure of the all-out air offensive on
Britain.
Although compelled to postpone the invasion of Britain, the Nazis were
able to reorganize the industrial and food production of all the occupied
territories to strengthen their war machine for the eventual assault on the
U.S.S.R. The Nazi Balkan campaign of the spring of 1941 was preparatory to gain
control over the approaches to the Straits. Considerable mystery cloaks the
relations between Germany and Russia in the period prior to the assault on June
22, 1941. The novelty was not the attack itself, nor the timing, but the fact
that Stalin was not given another opportunity to collaborate on fixed terms.
There was no German ultimatum. It is reported that Stalin hoped the attack
would not come before August, as winter would then be a more certain ally. His
actions (e.g. recognition
of the short-lived rebel régime in 'Iraq, and the dismissal from Moscow of the
missions of the various small countries conquered by Hitler) indicated that he
would have played for more time by collaborating further. But Hitler decided
otherwise. His decision to gamble on being able to destroy the Red Army by
autumn probably was the greatest risk he has taken since he invaded the
Rhineland in 1936.
While it is hard to distinguish between a war emergency arrangement and
plans for permanent reorganization, it seems likely that Hitler's political
purpose is to create a German Lebensraum by driving the Bolshevik régime into
Asia and by setting up a new multi-national state in Eastern Europe to serve as
a substitute for old Austria-Hungary. He may conceive of this new state as a
West Slav bloc consisting of Lithuania, part of Poland and all of the area
inhabited by a Ukrainian-speaking population. For German purposes such a state
must be militarily weak and politically dependent on the Reich. Into it would
be moved the Czechs, all the Poles, and other Slav groups whose historic lands
have bordered on the Reich. The lands vacated by these persons would be
occupied by Germans, thus enlarging the purely German Lebensraum. Hitler's
economic purpose is likewise vast. In particular it involves the exploitation
of Russia's raw materials, especially oil, as supplies for the "New
Order" in Europe and as sinews in a long war of attrition against Britain
and America.
II. WHAT NEXT?
Whatever the ultimate military outcome of the Nazi-Bolshevik war, it
created a new situation for Britain and America. Hitler's "crusade"
might spread conditions of civil war to all the occupied territories of Europe.
Or it might pave the way for Hitler to make a peace offensive in the West.
Meanwhile the British-Bolshevik war alliance of July 12, followed by the British-American
promise of all possible aid to Russia, has ushered in a new stage in the joint
effort against the Nazis. The many complications which may result from this
action can as yet be only guessed at. But it is here suggested that our policy
should be formulated with several contingencies in view.
The first contingency assumes the survival of the Bolshevik régime. This
requires that the Red Army shall keep the field in Europe through September and
shall continue to demonstrate a capacity for counter-offensive tactics in order
to avoid envelopment by the Germans. The Red Army must be able to retreat far
enough and in time (cf. the success of Joffre's retreat in
1914, and the failure of Gamelin and Weygand in 1940). It may be that the
German Army will stop for the winter at Leningrad and at points in the Eastern
Ukraine. The Germans would then control about three-fifths of Russia's coal and
iron, and a considerable part of the sources of food supply. Further, the Luftwaffe would
be within range of the lower Volga and could not only hamper industrial
production but also could threaten interruption of Russia's oil supplies by
river tanker and pipe-lines. The situation would be serious. Nevertheless, if
the Red Armies in European Russia can avoid suffering a knock-out blow, and
provided its air force remains effective, the Russians can contain a large part
of the German Eastern Army and can continue to exact a heavy Nazi expenditure
of manpower, matériel and
oil. In that event, provided the British and the Americans have meanwhile acted
with increasing rather than decreasing vigor, the situation of 1918 might be
repeated: "Germany wins victories in the East, but in the end loses the
war through a defeat in the West."
Survival of the Bolshevik régime also involves effective execution of
the "scorched earth" policy, so that invaded areas offer
insurmountable problems to the enemy; the continuance of effective guerrilla
warfare; and effective sabotage of communications and units of production by
the secret Russian organizations left behind in the occupied zone. As the
Ukrainian collective farms are operated almost exclusively by tractors, the
Germans must capture the Russian oil fields to make the campaign pay its costs.
Reports indicate the possibility of a sea-borne attack on the Caucasus with
barges built or assembled on the lower Danube, and supported by air-borne
troops after the manner of the operations in Crete. Granted the British obtain
transit privileges through Iran, it remains to be seen how much of the Indian
Army can be diverted by General Wavell from Singapore and East Africa for the
defense of the oil wells in the Caucasus.
If the Bolshevik régime is forced back to the Urals, how self-contained
would be the Ural-Baikal zone? There has been a heavy movement of industries
eastward since 1932, nearer to the new sources of raw materials. This has
vastly improved Russia's strategic position over that of 1914, when one-third
to two-thirds of the key industries were located in the extreme west. The
Ural-Kuznets combine (iron and coal), while not yet equalling the output of
South Russia, is expected eventually to become the economic center of gravity
of the Soviet industrial system. Transport difficulties have been largely met
by the building in recent years of numerous feeders to the trunk lines, and by
double-tracking of the Trans-Siberian railway. Whether the Ural area and the
territories stretching thence to the Pacific can withstand a combined siege
from west and east cannot be determined from the data available. Sverdlovsk,
the citadel of Russia's inner defense, will be the most likely choice by the
Bolsheviks for their capital if their régime moves east of Moscow.
Other factors conditioning the survival of the Bolshevik régime in the
circumstances indicated would include the capacity of the military and naval
commissars to counter German efforts to spread defeatism and separatism.
Further, the Bolsheviks used the "boring from within" process
successfully in Germany in 1918. They might do so again.
However, should the contrary happen -- should the Red Army be destroyed
this year, or should it be enveloped and captured, or should it be put out of
action through the breakdown of transport or a failure of supplies or the
general economic exhaustion of the country -- then it is possible that the
Bolshevik régime might collapse, and that under Nazi pressure the Soviet Union
might dissolve into its component racial parts, at least for a time. This is
the second contingency which American policy must take into account.
There can be little doubt that the Nazis expected such a collapse when
they again assumed the risk of a war on two fronts. Their plan is to set up
puppet régimes from Finland to the Caucasus, with a main focus of Germanic
power in the West Slav bloc described above. Control over the puppet régimes
would give the Nazis the advantages of control over Russian resources and labor
power. From this base they would be in a position to threaten Britain in the
Middle East and India.
III. ALTERNATIVE AMERICAN POLICIES
For the United States this new situation on the world battle front
compounds the political confusion. Who is friend and who is foe? Finland, long
hailed as the advance guard of the free peoples, is fighting on the opposite
side of the line from Britain. France, from whose forge the fires of liberté spread
through Europe, is collaborating, under the pressure of defeat and by decision
of the Men of Vichy, in the creation of Hitler's "New Order." At such
a moment, when yesterday's opponent is today's war partner, when the comrade of
many battles is the potential enemy of tomorrow, it is necessary for us to
think through a long-range policy which will reconcile the British-American
determination to win the war with the requirements of a constructive plan to win
the peace after the hostilities are over. Central in all such calculations must
now be a consideration of the rôle of Russia, both in the war and in the peace.
If the Bolshevik régime survives, as set forth above as one contingency,
and if the United States enters the war on the side of Britain, do we assume
any of the obligations Britain may have in regard to Russia? Granted that every
effort must be made to maintain the Eastern front so long as the Red Army keeps
the field, there exists the element of risk that some American supplies might
fall into German hands. Critics of the Bolsheviks, while expressing astonished
praise for the heroism of the Red Army, are alarmed over the possibility that
American supplies might help preserve Bolshevism in Russia, might even, one
day, serve as sinews for world revolution. They argue that the release of war
materials to Russia and American financing of Soviet purchases should be made
contingent upon the dissolution of all Comintern agencies in America and
Moscow's abandonment of world revolution.
A second question involves the Far East. If, after occupying Indo-China
as a precaution to the South, Japan abrogates her Neutrality Pact of April 13,
1941, with Russia, and attempts to seize the Maritime Province, the Kamchatka
fisheries, or Outer Mongolia, should the United States intervene in order to
keep open the line of supply to the Russians? Does the cause of defeating
Hitler require that we give military support to the Bolsheviks in the Far East,
considering the lessons of our intervention there in the years 1918-20?
A third question concerns the peace. The Bolshevik régime entered a
brief period of tolerance in 1934 following the successful completion of the
first Five Year Plan, but it hardened again under the threat that the Nazis
might march to the Urals. Is there any evidence that it might again soften once
the Nazi power were broken, and actually become an economic democracy through
faithful fulfilment of the 1936 constitution? Could the democracies share the
responsibilities of establishing peace with a chastened Bolshevik régime, one,
moreover, which would be dependent on the West for economic reconstruction?
That peace will demand, as the foregoing pages have endeavored to show, a
balance in Eastern Europe. It can be attained only through the creation of
strong buffer states to prevent direct contact between the Germanic and the
Russian zones of power and likewise to prevent the division of the area into
small nationalistic states having too complete jurisdiction over their separate
economic destinies. Can America take part in the war, even merely to the extent
of serving as the arsenal for democracy, and avoid responsibility for
correcting the historic disequilibrium which, once the Nazis had come to power
in Germany, made the war all but inevitable?
Should the Bolshevik régime collapse, another and different question
would arise. Should the process of dissolution of the Soviet Union, perhaps
into many weak states under shifting local leaders, be allowed to run its
course without any attempt being made to save the old national régime or build
a new one? The answer might be "yes" by those who imagine that the
war can be satisfactorily ended for Britain and America by a
"compromise" under which the Ukraine and the Caucasus became part of
the Nazi Lebensraum.
It is possible, of course, that in event of a collapse of the Bolshevik
régime there would be a new so-called national régime, one of the Vichy type
under German domination. In that case, ought we make an effort to prevent the
Trans-Siberian railway from falling into its control? Should we, as part of the
same policy, support whatever opponents to the Nazis there are at that moment
in the Far East -- China, or perhaps even Japan?
On the other hand, if the successor régime were purely Russian and
nationalistic in temper, organized by the remnants of the Red Army as a system
of military Socialism within the framework of the 1936 Constitution, should
America support it by economic and military means? The emergence of a Russian
national state of an attenuated socialistic character, which felt too weak to
foster world revolution or which was no longer interested in it, might very
well offer a solution which we could wholeheartedly support as an economic
democracy indigenous to the soil.
Our latest guidepost in reëxamining our attitude toward the Russian
problem was provided by the Roosevelt-Churchill "Atlantic meeting."
The two leaders there decided to give material support to Russia as part of the
"win the war" plan. Their "win the peace" plan was
incorporated in the Eight Points, certain of which bear directly on the problem
of Eastern Europe. Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill agreed:
2. They desire to see no territorial changes which do not accord with
the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.
3. They respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of
government under which they will live; and they wish to see the sovereign
rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of
them.
6. . . . they hope to see established a peace . . . which will afford
assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom
from fear and want.
The second and third points repeat, in essence, President Wilson's
doctrine of self-determination and consent of the governed as enunciated in his
speech on the Four Principles, February 11, 1918. The sixth point refers to two
of President Roosevelt's four freedoms. The phrase "all the men in all the
lands" applies not only to the oppressed peoples of Europe, but to
Russians and Germans as well.
It is interesting to recall that President Wilson in 1918 proclaimed
that the treatment accorded to the Russian people would be the acid test for
the victors. That test was met by putting Russia behind a cordon sanitaire. The
acid test may again be the treatment accorded the Russian people who have
suffered longer, and more intensely, than any other great nation except the
Chinese. By their Homeric labors to "build Socialism," and by their
equally Homeric resistance to the Nazi invaders, the Russian people would seem
to have earned the right to enjoy President Roosevelt's four freedoms. A purely
Russian national state, based on modified Bolshevism but moving in the
direction of true economic democracy, as devised in principle by the Bolsheviks
in 1936, would seem, in the eyes of the writer, one with which Britain and
America could fully coöperate. Should that come to pass, then the
British-Bolshevik alliance, supported through to victory by America, may prove
to be not just a war marriage for the purpose of defeating the Nazis, but the
initial step in a process to bring Russia back into the community of Christian
nations. In formulating our policy we should not take any action that might
block or impede the attainment of this satisfactory result.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
Many of the questions here raised cannot be answered before the military
outcome of the Nazi-Bolshevik war is known. It is becoming increasingly clear,
however, that the United States ought to formulate in its own mind the policies
which it should follow in each of the various contingencies which may arise.
Day-to-day decisions should conform to a pattern and they should add up, at the
end, to make a coherent whole.
Even
at this early date, and even in such a bewilderingly complex situation, one
still is able to make a few general statements. One of them is that the
nightmare of a Nazi-Bolshevik coalition is over. Another is that Russian
Bolshevism may be regarded as offensively dangerous to the world as a whole
only when, in alliance with German Nazism, it unites the two wings of world
revolution. A third generalization is that when Germany and Russia do not
adjoin each other they are likely to be friendly to each other and remain at
peace; and that when they are contiguous they gravitate into war. And fourth is
the possibility that out of the crucible of war may emerge a Russian national
state which, even though retaining Bolshevik leadership, will abandon world revolution.
From the historical point of view, the fundamental issue being decided
on the Eastern front is whether the Muscovite Power, which began as a small
nucleus around Moscow in the fifteenth century, can survive in the twentieth.
If so, the world will eventually face the problem of building up an effective
buffer zone between Germanic and Russian power. Unless a constructive solution
is achieved for the "Teufels Gürtel," it will continue as the cradle
of wars and the graveyard of peace settlements. The statecraft of the United
States, the world's strongest economic power, will share in determining not
only Germany's place, but Russia's place also, in the community of nations.
[i]Cf. W. E. D. Allen, "The Ukraine." New York, Macmillan, 1941.
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