A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (13 page)

Stresemann gained an equally clear sense for British and French drivers and constraints. The Nobel Peace Prize made it highly unlikely that Chamberlain or Briand would raise objections to Germany’s Versailles violations. Their continued acquiescence to German demands over the withdrawal of Allied troops from German territory only reinforced his conviction that Britain and France were not willing to pressure Germany to halt rearmament.

Following Stresemann’s death in 1929, Germany’s domestic instability increased in the wake of the Great Depression and the rise of the
Nazi Party. As Chancellor, Hitler oversaw the general course of German foreign policy, though he was often greatly influenced by the irrational organization of overlapping ministries that he created.
⁵⁴
Throughout the 1930s and beyond, statesmen would again struggle to determine the relative primacy of ideology in foreign policy. National leaders needed to know Hitler’s underlying drivers—something that in retrospect seems painfully clear but at the time was far more murky. By 1941, Stalin faced this same difficulty when deciding how to deal with the Nazi invasion that he knew would eventually come. Part of the reason why he failed to heed the warning signs lies in the patterns he perceived and the pattern breaks he could not grasp.

4
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Stalin the Simulator

The Problem of Projected Rationality

BY THE SUMMER OF
1941, 3 million soldiers were preparing for the largest invasion in history. For months German aircraft had been flying reconnaissance over Soviet airspace, noting the position of Russian planes and military installations. German troops had been boarding trains headed east and not returning. Soviet spies were sending back to Moscow a steady stream of warning signs that attack was soon to come. Then, just five days before the assault, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence delivered a report from a source inside Hermann Göring’s Air Ministry. All preparations for the invasion of Russia were complete. The strike was imminent. Yet when Stalin received the intelligence, he scratched across it: “You can send your source from the headquarters of German aviation to his fucking mother.” The Soviet leader simply refused to believe what was obvious to everyone else.

In fact, Stalin had been receiving reliable intelligence, and lots of it, since 1939. It increased after December 1940, when Hitler issued Directive Number 21, ordering his generals to prepare to conquer Russia. On May 19, 1941, Richard Sorge, the posthumously famous German who spied for the USSR from Japan, reported that a massive German invasion would happen by month’s end. Sorge’s network had penetrated the Japanese General Staff as well as the high-ranking German officials in Tokyo, and his information was typically reliable. Yet Stalin dismissed the reports as disinformation, calling Sorge “a little shit who has set himself up with some factories and brothels in Japan.”
¹

When war came, Russia was utterly unprepared. The initial German onslaught, dubbed Operation Barbarossa, was so effective it almost seemed as though the entire campaign would be over in weeks. Much of the Soviet Air Force was destroyed before its planes ever left the ground. The poorly led troops on the western borders were slaughtered by the thousands. Stalin’s purges, which had cut deep into his officer corps, left the nation vulnerable, just as Hitler had expected. Eventually, the Russians would regroup, reorganize, and retaliate without mercy, though they would lose an estimated 20 million citizens before the war was won.

Why did Stalin fail so spectacularly to recognize that Hitler planned to invade Russia in June 1941? Numerous scholars have attempted to fathom Stalin’s seemingly inscrutable behavior on the eve of war. Gabriel Gorodetsky,
²
David Murphy,
³
Dmitri Volkogonov,
⁴
Geoffrey Roberts,
⁵
and David Holloway,
⁶
to name only a few, have all combed the historical record for clues. This chapter does not attempt to unearth new archival findings that will definitively settle the mystery. Instead, it reexamines the question of Stalin’s failure in order to further illuminate this book’s two key questions: what produces strategic empathy, and how has its presence, or absence, affected international history.

Much of the scholarship on Operation Barbarossa has centered on Stalin’s intelligence before the attack. Some have argued that the Soviet leader received all the information he needed to make defensive preparations and that his failure to do so leaves him squarely to blame for the debacle. Others have countered that no body of intelligence is ever pure. All accurate reports arrive amid a background of noise—inaccurate information, rumor, and speculation—that makes it impossible or extremely difficult to discern the true signals from the false. Still others have pointed out that, beyond mere noise, Stalin also received intentionally false signals as part of the German disinformation campaign. The Germans hoped to convince Stalin that their military buildup in the east was intended for use against Great Britain. Their disinformation campaign rested on the notion that Eastern Europe provided a safe haven where Nazi forces could be assembled, free from British bombing raids. Stalin’s failure therefore lies less in his personal behavior and more in the craftiness of German counterintelligence.

Each of these interpretations emphasizes what Stalin actually knew. The problem with this approach is that it downplays the fact that statesmen must typically choose between divergent interpretations of intelligence reports. In this case, Stalin had to choose to believe in one of two conflicting sets of views: namely that the German forces on Russia’s border were preparing to attack Britain or, alternatively, that they were preparing to attack Russia. What Stalin knew, therefore, is important, but it is far less crucial than what he believed. If we want to understand why Stalin so stunningly lacked strategic empathy for Hitler on this crucial occasion, we have no choice but to explore how he developed a sense of his enemies.

What Drove Stalin

The international historian John Lewis Gaddis has observed that history is largely about the process of getting into and back out of another person’s mind, “and then arguing among ourselves about what we saw there.”
⁷
Gaddis’s reflections on how we discern a historical figure’s character are useful springboards to a discussion of how the historical figures themselves assessed their opponents. Gaddis observes that historians typically seek patterns of behavior across scale. For example, in one anecdote about the Soviet leader, Stalin removed his pet parrot from its cage and remorselessly crushed the bird’s skull. Some see Stalin’s brutal treatment of Ukrainians as merely the extension of his ruthless character. In the micro and the macro, many historians perceive a consistent streak of cruelty toward others.

While we can easily conclude the obvious about Stalin’s character—that his emotional empathy was commensurate with that of a psychopath—we can also say that in many respects he also lacked strategic empathy. Like the Slumdog Strategist from the Introduction, Stalin employed Jamal’s heuristic “trust no one,” but to very ill effect. He decimated his officer corps and Party faithful, consistently misperceiving threats from those around him, especially, of course, when it mattered most, in the summer of 1941.

Stalin’s lack of both emotional empathy and strategic empathy dramatically affected his behavior, yet those traits do not suffice to explain his underlying drivers. These traits were prominent aspects of
his character; they were not motivating forces in and of themselves. His Marxist ideology did indeed shape his actions, yet neither was it at the root. Despite his early adoption of Marxism, his years of bank robbing and imprisonment in the name of the cause, and all the ideological rhetoric he espoused, Stalin was a fair-weather fanatic. By this admittedly provocative statement I do not mean that Stalin was not a devoted Marxist. Although he may have been a true believer, many of his actions while in power suggest that fulfilling Marxist ideological aims proved secondary to his primary goal of preserving his own power.

Like all individuals, Stalin held multiple, fluid identities. Changing contexts brought one or another to the fore. Also like many notable leaders, Stalin possessed a single underlying driver of greater salience than his other traits. He sought power, for himself and for his nation.

Throughout his career, many of Stalin’s excesses were committed to protect or enhance his own power. His early purges of Party rivals were not designed to achieve any ideological purity within the Party ranks. They were primarily to eliminate threats to his own advancement. The same was true of his purges of the military, which cut deep into his own officer corps. Those soldiers were victims of Stalin’s fear of losing power in a coup d’etat. Their murders had nothing to do with dogma. Even the mass murders of the Great Terror from 1937–1938 can be seen rooted in power considerations, not ideological ones. The historian Norman Naimark makes this point, concluding that although Stalin used the threat of sabotage by internal traitors to justify the killings, the ultimate aim was to preserve his position as dictator.
⁸
Naimark wisely observes that multiple factors combined to produce Stalin’s genocides, and ideological convictions were just one factor among many.
⁹

The historian Geoffrey Roberts put it well when he wrote that Stalin was “blinkered by his ideology, but not blinded by it.”
¹⁰
Though Roberts was commenting on the Russo-Finnish War of 1940, his point was that Stalin’s military leadership style was not driven exclusively or even primarily by Marxist doctrine. This was equally true of his domestic and foreign policy. Early evidence of this came when Stalin began to consolidate his power soon after Lenin’s death.

Trotsky’s yearning for worldwide revolution demonstrated his unyielding devotion to Marxist dogma. After Lenin named him foreign minister, Trotsky infamously quipped that he merely intended to issue
a few proclamations and close up shop. Lenin’s replacement of Trotsky with Chicherin evidenced the need for precisely the traditional diplomatic niceties that Trotsky’s worldview abjured.

Following the Trotsky–Zinoviev push for a German revolution in 1923, and the revolution’s dramatic failure, Stalin was able to oppose a policy of global revolution and instead argue for socialism in one country. This had the benefit of distinguishing him from his chief rivals for power atop the Soviet hierarchy. Stalin subsequently supported the growing cooperation with the German military, arming forces on the German Right, not the Left. Of course he believed in the historical inevitability of a worldwide communist victory, but because he was exceedingly patient and clung to no timetable of events, he never needed to behave recklessly by advancing ideological ends to the detriment of his own power. Advancing his own position always came first. Marxist dogma lingered ever-present in the background, and often rose to the foreground, but never supplanted his hunger for power.

Hitler, like Stalin, had multiple, competing motivations, and, like Stalin, he could compromise his views when it proved expedient. But unlike Stalin, Hitler was not driven ultimately by a thirst for power. Instead, he strove to achieve power in order to fulfill his perceived mission—even if the attempt to achieve his ideological ends would cost him his power and his life. The aim was simple: to ensure the German people their rightful place atop a hierarchy of world races. The means to achieve this were more complicated. Based on a social Darwinistic notion of competition, the German people would need to test their mettle in battle. If victorious, their place atop the pyramid of races would have been earned. If they failed, then, just as Hitler wrote in his final testament, the German people were not ready. Along the course of this epic struggle, it would be necessary to exterminate as many of the
Untermenschen
as possible. The war in Russia was not solely a war of expansion; it was a war of extinction, designed to obliterate the Slavs and Jews. As cruel as Stalin had been, it is not hard to grasp why the Russian people supported him during the Nazi invasion: Their alternative was even worse.

One of the clearest signs of Hitler’s devotion to dogma can be seen in his relentless pursuit of the Jews, both within and beyond German borders. At a time of war, it was not efficient to divert resources
away from military objectives and channel them into extermination campaigns. The ongoing operation of concentration camps as well as the use of
Einsatzgruppen
—those units designated for killing noncombatant Jewish men, women, and children in occupied territories—strongly suggests that the Führer’s ideology superceded his other objectives. Stalin, for all his barbarity, would not have focused on killing Ukrainians, for example, if by doing so it risked a possible loss of his power. Hitler was naturally concerned with attaining and protecting his power but primarily as a means of fulfilling his racist mission.

Stalin, like many others at the time, recognized a pattern in Hitler’s behavior whereby his pragmatism trumped his ideology. Hitler had repeatedly indicated that, despite his racist rhetoric, in foreign affairs realism came first. In 1934, Hitler violated his oft-stated hatred of the Poles by forming a nonaggression pact with Poland.
¹¹
In 1939, Hitler showed that he could easily discard his anti-Slavic, anti-Bolshevik pronouncements by forging an accord with Soviet Russia. The Führer again overrode Nazi racial dogma in 1940 by forming an alliance with the Japanese because the Tripartite Pact would cripple Britain’s access to raw materials in the Far East. Stalin observed this pattern, misread Hitler’s key driver—his ideology—and failed to scrutinize the pattern breaks.