Abstract
For more than 30 years historical debate on the outbreak of the Second World War has centred on one book: A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War.1 In the various controversies generated by the Originsattention has focused mainly on Taylor’s depiction of Hitler as a tactical improviser in foreign policy rather than a fanatical ideologist bent on war, and on his sympathetic treatment of British and French appeasement of Germany.2 Generally ignored in these debates is Taylor’s authorship of an equally controversial and contentious interpretation of the Soviet role in the origins of the Second World War.3
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Notes and References
A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War(Harmondsworth, 1964; first published London, 1961).
For the debate on Taylor’s Originssee W. Roger Louis (ed.), The Origins of the Second World War: A. J. P. Taylor and His Critics(New York, 1972);
G. Martel (ed.), The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered: The A. J. P. Taylor Debate after Twenty-Five Years(London, 1986);
E. M. Robertson (ed.), The Origins of the Second World War(London, 1971);
E. M. Robertson (ed.) and articles in the Journal of Modern History(March, 1997).
To my knowledge the only major treatment of Taylor’s views on Soviet foreign policy and the outbreak of the Second World War is T. J. Uldricks’ ‘A. J. P. Taylor and the Russians’, in Martel (ed.), Origins Reconsidered.
This summary of Taylor’s view is based on a reading of remarks scattered throughout the Origins,but see especially chs 9–10. The quote is from p. 319 of the Penguin edition of the book.
See G. Roberts, The Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact with Hitler(London, 1989), ch. 2.
Members of the collective security school of thought include the present author in The Unholy Alliance,T. J. Uldricks, ‘Soviet Security Policy in the 1930s’ in G. Gorodetsky (ed.), Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1991(London, 1994) and ‘A.J. P. Taylor and the Russians’;
G. Gorodetsky, ‘The Impact of the Ribbentrop Pact on the Course of Soviet Foreign Policy’, Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique(January–March 1990)
and ‘The Origins of the Cold War: Stalin, Churchill and the Formation of the Grand Alliance’, The Russian Review,47 (1988);
M. Jabara Carley, ‘End of the “Low, Dishonest Decade”: Failure of the Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance in 1939’, Europe-Asia Studies,45, no. 2 (1993)
and ‘Down a Blind Alley: Anglo-Franco-Soviet Relations, 1920–1939’, Canadian Journal of History(April 1994);
I. Fleischhauer, Der Pact: Hitler, Stalin und die Initiative der deutschen Diplomatic, 1938–1939((Frankfurt, 1990);
and B. Pietrow, Stalinismus, Sicherheit und Offensive. Das Dritte Reich in der Konzeption der sowjetischen Ausenpolitik 1933 bis 1941(Melsungen, 1983).
An important but semi-detached member of this school is J. Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–1939(London, 1984), who writes: ‘what is so striking from 1933–1939 is less the tentative soundings in Berlin — the echoes of Rapallo — than the merciless persistence with which the Russians so doggedly clung to the policy of collective security, a policy which so rarely showed any promise of success’ (p. 230).
Exemplars of the old official Soviet line which argue the collective security case include I. K. Koblyakov, USSR: For Peace, Against Aggression 1933–1941(Moscow, 1976)
and V. Sipols, Diplomatic Battles Before World War II(Moscow, 1982).
On the Rapallo period in Soviet-German relations see K. Rosenbaum, Community of Fate: Soviet-German Diplomatic Relations 1922–1928(Syracuse, NY, 1965);
H. L. Dyck, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia 1926–1933(London, 1966);
R. H. Haigh et al., German-Soviet Relations in the Weimar Era(London, 1985);
and the relevant volumes and sections of E. H. Carr’s A History of Soviet Russia(London, 1950–78).
Some new and interesting archival documents on Soviet-Germany military co-operation in the 1920s were published in International Affairs(Moscow), July 1990. A recent, interesting Russian/Soviet article on Rapallo is V. Sokolov and I. Fetisov, ‘Rapallo and Prewar Poland’, International Affairs(Moscow), March 1993.
For a review of Soviet foreign policy as a whole in the 1920s see T. J. Uldricks, ‘Russia and Europe: Diplomacy, Revolution and Economic Development in the 1920s’, International History Review,no. 1 (1979).
Adherents of the ‘German’ school of thought include O. Pick, ‘Who Pulled the Trigger? Soviet Historians and the Origins of World War II’, Problems of Communism(January–February 1968);
J. Hochman, The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, 1934–1938(Ithaca, NY, 1984);
N. Tolstoy, Stalin’s Secret War(London, 1981);
R. Tucker, ‘The Emergence of Stalin’s Foreign Policy’, Slavic Review,xxxvi (1977);
and G. L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany,2 vols (Chicago, 1970; 1980),
Germany and the Soviet Union 1939–1941(Leiden, 1954).
The ‘German’ interpretation has in recent years also found an echo among many Soviet/Russian historians. See e.g. M. I. Semiryaga, Tainy Stalinskoi Diplomatii, 1939–1941(Moscow, 1992).
See the two Uldricks articles cited above in Notes 3 and 6.
Doing business with the Nazis was, of course, the universal norm in the 1930s for all types of governments and states. See e.g. G. Dutter, ‘Doing Business with the Nazis: French Economic Relations with Germany under the Popular Front’, Journal of Modern History(June 1991).
The nature of Soviet collective security policy is explored further in Uldricks, ‘Soviet Security Policy in the 1930s’ and Roberts, Unholy Alliance,ch. 3. See also Haslam, The Soviet Union, 1933–9and R. Craig Nation, Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917–1991(Ithaca, NY, 1992), ch. 3.
The most important representatives of the ‘internal politics’ school are Haslam, The Soviet Union, 1933–9and, for the most sustained and explicit argument of this view, P. D. Raymond, Conflict and Consensus in Soviet Foreign Policy, 1933–1939,PhD thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 1979. See also Haslam’s article in Gorodetsky (ed.), Soviet Foreign Policy.
On Soviet policy towards Japan see J. Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Threat from theEast, 1933–1941(London, 1992).
Uldricks, ‘Soviet Security Policy in the 1930s’, p. 73.
The emphasis here on the ramshackle character of foreign policy in the 1930s is commensurate with the picture of crisis and chaos in Soviet domestic politics drawn by the so-called ‘revisionist’ historians. See, inter alia, J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938(Cambridge, 1985);
G. T. Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933–1953(London, 1991);
J. Arch Getty and R. T. Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives(Cambridge, 1993);
and, for a superb summary and commentary on the whole debate, C. Ward, Stalin’s Russia(London, 1993). However, compared to internal politics, foreign policy and diplomacy was a relatively sane and controlled domain of decision-making. I also think that the divisions and conflicts over foreign policy were of a different character and order than those typical of domestic politics.
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© 1995 Geoffrey Roberts
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Roberts, G. (1995). Introduction: Conflicting Views on the USSR and the Origins of the Second World War. In: The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24124-8_1
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