Industrial Preparedness in Cheliabinsk, 1939–1940

Abstract

Starting in the mid-1930s, the Soviet leadership believed that a new great war in Europe was inevitable. Articles in the army newspaper Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda) foresaw, as did informed organs in other parts of the world, a forthcoming war between Japan and the USA. The most serious fears from the Soviet perspective involved which coalitions were possible and most probable in terms of aggression against the USSR. Ernst Henry wrote two books on this question, Hitler over Europe? and Hitler over Russia? In the former, Henry warned of an appeasement policy towards Germany.¹ The other book contained, with nightmarish precision, a possible scenario for a fascist coalition war against the Soviet Union. Ernst Henry was the pseudonym chosen by Semën Rostovskii after fleeing from the Nazis to London, where he worked as correspondent for several newspapers. During his time in Germany he had collected a lot of material on which groups in German society supported Hitler. Although Henry’s book predicted a joint fascist army invasion of the Soviet Union, his further reasoning about the outcome of such a conflict merely reflected the ideas of the Communist International, that a victorious workers’ revolution would be the ultimate consequence of a new war.