Getting your punch in first
John Zametica
ICEBREAKER: WHO STARTED THE SECOND WORLD WAR? by Viktor Suvorov, translated by Thomas B. Beattie
Hamish Hamilton, ,(16.99, pp.364
Imagine that you are Stalin. It is 1939. Molotov and Ribbentrop have just signed the Soviet-German non-aggression pact. Already, however, you have decided on a course of military aggression against Ger- many. But first, Hitler can do some very useful work for you. Your aim, of course, is world revolution and world domination, although Europe will do nicely for the time being. So you let Hitler start a war. He is your 'Icebreaker for the Revolution'. And whilst it is important in the initial phase to stay out of the main conflict, you do not simply watch. You take the eastern part of Poland and you also pocket the Baltic states. How is the Soviet Union going to attack Germany if there is no common frontier?
But you are only human and you make mistakes. In June 1940 you take Bessarabia from Romania. This makes Hitler rather unhappy, which is not surprising because you are now threatening his vital oil supplies in Romania. Bessarabia makes sense only if the oilfields in the south are also taken. At this point, Hitler decides in principle to attack you, since he really cannot afford your kind of neutrality. Your own aggressive preparations are already well advanced, and since you have no intention of fighting a defensive war you take absolutely no steps to get ready for one. And so, from about July 1940, two vast armies are being formed, almost liter- ally staring at each other across the frontier and getting stronger by the day. There is no reason, however, for you to believe that Hitler would actually launch an attack on you, because for him that would entail a war on two fronts. And, after all, he has signed a pact with you precisely to avoid such a disaster. So you carry on with your aggressive preparations and ignore all the warnings of impending attack. When this comes in the shape of operation Barbaros- sa on 22 June 1941, only two weeks or so before you are meant to go into action, the setback is substantial. It means that, in- stead of ending up with the whole conti- nent of Europe, you only get a half.
Icebreaker, where the above argument is put forward, is written by Viktor Suvorov (the pseudonym of a Soviet defector). Clearly, it has major implications for fu- ture study of the origins of the second world war, of the June 1941 German attack and of diplomatic history until that attack. The Soviet Union, far from being the victim of aggression, in fact invited it whilst preparing her own. The potential for con- troversy inherent in this view is of course enormous.
The first thing to be said about Suvorov's book is that it does not present an essen- tially fresh point of view. In 1985 Ernst Topitsch, an Austrian professor, published his Stalins Krieg, a fairly short but brilliant piece of analysis, in which he suggested and explored much the same themes as Suvorov has done since. Suvorov is not an academic and Icebreaker is hardly written in a calm fashion. But Topitsch's work has established an academic background to Suvorov's arguments. In Icebreaker we are not, in other words, dealing with some mad defector out on his own to rewrite history.
In order to support his thesis of a Soviet Union bent on aggression, Suvorov looks at all manner of relevant detail on the Soviet side: the weapons of the Red Army, troop dispositions, the geographic position of river flotillas, the military backgrounds of commanding officers, the creation and movements of different armies and army units, and much else besides. He is very strong here. Thus we learn that the Soviet Union trained thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands of parachutists, who would be useless in a defensive war; that the in- depth defensive fortifications of the Soviet Union, known as the `Stalin Line', were dismantled just as soon as the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact was signed; that there was an emphasis on designing weapons with aggressive capabilities, not defensive ones; that aircraft pilots were trained mainly in the art of aggressive ground attack and 'Cheer up, Cassandra, it may never happen.' hardly at all for dog fights; that there was, curiously, a very large production of glid- ers; that mountain divisions were being created in the steppes of the Ukraine, and then moved close to Romania and Czechoslovakia; and that, in general, there was hardly anything meaningful done in the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 to prepare the country for a defensive war. On the contrary, everything was being done to move on to the attack.
According to Suvorov, the point of no return for the Russians was reached in mid-June 1941, when huge armies were ordered to regroup in the west, with the most high-ranking military commanders being transferred to join them there. All this was proceeding in conditions of strict secrecy, but of course it was impossible to remain invisible. The Soviet armies, in- cidentally, contained a substantial element of Gulag prisoners, recently released to fight in their distinctive black uniforms. The war was now unavoidable, with the most powerful Soviet forces assembled on the Romanian frontier, clearly after the Ploesti oilfields, and further forces massed along the frontier with Germany and in the south poised to attack Persia. Hitler preempted the Soviet strike with Barbaros- sa — just. Had the Russians been able to strike first, they would have been able to inflict massive immediate losses on the Germans.
This thesis is likely to be attacked by many academic historians whose previous work would not make much sense if Suvorov is right. Certainly, his evidence is mostly circumstantial. But there is a differ- ence between circumstantial evidence and massive circumstantial evidence, which is what Icebreaker provides. And whilst Suvorov's evidence is understandably sel- dom of a documentary type, he has gone to great lengths in his use of previously unknown or unused Soviet sources such as the vast military memoir literature. He is weak on diplomatic history, but then a major implication of his book is that the diplomatic history of the period was in significant measure irrelevant.
There are other reasons for giving se- rious consideration to Suvorov's argu- ments. Only days ago there was a revela- tion in an authoritative Soviet journal that the Soviet Union did indeed have a plan of attack only weeks before Barbarossa. Ex- actly what kind of attack will presumably remain controversial. Perhaps only a li- mited war was envisaged, or perhaps Stalin was merely giving a warning to the Ger- mans. But Suvorov argues that Stalin could not have left his vast armies to winter in the forests of the frontier area, and that the process of dispersing those armies would have been long and enormously costly. `This', Suvorov writes, 'is the central ques- tion of this book: if the Red Army could not go back, but could not stay long in the border area either, what was left for it to do?'
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