Remembering the Road to World War Two

International History, National Identity, Collective Memory

Patrick Finney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415230186
• eBook ISBN: 9781136932922
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

'This is comparative history on a grand scale, skilfully analysing complex national debates and drawing major conclusions without ever losing the necessary nuances of interpretation.'

Stefan Berger, University of Manchester, UK

Remembering the Road to World War Two is a broad and comparative international survey of the historiography of the origins of the Second World War. It explores how, in the case of each of the major combatant countries, historical writing on the origins of the Second World War has been inextricably entwined with debates over national identity and collective memory.

Spanning seven case studies – the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain, the United States and Japan – Patrick Finney proposes a fresh approach to the politics of historiography. This provocative volume discusses the political, cultural, disciplinary and archival factors which have contributed to the evolving construction of historical interpretations. It analyses the complex and multi-faceted relationships between texts about the origins of the war, the negotiation of conceptions of national identity and unfolding processes of war remembrance.

Offering an innovative perspective on international history and enriching the literature on collective memory, this book will prove fascinating reading for all students of the Second World War.

1
On virtue

Stalin’s diplomacy and the origins of the Great Patriotic War

This attitude of the Soviet Union is predetermined by its general policy of struggling for peace, for the collective organisation of security and for the maintenance of one of the instruments of peace – the existing League of Nations. We consider that one cannot struggle for peace without at the same time defending the integrity of international obligations, particularly such as have direct bearing on the maintenance of existing frontiers, on armaments and on political or military aggression.

Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, address to the Council of the League of Nations, 17 March 1936¹

The signature of the Nazi–Soviet pact on 23 August 1939 was one of the most dramatic diplomatic coups of the inter-war years, signifying a rapprochement between bitter ideological enemies who had rained invective and scorn upon each other for years. Where the Soviet Union was concerned, the pact raised fundamental questions about the nature of General Secretary Josef Stalin’s foreign policy. Since the mid-1930s, with the indefatigable Litvinov to the fore, the Soviets had been ardent advocates of collective security, pursuing a Popular Front policy to concert all anti-fascist elements in Europe against Nazism. Now, Stalin and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop clinked glasses of vodka and Crimean champagne to toast their non-aggression treaty and the incipient partition of Poland, joking cynically about the Soviet Union joining the Anti-Comintern pact. In Britain, the Labour Party Daily Herald encapsulated the dismay of the left as it damned Stalin for ‘one of the most indefensible and shocking reversals of policy in history’; in the Soviet Union itself, there was equal bewilderment: ‘we felt that we did not understand something as we should have … Yesterday, we were taught to hate fascism but today to take it for a friend’.²

From the very outset, the apparent incongruity between the previous path of Soviet policy and the pact was reconciled in diverse ways. Soviet propaganda insisted that the collective security policy had been sincere and genuine, but had been confounded by the western powers’ refusal to agree terms in the alliance talks that had been proceeding for months. In the words of Vyacheslav Molotov, Litvinov’s successor, negotiations ‘had come to a deadlock owing to insuperable differences and had ended in failure through the fault of the ruling classes of Britain and France’.³ The dilatory manner and contradictory demands of the western powers had raised suspicions that their real aim was to divert Nazi expansionism eastwards, thus embroiling the Soviet Union in war. The pact was therefore justified as a realpolitik necessity to ensure Soviet security whereby Stalin had skilfully ‘out-Muniched’ them.⁴ The British government, having largely discounted the value of a Soviet alliance, reacted to the pact with relative equanimity, while the French were more disconcerted by its strategic implications; yet both predominantly viewed it as an act of realpolitik, of either a defensive or imperialist kind.⁵ An alternative but at this point marginal interpretation imputed a much more sinister character to Stalin’s policy and blamed excessive and ever-escalating Soviet demands for the failure of talks with the West. On this view, Soviet collective security rhetoric had been mere verbiage, camouflaging the true aim of seeking an agreement with Germany in order to plunge the capitalist world into internecine conflict, thus furthering revolutionary expansionist goals.⁶

These two starkly opposing interpretations marked out the terrain on which the subsequent historiographical debate on Soviet policy in the 1930s has been conducted. Existing in many different variants with diverse nuances, the two arguments have remained in play in continual contestation. Historians often attribute this to the congenital secrecy of the Soviet regime and its reluctance (shared to a lesser extent by its post-Soviet successors) to open its archives to historical scrutiny; ‘gaps in the evidence’, it is asserted, mean debate has been ‘locked in the realm of speculative interpretation and political polemic’.⁷ But while it is undeniable that documentation is lacking for some crucial facets of Soviet diplomacy, a more fundamental reason for the persistence of this pluralism is that interpretations are inextricably bound up with a larger set of political and moral questions about the legitimacy and capacity for virtue of the Soviet system as a whole, questions that the demise of communism has done little to still or resolve.

‘Persistent and prolonged struggle’: Soviet historiography and the origins of the war

Within the Soviet Union and its successor states, the development of narratives of the origins of the war has to be understood within two broader contexts. The first is the overt politicisation of Soviet historiography. Within all political systems, it has been argued, historiography functions ‘to socialize the coming generation, to legitimate political institutions, to perpetuate established mores and mythology, and to rationalize official policies’, but in the post-war Soviet Union –‘because of a unique blend of ideological, historical, and political factors’–it was ‘charged with these functions to an unprecedented degree’.⁸ At the heart of Marxism-Leninism lay an explicit metanarrative: an interpretation and periodisation of human history which offered an overarching theory of how historical change occurred, complete with a teleology, namely the realisation of human potential and freedom under communism. Since the Bolsheviks who made the revolution of 1917 conceived of themselves as acting within this broader framework, it was scarcely surprising that the regime should have devoted careful attention to scripting its own history. More pragmatically, the legitimacy of a political system founded in violent revolution depended on the inculcation of belief that the seizure of power had been ‘law-governed’, popular and the inevitable product of prodigious leadership.⁹ So, from the first, the Bolsheviks averred that history was ‘a sphere of acute ideological struggle’ and a means to inspire the masses with loyalty, confidence and pride in the new political order.¹⁰

In the first decade after 1917, although the state did work to foster ideologically secure historiographical foundations for itself, bourgeois historians were not entirely eradicated and there was healthy debate within the Communist Party about the utility of history in general and the true meaning of the revolution in particular. But this relative pluralism was foreclosed in the 1930s after Stalin’s rise to power and launch of the ‘Second Bolshevik Revolution’; tighter institutional and ideological controls were imposed and the new climate of intellectual sterility was exemplified by the promulgation of a simplistic (and in many respects mendacious) master narrative of Soviet history in the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course, published in 1938. Stalin’s death in 1953 and the subsequent onset of ‘de-Stalinization’ saw renewed liberalisation. Access to archives became easier and the publication of primary source material more frequent, so interpretations acquired a firmer grounding in documentary reality; simultaneously, debates became more sophisticated and diverse and historians acquired an unprecedented sense of constituting a self-regulating professional community.¹¹ But if history regained something of an autonomous dynamic, becoming more than simply the handmaiden of politics, nonetheless the broad tenets of Marxism-Leninism continued to govern scholarship, state and Party supervision remained close, and the vicissitudes of contemporary politics were closely reflected in the nature and content of historiographical output. Nor was this surprising, since if anything the abandonment of terror laid even greater importance on history as a means of manufacturing consent; hence Nikita Khrushchev’s famous aphorism: ‘historians are dangerous people … They must be directed’.¹² Indeed, the two decades of conservative stagnation that followed Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964 saw the pendulum swing once more back towards repression with a further crackdown on independent thinking amongst historians.

The second context is the cataclysmic impact of the Second World War upon the Soviet Union and the particular nature of its subsequent public historicisation. The Soviet experience of the war was unparalleled in terms of psychological trauma and physical destruction. Estimates of casualties vary widely and are politically charged, but deaths are now estimated at 27 million, with over 70,000 villages, 1,700 towns and 32,000 factories devastated.¹³ Even though the war had been fought to victory and had delivered tangible gains in a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and incipient superpower status, the mammoth costs compelled the regime to promulgate positive authorised readings of it: this was an effort ‘to impose a single meaning onto a complex and diverse human experience’, effacing crimes, blunders and ambiguities ‘in favor of a narrative that celebrated an unmitigated communist heroism and universal suffering’. This narrative portrayed victory in the war as the ultimate vindication of the Soviet system, and emphasised the signal contribution made to it by the particular institutions and interest groups that were central in the post-war political order. Thus, ‘Soviet official memory of the war advanced a simplified tale aimed at the mobilization of the past in the service of the present and the future’.¹⁴ For four decades after 1945, such representations of the war, in academic historiography, popular culture and a host of public commemorative practices, were the regime’s crucial mnemonic technologies for instilling and securing a sense of Soviet identity amongst the disparate peoples of a sprawling empire.

A conflict that had rapidly been dubbed the Great Patriotic (or Great Fatherland) War – a designation imputing a unique nature to the Soviet dimension of the broader global hostilities yet also carrying resonances from Russia’s national past and the first ‘Patriotic War’ against Napoleon in 1812¹⁵ – over time acquired a full-blown cult. This did not emerge fully formed immediately after the war was won, nor was it monolithic or immutable, but from 1945 onwards the historicisation of the Second World War served as a crucial means of ensuring cohesion in Soviet society. Nor was this simply a work of historical engineering: for all its excesses the cult would not have endured so long had it not achieved ‘an effective fusion of personal and public imagination’ as Soviet ‘citizens, politicians and historians … consistently placed the war at the center of their private and public worlds’.¹⁶ The Soviet case is thus a natural starting point for this study: because of the traumatic impact of the war upon almost every Soviet citizen, and the political task of legitimation with which representations of it were entrusted, the war loomed much larger in po...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 On virtue
• 2 On guilt
• 3 On complicity
• 4 On decadence
• 5 On folly
• 6 On liberty
• 7 On tragedy
• Conclusion
• Index