Putin:An Historical Comparison
Mike Walker, Col. USMC, ret
Some historical musings on Russia and Putin (and my apologies if you received this earlier -- although this version fixed a few typos).
According to the recent Wall Street Journal interview of Nigel Farage, Farage put forth the claim that Putin’s Russia had been “provoked” into invading peaceful Ukraine. This is a tragically wrongheaded misreading of Putin and his territorial ambitions.
It is identic to the same appeasement trap that ensnared Neville Chamberlain when dealing with Adolf Hitler in 1938.
It also is a gross misrepresentation of the history of that era. Russia had no one to blame but itself for the 1941 German invasion. Farage presenting the “deep memory” of “Hitler invading them” as justification for Putin’s own Hitler-like aggression against peaceful Ukraine is absurd.
It is nothing but a rewrite of history designed to expunge the truth: The 1939-1941 record of treacherous Russian conquest of its peaceful neighbors and in dubious partnership with Hitler. The 1941 invasion of Russia was the logical end of a Faustian bargain.
In 1939, Russia sowed the wind and later reaped the whirlwind. Putin embraced the same greedy and vile conceit in 2022. But in 1941, Russia had the Western Allies to come to its immediate aid.
So here is the real history that Farage either has forgotten or never knew or refuses to accept:
On 23 August 1939, the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was signed. When the treaty along with its secret protocol were combined with the 19 August German-Soviet Trade and Credit Agreement, it created a de facto economic and military alliance between the two socialist dictatorships.
Everything now was in place for the Second World War which began the next month, in September, when both countries invaded and then divvied up Poland.
At first the alliance worked satisfactorily and was further strengthened with the 11 February 1940 German-Soviet Commercial Agreement which ensured Soviet oil, manganese, phosphates and other raw materials kept the German war machine running smoothly.
The percentage of German imports coming from Soviet Russia rose from 0.9% in 1938 to 7.8% in 1940. It was an important change. While Russia exported over 800,000 tons of grain, a significant amount, oil by far was the most important commodity rising from 5,100 tons in 1939 to 617,000 tons in 1940. And it is no exaggeration to argue that the German mechanized blitzkriegs of 1940 were made possible by Soviet Russian petroleum products.
Russia, in turn, gained vast quantities of German coal, over 3.8 million tons in 1940 and finished products such as 19,400 tons of modern machinery as well as over 11,000 vehicles and even some aircraft.
The secret 1939 protocol, however, led to unexpected friction.
As the Soviets now occupied eastern Poland and Hungary had gained parts of the Poland’s Carpathian Mountains, Hungary and Soviet Russia now shared a border and Stalin declared that the new reality gave him a say in Hungary’s security and foreign policies (which were strongly pro-German) and Berlin resented Moscow trying to insert itself into the relationship.
Elsewhere, Hitler had no worries over Moscow keeping Finland in its sphere of influence (which was undefined) but Germany needed Finland’s nickel and lumber for the duration of the war and Sweden’s iron ore also was vital to its war effort.
As such, Hitler did not want the Red Army in Finland where it could control Finnish exports and directly threaten Sweden. Hitler wanted Finland as a neutral buffer that kowtowed to Moscow but remained independent.
The Baltic States also became a point of contention as Russia was to get Estonia and Latvia but Lithuania was to remain in the German sphere. But Moscow balked at entering the war against Poland unless Germany agreed that the large majority of Lithuania fell into the Russian sphere. Hitler went along and by 10 October 1939 all three Baltic States signed Mutual Assistance Treaties with the Soviet Union.
But relations began to fray. On 30 November 1939, Stalin invaded Finland without consulting Hitler. Like Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the invasion of Finland became a bloody stalemate as the Russian Army stumbled badly.
Then in June 1940, with the German Army fully occupied in the Battle of France, the Soviet Red Army invaded the Baltic States which Moscow then annexed.
Berlin saw it as a betrayal of trust and what no one fully grasped was that Stalin’s deepest desire was to restore the pre-1914 border of the Russian Empire (just as Putin now seeks to restore the 1991 Soviet borders) and that meant not dependency but the end of independence for Finland and the Baltic States. Those Russian acts of aggression prevented real amity between the two socialist dictatorships.
Moscow also wanted to know Germany’s intent regarding the new 27 September 1940 Tripartite Pact with Italy and especially Japan (with its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere). Where did Soviet Russia fit into that relationship?
One guiding source was the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact. But it had proved a curious arrangement. Ostensibly aimed directly at Soviet Russia, the signatories (Germany, Italy, and Japan) also saw it as anti-British and by extension, assuaged Berlin’s fears of again having to fight alone an Anglo-French alliance. But Japan’s resistance to entering into any alliance which could force it into a European war hobbled the pact.
Moscow was particularly concerned about Japan. It has fought a disastrous war in 1904-1905 that ended in humiliating defeat. Then came the Siberian Intervention (1918-1922) when Japan unsuccessfully attempted to annex the Russian Far East. That was followed by Japan’s conquest of Manchuria during 1931-1932 which witnessed the eclipse of Russia’s sphere in influence in northern Manchuria that had been in place since the 1890s.
Further unsettling Moscow, Tokyo’s Co-Prosperity had gelled by 1929 through economic cooperation between the Japanese Empire and its protectorate of Korea. After the conquest of Manchuria, the new Manchukuo state was added to the sphere. The Imperial Japanese Army then took parts of northern China and Inner Mongolia in the mid-1930s whose lands also were added to the sphere. It clearly had become a framework where Japan would dominate East Asia. But Tokyo saw it as the unification of Asia for Asian in opposition to Western colonial domination – not a direct attack on Russian interests.
Further roiling the waters, in July 1937 Japan began an all-out if undeclared war against China and in 1938 Tokyo declared it aimed for regime change in China under the guise of a New East Asian Order. Moscow realized it had a violently aggressive East Asian power in the form of Japan that had a history of aggression towards Russia.
To Moscow, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere looked like a formula to continuously expand the Japanese Empire by force and the 1938 clash between Japanese and Red Army soldiers along the Korean border followed by the 1939 Khalkhin Gol fighting with the Japanese Army in Soviet-controlled Mongolia only confirmed this fear.
But that turned into a bright spot for Moscow. The border war in Mongolia ended in a powerful victory for the Red Army that September which nicely complemented its diplomatic coup with Nationalist Socialist Germany (and had the added benefit of alienating Japan from Germany).
The Russian victory also led to ongoing talks between Japan and Russia over a possible neutrality pact as Japan now knew it could not battle Russia alone. In the future, the militarists ruling Tokyo would look south towards the Pacific – not Russia – to further expand the Co-Prosperity Sphere. But for the rest of 1939 and into early 1940, beyond both Tokyo and Moscow honoring the ceasefire, little progress was made.[1] Stalin could never completely ignore the Japanese threat.
Then came Hitler’s stunning defeat of France in June 1940 which – in a seemingly blink of an eye – dramatically realigned military strategies across the globe.
This compelled Stalin to reexamine the situation in Europe. Moscow began to grasp the potency of a Wehrmacht no longer fully engaged by the massive French Army. In that light, would the September 1940 Tripartite Pact serve to encourage further Japanese and possibly German aggression or could it be used to form a modus vivendi between the Axis Powers and Soviet Russia?
Stalin keenly wanted to avoid a two-front war in both Europe and the Far East but the 1940 Tripartite Pact conjured up that very nightmare. He reached out to Hitler. With their shared dislike of the British Commonwealth, Moscow found a fairly receptive audience during November discussions in Berlin. Hitler seemed more than willing to continue the quasi-alliance.
Hitler was willing to help Russia dominate the Black Sea and gain passage through the Dardanelles. But it was not all smooth sailing. Moscow again stated that it had interests in the fates of Hungary and Romania.
Stalin held that when Germany guaranteed the security of Romania in late 1940 it did so without consulting Moscow and that weakened Soviet Russian security in the Black Sea. Stalin wanted Germany (and Italy) to withdraw their guarantee. Hitler declined.
Stalin then asked for a similar Soviet guarantee over Bulgaria. To this Hitler also balked as Bulgaria had not asked Moscow for such a guarantee (and Bulgaria actually preferred to be more closely aligned with Berlin than Moscow). The talks dragged on throughout the rest of 1940.
The difficulties were not so much resolved as papered over and Germany decided to offer a draft non-aggression agreement between the Tripartite Pact and the Soviet Union. It was formalized and later submitted to Stalin in December.
The gambit worked. It came back to Berlin in early January 1941 as a tentative agreement with only a few additional and minor Russian demands. The agreement was signed on 10 January 1941.
By that time, Moscow wanted something entirely different: Another Russo-Finnish war for the purpose of occupying Finland and establishing a Soviet satellite there – something Hitler would not accede to. Similarly, the Romanian oilfields were of vital strategic interest to Germany but the Red Army had occupied nearby Bessarabia and Bucovina.
At this point, an always aggressive Hitler saw no viable way forward. On 30 March 1941 he issued the Barbarossa Decree to prepare to fight, invade, and defeat Soviet Russia.
On 22 June, the invasion of Russia got underway.
Stalin, with his 1939-1941 policy of military conquest, was complicit every step of the way towards his bloody collision with Hitler. Evil playing against evil.
So too has Putin been complicit (through his relentlessly aggressive conquests) in the tense situation that now exists in Europe and the bloody quagmire in Ukraine, a futile mess of Putin’s own making.
Putin is fortunate, however, that today’s Western leaders are more circumspect and exhibit wiser judgement than the likes of Hitler.
But one should never underestimate Putin’s rash and irrational tendencies.
It would be both wise and prudent for Nigel Farage (and his Putin-apologist American adherents) to not advocate appeasing such a reckless dictator as Vladimir Putin.
As one great British leader, Sir Winston Churchill, said, an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
[1] It was not until 13 April 1941 that the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact was inked.
