Prelude: Stalin, Dimitrov and the Nazi Threat (1933–41)

Abstract

The intense and dynamic interaction between the Soviet Union and the capitalist great powers, and between the Soviet Union and the domestic politics of European countries, which characterized the period 1941–47 and eventually led to the Cold War, did not start with the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. Since the seizure of power by the Nazis in Germany in 1933, the Soviet Union, driven by a desperate search for security, had been forced to abandon its revolutionary isolation from the capitalist world and enter into close relations, both positive and negative, with the world’s leading capitalist powers, and had been attempting to influence the internal politics of European states. In 1933–39, Stalin and his Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Litvinov, sought protection against the rising Nazi menace in a policy of collective security with the Western democratic powers. Whilst Soviet attempts to influence the domestic politics of European states were not altogether novel — the Communist International (Comintern) had been trying to do little else since its establishment in 1919 — what was new in 1934–39 was that Soviet efforts were directed at using national democratic systems to steer governments in a direction favourable to Moscow, rather than at overthrowing capitalist democracy through a communist revolution. Convinced that Britain and France were not prepared to assist the Soviet Union, Stalin turned, in 1939–41, to a policy that combined appeasement of the Nazis with the building up of a territorial buffer zone along the Soviet Union’s western frontiers.