The Soviet Colossus by Michael Kort

Author:Michael Kort
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317454519
Publisher: Routledge

14

Trial by Fire: The Great Patriotic War

Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, deceptions, treacheries, robberies, forgeries, issues of false monies deprecations, incendiarisms and murders as the annals of all the courts of justice in the world could not muster in the course of whole centuries, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as crimes.

—Leo Tolstoy

Although the Soviet Union did not live in a friendly world during the 1920s, it was not a world that posed the direct threats the Bolsheviks had faced immediately after the revolution. The Soviet Union, to be sure, had no real friends, only acquaintances offering a degree of toleration that varied from country to country and year to year. There also was no shortage of vocal ideological opponents to the Soviet system in every Western country. This enabled Stalin to raise the specter of war when it suited him in his political struggles, although in truth during the 1920s none of the world’s military powers was ready for war. The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 and the resulting domestic turmoil in the advanced capitalist countries, if anything, worked to the Soviet Union’s advantage. Western businessmen began to knock at the Soviet Union’s door to sell the heavy machinery so vital to Russia’s industrialization drive. All in all, the decade after the civil war was a breathing space in which the party leadership was able to go about its business without undue concern for what its critics in the West were planning.

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