Soviet-Germany 1933-

Patukov said:

The Capitalists in Europe seem to be terribly outnumbered

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That's right, but let's not forget that Britain and France will never turn communist without a good fight, and they are backed by the industrial giant across the sea.

EDIT: Now when I think about it, none of the red countries turned communist without a good fight either, except perhaps Germany, depends how you look at it

Soviet-Germany B4 - C2





There were three milestones on the stony road towards total military cooperation between Soviet-Germany and the Soviet Union. The first came in 1933 when Stalin offered the new communist regime in Berlin a guarantee against counter-revolution. The second came in 1944 when Stalin accepted and signed the Molotov-Ulbricht Agreement, where Soviet-Germany promised military support, even in case of a Soviet war of aggression within the Soviet sphere of influence and the third and final milestone was the forming of the Comintern Military Alliance in 1945. But as was discussed previously, Stalin not only gained Germany’s support in the case of an aggressive war but her very support would turn Germany into a buffer zone from the West. Stalin felt he had masterfully calculated a plan for a Russian dominance of Eastern Europe; after all, Thälmann had been outshining him on almost every level, even in the field of practical communist dominance. Once Stalin’s physical dominance of Eastern Europe would be asserted, he could do his best to revise the Thälmannist challenges. He also knew that in the event of a world war where the capitalist states might prove stronger, Germany would be the first to fall while the Soviet Union could prepare for a replay of the Napoleonic winter of 1814. While the Cold War come about mostly because of German acts until 1945, Stalin became main actor in its tuning up from 1946 on. Exploiting the leadership change in Berlin, he hoped to demonstrate to Germany and to the West who was the future master of Europe.


From Leningrad to Stockholm

After the partition of Poland, Stalin was heavily criticised from the West for the annexation of the Polish Soviet Republic. The war in Poland had also greatly alarmed the remaining capitalist states in Europe, especially Finland and the Baltic states, who now feared they were next on Stalin's wishlist. In order to deter further Soviet expansion, Great Britain agreed immediately after the Polish Campaign, to sign seperate naval treaties with the four countries where the Royal Navy was given full access to waters and harbours in the Baltic Sea and in the Finnish Arctic sea. Soviet leaders protested and claimed that Finland and the Baltics now were a great threat to Soviet security for their proximity to the country’s second largest city, Leningrad. They maintained that in the event of war by the Western Allies, the Baltic Sea could and would be used by allied forces to bypass Germany and attack Russia from two directions simultaneously, the other being from Manchuria. Surely, Stalin wanted to expand his empire but the threat was nevertheless very real.


On December 16, 1945, after having received no plausible answers from Helsinki to his territorial ultimatums in the Gulf of Finland, Stalin launched a military campaign against the Finns. “As the British keep the knife to our throat in the Far East”, the Soviets announced in the declaration of war, apparently more directed towards the West then to Finland, “we are forced to whatever we can to secure [Finnish Karelia] and avoid encirclement … by the Atlantic Pact states”. The so called War of the White Death as it was called for the tremendous Soviet casualties by General Winter, found Soviet forces struggling with the Finns and the Germans, devoted to honour the Molotov-Ulbrich Agreement sent their renowned II Panzerkorps to aid them. The Finns fought bravely but they soon realised that it didn’t matter how much casualties they inflicted to the Red Army, it would overrun them eventually.


A peace treaty was concluded in January 1946 where the Finns ceded Finnish Karelia to the Soviet Union but more importantly, they were inclined to form a coalition government of the centre-left parties and giving the Ministry of Interior to the Finnish communists. This was a clever but transparent manoeuvre. In order not let the scheme slip through his fingers, Stalin ordered the communists to remain cooperative and moderate for the time being. Additionally, in order to display to the West that the war in Finland was only a security reaction to British threats and not thirst for new territories, Stalin decided to give independence to the Soviet Republic of Poland. After huge Russian and German annexations, the People’s Republic of Poland was created on March 12, 1946. It was a landlocked rump state and became heavily dependent on Moscow.



The Finnish communists stayed aloof during the summer of 1946, consolidating their power within the government and purging the security forces. This was the same method used by the Socialist People’s Front in Germany during the March Coup of 1933 which delivered the German communists to power. In a similar fashion, the Finnish communists launched their coup on September 15, 1946. The Finnish Democratic Republic, formed in the aftermath of a great red terror, became a loyal client state of the Soviet Union.

At the same time in neighbouring Sweden, a country struggling with financial crisis, the communists raised their fighting spirit. A few days after the Finnish events, peaceful worker’s demonstrations in Stockholm, organised by the widely popular Swedish Communist Party, was increasingly turning to a riot. Ridden with crisis and insecurity and influenced by the developments in Finland, the government ordered its soldiers to open fire at the crowd. A mass of soldiers, appalled, humiliated and demoralised, mutinied and joined an angry crowd demanding the resignation of the government. Facing the choice between a massacre by the armed forces and resignation, the government chose the latter. That’s when the communists grasped the opportunity and forcibly seized a number of government agencies in the capital. But instead of fighting the armed forces the Swedish communists drew the army leadership to the negotiation table. With a significant popular support and enchanted by the revolutionary atmosphere, the communists managed to win the army over. It was the most peaceful communist takeover ever to have happened. In contrast to the Finnish puppet state however, the Swedish Socialist Union became a purely Thälmannist state with close relations with Soviet-Germany. In their agreement with the army, the communists promised that Sweden would continue its tradition of neutrality and stay out of Cold War alliances.



The Starvation of the Baltic States

The final piece in Stalin’s great comeback was put in place in 1948, coinciding with the election campaign in the United States which guaranteed Harry S. Truman and his hawkish government continued power. After Eastern Poland, the loss of the Baltic States had been the greatest thorn in Russia’s eyes since 1918. Those states had suffered much pressure during their lifetime from their giant Soviet neighbour but when all of their other neighbours; Finland, Sweden and Poland swiftly came under Soviet-friendly communist control in 1945-1946 they felt intolerantly isolated. The Western Allies had in their anti-communist rhetoric, especially after Truman became president, made the impression they were a potential defender against Soviet and German aggression remained in 1948 strictly committed to the defence of Western Europe only. When this fact was officially stated to the Baltic leaders early in 1948, they became demoralised, insecure and increasingly more authoritarian. The situation was much like that of Poland in 1945, although internal divisions were not that much of an issue in the Baltic States.

Starting in the winter of 1947, Stalin launched a pressure offensive on the Baltic States. He issued them with threats of economic sanctions or a military campaign lest they peacefully gave up their independence. Ignoring the above mentioned statement by the West, the Soviets used the same argument against the Baltics that was used against Finland; that the area could be used as a stepping stone for an attack. Despite their demoralisation, the Baltic leaders refused and instead resorted to a chaotic and hopeless last-stand strategy by mobilising their militaries at the Russian borders and threatened a fierce resistance if Stalin’s armies so much as take one step over the borders. In a vain effort to scare Stalin off, yet knowing it was untrue, they told him that a Soviet invasion of the Baltic States would be the beginning of World War II.

The Germans and the Swedes then took the initiative to thwart these empty words in April 1948. Berlin issued a trade embargo on the Baltic States to sanction them for “threatening war with the Soviet Union”. To enforce this embargo, the Soviet Union, Soviet- Germany and Finland closed themselves off from the three minor states and the Swedish and German navies sealed off the Baltic Sea separating their countries. While all land trade was shut down, all Western merchant ships en route to and from the Baltic States were halted at the naval closure and sent back. The three tiny states became totally isolated from the outside world resulting very quickly in serious shortages of food, fuel and other essentials.The idustries were paralyzed and when winter settled in, the situation became unbearable and turned into a national emergency. In early January 1949, the Baltic leaders gave up. Abandoned by the West and left for starvation by the East, they voluntarily entered negotiations with Moscow about their accession to the Soviet Union. Within three weeks of signing a treaty of entering the Soviet Union in March 1949, all three governments collectively and simultaneously resigned according to the treaty.



With the Baltic States and Finland securely Soviet-friendly, the threat of Atlantic Pact landings in Germany or Russia from the Baltic Sea was eliminated. This was Stalin's hour of glory, not only had he restored the borders of the Russian Empire, he had also succeeded in turning Germany into a buffer zone in the coming world war.

Endgame

I regret to inform you that following the crash of my computer the savegame for this AAR is lost. Thus it ends here.

In short: What happened was that the Cold War raged on for two decades without a major military confrontation between the East and West. In fact, it reached its climax in 1948-1950 at the time of Thälmann's death, Truman's re-election and Stalin's expansionist drive. There were two reasons why the war never came. First, by the early 1950s both camps had developed such weapons of mass destruction that war would have meant the end of civilization as we know it. The Americans detonated their first nuclear bomb in 1948, and the Germans in 1949. By the 1950, both countries had developed the hydrogen bomb.
Second, in the late 1960s the German-Soviet Split occurred following Ulbricht's ousting from the KPD leadership. His successors initiated a détente with the Western powers while at the same time becoming increasingly criticising on the Soviet policies.

So the 1970s witnessed increasing cooperation between Soviet-Germany and the capitalist West. With increased trade, the KPD even began reforming the the German economy, beginning in 1971 with a historical revision on The Act on Ownership of the Means of Production (from 1940), which introduced more consumerism and marketization of the German economy. The economy remained strictly socialist, but German economists deemed that reforms were necciscary in order to cope with changing world economy. Indeed, the world was changing in the late 20th century, as the post-industrial age; the information age, came along and rendered the old Stalinist industrial system outdated. The Russians, however, entered an era of stagnation from the 1970s on, as their economic system did not cope with the world. Soviet goods became second class and living standards dwindled.

By the the 1990s, the Soviet Union was on the verge of economic collapse. The 1995 Oil Crisis in Iraq and Syria had devastating effects on the world economy. As Soviet-Germany, the United States and other industrial giants went under, they ceased loan payments to the Soviet Union, and because of the crisis, the Russians could no longer buy cheap German consumer goods. As a result, the stagnating giant finally collapsed in May 1998, followed by a successful coup by the military and security police in early 1999, civil war between nationalities and finally abolishment of the Soviet Union in September 2001.
Soviet-Germany however managed the economic turndowns of the 1990s without a major crisis. The wast German industries were still in the ownership of the state, yet most day-to-day business in Germany had become marketized and the five year plans no longer commanded the whole economy as it used to. Germany was not fully capitalist like the West, but its economy was spontaneous enough so that it kept on going.

Thanks to the quick end of the Cold War and to contiued economic prosperity, the KPD and the soviet republic was still in its place in 2001 where it had been firmly established in the 1930s and the 1940s and there were no signs that this would be changing any time soon.

Viden said:

What?

And what happened with the other Communist states?

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Well, what do you think?