Sorry IBC. I misread an early post you made. I thought you said "Orwell could make cracks..." My apologises at my misunderstanding.
Ah, I see. Quite alright.
Oh, please, Stalin was eager to set up some kind of collective security in the 1930s just because he wanted to avoid war with the capitalist powers while the USSR remained in a position of relative weakness.
So he was a bit like almost all statesmen, ever?
Nobody conducts diplomacy according to principles. Liberal democracies don't (just look at the whacky adventures we had in the Cold War) stand by theirs; totalitarian regimes don't stand by even their own skewed and immoral ones (hence the M-R pact), let alone
ours.
His actions were mirrored by Hitler's signature of non-aggression pacts with Poland and naval limitations treaty with Britain in the mid-1930s for similar reasons.
That's not remotely analogous. Hitler signed an aggression pact with Poland as a temporary rear-cover measure (although his plans for Poland wouldn't have been in the least pinned down at that point, we know that his eyes were pinned on Lebensraum) while he engaged in aggressive actions in Germany's west and south (we all know that I think Anschluss was a good thing in itself, but in real balance-of-power terms violating treaties is always more "aggressive" than upholding them; the Nazis charming habits of marching into a place with armed divisions, abolishing democracy, and unleashing their gangs on the local political troublemakers and Jews aren't what I'm referring to here).
But Stalin, when he flew Soviet aircraft to CZS while frantically canvassing for a three-power pact, obviously meant to actually defend the independence of CZS. His search for collective security was not a cover until he was done pursuing urgent goals elsewhere, since he didn't have any.
I don't see what's so remarkable about this. A regime comes to power in an important European country, throws all your co-ideologues in camps, preaches the destruction of your ideology and the extermination of your people, signs alliances which say on the tin that they're directed against you (something peacetime alliances, which are full of euphemism, rarely do), and starts re-arming at a furious rate.
And being worried about this and trying to use the fact that this regime is obviously an aggressive menace to divide the capitalist front that haunts your nightmares makes you an "angel of peace", as opposed to "a chap with brains, even if they are paranoid"?
He wanted to keep Europe quiet until he was done with Soviet industrialization and rearmament, then he would unleash his aggressive aims.
What? His burning lust to posses Viborg and Chisinau?
I'm not seeing much evidence for these unusual positions, as against the clear attempts by the 1930s USSR to shut out outside influences, and the fact that Soviet re-armament began on a massive scale
after Nazi re-armament.
When he began to see the preparation close to completion, he kept himself ready to exploit the clash to mutual exhaustion between Nazi Germany and the Western powers (he did not expect France to fall so swiftly and completely).
As I said, he mobilised his troops over the Czech crisis, and organised flights to CZS. Given that, it seems abundantly clear that his almost desperate search for a three-way pact was a real attempt to check Hitler.
One can hardly argue that he
wasn't stupidly snubbed by Chamberlain: the man himself at first poo-pooed the idea of a general conference (as opposed to Anglo-German talks) in case "other powers" might get a seat. Who could that be?
Now, that doesn't make it
right that he signed a pact. Frankly, everybody screwed up. A lot. I just find it annoying that Stalin's blunder is Pure Evil, whereas Britain's blunder is frequently apologised for. We both had entirely cynical motives. We both did things which were entirely immoral. We both did it because of a massive miscalculation. When all is said and done, Britain's miscalculation was bigger and less justifable.
In the meanwhile, he exploited Germany's need to avoid a two-front war to bring the USSR's borders back to the Tsarist levels (unfortunatley for him, Finland proved to be too tough for complete conquest).
I won't apologise for Soviet imperialism, but he was also, ah, "exploiting" the USSR's need to avoid a one-front war.
Then the revamped Red Army would sweep exhausted Europe and pick the pieces. Even when the Fall of France disrupted his earlier plans, he was preparing to attack Hitler in 1942, only the Nazis beat him to the gun.
Ah, those documents. If we're thinking of the same ones, let's review the plans in question. Their author was Zhukov: not a man known to see eye-to-eye with Stalin on everything, or to underestimate Soviet capabilities or his own. They were
not stamped by Stalin, so in the totalitarian Soviet society they were essentially tissue-paper; and it's quite possible the marshall was using them as a coded message to Stalin (the Soviets
loved coded messages: the elaborate stories dreamed up for show-trials all had a moral for the underlings) about the growing possibility of a German attack before it was expected. And then, generals just make up war-plans all the time. They can't always be Saving the Motherland on a White Horse with Strategic Insight and Mountain Manliness.
All this talk of Stalin the peace angel eager to contain the Nazi monsters for the good of Europe that was let down by the nasty Western powers thoroughly sickens me. He was just a genocidal imperialist warlord that was beaten to the gun and cast in the position of temporary lesser evil in the face of the West by the actions of his even more blatantly aggressive peer. Trust a killer to outsmart a killer.
Diplomacy is actually very complex. It contains a great deal of indecision, misunderstanding, confusion, and humbug. The only way to trace trains of thought are the actual documents, where they're to be had. One can't imagine that Stalin (or Hitler, though he knew what he wanted in the end) ever had a coherent master-plan. Diplomacy just unfolds.