What if Stalin did not direct European Reds to take an antiwar defeatist line during the M-R Pact?

raharris1973

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What if Stalin took a more hands off attitude. Keeping the USSR neutral towards the Axis powers while encouraging local Communist parties to do what seems most popular in their own country.

It is hard to imagine Stalin doing this, however, Stalin managed to remain very correct in its neutrality toward Japan for several years during WWII while Communist-led resistance movements sprouted in Japanese-occupied Asia.

Does such a Stalin/COMINTERN stance lead to earlier Soviet-Nazi warfare?

What does it do to the political activities and popular perceptions of the Communist Party in the various European democracies?
 
In OTL, some communist parties actually were *more* "collaborationist" than the Comintern wanted! To quote a soc.history.what-if post of mine from a few years ago:

The PCF--or at least some of its leaders, who had remained in France--was actually too accomodationist with the Germans for the Comintern's taste. In 1940 the PCF (through Central Committee members Maurice Tréand and Jean Catelas and Party lawyer Robert Foissin) conducted negotiations with the German occupation authorities to let *L'Humanité* again be published legally (it had been banned by Daladier on the eve of the war for its support of the German-Soviet pact). Tréand and Catelas held discussions with Otto Abetz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Abetz and afterwards sent him a letter which "recalled that Communists had been against the war and had been persecuted for their stand. Finally, it pledged that *L'Humanité* would oppose 'British imperialism' (adding, however, that it would also call on all colonies to fight for their independence) and that it would campaign for 'a lasting peace,' to be achieved by a Franco-Soviet pact 'which would be a complement of the Soviet-German pact.'" http://books.google.com/books?id=MHu7AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA109 Maxwell Adereth, *The French Communist Party (PCF): A Critical History (1920-1984)*, p. 109.

Fortunately for the PCF's "anti-fascist" reputation, the negotiations failed. Adereth attributes this to Abetz realizing that he could not control *L'Humanité*; instead he decided to publish a new Nazi-controlled newspaper called *La France au Travail* which billed itself as an organ of the "revolutionary left"--and which Adetz cleverly gave the same format as *L'Humanité*. However, from what we now know, *L'Humanité* would not have reappeared even if Abetz had agreed to it, because the Comintern, having gotten word of the negotiations, was furious and demanded that they be immediately halted. From Moscow, Thorez and Dimitrov sent an urgent message to the PCF, "Limit All Relations With Occupation Authorities." http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/thorez/1940/relations-occupiers.htm saying "Would be veritable disaster if party allowed itself influenced by occupier's maneuvers.." Foissin in particular was condemned as a German agent and expelled from the Party (he later contributed to *La France au Travail*).

Adereth, whose history of the PCF is not uncritical but still fairly sympathetic, argues that while the approach to the Occupation authorities was no doubt a mistake, it was not really "collaboration" but a clumsy attempt to apply the Leninist strategy of "utilization of legal possibilities." To him, the PCF erred in (1) assuming that the Germans would reply favorably, and (2) failing to see the "confusion" that would be caused by *L'Humanité* appearing legally under German occupation. Be that as it may, it is interesting that in this instance the Comintern took a harder line against the Germans than the PCF leadership in France did...

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/6s5L83iFgDI/zDBnC1auZWUJ
 
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raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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this embarrassing behavior still does not seem like the product of grassroots sentiments of Communist party members or the French working class though. It sounds like party leaders trying to guess at and stay ahead of the Moscow party line, and they did so to the point Stalin thought it was stupid and overzealous.
 
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