Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 5 Episode 1: Michael Carley, Stalin's Great Game : War and Neutrality, 1939-1941

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Season 5 Episode 1: Michael Carley, Stalin's Great Game : War and Neutrality, 1939-1941 · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

0:00
SPEAKER_02: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
0:01
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
0:21
SPEAKER_02: Hello, welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
0:25
SPEAKER_02: Today I'm thrilled to be speaking with a world-leading historian, Michael Jabara Carly, who is one of the world's great experts on the West's relations with the Soviet Union and with Russia.
0:41
SPEAKER_02: Professor Carly is recently retired from the University of Montreal.
0:47
SPEAKER_02: He chaired the history department at some points for the university.
0:51
SPEAKER_02: He is a great scholar in the true uh historian's uh mold.
0:58
SPEAKER_02: He has spent uh his time in the archives, and not just the one archive, but archives all over the world, to get to the core of uh the complexities of foreign relations between the Soviet Union in particular, so 1920s uh to 1945, the period of the rise of Hitler, or the period, I should say, first of the rise of the Soviet Union itself after the Bolshevik Revolution, and then the creation of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the rise of Stalin to the leadership of uh the Soviet Union, the uh rise of Hitler in the 1930s, and the peril that Hitler's rise uh meant for Europe and for Russia.
1:48
SPEAKER_02: And uh Professor Carly uh has studied the incredible difficulty of France and Britain and Poland, even under the peril of Hitler, of uh coordinating and cooperating uh with the Soviet Union.
2:05
SPEAKER_02: He's written a trilogy, which is absolutely extraordinary.
2:10
SPEAKER_02: This is 30 years of work, of archival work, so it is uh a remarkable contribution to knowledge.
2:18
SPEAKER_02: It's a great read, also, let me say at the outset, uh, because you get to know a cast of characters that are amazing.
2:27
SPEAKER_02: And I want to talk about many of them their strengths, their weaknesses, their blind spots, uh their heroism, their persistence.
2:37
SPEAKER_02: Uh it is, of course, uh an incredible array of personalities.
2:42
SPEAKER_02: But the basic uh story is the great uh barriers of distrust and confusion that have made it very difficult for countries of Western Europe, for uh the United Kingdom, and what was then the British Empire, for the United States, and for the Soviet Union, or today for Russia uh to cooperate.
3:07
SPEAKER_02: And it's a a challenge that is with us to this moment, uh, because uh even as I was just uh preparing to get on the line with you, Michael, I was reading about how the European Union Commission wants extraordinary powers to take out a major loan against Russian assets to continue the war against Russia.
3:30
SPEAKER_02: So to this moment, we're at war, and your historical work does so much to illuminate the blind spots, the prejudices, the terrible misjudgments that have been incredibly self-defeating on the Western side.
3:51
SPEAKER_02: We are meeting for the first time today, though I'm an admirer of yours.
3:56
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Book Club.
3:58
SPEAKER_02: You've spent 30 years uh on this.
4:00
SPEAKER_02: Can you tell our listeners uh a little bit about you and about how you entered this incredible effort, this uh lifelong pioneering effort, which is unique to historians?
4:13
SPEAKER_02: Uh so I'd love for you to share the basic story and then we'll get into your findings.
4:19
SPEAKER_01: Well, uh I I first became interested in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union when I was an undergraduate student at the uh George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
4:32
SPEAKER_01: I was born in uh Brooklyn, New York, by the way.
4:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
4:36
SPEAKER_01: In Bay Ridge in a Methodist hospital.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: My mother was of uh Lebanese and Syrian descent, and my father was of uh British and uh Dutch descent going back, you know, to the early colonial period and uh in American history.
4:54
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I I got interested in Russian medieval history and uh and Soviet history, and uh, you know, in Washington it was a crazy time, eh?
5:05
SPEAKER_01: Uh in the 1960s, uh it was a sexual revolution, there was uh the uh civil rights movement, and then it was the anti-war movement, and all those things uh sort of, I don't know, uh influenced me, and uh I became a little bit crazy, and uh I ended up in Canada in 1967.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: The first uh paper that I wrote on Soviet history was the fourth-year paper, it was about the French intervention in the Russian Civil War, and I just picked up on that when I went to graduate school.
5:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I did a thesis uh on it, uh spent two and a half years in uh living in Paris, became uh Francophile, developed Parisian habits, and I also became uh what the French call a Radis Alchiv.
5:56
SPEAKER_01: Somebody hangs out at the at the archives, because that's where I was.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: Whenever they were opened, I was at the archives.
6:03
SPEAKER_01: Not just one, there were you know many different archives in Paris, and and anyway, uh so uh from a fourth year paper to uh doctoral thesis and a first monograph.
6:16
SPEAKER_01: I worked on the French uh intervention, Russian Civil War.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: That was the period after the uh Bolshevik Revolution uh seizure of power in November 1917.
6:28
SPEAKER_02: And this is when the French, the British, the Americans uh intervened to try to put down the uh the Bolshevik Revolution.
6:35
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
6:36
SPEAKER_01: Really put it down.
6:37
SPEAKER_01: One British uh general boasted of his intention to hang Bolsheviks from every light post between Moscow and Petrograd.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: You know, the uh the Bolsheviks really angered the elites of the West.
6:53
SPEAKER_01: This was the first socialist revolution that really took root, and it was a tremendous threat to the ruling elites of Europe, not just of the Entente Cordial, but of uh Willemine Germany uh as well.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: Uh they all hated the Bolsheviks, and all of them they all thought that their wealth would be next to be confiscated.
7:16
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
7:17
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
7:18
SPEAKER_02: So uh from the intervention, uh I moved on to Soviet foreign policy because just to say for everybody, during uh what is it, 1919 to 1921, more or less, uh the Western powers tried to uh kill the Bolshevik revolution.
7:34
SPEAKER_02: They failed, obviously.
7:36
SPEAKER_02: Lenin and the revolutionaries succeeded, and so the revolution held, and the French uh retreated, uh left, as did the British uh and the American expeditionary forces, and uh now you're gonna pick up the story in the 1920s.
7:53
SPEAKER_01: Correct.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: And the Soviet archives were not open at that point, they were closed, tight.
8:00
SPEAKER_02: This was still the Cold War when you were writing.
8:03
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
8:04
SPEAKER_01: But at the beginning of the 1990s, uh they started to open.
8:08
SPEAKER_01: And uh I thought, man, I gotta go.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, amazing.
8:13
SPEAKER_01: Uh I gotta go look at these papers.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: And you know, I like to say that it's like you're you're in this dark room, right?
8:21
SPEAKER_01: And you can't see a damn thing.
8:23
SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden, you open the blinds and the light floods in, and many things that you didn't know or you couldn't imagine become visible and change everything.
8:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, a little like Plato said about the people living in the cave, looking at the flickering lights, and then, like you say, the archives open, and suddenly you can actually not look at the prejudices, but look at what people were doing and saying and writing in real time.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that jumped out at me was uh the remarkable skills of the first generation of Soviet diplomats.
9:05
SPEAKER_01: They functioned in the world where they where their country was despised and feared.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: You know, they were often uh multilingual, French, British, German, and they were able to develop uh relationships of confidence with their counterparts in Europe and the United States, in ways public opinion hated the Soviets, but the the Soviet diplomats were able to function almost as uh human beings, uh developing human-type relations uh with their uh Western counterparts.
9:41
SPEAKER_02: If there's a a hero of your trilogy, it uh seems to be Maxim Litvanov.
9:48
SPEAKER_02: What an extraordinary individual.
9:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
9:51
SPEAKER_02: I I knew very little about him.
9:54
SPEAKER_02: I only knew his name, basically, before the uh, I don't know, 1,500 pages that I uh got to meet him, but what an absolutely extraordinary figure.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: Right.
10:07
SPEAKER_01: Maxim Maksimovich Litvinov.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: He was uh he was born in in Tsaris, Poland, in a sort of a dysfunctional Jewish family.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: Because he was Jewish, he had a trouble getting into a Russian university, and he went into the uh Russian army, became an artilleryman, and uh he learned about Karl Marx and company, reading uh Marx in his spare time as a soldier.
10:36
SPEAKER_01: And then he became uh a money launderer, and uh he bought arms for uh the Bolshevik Party.
10:44
SPEAKER_01: In one of my books, I call him the Sundance Kid.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: And he eventually went to England in exile.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: Uh he spent 10 years there.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: He started working for a big publishing company in London, married a British woman who was uh a novelist, came from a very uh high bourgeois uh British uh family.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: The her father was uh a newspaper man, so forth and so on.
11:11
SPEAKER_01: And when the revolution in Russia came in 1917, he decided he was going to go and help out.
11:19
SPEAKER_01: First of all, he became uh the uh Soviet official, unofficial uh ambassador in London, then he was arrested by the British, and then he was traded for some British diplomats that the uh Soviets were holding, and he became a deputy commissar for foreign affairs, and you can see right away that he becomes an absolute realist, trying to uh improve relations with the Western powers even in 1919 when the intervention, the military intervention, was uh in full flight in uh Soviet Russia and uh, you know, the Red Army was fighting to defend the Soviets against foreign armies and uh white armies uh across Russia.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: And in the 1920s, he becomes uh a spokesperson for realism in Soviet foreign policy and for uh a policy w that we came to know after 1945, but existed almost from the beginning as peaceful coexistence.
12:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he basically takes the view from the beginning that the Soviet Union, France, Britain, the United States have a common interest in peace, should get along, and should overcome their ideological blinders, if I could put it that way, or their ideological commitments, because the basics should be peaceful relations, economic security.
12:53
SPEAKER_02: And he's so persistent in this, and I think you call him or he calls himself the Sisyphus of uh foreign policy, because for more than 20 years he's pushing that boulder up the hill of cooperation between the Soviet Union and the West.
13:12
SPEAKER_02: And everyone is saying, no, we can't cooperate.
13:16
SPEAKER_02: And he's saying we need to cooperate.
13:19
SPEAKER_02: And it's uh it's so impressive, by the way.
13:22
SPEAKER_01: Well, the first generation of Western historians wrote that the Soviet Union didn't have uh national interests which it chose to defend, it only had the interest in spreading uh world socialist revolution.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: But that was wrong.
13:38
SPEAKER_01: That was wrong.
13:38
SPEAKER_01: In fact, there was a conflict inside uh the Soviet government in 1920 between what the German ambassador called a conflict between Komrad Komin Thernovsky, the you know the Komintern, uh International World Socialist Revolution, and Comrade Narkominchitsky.
14:01
SPEAKER_01: The Narkomindjel was the uh commissariat for foreign affairs at Moscow.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: And these two elements clashed in the 1920s before the realists sort of uh established their position as dominant.
14:15
SPEAKER_02: So just to help everybody understand, the Bolshevik Revolution came, the Western countries uh immediately intervened militarily rather than trying to deal with the new government and understand it.
14:28
SPEAKER_02: They attacked it and tried to bring it down.
14:31
SPEAKER_02: They failed to do so.
14:32
SPEAKER_02: The Soviet Union was established in 1924, I believe, if I have the date right, 22 or 24?
14:39
SPEAKER_02: 22.
14:40
SPEAKER_02: 22, excuse me.
14:41
SPEAKER_02: Became the Soviet Union, merging different parts of what had been the Tsarist Russian Empire.
14:47
SPEAKER_02: And then there was a debate inside: we're a revolutionary government, are we for world revolution or are we for building our country?
14:58
SPEAKER_02: Uh and what you've just described is that that debate is it world revolution or is it practical building of the new Soviet Union going to take precedence?
15:09
SPEAKER_02: And by the end of the 1920s, it was the national builders that predominated, actually led by Stalin.
15:18
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
15:19
SPEAKER_02: And and what's so interesting is that, of course, when I grew up as a kid in the Cold War, like you did, we always were told, well, Stalin was out for global conquest, for global revolution.
15:34
SPEAKER_02: But he was actually the protagonist in that battle inside for a national focus, not for the global revolution.
15:43
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and uh this is almost the opposite of what we were taught in the mainstream that Stalin was wanting to take over the world.
15:53
SPEAKER_02: But actually, he was the one that said, we must be practical and uh put our own country on an industrial development basis, be able to have our own security.
16:05
SPEAKER_02: And Litvinov was the realist who said, we're just here as another country.
16:11
SPEAKER_02: Stop seeing us through this propaganda that we're out to take over the world through a communist revolution.
16:19
SPEAKER_02: We are a normal country trying to build our normal economy, our normal security, and deal with us on that normal basis.
16:29
SPEAKER_02: Is that a fair summary?
16:31
SPEAKER_01: Yes, except for one thing.
16:33
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
16:33
SPEAKER_01: Stalin was a very cagey guy, eh?
16:36
SPEAKER_01: And he was uh in the 1920s, he was involved in a big conflict, uh, especially with Lev Trotsky for control of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet state.
16:46
SPEAKER_01: And he could never let anybody uh outflank him on the left because Trotsky was constantly accusing him of selling out the revolution.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: So he he was always maneuvering during this uh conflict for control of the Communist Party and the Soviet government.
17:05
SPEAKER_01: But basically, he was a sneak.
17:07
SPEAKER_01: He had to appear as though he was left to the left, but in fact, he was a hardcore realist hiding hiding out until he got rid of all his opponents for control of the party and so on, and then he could show his true colors.
17:23
SPEAKER_02: Let's pick up the story here because this is the start of your trilogy, 1930.
17:29
SPEAKER_02: Stalin is uh now in charge.
17:32
SPEAKER_02: He is a realist.
17:33
SPEAKER_02: It is socialism in one country, not global revolution.
17:38
SPEAKER_02: And 1930 is a pivotal year in world history because Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party wins a very significant vote in the fall of 1930 in Germany.
17:55
SPEAKER_02: This is uh on the way to Hitler taking power in January 1933.
18:01
SPEAKER_02: This is already now the world depression has hit, the Great Depression has come.
18:07
SPEAKER_02: This didn't start in Germany, it started on Wall Street in 1929.
18:13
SPEAKER_02: But by 1930, there was mass unemployment in Germany.
18:18
SPEAKER_02: This radicalized politics.
18:21
SPEAKER_02: Hitler gained a uh tremendous uh vote, he didn't take power yet in 1930, but your book starts with the the rise of Hitler as a very dangerous force, and the Soviet leaders understand that Hitler is dangerous because they have read Hitler's book, Mein Kampf.
18:45
SPEAKER_02: Hitler uh did not hide his agenda in 1925.
18:50
SPEAKER_02: He described absolutely vividly and accurately what he intended to do.
18:56
SPEAKER_02: So, Michael, if you could pick up the story in 1930, Hitler now has uh gained not power yet, but a major position in German politics.
19:06
SPEAKER_02: The Soviet realists say, we have a problem here.
19:10
SPEAKER_02: This is a very dangerous person.
19:13
SPEAKER_02: And your book starts, the subtitle of volume number one of the trilogy is The Search for Allies Against Hitler, uh, starting in 1930.
19:24
SPEAKER_02: So if you could pick up the story there, that would be great.
19:26
SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, the Soviet government at first, after you know, uh Hitler had this big election win in 1930, they still wanted to work with the existing government, which was called the Weimar government.
19:40
SPEAKER_01: They still tried to protect uh decent workable relations uh with Germany.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: Till in 1932, uh, inside the Soviet government, they began to see that there was a potential danger of Hitler taking power.
19:56
SPEAKER_01: And at the beginning of 1933, of course, Hitler uh takes uh power in Germany.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: He's named chancellor, perfectly legal assumption of power.
20:07
SPEAKER_01: And uh right away questions began to be raised in the Soviet Commissariat for Foreign Affairs about holy moly, what does this mean for us?
20:18
SPEAKER_01: And there were a whole series of meetings between uh Litvinov and his colleagues with uh members of the German Foreign Service about what was gonna be the impact of Hitler in power on Soviet-German relations.
20:33
SPEAKER_01: And the question of Main Kampf came up.
20:37
SPEAKER_01: Litvinov said to uh German ambassador, he said, Well, you know, I you keep saying that everything's gonna be okay, relations aren't gonna change, and Litvinov would say with a sly sort of smile, well, gosh, what about Mein Kampf?
20:56
SPEAKER_01: Mein Kampf was essentially Hitler's blueprint for the establishment of German domination in Europe right up until the Ural Mountains.
21:07
SPEAKER_01: The German diplomats would say, Oh, you know, Hitler was a bit crazy in the 1920s.
21:13
SPEAKER_01: You know, he was a bit of uh a kook and uh but now he's in power and don't pay any attention to that.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: It's just talk from uh from somebody who wasn't holding power.
21:25
SPEAKER_01: And uh Litvinov and his colleagues they didn't believe it.
21:30
SPEAKER_01: And they were right.
21:31
SPEAKER_01: That's right, they were.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: So essentially the Soviet side as a government was the first government to recognize the danger of uh Hitlerite uh Germany, and uh uh recognizing it, they sought allies in the West.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, Litvinov made a speech at the end of December uh 1933, announcing a change in Soviet policy, i.e., in favor of Of security and mutual assistance against Nazi Germany.
22:05
SPEAKER_01: Litvinov said this.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: He said, the Soviet Union alone cannot assure security in Europe, peace and security in Europe.
22:15
SPEAKER_01: It has to have the support of other powers, for otherwise it won't work.
22:20
SPEAKER_01: And that was the basic logic of Soviet policy between, say, 1933 and 1939, was to form a defensive alliance against Nazi Germany, to contain Nazi Germany if possible, and if not, to uh make war against uh Nazi Germany to destroy it.
22:42
SPEAKER_02: And Litvinov during that whole period was the Narkom, I think is the uh Narkom.
22:49
SPEAKER_02: Narkom, the Russian title, meaning uh the commissar for foreign affairs, or what we would call the foreign minister in essence.
22:56
SPEAKER_02: And uh you point out repeatedly that while some Western historians have said that he may have been freelancing or acting on his own, there's no doubt that this was a policy that Stalin led.
23:12
SPEAKER_02: The Vojd, is that the right way to say it?
23:14
SPEAKER_02: Stalin was the boss.
23:16
SPEAKER_02: The Vojd.
23:17
SPEAKER_02: I got to learn some uh Russian from you.
23:20
SPEAKER_02: So uh he was the Vojd, and Litvinov was the Narkom, and uh this was the Soviet policy.
23:27
SPEAKER_02: We need to have collective security against the threat from Hitler.
23:33
SPEAKER_02: And of course, your three volumes are exactly about this uh quest for security, and it's a tragedy, your trilogy, uh of course.
23:47
SPEAKER_02: Uh it's a tragedy that in the end, with vast, vast, vast loss of life, ends with uh Hitler's defeat, but just barely, and with so many opportunities missed in the 1930s, and that's the incredible drama that you tell.
24:07
SPEAKER_02: So there are three volumes here.
24:09
SPEAKER_02: The first is the period 1930 to 1936, which you uh describe as more or less the failure of Litvinov's heroic attempt to forge a British, French, Russian collective security against Hitler, even though Hitler's showing his colors and all the threat.
24:36
SPEAKER_02: The second volume is from 1936 to 1939, which are just awful, awful years of the British and the French in the face of the most dire possible threats, turning down the increasing pleas of the Soviet Union to make an alliance.
24:59
SPEAKER_02: They don't do it until the war breaks out.
25:03
SPEAKER_02: So could you tell us what is going on in the minds of the French leaders and the British leaders that make it so hard in the face of Hitler's clear and imminent threat make it so hard to find uh an alliance that the Soviet leadership is basically pleading for?
25:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
25:31
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's a complicated question which requires a complicated uh answer, but I'll try to keep it brief.
25:38
SPEAKER_01: And uh the basic question for all the powers in the 1930s, especially after 1933, was who was enemy number one?
25:49
SPEAKER_01: Who was enemy number one, Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union?
25:54
SPEAKER_01: That was the key question for everyone.
25:57
SPEAKER_01: And the European elites, all of them really, came up with the wrong answer.
26:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, extraordinary.
26:05
SPEAKER_01: But it's not so extraordinary when you think about it, because the ideology of fascism is the ideology that arises when capitalism is threatened.
26:15
SPEAKER_01: And capitalism looked like it was being threatened.
26:20
SPEAKER_01: By the Great Depression, for example.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
26:23
SPEAKER_01: And Hitler and Mussolini.
26:30
SPEAKER_01: You know, some of us think that fascism is even now is a bad thing.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: But back then, the elites, not all of them, but some of them, most the majority, they didn't see fascism as something that uh needed to be fought against.
26:48
SPEAKER_01: They preferred to get along with it.
26:50
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, Mussolini was the kind of guy that, oh, you know, we can get along with him.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: And Hitler comes along and he's sort of a rough-edged character.
26:59
SPEAKER_01: But if you know, if you sent him to a new barber and he got him a new tailor and uh made him more presentable, he'd be all right too.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: And basically, the majority of the elites in Europe during this period did not want to pursue a policy of collective security and mutual assistance against Nazi Germany.
27:22
SPEAKER_01: They wanted to get along.
27:24
SPEAKER_02: And I think it's so uh smart what you're saying about fascism being uh an ideology of saving capitalism that's under threat, because it is a kind of state capitalism.
27:38
SPEAKER_02: The state and large enterprise partner join forces.
27:43
SPEAKER_02: The state becomes powerful to organize the society, but it's because the economy doesn't otherwise function.
27:52
SPEAKER_02: And Hitler put people back to work, building the highways and so forth and remilitarizing.
27:59
SPEAKER_02: But it was viewed at the time by big business in Germany as yes, it keeps us going, not as a dire threat.
28:08
SPEAKER_02: And you're saying that in Britain and France, among the elites, powerful corporate interests, and in the United States, of course, uh, some of uh our most important leaders, uh, like the Dulles brothers uh during and after World War II, who took over as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and the CIA, his brother Alan Dulles, they represented German companies uh during the 1930s.
28:35
SPEAKER_02: They thought, well, fascism, this is working for business, after all.
28:39
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
28:40
SPEAKER_01: And uh the Soviet government worked on the United States, it worked on France, it worked on Britain, it worked on Poland, it worked on uh Romania, all these various states in Europe to try to organize collective security against Nazi Germany.
28:58
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, not all of the elites were against this idea.
29:04
SPEAKER_01: Take somebody like Churchill, for example.
29:07
SPEAKER_01: Beginning in 1934, he started to see the uh the necessity to uh get along with the Soviet Union, because in answer to the big question, number one, Germany was the main threat.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: And uh uh Charles de Gaulle was another one.
29:25
SPEAKER_01: He was a colonel in the French army in the 19 uh thirties, kind of an oddball maverick, but he wrote this letter to his mother in 1936, because mother was wondering, well, should France really get along with the Soviet Union?
29:44
SPEAKER_01: And de Gaulle wrote back to her and said, yes, and he went down the list of potential French allies.
29:51
SPEAKER_01: Italy, he said, will double cross us.
29:54
SPEAKER_01: Poland can't count on them.
29:57
SPEAKER_01: The British don't have an army.
29:59
SPEAKER_01: The only potential ally in Europe which will come to our side with arms in hand is the Soviet Union.
30:09
SPEAKER_01: Extraordinary.
30:10
SPEAKER_01: And the basic argument of people like De Gaulle and Churchill and some others uh was that uh France and Britain by themselves in a war with Germany could not defeat Germany, they would be defeated.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: And the only way to assure victory was within an alliance with the Soviet Union.
30:30
SPEAKER_02: Your book really helped me with the meaning or a meaning of the international relations uh term realism, uh, because to me it has changed its meaning in a way.
30:43
SPEAKER_02: To me, currently, realism means that we're kind of doomed for conflict, which I think is too pessimistic in many contexts.
30:53
SPEAKER_02: But realism in the 1930s meant to see beyond the ideological simplicities.
31:00
SPEAKER_02: So Churchill was a realist in the sense that for him the labels didn't count.
31:06
SPEAKER_02: He could see Hitler for what Hitler was, and he could sense, okay, Stalin, he's not my favorite, and he didn't like him.
31:14
SPEAKER_02: He didn't like the Soviet system.
31:16
SPEAKER_02: But he saw realistically that Hitler was the threat.
31:21
SPEAKER_02: And that's a slightly different meaning of the word realism that I like uh very much, by the way, because it uh basically says don't get blinded by labels.
31:33
SPEAKER_02: Understand uh beyond the labels.
31:36
SPEAKER_02: And what Churchill and de Gaulle could do was to understand beyond all the labels and the rhetoric, Hitler was a militarist expansionist uh who was uh after a war of annihilation, whereas uh Stalin would join together to defend against this.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: Stellin was a hardcore realist in the sense that the what counted were the national interests of the Soviet Union.
32:05
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
32:06
SPEAKER_01: Period.
32:07
SPEAKER_01: The security of the Soviet Union, how to protect it, who would be our allies, and who would be our enemies.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: And you uh you prepare against your enemies and you try to make alliances with potential allies, and that was Soviet policy for six years, from 1933 to 1939, and all the offers, all the offers made by the Soviet Union to the United States, to France, to Britain, etc., etc., they were refused.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: They were refused.
32:45
SPEAKER_02: And and you also make clear, of course, one of the most famous pivotal moments of uh history of the 20th century is uh Chamberlain's agreement at Munich in 1938 to Hitler's demands to return part of Czechoslovakia to Germany, the Sudatenland.
33:04
SPEAKER_02: And when that is debated, typically, it's debated uh on the grounds that, well, either Chamberlain was just a reckless appeaser, or he was uh reflecting the fact that Britain wasn't ready for a fight.
33:21
SPEAKER_02: But what you are emphasizing is there was a third choice, and the third choice was a collective security arrangement with the Soviet Union, and Chamberlain was completely unable, unwilling to see that as a choice.
33:38
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
33:39
SPEAKER_01: But he wasn't the only one.
33:41
SPEAKER_01: The majority of the ruling elite in Britain was opposed to it as well.
33:46
SPEAKER_01: There's a really interesting paper in the Foreign Office uh papers at the archives in the Kew and uh outside of London.
33:55
SPEAKER_01: One of the officials of the foreign office developed a paper.
33:58
SPEAKER_01: It was after the Munich uh negotiations, it was in October of 1938, and he flat out came and said, we're opposed to the policy of collective security, we're opposed to the policy of alliance with the Soviet Union.
34:16
SPEAKER_01: He flat out came out and said it.
34:18
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely extraordinary.
34:20
SPEAKER_02: And uh the second volume of your trilogy is so heartbreaking, uh, actually, but it ends the Munich September 29, 30 climb down by Chamberlain is this pivotal moment where instead of collective security, the British uh hand a part of uh Czechoslovakia over to the Soviet Union.
34:43
SPEAKER_02: And by the way, uh Poland acts incredibly opportunistically as well, grabbing a piece of uh Czechoslovakia as well.
34:53
SPEAKER_02: But your second volume ends with the shocking moment.
34:57
SPEAKER_02: It closes basically with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which is Stalin's uh agreement with Hitler at the end of 1939, so a year after Munich, of a non-aggression pact, and in a covert uh way a division of Poland, in effect.
35:19
SPEAKER_02: And this is, of course, pivotal because uh when I learned history, that was meant to prove how Stalin was perfidious, uh, that uh that Stalin and Hitler were really one and the same thing.
35:35
SPEAKER_02: That's what I was taught.
35:37
SPEAKER_02: It's a proof.
35:38
SPEAKER_02: You see, Stalin and Hitler joined forces.
35:42
SPEAKER_02: But what your trilogy makes so absolutely clear, irrefutably clear, is that it was a desperate move of Stalin to have at least a chance for the Soviet Union to save itself from an imminent invasion by Germany, given the fact that Britain and France had turned down the collective security option.
36:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's basically it, but it's even worse than that.
36:12
SPEAKER_01: You know, after six years of efforts to achieve uh collective security and mutual assistance with powers and especially with Britain and France, after failure after failure, after uh acts of duplicity and dishonesty on the part of the the French and the British toward the Soviet Union and a desperate situation in the summer of nineteen thirty-nine when it was obvious that war was inevitable, was could come at any moment, and there was a last gasp effort to negotiate uh a warfighting alliance between the Soviet Union and Britain and France.
36:52
SPEAKER_01: French and British sent delegations to Moscow to negotiate, and they didn't come with plentipotentiary powers to conclude an agreement.
37:02
SPEAKER_02: In other words, they were just delaying again, just going through the motions, even as war was imminent.
37:09
SPEAKER_02: They were bullshitting.
37:10
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
37:11
SPEAKER_01: Excuse my use of the language, they were bullshitting the Soviet side.
37:16
SPEAKER_01: And the Soviet side recognized it.
37:18
SPEAKER_01: And they said, okay, we can't count on you guys.
37:22
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna leave us to fight the Germans alone while you sit on your butts and watch from the West.
37:29
SPEAKER_01: So Stalin outplayed them and concluded the non-aggression pact with uh Nazi Germany, and he was able to stay out of the war, was able to uh buy time to uh strengthen uh Soviet uh military power.
37:46
SPEAKER_01: He made some mistakes.
37:48
SPEAKER_01: The winter war against Finland was not uh a great moment in uh Soviet foreign policy making.
37:56
SPEAKER_02: Although it it wasn't a great moment of Finnish foreign policy either, frankly.
38:00
SPEAKER_02: Correct.
38:01
SPEAKER_01: Correct.
38:02
SPEAKER_01: We see the Finns as heroic people.
38:05
SPEAKER_01: In fact, they were very fond of fascism, but we shouldn't single out the Finns.
38:10
SPEAKER_01: Most of the European powers, most of the European elites were uh sympathetic to fascism in 1939.
38:19
SPEAKER_01: And basically uh Stalin was covering his ass.
38:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no one would join forces with them.
38:27
SPEAKER_02: So he had to take, in the end, he had to take desperate measures to just barely save the Soviet Union in the end, which lost 27 million people in World War II.
38:39
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
38:39
SPEAKER_01: But the key thing is that absolutely from the beginning, the uh public opinion in the West accused uh the Soviet Union of treachery, of stabbing poor Poland in the back, for example.
38:54
SPEAKER_01: You know, the iconography, the political cartoons showed uh Hitler walking arm in arm with Stalin or drinking beer with him, clinking their uh beer glasses together.
39:08
SPEAKER_01: Now there was one cartoonist, uh David Lowe, who was the famous uh British cartoonist who showed Hitler and Stalin walking arm in arm together, but each one of them had a pistol behind their back, ready to use in case of necessity, the one against the other.
39:30
SPEAKER_01: And that was the image, the proper image to uh represent the relationship between Hitler and Stalin.
39:38
SPEAKER_02: One thing that's sad for me, I was an advisor, uh leading advisor to the Polish government in 1989-90 at the uh end of uh the communist period.
39:49
SPEAKER_02: And of course, I did everything uh I could to help Poland.
39:53
SPEAKER_02: But Poland's behavior many times in this is uh very ignoble, I have to say.
39:59
SPEAKER_02: First, uh Poland invading Russia in 1920-21, because that was an aggressive invasion by Poland, completely unnecessary.
40:11
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and then even with Hitler about to destroy Poland, Poland could not see its way to join forces with the Soviet Union.
40:24
SPEAKER_02: Even with Hitler on the border, about to destroy Poland, Poland was still resisting any kind of collective action with the Soviet Union.
40:36
SPEAKER_01: If we had the time, I could really tell you the full story of Polish conduct during those years.
40:43
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely reprehensible.
40:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
40:45
SPEAKER_01: But if you try to talk about that now, uh Polish nationalists and uh Polish historians be ready to jump you and say that it's all not true, that uh we were stabbed in the back and so forth and so on.
41:00
SPEAKER_01: But that is not what really happened.
41:03
SPEAKER_01: I I compare the uh Polish behavior in that period uh as uh the skunks and the wood pile of security uh and peace and security in Europe in the 30s.
41:16
SPEAKER_02: Yes, I think it's uh shocking and uh just so depress it was very depressing for me to learn more about this.
41:24
SPEAKER_02: We need ours, Michael.
41:26
SPEAKER_02: You know so much, and it's so fascinating.
41:29
SPEAKER_02: But let me uh try to bring us to the present.
41:32
SPEAKER_02: Just to say, collective security failed when it could have stopped Hitler.
41:39
SPEAKER_02: Instead, there was no collective security.
41:42
SPEAKER_02: Hitler controlled most of uh Europe by 1941, and of course, on June 2nd, 1941, invaded the Soviet Union, nearly defeated the Soviet Union, but was heroically stopped by the Soviet Union, which suffered uh unimaginable losses.
42:04
SPEAKER_02: 27 million is the number that I know most from the historical references.
42:11
SPEAKER_02: And at that point, yes, then Churchill, of course, because he always believed in it, though even then, with some hesitations and limits, said, Yes, we uh become allies.
42:24
SPEAKER_02: I think I give Franklin Roosevelt high marks in this of uh quick action, even before the United States was a formal combatant, because the invasion of the Soviet Union came several months before Pearl Harbor.
42:38
SPEAKER_02: So the U.S.
42:39
SPEAKER_02: wasn't in the war, but FDR knew get the supplies through Len Lease through any way possible to the Soviet Union so it could defend itself.
42:50
SPEAKER_02: And just to say, because I want to hurry to the present, by heroism of the Soviet Union, because that's what it was, this massive effort we can't even imagine, a loss of life, multiples of what the Western countries experienced in World War II.
43:08
SPEAKER_02: Basically, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of defeating Hitler, but there was an alliance that formed after Operation Barbarossa.
43:17
SPEAKER_02: But then it breaks down almost immediately with peace.
43:22
SPEAKER_02: Almost immediately after the Soviet Union has lost 27 million people, has borne the brunt of this battle, has uh reached agreement with the West to disarm Germany, to have a neutral Germany agreed at Potsdam.
43:41
SPEAKER_02: The West begins to rebuild Germany, remilitarize Germany.
43:46
SPEAKER_02: I take that to be the Western start of the Cold War, which uh happens from the West, not from the Soviet side, but from the West within nanoseconds of the war ending.
44:00
SPEAKER_02: Actually, it's worse than that.
44:02
SPEAKER_02: You know the story of Operation Unthinkable?
44:06
SPEAKER_02: I I do know in broad terms, but if you could uh explain briefly.
44:11
SPEAKER_01: Operation Unthinkable was a plan that was cooked up uh on uh the initiative of uh Churchill, April, May 1945, okay, even before the end of the war in Europe.
44:22
SPEAKER_01: And it was a contingency plan for uh British and American forces and German forces, German forces, former Wehrmacht forces, to attack the Soviet Union and push them back towards the east.
44:38
SPEAKER_01: The launch date was supposed to be, if I remember right, 1st of July.
44:43
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
44:43
SPEAKER_02: In other words, the fighting hadn't even completely stopped in Europe, and Britain was exploring a war against the Soviet Union.
44:53
SPEAKER_02: The lead ally that had defeated Hitler's army in the East.
44:58
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
45:00
SPEAKER_02: We have so much to talk about, and unfortunately we have run out of time.
45:05
SPEAKER_02: But Michael, why is it?
45:07
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if it's possible to say.
45:10
SPEAKER_02: But even today, I've experienced uh the Soviet Union and Russia firsthand as an economic advisor 30 years ago when I was advising President Gorbachev's economic team and President Yeltsin's economic team.
45:26
SPEAKER_02: I know absolutely 100% they wanted peace and they wanted normal relations.
45:32
SPEAKER_02: If we talk about realism, it was like Litvinov over again, but even more, because they said, okay, we stop even the revolution.
45:42
SPEAKER_02: There's no nothing about communism left over.
45:46
SPEAKER_02: And yet we couldn't accept peace to this moment.
45:50
SPEAKER_01: Plus a change, plus c'est la même chose.
45:53
SPEAKER_01: The more things change, the more they're the same.
45:56
SPEAKER_01: Isn't it shocking and tragic?
45:59
SPEAKER_02: It's uh very unfortunate.
46:02
SPEAKER_02: We're gonna have to leave it here for the moment.
46:05
SPEAKER_02: I want us to uh return for more discussions, uh, Michael.
46:09
SPEAKER_02: We've been speaking with Michael Jabara Carly, a great historian, professor of history at University of Montreal until recent retirement.
46:21
SPEAKER_02: We've been talking about this remarkable trilogy, the trilogy that explains the failure of Western countries to understand the possibility of uh collective security with the Soviet Union when it mattered most for history in the 1930s to uh stop uh Hitler's threat.
46:44
SPEAKER_02: It never came about at the time that it should have.
46:47
SPEAKER_02: The results uh were disastrous, though by uh the skin of the teeth, uh by uh 27 million dead in the Soviet Union, Hitler was defeated in the end.
47:00
SPEAKER_02: But even until today, this basic lack of collective security and cooperation, where the West continues a kind of rusophobia, is with us till this moment.
47:14
SPEAKER_02: Michael Jabara Karly's work helps us to understand it, that this is something that has been in play for more than a century.
47:24
SPEAKER_02: In fact, uh one could even say almost two centuries uh at least.
47:29
SPEAKER_02: But it's uh so stunning, Michael, to read your remarkable scholarship, and we're grateful to you for your contribution and 30 years of labor to uncover all of these facts and rewrite with accuracy the history of this period.
47:46
SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Jeff.
47:47
SPEAKER_02: Thanks a lot.
47:48
SPEAKER_02: Really wonderful.
47:48
SPEAKER_02: And uh thank you for being with us.
47:50
SPEAKER_02: You've been listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs, and our guest has been the historian Michael Javara Carly.
47:58
SPEAKER_02: Please uh join for the upcoming podcasts very soon.
48:02
SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much.
48:11
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
48:14
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