Wednesday Book: The crooked road to Stalingrad

GRAND DELUSION: STALIN AND THE GERMAN INVASION OF RUSSIA BY GABRIEL GORODETSKY, YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, pounds 25

MUCH OF the history written about the pact with Stalin that allowed Hitler to make successful war against Poland, Britain, France, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Greece, has been coloured by the attitudes of the Cold War. Indeed, the first publication of German documents on the Nazi-Soviet pact of 24 August 1939 was made by the US State Department in breach of an Allied agreement.

A conscious effort is now being made to re-examine the history of the years 1939-41 from a post-Cold War point of view. It is a difficult task, given that the Cold War was an ideological dispute long before it became a Soviet-American confrontation. But the notion that western historians today are governed by political bias is unfounded, despite the lucubrations of the new Russian Right.

It is not the wickedness of Stalin's regime in making it possible for Hitler to unleash war upon Europe that matters so much as his sheer folly. That folly was compounded by Stalin's insistence, up to 22 June 1941, that all efforts to warn him of the oncoming German attack were British- inspired ploys intended to provoke a war between Russia and Germany, and that any Soviet citizens or German deserters who reported otherwise were committing treason.

Gabriel Gorodetsky is a distinguished Israeli historian who has made the study of Russian foreign policy in this period his own. He has been rewarded by a degree of access - not only to Soviet political and diplomatic records, but also to selected records of the NKVD and Soviet military intelligence - which ought to make other historians green with envy. He has now produced a work which probably goes as far as any can to answer the question: why did so clever and suspicious a man as Stalin take a mixture of German disinformation and muddle for reliable intelligence?

The question must be posed in the names of the millions of dead and crippled Soviet soldiers and citizens, not to mention the destruction of European Russia - its cities, its industry, its agriculture, its very landscape - in the war which followed. It is a measure of the personal power which Stalin had built into the Soviet state that the man responsible stood before no court and died of natural causes.

Professor Gorodetsky has given us the view through Soviet eyes. In some respects, he has not entirely freed himself from its thrall. The reader should be warned that Russian diplomatic intelligence on Britain was obsessed by the belief that Britain was working for a war between Germany and Russia, when its actual aim was to stir Russia into behaving like an independent power and stop making everything so easy for Hitler.

The most difficult truth for any Soviet supporter or Russophile to accept in their guts is the worthlessness of Stalin's Russia to European statesmen until the heroism of the Red Army and ordinary Soviet citizens proved them wrong. In the summer of 1941, most shared Hitler's belief that the Soviet state would collapse before the Russian winter set in. The main British fear at that time was that, to buy off Hitler, Stalin would allow German forces passage through Soviet territory to attack the Middle East.

This underestimation of Soviet resistance was partly a result of Stalin's obsession with secrecy; partly based on knowledge of what his purgers had done to the Red Army's high command; and partly the result of a misunderstanding of the degree to which Soviet industry had advanced since the chaos of the first Five Year Plan.

Gorodetsky's hero, if he has one, is Sir Stafford Cripps, the brilliant, High Church, left-wing barrister whom Churchill was persuaded to send as ambassador to Moscow in May 1940. Cripps did exhibit an unusual grasp of Soviet realities. But Gorodetsky's belief that he ever threatened Churchill's position as Britain's war leader (except in the minds of a few intriguers such as Lord Beaverbrook), only shows that, in mastering Soviet politics, he has missed their British equivalent. Cripps was a truly great man, who kept Britain's economy afloat after 1947 at the cost of his death through overwork shows. As a political animal, however, he was too cerebral, too God-driven and too far from the gut feelings of the British Labour Party.

Professor Gorodetsky has told us what a melange of ignorant nonsense Stalin believed: of his persistent fears of a repetition of the Crimean invasion, or of a British naval action like that of 1918 in the Baltic and the Black Sea - as though, in 1940, sea-power was still driven by sail, and there were no dive-bombers. But what made Stalin the way he was - what made his fears of Britain more real than his fears of Hitler - is a question that needs a different kind of history. For that, we have little evidence and no reliable methodology.