Published in Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 8 (Moscow, 2012): 178–86.
Abstract
Perceptions about the list of potential enemies in a future war form one of the most important elements of the military doctrine. Their adequacy determines largely the army’s level of preparedness in the event of an actual war. We will see how the ideas of the Soviet military-political leadership about which countries were potential enemies evolved during the period lasting from the end of the 1920s, when industrialization and rapid build-up of the Red Army started, until June 1941, when a large-scale war from a purely theoretical hypothesis became a reality.
In the period under consideration, the perceptions of the Stalinist leadership of the probable military enemies of the USSR have undergone significant changes. In the late 1920s—early 1930s, they still had a predominantly abstract-theoretical character and were the result of the dominant ideology in almost a greater extent than the real situation of those years; hence, the thesis that the potential enemies of the Soviet Union are almost all the major capitalist countries, and in particular France and the United Kingdom, although in reality, the problem of the destruction of the Soviet system in Russia, even if it really was of any interest for the governments of the great powers in those years, interested them to a much lesser degree than it seemed to the Bolshevik leaders in Moscow. During the 1930s, with growing tensions in international relations, the previously described perceptions evolved. At the end of the decade, the main supposed potential adversaries of the USSR were instead Japan and Nazi Germany as the states whose governments really pursued an aggressive foreign policy and seriously considered war with the Soviet Union.
It is curious, however, that the process of refusal from the original stereotypes proceeded rather slowly, and I would say, very reluctantly: as early as in the middle of 1930s Germany and Japan were considered not so much as an independent factor in the world politics, but as an instrument in the hands of the Western democracies, particularly England and France. Moreover, this process proved to be incomplete since even in 1940 the possibility of a war with the British was conceded in Moscow, though the General Staff had already been developing strategic plans in the event of a conflict with Germany.
Apparently, this was not just ideological trick. It reflected the actual distrust in relation to the Western democracies. It was felt in the first half of 1941 as well, fueling Stalin’s suspicions that the information he received about Germany’s attack preparations against the Soviet Union was the fruit of British provocations. Thus, contradictory ideas of the Soviet leadership about with whom exactly the Red Army should fight in the near future, can be considered as one of the factors contributing to an underestimation of the German threat on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, and one of the reasons that the immediate preparation of an armed conflict with the Third Reich was started with a delay.