Page 272 - The Chief Culprit
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Churchill’s Warning and Stalin’s Reaction
Can Churchill be trusted in this matter? He is interested in making us clash with the
Germans as soon as possible. Isn’t it so?
—V M, MOLOTOV: MASTER OF HALF A DOMAIN
or more than half a century, historians have been saying that Churchill warned Stalin
about the impending German invasion, but Stalin ignored his warnings. Perhaps we
Fshould ask a different question: Why should Stalin have believed Churchill?
Churchill was one of the most powerful political leaders who had understood the
great threat posed by Communism back in 1918. He invested considerable effort in helping
the Russian people get rid of that regime. His efforts turned out to be insufficient but still,
Churchill did more for the destruction of Communism than all other world leaders. Churchill
was an open enemy of the Communists, and never tried to hide that fact. But all of a sudden
in 1941, Churchill rushed to warn Stalin, the most powerful Communist in the world, that
Hitler posed a danger to the Soviet Union.
From the Soviet point of view, Churchill could have had only one political motive:
to deflect the German attack to anywhere other than Britain. Even before World War II
began, on March 10, 1939, at the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party, it had been
openly declared that Great Britain wanted to trigger a war between the Soviet Union and
Germany, while it remained on the sidelines of this fight. We do not know whether that was
indeed Churchill’s intention, but it was exactly how Stalin interpreted every action of British
leadership and diplomacy. As Admiral N. G. Kuznetsov put it, “Stalin, of course, had more
than enough grounds for thinking that England and America were seeking to have us collide
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head-on with Germany.” Upon receiving any letter from Churchill, Stalin, without reading
it, could guess its contents.
To understand Stalin’s suspicion of Churchill’s letters, we must also examine the strate-
gic situation in Europe. e concentration of power against weakness was the main principle
of strategy. Germany was unable to apply this principle in World War I, because it was fight-
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