Koba The Dread's Wilful Ignorance

Purblind Prejudice

We have been reading with great interest and pleasure Winston Churchill's six volume, The Second World War.  We are nearly halfway through, in the midst of volume III.  In chapter xx, "The Soviet Nemesis", Churchill details the lead up to the German invasion of Russia, June 1941.

One would be on safe ground believing that Churchill had little time for either Communism in general and Stalin in particular.  Somehow the-oh-so-stuck-in-the-mud, antediluvian UK Prime Minister had not got caught up in the adulation communism, and of the Soviets that swept up UK intellectuals at the time. 

Churchill made the following comments against the backdrop of an evident build-up of the Nazi war machine along the line between the USSR and Hitler's eastern border.  This build-up was an open secret throughout the UK and US governments at the time, and was well known amongst European nations.  Only Stalin remained completely blind to it--so much so that when Hitler finally attacked, a great deal of the Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground within a matter of hours.

Churchill writes:

We must now lay bare the error and vanity of cold-blooded calculation of the Soviet Government and enormous Communist machine, and their amazing ignorance about where they stood themselves. . . . They seemed to have no inkling that Hitler had for more than six months resolved to destroy them.  . . .

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders, but it may be doubted whether any mistake in history has equalled that of which Stalin and the Communist chiefs were guilty when they cast away all possibilities of the Balkans and supinely awaited, or were incapable of realising, the fearful onslaught which impended upon Russia.  We have hitherto rated them as selfish calculators.  In this period they were proved simpletons as well.  The force, the mass, the bravery and endurance of Mother Russia had still to be thrown into the scales.  But so far as strategy, policy, foresight, competence are arbiters Stalin and his commissars showed themselves at this moment the most completely outwitted bunglers of the Second World War. [Winston Churchill, The Second World War (London: The Reprint Society, 1952).  Volume III: The Grand Alliance, p. 286f.]

The very day the tanks were massing, and 120 German divisions were on war-footing along the breadth of the Russian front, the Soviets persisted in sending supply trains to Germany of vital war materials.  Express supply trains.  Stalin, the absolute dictator had wilfully blinded himself to reality--and therefore all his staff likewise suffered acute self-willed myopia.  No-one in Russia dared suggest the emperor had no clothes on.

 . . . it had been vain for us to add to the various warnings which Eden had given to the Soviet Ambassador in London, or for me to make a renewed personal effort to arouse Stalin to his peril.  Even more precise information had been constantly sent to the Soviet Government by the United States.  Nothing that any of us could do pierced the purblind prejudice and fixed ideas which Stalin had raised between himself and the terrible truth. . . . The Germans found no signs of offensive (Russian) preparations in the forward zone, and the Russian covering troops (119 divisions!) were swiftly overpowered.  Something like the disaster which had befallen the Polish Air force on September 1, 1939, was now to be repeated on a far larger scale on the Russian airfields, and many hundreds of Russian planes were caught at daybreak and destroyed before they could get into the air.

Thus the ravings of hatred against Britain and the United States which the Soviet propaganda machine cast upon the midnight air were overwhelmed at dawn by the German cannonade.  The wicked are not always clever, nor are dictators always right.  [Ibid., p.297.]

Let the ironic understatement of the last sentence reverberate.