Długa droga Stalina do ugody z Hitlerem
Stalin’s Long Road to a Settlement with Hitler

Summary/Abstract: Summing up the preliminary results of the research on the difficult relations between Moscow and Berlin – whose academic analysis is still not sufficient in many ways – it has to be stressed that practically throughout the period between 1933 and 1939, interest in the improvement of political relations between the countries was displayed by Stalin, who perceived in it both a certain guarantee of the security of the Soviet Union, which he understood in his own way, and a possibility to firmly establish the military power and political influence of his country in the international arena. To his tremendous disappointment, Stalin’s efforts in this area of foreign policy, which was of fundamental importance to him, met, in the best of cases, with a total lack of interest on the part of the Third Reich authorities. Only once, when Hitler came upon the idea of breaking the potential alliance between the Western powers and the Soviet Union, making it possible to solve the perennial German problem of a war on two fronts, in the light of a looming conflict with England and France, did he react positively to the continued attempts by Moscow to establish closer relations with Berlin. It was not in any way tantamount to Hitler’s resignation from his main objective, which was to defeat the Soviet Union as a condition for further conquests and control of the European continent, but only entailed a postponement of its actual fulfilment which, as it would turn out later, did not take so long. The development of the relations between the National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union between 1933 and 1939 was based on an ideological scenario, with only a few exceptions for the sake of a harsh pragmatism practised predominantly by Hitler, which, in fact, Stalin never understood. All in all, this was the measure of the nature and dimension of the political and military mistakes made by Kremlin between 1939 and 1941.

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