The Battle of Stalingrad

As we remember the 75^th anniversary of the siege of Stalingrad and the inevitable defeat of the Nazis that it guaranteed, one marvels at history’s workings. The Red Army, almost completely Russian, was in the hands of Stalin, of course. Stalin, along with Lenin, commandeered the Bolshevik revolution, eventually assassinating Trotsky and creating a police state. Solzhenitsyn, weeks before he was supposed to receive a medal for bravery in fighting Nazis in Poland, was arrested and sent to the Gulag. But Stalin was emulated in a lot of places; Spain and South America, and became the poster board for fascism. Literally. George Orwell’s Big Brother, with his walrus mustache, was clearly based on Stalin. He’s generally thought of as one of the twentieth century’s monsters and his Soviet Union a disaster. Russia is only now getting back on its feet.

Yet he was our ally in the Great War, Part 2. How’d that happen?

Instead of 75 years, let’s go back 101 years to the February revolution and the abdication of the Czar, Nicolas II. He was surrounded by back stabbers and foes who openly opposed his rule. He was routinely deprived of information and the public was routinely lied to about his activities and policies. They had fake news back then, too. But still, the public loved him. There’s an old saying in Russia: The streets are full of crime, the local officials, clergy, and police are corrupt, prices are too high, but the Czar is a good man, a Christian man who would set things right if only he knew what they were doing in his good name. If only the Czar knew, he’d put a stop to this.

I’m not sure if they were being sarcastic or saturnine, but there’s some truth in there. Suppose Nicolas had been able to ‘clean the swamp’ in Moscow? Suppose he had been able to heel the oligarchs and restore order, oversee a constitutional convention, and create a new Twentieth Century Russia? Well, improbable as that sounds, it is an interesting thought experiment. First of all, Russia is not a European country, even though they look like Europeans.

They are different people with a different personality and a different perspective, much more like Asians as the parable above shows, Russians look to the Czar as a father figure and expect him to just sweep in and correct all wrongs, put down all evil-doers, and restore order. They tend to like strong leaders with labels like ‘The Great,’ or, less flattering, ‘The Terrible,’ appended to their names. They liked Nicolas. He did much in the Nineteenth Century to modernize Russia with science, engineering, and art. The Russian Orthodox Church has made him a saint. Soviets mostly liked Stalin, too. They don’t like Gorbachev and today they like Putin. So they are not exactly European style liberals. Also, there were factions, Communist, Socialist, White and Red. Remember the line in Doctor Zhivago when he came to a village that had been decimated by soldiers? “Who did this to you? What were they?” he asked. “Soldiers,” a woman replied. “White soldiers or red?” “Soldiers.”

So, what might have happened if, in 1917, Russia had been united under Nicolas? He would have had more opportunity and support for the Great War. Russia would have had more input to the post war reconstruction, placing Russia in a much greater role in the shaping of the Twentieth Century post Ottoman, Astro-Hungarian empires. The politics of the Middle East would have required greater Russian input and we might possibly have avoided the battle we remember today. And no Cold War. No Stalin. No Rockefeller lending money to Hitler or IBM selling him tabulating machines. No oil sales right up to 1941 as long as the west thought that Hitler would crush Stalin so we could just go in and sweep up the ashes and reshape the world as we saw fit later. No Normandy, which was fought in an attempt to get to Berlin before Stalin. We both got there at the same time and Churchill’s Iron Curtain was born.

Maybe?

We never declared war on Hitler. He declared war on the US in December, 1941, after Japan did, and also just a couple of months before Stalingrad. Till that time, we had been neutral during the annexation of Austria, the invasions of Belgium, Luxemburg, The Netherlands, France, Poland, Ukraine, and then Russia. We waited. We traded with the enemy. And were seemingly going to continue waiting and trading for ever.

Would Nicolas have created a parliamentarian Russia with the monarchy as a figurehead, like England? Not likely. The Russian people don’t like that sort of thing, remember? Plus he’d still have Socialists and Communists to deal with. Still have enemies in the west that would never let Russia have an equal say in anything. And there’d still be fake news, back stabbers, factions, parties, secret police, propaganda, and people with grudges. They would all clamber for a seat at the trough, as politicians and pigs do everywhere.

Maybe it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.