Authors

Discussion

In 1946, Russian émigré sociologist Nicholas Timasheff published The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia, which argued that by the late 1930s Stalinism had mutated into an ethnic-ultranationalist, neotraditional ideology distinct from earlier iterations of Marxism-Leninism. While he did not, as is sometimes alleged, argue that socialism had vanished from the USSR, Timasheff believed that the aggressive “re-Russification” of Stalinist culture was to attempt to stabilize Soviet society after the chaos of the First Five Year Plan (1928-32) and collectivization (1929-33). The Great Retreat thesis has been controversial since it appeared and has accumulated a range of defenders and detractors.

My purpose in this paper is not to resolve the empirical dispute surrounding the Great Retreat. Instead, I am interested in how certain Nazis, and Germans generally, perceived the Great Retreat, and the consequences of those perceptions for Nazi-Soviet relations. By early 1939 Hitler was increasingly hearing voices in his inner and outer circles that advocated for a German-Soviet thaw, justified on the grounds that the USSR was jettisoning communism, had sought to purge its supposed Jewish puppeteers, and was becoming a “national state” with which Nazism could do business. During negotiations in the months preceding the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the German diplomat Karl Schnurre explicitly made this argument to his Soviet counterparts: “The amalgamation of Bolshevism with the national history of Russia…had really changed the international face of Bolshevism, as we see it, particularly since Stalin had postponed world revolution indefinitely.”

The paper will argue that cultural relations between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Molotov-Ribbentrop years (1939-1941) were conducted on the basis of such an understanding between the regimes. In this regard I am less interested in whether Ribbentrop, Schnurre and others who advanced the Great Retreat argument sincerely believed in it, and more interested in how German society and culture reacted to this narrative. The goal of the project is to move beyond Orwellian caricatures of the Nazi-Soviet relationship as completely free of content. The notion of a “national” Soviet Union was present in Nazi discourse of the late 1930s, and by recognizing this, we may begin to grasp the key themes underpinning dialogue between the German and Russian peoples in the fraught early years of the Second World War.