I stand to be corrected, but I do not think Stalin anticipated a war with Germany - everything suggests that Soviets were caught by surprise. I guess the the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was mainly beneficial to Germany - it lulled the Soviets while the germans moved their forces to their borders by anexing Czechoslovakia (and their weapons industry) and Poland. Russian, in exchange re-gained a temporary control of the territories east of the Curzon line they lost to Poland in 1920.
>
>Also, as usual, 20/20/ hindsight gives a distorted "overknowledge" of what
was rational in some past historical period. At the time of the Pact, the
Nazis had not carried out anywhere near their world historic crimes such as
the Holocaust or killing 20 million Soviets. At the time of the
German-Soviet Pact ,Hitler was not known to be the Hitler we know today.
Henry Ford and the Crown Prince of England and many others in the West ,
were Nazi sympathisers and supporters. Given the historic crimes of English
and American Imperialism, one imperialist country looked about as bad as
another. Signing a pact with one was merely an effort to divide one's
overwhelmingly stronger enemies. Only 20 years earlier, during the Russian
Civil War , all of those countries had surrounded and attacked the young
Soviet Union. There was no reason to see the Germans as that much worse
than the French, English or Americans.
>
An excellent point, indeed. We need to explain things by considering what was or could be known at the time when the relevant decisions were made, and from hindisght rationalization, as bourgeois pundits, those on this list included, often do. Without knowing the outcome of the 2nd ww, a pact with germany was probably the most rational thing Stalin could do at that time, from a geopolitical point of view. It seemed that a strong Germany would threaten mostly its immediate neighbors, especially Poland and France for who the Soviets had litlle sympathy, and justifiably so. A strong Germany was also good antidote for imperialist hegemony of England - at least from the point of view of a mindset locked in the 1st world war logic.
Seems that bat'ushka Stalin was taken by surprise by German innovation (blitzkrieg, a drive to control oil fields), but so were the western imperialists. So howcome that everybody reproaches Stalin for his policies of nazi appeasement, and nobody remembers Chamberlain.
But as Noam Chomsky once remarked, in the special case of the United Stated (or western capitalism, I may add), facts are irrelevant - they are "democratic" by definition.
wojtek