Nathan got this debate right.
What was so reprehensible about the Hitler-Stalin pact was that the immediate exigency of defending the Soviet Union was falsely contrasted with the needs of the international working class.
Stalin elevated tactical considerations of survival against the strategy of anti-capitalism. Consequently, Stalin saw the goals of the movement better served by alliances with imperialism than by independent working class organisation.
As Nathan rightly says, the subsequent alliance with Churchill-Roosevelt was as problematic, casting the Communist Parties as company spies wrecking working class militancy. Richard Croucher's Engineers at War records how the British CP smashed up militant unions and ratted out strikers to Churchill's secret services.
That said, the grotesque cost of the Hitler-Stalin alliance was even more problematic, casting the Communist International as apologists for Fascism.
'Don't you think Neumann, that if the nationalists came to power in Germany they would be so exclusively concerned with the western powers that we would be free to build socialism in peace?' Stalin to Heinz Neumann, November 1931
In 1928 Stalin wrote of the 'superhuman struggle of hte German people against Entente oppression'
Litvinov told one German diplomat: 'we don't care if you shoot your German communists' (Robert Black, Fascism in Germany, p 931)
German communist Wilhelm Pieck records that 'Moscow ordered us to give up' underground activity against the Nazis' (C Stern, Ulbricht, 1965, p 93)
As late as September 1933 Molotov wrote 'We of course sympathise with the sufferings of our German comrades, but we Marxists [sic] are the last who can be reproached with allowing our feelings to dictate our policy. The whole world knows that we can and do maintain good relations with the capitalist states of any brand, including the fascist'. (Black, p1035)
In message <029301c04f26$3a2308e0$1db9fea9 at 7zig1>, Nathan Newman <nathan at newman.org> writes
>I don't buy it. What is ultimately showed was that the CP in the USA would
>subordinate the needs of workers and other folks in the US to the strategic
>needs of the Soviet Union. You may see that as the right choice - even that
>preserving a strong Soviet Union was more important than strong leftwing
>unions in the US - but for those who did not, it discredited the CPUSA and
>the left in general.
>
>There are many leftists then (and like myself today) who saw nothing
>superior in Munich over the Hitler-Stalin pact, but saw the willingness of
>the CPUSA to sell out US workers for the needs of the Soviets as
>reprehensible. It extended not just to their initial twists in foreign
>policy but to their rigid support for no-strike pledges during World War II,
>to the point where conservatives in the union movement ended up looking more
>militant than the so-called "left-wing." Because of the CPUSA's rigid
>position on the no-strike clause, even as the capitalists drove down the
>standard of living of workers during the war, by the time we entered the
>post-war period, the CP-led left in the union's no longer was seen as the
>militant wing of the movement. More conservative but more militant union
>leaders like Walter Reuther were able to take over control of unions like
>the UAW, leading to the 1948-49 expulsion of the left-led unions.
>
>Which in the end was hardly in the strategic interests of the Soviets. So
>it was bad on both fronts.
>
>-- Nathan Newman
>
-- James Heartfield