Stalin at War, 1918–1953: Patterns of Violence and Foreign Threat

Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union from the 1920s to his death in 1953, often invoked the specter of war. For some reason, however, we have never taken those invocations seriously. We have always understood them as a manipulative device, either to gain political advantage over his opponents, to mobilize the population, to deflect blame for ill-advised and extreme policies, or in some other way to consolidate the dictator’s power. This article argues that the dictator’s expectations of war were not just discursive or rhetorical, as most histories argue. In fact, Stalin’s perceptions of external threat were inextricably intertwined with internal policies of mass repression, as well as campaigns of industrial mobilization. This article examines the patterns of radicalized internal violence that so characterized the Stalinist regime, and connects them to the dictator’s perceptions of war and foreign threat. Discussion focuses on the crisis years 1927-1932, 1936-1939, the Great Patriotic War, and the last war crisis period, 1946-1952. Violent repressions under Stalin were cyclical, peaking and ebbing but, in each case, they were linked to Stalin’s expectation of war and invasion, and they followed a pattern established during the dictator’s experience as a military commander in the Russian revolutionary and civil wars, from 1918 to 1920. This article examines those links, and it compares the cyclical character of Stalinist repression to the pattern of cumulative radicalization of violence under the German National Socialist regime.