Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Unlike Chamberlain, Churchill was determined to go on the attack and persuaded his Cabinet colleagues to stage a spectacular landing in northern Norway. His original scheme was to intervene in the Russo-Finnish war, which Stalin had launched on Nov. 30, 1939. Finland's well-trained and determined army of 300,000 had fought the Red Army to a standstill. Churchill's plan was to land a British expeditionary force at the northern Norwegian port of Narvik, cut across to the Swedish iron mines at Gallivare (which provided Hitler with almost 50% of the iron he needed...
Despite all the German troop movements, despite sharp words between the two regimes, the supposedly crafty and suspicious Stalin foresaw nothing. The very night before the attack, Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov called in the German ambassador, Count Friedrich von der Schulenberg, and said the Soviets were "unable to understand the reasons for Germany's dissatisfaction." Schulenberg said he would try to find out. A few hours later, at dawn, he returned to the Kremlin with a message from Berlin. It accused the Soviets of violating the Nazi-Soviet pact, massing their troops and planning a surprise attack on Germany...
...part, too, it was a matter of paranoia. Hitler suspected that Churchill fought on largely because he hoped to inveigle Stalin into joining him. And Hitler was himself so treacherous that he could not believe Stalin was not planning to betray him. Stalin intensified those suspicions by his own aggressiveness. On virtually the day the Germans occupied Paris, the Soviets seized the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. A few weeks after that, they demanded and got Rumania to give up its provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Hitler saw this as a threat to his access to Rumania...
...Moscow, Hitler still controlled vast territories in the western U.S.S.R. What if he had negotiated a settlement that let him keep his gains? He had predicted such a possibility in the fall: "The recognition that neither force is capable of annihilating the other will lead to a compromise peace." Stalin actually began sending out peace feelers as early as October 1941, and, according to Liddell Hart, Foreign Ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop finally met secretly in 1943 to seek a settlement. But the Germans wanted a new boundary on the Dnieper River, which would have given them more than...
...partial or complete Hitler victory is whether peace would have brought any kind of stability. Could Hitler have established a continental network of satellite states under German domination, like that in Vichy France? And could such a network of satellites have lasted as long as the one created by Stalin after the war? It was partly wartime hysteria that led to the savagery of Nazi rule in the occupied lands, not only against the Jews but also against the Slavs, some of whom had originally welcomed the Wehrmacht for liberating them from Stalin. Once some kind of peace...