Hitler’s Betrayal of Stalin Nearly Ended the Soviet Union
Stalin was surrounded by yes men who dared not contradict him. By 1939, he was the center of a personality cult that ascribed to him infallibility. The Soviet dictator believed some of the hype about his supposed omniscience, and that omniscience told him that Hitler would not attack anytime soon. A further incentive for the self-delusion was that Stalin had gone far out on an ideological limb to sign a treaty with communism’s avowed enemy. For war to break out before the USSR was ready would mean that Stalin was wrong, and to say that Stalin could be wrong was unhealthy in the USSR.
Thus, when evidence mounted that the Germans were about to attack, Stalin adamantly refused to believe it. He dismissed it as fake news, incompetence on the part of Soviet agents, or part of a sinister plot by British intelligence to instigate a war with Germany in order to use the Soviets “as a cat’s paw to pull the capitalists’ chestnuts out of the fire“. When the Germans attacked on June 22nd, 1941, the Soviets were caught off guard. They survived only by the skin of their teeth before the German advance finally ran out of steam that winter, literally within sight of the Kremlin.
