Hitler-Stalin Pact

HITLER-STALIN PACT. Signed on 23 August 1939, The Hitler-Stalin Pact (also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), announced a cessation of war preparations by each side against the other, and meant the division of Eastern Europe into two spheres of control. The pact came as a shock to almost everyone in the United States Left, but its impact varied greatly from sector to sector. From the mid-1930s onward, the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) had devoted a substantial amount of time and energy to the struggle against fascism, internationally as well as against such domestic pro-Nazi organizations as the Silver Shirts, the Coughlinite Social Justice movement, and the Ku Klux Klan. Many American liberals had joined or allied themselves with the CPUSA largely because of its leadership in this struggle. The Soviet Union was generally accepted as Nazism’s archenemy, if not as leader of international opposition to fascism. On the other side, Hitler’s emphatic anticommunism was, explicitly or implicitly, accepted as sufficient reason for benevolent neutrality by more respectable rightist groups such as the Liberty League.

Most leftists had been well aware of the frustration the Soviet Union had met with in its repeated attempts to form alliances for collective security against the Nazis, and, likewise, of the Neville Chamberlain–led British government’s refusal to give any serious consideration to Soviet proposals for a mutual-aid pact. There seemed, in short, to be a reasonable foundation for Soviet fears that Britain’s rulers would welcome, or even actually support, a Nazi drive to the East.

The startled leadership of the CPUSA therefore accepted the strategic value of the amazing countermove Stalin had apparently engineered, and most U.S. Party members reluctantly endorsed the pact as being necessary to the defense of the Soviet Union, whose survival was considered the decisive priority.

The Party therefore suffered no substantial immediate loss of actual membership. But the sense of disorientation and of total CPUSA adherence to Russian leadership took a heavy toll in the long run.

For three feverish days, the Party leaders remained sharply divided as to their own propaganda line. General Secretary Earl Browder advocated continuation of anti-Nazi campaigns, presenting the pact as a tragic military necessity forced upon the Soviet Union by the Allied nations. A large section of the Party “old guard,” never entirely comfortable with the Popular Front, insisted that primary emphasis be placed upon the imperialist nature and essential equivalency of the Wall Street–Downing Street axis and the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis, and called for a denunciation of the attempt of the Allies to repeat the fraudulent moral claims of World War I. It rapidly became clear that the Soviet Union had adopted the latter stand and expected its sister movements to follow.

The result would have been catastrophic in any case but was made even more so by the ways in which Party members active in mass or liberal-Left movements found themselves directed to implement the new line. In many cases, as in the League of American Writers, they were instructed to introduce totally inappropriate motions on the pact or the nature of the impending war. Such motions generally passed by narrow majorities; these were Pyrrhic victories, however, for they were followed by the near-complete exodus of all those opposed. The work of years was thereby undone almost overnight.

The breakdown of such relations and its devastating results are well exemplified by the fortunes of the strongly antifascist faculty committee built up at the City College of New York. Here, as generally, the actual core of Party membership remained intact. But the shock and disillusionment precluded any united action, even in self-defense. When, in 1940, the Rapp-Coudert Committee initiated a political witch-hunt at City College, no organized faculty opposition emerged, and no protest developed against the summary dismissal of many highly respected colleagues.

Despite a real period of effective united-front action and even Communist Party respectability (or popularity) during the war, a strong residue of distrust remained among the non-Communist Left and liberals, a sense of Party direction by outside forces and of Party members following a hidden agenda in mass organizations. The reservoir of suspicion was soon tapped and effectively exploited by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others in the domestic Cold War.

Fisher, David and Anthony Read. The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact 1939-1941. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).

Richmond, Al. A Long View from the Left. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

Starobin, Joseph. Crisis in American Communism, 1943–1957. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.