Europe in 1917 was at the end of World War I, at a time when Russia, an important member of the Allied Eastern Front, was undergoing an earth-shaking upheaval. With the victory of the October Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky, Soviet Russia was born. Only 5 years later, in 1922 a union state of 15 Soviet republics was formed, and it was the Soviet Union.
Russia was once a military giant that revered Europe and the world, but when Stalin succeeded Lenin as supreme leader of the Soviet Union, he inherited a mess of defeats in World War I and victories in the Civil War. In fact, as early as 1855, when the Anglo-French coalition army captured the fortress of Sevastopol, the military position of Tsarist Russia was already facing serious challenges. The defeat in the Crimean War led to further internal contradictions in Russia, and the absolute monarchy was discredited at home and abroad. On the other hand, it also prompted it to accelerate the pace of its expansion to the East. However, in 1904 Japan challenged Tsarist Russia with the support of Britain and the United States, and defeated Russia the following year. So how did Russia develop and eventually become one of the world's two great superpowers after World War II? This article begins with how the Soviet Union rose again and emerged from isolation from the October Revolution to the outbreak of World War II.
※ Isolated Russia under the Soviet model?※
After the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, Russia and Britain began to approach, and with the pursuit of shame and revival, resolutely participated in the intervention in the affairs of the Balkans and declared war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Unfortunately, due to the weakness of the country, the Russian army suffered heavy casualties on the Eastern Front, but it was never able to open the situation. With the erosion of the battlefield situation, two revolutions broke out within it, directly forcing it to take the lead in withdrawing from the battlefield of great power hegemony.
With the Soviets in power, the Allies saw Soviet Russia as a weak and bullying opportunity, while the Allies saw it as a traitor to the chess game. As a result, at the end of World War I, Russia was violently humiliated by the Allies, and Russia had to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, ceding Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to seek secession from the war in a deliberate manner. However, the outcome of the First World War was the victory of the Allies, which did invalidate the peace treaty, but also led to the outbreak of civil wars between the red and white and the intervention of the victorious powers in Soviet Russia.
In the years that followed, the nascent regime fought endlessly for survival, the "bloodless" revolution had to pay a great price to preserve, and disease, war, famine, and slaughter caused more than twenty million deaths in Russia and millions fled their homes. The economic collapse led to the exile of many educated people, and the russian ruble plummeted from 2:1 in 1914 to 1200:1 in 1920, making it the country with the highest inflation rate among the countries involved in World War I. Of course, the most critical impact on Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union was international isolation. The Soviet Union under Soviet ideology was naturally ostracized by the post-war capitalist camp, and the international geopolitical situation was very bad. How to break the situation became the top priority of Soviet leader Stalin, but fortunately the Russians were far from being unlicensed.
※The strategy of Peter the Great and Lenin?※
Stalin inherited not only the vast territory and rich property of the Soviet Union, but also the great power strategy inherited from Peter the Great and Lenin, the teacher of the revolution. Tsarist Russia rose on the basis of the Muscovite Principality, and in 1472, after the Grand Duke ivan III of Moscow married Sophia Paleolog, the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, he considered himself the legitimate heir to the throne of the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Rome), practiced Greek Orthodoxy, and thus proclaimed himself the suzerainty of all Orthodox Christians and Slavs. Beginning with Peter the Great, successive tsars (i.e., Russian-speaking Caesars) continued to expand outward under the guidance of Technosism.
Peter the Great's reforms were the beginning of Russia's modernization, so Peter the Great's own preferences and tendencies also profoundly influenced the social climate of modern Russians. For example, Peter the Great himself is very good at engineering technology and can be called a super engineer. Under the influence of this engineer spirit, Russia has formed a unique and strong military heritage. His tireless pursuit of access to the sea is in line with the historical background of the Great Navigation Era, and gradually becomes a national macro-level grand strategy of Tsarist Russia. During the reign of Peter the Great, Russia defeated Sweden through the Great Northern War, almost encompassing the Baltic Sea as Russia's inner lake, and future successors also sought new outlets to the sea. The strategy of going to the sea thus had a great impact on the formulation of diplomatic, military and geopolitical strategies for Tsarist Russia and even the Soviet Union.
Strongman politics is another political gene that Peter the Great brought to the Russians, stemming from his travels to Western Europe. In order to propel Russia out of its backwardness and become a leader in the great power game, Peter the Great was determined to use iron fist means to carry out reforms from top to bottom and promote Russia's development. Although this strategy can form the explosive power of the country in a short period of time, it greatly overdrafts the subjective initiative and long-term development equilibrium as a grassroots and individual. Before and after the end of World War I, when Soviet Russia was attacked by the Allies, the Allies and the White Army, Lenin followed the style of Peter the Great and formed the policy of Soviet Russia in wartime.
In addition to the wartime model, Lenin brought a highly pragmatic diplomatic strategy to Russia. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed with Germany in 1918, was considered by Lenin to be equated with the Treaty of Tyrsit in 1807 with Napoleonic France, and as a stopgap measure for respite. Another legacy left by Lenin was the strategy of "keeping enemies out of the country", which originated from a series of wars caused by internal and external troubles at the beginning of the establishment of Soviet Russia. In the process of quelling the civil war, anti-Soviet forces at home and abroad were entangled, resulting in the later wars of consolidating power becoming more and more colored by cross-border attacks.
During Lenin's time, the Red Army had advanced as far as warsaw on the Western Front, but had failed to intervene in support of Poland; on the Eastern Front, the Red Army not only drove the Japanese army out of Siberia, but even brazenly took advantage of China's internal and external difficulties to extend its tentacles to Outer Mongolia and the Northeast. Therefore, taking the initiative to attack and prevent problems before they happened, also became a major feature of Soviet diplomacy during the Stalin period.
※Candlelight axe shadow under versailles system?※
On the surface, the Soviet Union under versailles was widely isolated by the world powers, but from a deeper perspective, it was a different perspective. The horrors of the First World War were unprecedented, and with the advent of the era of industrial warfare, fighting on the battlefield became meaningless to individual soldiers. More importantly, although Britain and France were the victors of the First World War, they did not receive much real benefit, but instead changed from pre-war creditors to debtor countries. At this time, although the British Empire was still in the position of world hegemony, it had long since weakened. Although Germany was defeated, the rise of the United States and Japan did not diminish at all. Among the world's major powers, the United States, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan constantly attacked the old order of the global colonial system dominated by Britain and France, and only the weaker France and the imminent Italy were barely their potential allies. Because of this, although Germany, Italy, Japan and other countries are under the banner of "anti-Soviet", their essence is to impact the Versailles system with Britain as the core, which makes enough diplomatic space for the Soviet Union.
The geopolitical landscape at that time was unpredictable, and the shackled Germany was desperately seeking a diplomatic breakthrough, so the legendary German foreign minister of Weimar Germany, Stresemann, frequently strengthened relations with the Soviet Union and the United States, and used the United States and the Soviet Union in turn to force Britain and France to relax the repression of Germany. The reason why Germany sought the support of the Soviet Union was because from 1928 to 1932, after the first five-year plan, the Soviet industrial system had developed by leaps and bounds, and the industrial output value had reached 234.5% on the eve of the First World War.
In the Soviet Union, the group of engineers had a special social status, from Peter the Great to Stalin. The community of outstanding engineers formed the core of the so-called "Stalin model", which was precisely what many later imitators ignored. Under the research and development of these engineers, the "Bobosha" submachine gun, the T34 tank, the "Katyusha" rocket launcher, the "Black Death" strike machine and many other divine weapons became the sharpest "bayonet" of the Soviet Army. After the outbreak of the great economic crisis, Germany and Italy gathered together under the banner of "anti-Soviet", the hope of Britain and France to push the boat along the water to alleviate the geopolitical crisis faced with its continuous decline, as for the United States, it was like a huge fog, lurking in the depths of the ocean silently spying on The movements of Europe. Against this backdrop, Stalin had reason to fear that an unprecedentedly large anti-Soviet alliance would emerge in the world, and it was imperative to elevate the Soviet Union to the ranks of military powers as soon as possible.
※The Soviet Union approached, shocking the world?※
In fact, the Soviet Union and Britain faced similar geopolitical dilemmas, both facing an unprecedentedly large camp of hostility, differing only in the motives of overthrowing world hegemons, establishing a new order, or strangling Soviet power. Thanks to the clamor of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and militarist Japan, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had reason to believe that a policy of appeasement could force Germany and the Soviets to collide first. Just as the so-called driving the tiger and swallowing the wolf and reaping the benefits, Stalin was also well versed in this way. As early as 1935, before Chamberlain came to power in Britain, Stalin wrote to Kaganovich and Molotov, clearly expressing the purpose of provoking European countries to fight each other and ensuring that the Soviet Union stayed out of the matter, thus seizing the strategic initiative security.
In East Asia, Stalin used military aid to China to contain Japan and used Japan to restrain the United States. In Europe, contacts with Britain, France and Germany were maintained at the same time, in order to prepare for the future. In the Soviet Union's strategic arrangement, Europe was the mainstay and Asia was supplemented, but the northward posture of the Radicals of the Japanese Army in the 1930s led to a far greater urgency in Asia than in the direction of Europe, and after the September 18 Incident, the possibility of War between Japan and the Soviet Union increased sharply. To this end, the Soviet army's deployment in the Far East jumped from six infantry divisions and two cavalry divisions at the time of the "918 Incident" to sixteen infantry divisions, three cavalry divisions, 1200 tanks, 1200 aircraft, and 30 submarines at the end of 1936, with a total strength of about 290,000 people. At this time, Japan's total military strength in northeast China and the Korean Peninsula was only 80,000 people, not to mention the impact of factors such as the improvement of transportation conditions that led to the increase in the mobile transportation capabilities of the Soviet army.
By increasing its deployment in the Far East and providing military assistance to China, the Soviet Union contained the Japanese army to some extent. In Europe, Stalin, on the other hand, focused on building an anti-fascist united front against the anti-Soviet bloc of Germany, Italy, and Japan. However, Chamberlain clearly saw the Soviet Union's intention to break up British-German-Japanese relations, so his attitude was extremely resistant. So the Soviet Union turned to the second place, seeking to sign mutual assistance treaties with France, Czechoslovakia and other countries. However, according to the experience of the First World War, France's defense strategy at that time was mainly defensive, so it built a rather sophisticated Maginot Line, and it was impossible to take the initiative to attack Germany. In other words, if Germany had taken the lead in attacking the Soviet Union and the Czechs, France would have sat idly by; if it had taken the lead in attacking France, the Czechs and the Soviet Union would have to bear the responsibility of containing Germany, which was obviously a "bad deal" for Stalin.
However, the ink on the Munich Agreement was not dried, and Hitler changed hands and dismembered the Czech Snorvak, which led to a reversal of British public opinion, with Chamberlain stepping down and Churchill coming to power. The British urged the government to assume its security responsibilities for Poland, Romania and greece. Britain was forced to oppose Germany over the Polish question, and Germany decided in early 1939 to seek Soviet-German cooperation because Romania was involved in both the Soviet Union and Germany. Stalin was keenly aware that this was a perfect opportunity, and the Soviet Union and Germany quickly entered, and in August of that year, they signed the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, which shocked the world, and the international geopolitical pattern changed greatly.