Rethinking the History of the Second World War: How the United States Made the Soviet Union a Superpower
On May 20, the HSE’s Department of History held a lecture by Professor Hiroaki Kuromiya (Indiana University) as part of an academic seminar of the Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II. The lecture was called “Rethinking the History of the Second World War: How the United States Made the Soviet Union a Superpower.”
On May 20, the HSE’s Department of History held a lecture by Professor Hiroaki Kuromiya (Indiana University) as part of an academic seminar of the Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II. The lecture was called “Rethinking the History of the Second World War: How the United States Made the Soviet Union a Superpower.”
The Great Patriotic War was only part of the Second World War. Although the Soviet Union did not participate in hostilities in the Far East and the Pacific until 1945, before 1941 the threat of war in the Far East from Japan was as serious as the threat of war in the West from Germany and Poland (before 1939). Stalin was aware of the USSR’s inability to fight on two fronts. It was therefore necessary to neutralize the threat on at least one side. Stalin brilliantly managed to neutralize Japan and brutally neutralize Poland. It seemed that Stalin even outsmarted Hitler, but he was wrong. The results of his fatal miscalculation are widely known: the ultimate victory through 20 million (or more) Soviet lives. This high price of victory should not obscure the essence of Stalinist policy in the West, which had grown imperialist in the late 1930s; it is impossible to characterize what he did in Finland, Poland and the Baltic countries as anything different.
Even more telling in this regard is Stalin's policy in the East, where Moscow acted like a true colonial power. Mongolia and Chinese (eastern) Turkestan (Xinjiang) virtually became Soviet colonies. The USSR, like Japan, was an aggressor in Asia. In other words, the conflict with Japan was an imperialist one from the beginning, which is fundamentally different from the events in Europe before 1939.
Few people know or understand that the USSR and the U.S. had effectively formed a united front against Japan. In 1933, the Soviet Union and the United States restored diplomatic relations because of Japan. Thanks to the U.S., the Soviet Union became a significant player in the international arena as early as the 1930s. The two countries joined their imperialist interests in Asia, but once Japan was defeated, their interests began to part ways. The Soviet Union became a superpower because of World War II. The irony of history is that the United States greatly helped the Soviet Union transform from an isolated giant to a powerful participant in world politics.
Hiroaki Kuromiya was born in Japan in 1953. He was educated at Tokyo University and Princeton University, where in 1985 he received his PhD. He has taught at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, and is currently Professor of History at Indiana University. His research interests include Stalin and Stalinism, the Second World War, and the Cold War. He has published on the Great Terror, industrialization and other aspects of Stalinism. His books include Conscience on Trial: The Fate of Fourteen Pacifists in Stalin's Ukraine, 1952–1953 (2012), The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s(2007), Stalin (Profiles in Power) (2005), Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (1998), and Stalin's Industrial Revolution. Politics and Workers, 1928–1932 (1998).
Photo by Maksim Krasnopolsky