Slavic world and class battles: Scenarios of future war in Eastern Europe in Soviet military and utopian thought of the 1920s-1930s

Abstract

The article analyses the images of Eastern Europe in descriptions of the future war in Soviet military-utopian literature (both fiction and publicist) of the 1920s and 1930s. The author shows that Eastern Europe was seen by Soviet writers as a threat for the USSR, with Poland and Romania as chief enemies. However, most of the Soviet writers refused to recognise Eastern European countries as independent actors, as they were considred economically undeveloped. Such perception was strengthened by the Comintern polemics of the early 1930s about the possibility of revolution in Eastern Europe. Thus, Eastern European countries were depicted as puppets of well-developed, economically powerful Western nations: England and France in the 1920s and Hitler's Germany after 1933. It is important to note that almost all scenarios of war implied aggression against the USSR from the territory of Poland or Romania usually followed by the revolution in Western Europe. A scenario of Slavonic consolidation under the aegis of Russia, traditional for pre-revolutionary Russian literature, was not employed at all. Neither was the concept of restoration of the former Imperial borders. The Soviet writers envisaged the formation of new socialist states as the result of the future war rather than expanding of the USSR borders, even though there were certain conditions for the expansion scenario. This scenario could stem from the issues of Belorussians and Ukrainians in Poland as well as those of Bessarabia in Romania, since they were mainstream in the Soviet literature of the 1920s - 1930s. It can be concluded that the expansion of Soviet borders in 1939-1940 was an ideological improvisation, since the appropriate scenario was almost not discussed in Soviet ideological literature.