Название: The Road to Barbarossa: Soviet-German Relations, 1917-1941
Автор: Norman Ridley
Издательство: Frontline Books
Год: 2023
Страниц: 273
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, epub
Размер: 10.2 MB
This book looks at how these two ‘strange bedfellows’ dealt with western hostility and found ways to accommodate each other in a bid to recover from the economic devastation and dismantling of their historic territorial boundaries. From the chaos of the First World War, during which Germany and Russia had fought each other to a standstill, there emerged two societies whose diametrically opposed ideologies of communism and fascism represented the opposite extremes of the political spectrum. Despite this, in time the governments and military establishments in both countries were able to create an environment where political expediency led to both cooperation and an eventual alliance. Western democracies found both systems repellent but the two countries, Germany and the Soviet Union, embodied vast resources of, in the case of the Soviets, raw materials and, in the case of Germany, huge intellectual, scientific and industrial expertise. Both offered massive opportunities for trade, but neither made comfortable partners. Britain, whose sympathies lay more with the Germans, and France, whose history tied them more to Eastern Europe, tended to treat both Germany and the Soviet Union as outcast states. This created a great deal of animosity in return and ultimately drove the outcasts into each other’s arms.
