The West‘s 100-Year War To Destroy Russia | Michael J. Carley

## Intro: Soviet Foreign Policy Goals & Continuity The conversation with Michael J. Carley reframes a familiar debate: was Soviet foreign policy inherently expansionist, or was it primarily defensive and shaped by a long-standing Russian strategic culture? Carley’s archival work insists on continuity—between Tsarist imperatives, interwar Soviet statecraft, and even modern Russian concerns—centering security, territorial integrity, and the search for stable frontiers. What looks from the outside like aggression often emerges, in the documents, as a sequence of risk calculations driven by geography and the trauma of invasion. That reframing matters because it changes how we read episodes from 1917 through 1945: not as a single ideology-driven drive for empire, but as a series of choices aimed at ensuring survival in a hostile international environment. Carley emphasizes that the Soviet state, especially in its early decades, was preoccupied by defensive needs. The contest between the Comintern’s revolutionary ambitions and the foreign commissariat’s realpolitik was not simply rhetoric; it shaped policy. By the late 1920s, Stalin had tilted the balance toward national interest—security, diplomacy, and the pragmatic management of borders—without entirely discarding revolutionary rhetoric. Reading the archives, he argues, strips away retrospective myths and exposes a foreign policy often misread by contemporaries and later analysts alike. ## Poland & The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Poland looms large in any narrative of Soviet-Western relations in the interwar years, and the conversation brings a nuanced reading to Soviet-Polish dynamics. Carley points out that Poland perceived itself between two threats—Germany and Russia—and consistently distrusted Moscow. That distrust wasn’t manufactured by Soviet aggression alone; it reflected Poland’s post-1772 geopolitical imagination and its own territorial ambitions after 1918. Soviet diplomats repeatedly sought rapprochement with Poland in the 1930s, overtures that Warsaw rebuffed, contributing to a mutual spiral of suspicion. The Nazi–Soviet Non‑Aggression Pact of August 1939, and its secret protocols dividing Eastern Europe, must be read against this backdrop. Carley frames the pact not as ideological alignment with Nazism but as a grim calculation born of Western refusal to partner with Moscow against Hitler. If Soviet leaders had reason to believe that Britain and France would do little to check German aggression—while Poland refused collaboration—then making a temporary accommodation with Germany was a costly but rational move to buy time and secure buffers. The moral and political effects of the pact remain condemnable for its human costs and territorial rearrangements, but its strategic logic becomes clearer when placed in the context of failed collective security and diplomatic isolation. ## Japan, The Purges & Military Readiness East Asia, Carley reminds us, was not peripheral to Soviet strategy. The Red Army’s clashes with Japanese forces on the Manchurian–Mongolian frontier—most notably Khalkhin Gol in 1939—proved decisive in shaping Tokyo’s strategic orientation and revealed the military realities the USSR faced. Japanese decision‑making was fragmented and often misread Soviet intentions; after suffering heavy defeats, Tokyo shifted focus southward, a choice with profound consequences for the global balance of forces. At the same time, the conversation returns to the paradox of Soviet military capability under Stalin. The purges of the 1930s decimated the Red Army’s officer corps—hundreds of thousands were arrested, many executed or sent to the Gulag—yet Carley rejects simplistic claims that those purges were justified preventive measures against a treacherous high command. Instead, they reflect a darker, less rational logic within Stalin’s regime. Still, the Soviet military proved resilient: defeats and humiliations prompted rapid reforms, doctrinal adjustments, and learning that would be tested at scale in 1941–45. The purges weakened capacity in the short term but did not necessarily render the USSR incapable of rebuilding military effectiveness. ## The Winter War & Stalin's Risk Aversion If the Soviet leadership generally preferred caution, the Winter War against Finland (1939–1940) appears as a striking exception that illuminates both Soviet strategic aims and misjudgments. Carley’s portrayal is vivid: Stalin as a gambler who, buoyed by a string of apparent successes, overestimated his leverage and underestimated Finnish resistance. The objective—to move the Karelian Isthmus away from Leningrad for the sake of urban defense—was defensive in logic, but the means were costly and exposed weaknesses. The campaign’s brutality and the unexpectedly stiff Finnish response had multiple effects. It tarnished the Red Army’s reputation, encouraged German reassessment of Soviet fighting capability, and produced lessons in command and tactics that the USSR would rapidly internalize. More broadly, the Winter War illustrated the limits of deterrence by coercion: even a dominating power can suffer reputational and operational costs when it seeks territorial concessions from a smaller neighbor by force. It also prefigures later patterns where Moscow’s security-driven calculus clashes with local resistance—an enduring theme in Russia’s borderlands. ## Delaying War: League of Nations & Neutrality Pacts Throughout the interwar period, the USSR pursued diplomatic avenues that often went unnoticed or were dismissed in contemporary Western narratives. Joining or engaging with institutions like the League of Nations, offering mutual assistance pacts, and proposing collective security arrangements were part of a consistent Soviet effort to insulate itself from the growing threat of Nazi Germany. Carley underscores that these initiatives were not merely propaganda; they came from a state acutely aware of its vulnerabilities and eager to construct systemic barriers to aggression. Western reactions, however, were often lukewarm or hostile. Distrust of Soviet intentions, ideological antipathy, and national political calculations in London and Paris repeatedly undermined the possibility of a robust anti‑fascist coalition that included Moscow. The result was not only the diplomatic isolation of the USSR but a strategic opening that Germany exploited. Neutrality pacts and delay tactics bought time for all sides, yet for the Soviets delay was frequently a matter of survival rather than strategy for expansion. ## Operation Unthinkable & Origins of the Cold War The wartime alliance against Nazism gave way quickly to strategic unease, and Carley returns to a critical but underexplored moment: Allied contingency planning for confrontation with the Red Army even before World War II had fully concluded. Operation Unthinkable—an Anglo‑American plan that contemplated offensive operations against Soviet forces in Europe—symbolizes how rapidly wartime cooperation could sour into plans for confrontation. Such planning, and the reciprocal Soviet suspicions it confirmed, sowed seeds for the Cold War. These early mutual war‑scares underline a larger point Carley makes repeatedly: the origins of the Cold War were not simply Soviet designs or Western ideological crusading, but a mutual and accelerating distrust shaped by geography, memory, and the consequences of wartime diplomacy. Western plans for containing Soviet power fed Soviet perceptions of encirclement and threat, which in turn justified Moscow’s insistence on buffer zones and friendly regimes in Eastern Europe. Each side read the other’s defensive moves as preparations for aggression, producing a self‑fulfilling slide into bipolar hostility. ## The Great Patriotic War: Trauma & Memory The Great Patriotic War—World War II in Soviet parlance—left an unmatched imprint on Russian state identity and popular memory. Carley draws attention to the scale of trauma: cities laid

The West’s 100-year War To Destroy Russia A good part of Western media has been telling us for years that Vladimir Putin is trying to re-create the Soviet Union and its militant, expansionist foreign policy. But what exactly was Soviet Foreign Policy about in the first place? Here to help with this historical question is Dr. Michael Jabara Carley, a prominent Canadian historian and professor of history at the Université de Montréal, specializing in 20th-century international relations, primarily the relations between the Soviet Union (USSR) and Western powers from 1917 to 1945. Links: Michael's books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com /stores/author/B004NA4BVW Michael's University of Montreal page: https://histoire.umontreal.ca /english/department-directory/professors/professor/in/in14958/sg/Michael%20Jabara%20Carley/ Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Goods Store: https://neutralitystudies- shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro: Soviet Foreign Policy Goals & Continuity 00:10:37 Poland & The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 00:18:00 Japan, The Purges & Military Readiness 00:25:22 The Winter War & Stalin's Risk Aversion 00:34:30 Delaying War: League of Nations & Neutrality Pacts 00:40:30 Operation Unthinkable & Origins of the Cold War 00:46:44 The Great Patriotic War: Trauma & Memory 00:54:17 Modern European Security & West-Russia Relations #Pascal A good part of Western media has been telling us for years that Vladimir Putin is trying to recreate the Soviet Union and its militant, expansionist foreign policy. But what exactly was Soviet foreign policy about in the first place? Here to help with this historical question is Dr. Michael J. Carley, a prominent Canadian historian and professor of history at the University of Montreal, specializing in 20th‑century international relations, primarily the relations between the Soviet Union and Western powers from 1917 to 1945. Professor Carley, welcome. #Michael J Carley Thank you for inviting me, Pascal. #Pascal Thank you very much for saying yes. I'm very impressed with your work. You wrote three major volumes about Soviet foreign policy, so who better to ask than you about what the Soviet foreign policy goals were? You looked at the early period, right—1917, the revolution. How would you describe the process of the Soviets coming into power and suddenly being tasked with managing external relations? #Michael J Carley -- 1 of 16 -- Well, you know, at the beginning of the development of Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s, there was a clash inside the Soviet government about what the major objectives of the Soviet Union should be. Should it be a world socialist revolution, or should it be like any other power, protecting the borders and the national interests of the country? The German ambassador in Moscow at the time observed that there was a conflict inside the Soviet government between what he called Comrade Kominternovsky—that is to say, the people in the Comintern, the Comintern being the organization set up in 1919 to spread revolution—and Comrade Narkomindelsky, Narkomindel being the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. And these two comrades clashed during the 1920s. Comrade Narkomindelsky accused Comrade Kominternovsky of sucking ideas from his thumb, and Comrade Kominternovsky accused Narkomindelsky of being a total opportunist. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. This clash went on for almost the entire decade and ended at the close of the 1920s, when Stalin more or less settled it. The Comintern became less important, and the national interests of the Soviet state became paramount. Many Western historians to this very day say that the Soviet Union didn’t have a foreign policy—that its policy was world Soviet revolution—but that’s not true. #Pascal How did it go, though—like, this formation? I only read a couple of papers, and the one that comes to mind is—well, I forget who wrote it—but it’s about the continuation of the politics of first the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union toward Mongolia. Mongolia is an interesting case because Mongolia, as we know it today—Outer Mongolia—became independent in 1911, and that had a lot to do with its relationship with the Tsarist Empire, because they kind of split it off from China. And this paper—and I forgot the guy’s name—shows how the first idea, especially from the Lenin wing of the Soviets, was to help these countries gain their independence. But this very quickly changed into integrating Mongolia into the orbit of the Soviet Union, although Mongolia, of course, never became a Soviet republic. It always remained independent. But the whole argument there was that the Soviet Union actually continued, more or less, the foreign policy of Tsarist Russia. Is that something your research can confirm, or how would you characterize it? #Michael J Carley My feeling is that there is continuity between Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation. You can learn a lot about how Soviet diplomats reacted to particular kinds of problems— for example, by reading my books, my trilogy, or my “trilogy plus one” series on the period between 1917 and 1941–42. There is continuity. And, you know, I like to repeat the statement that Tsar Alexander III was once recorded as saying: Russia didn’t have any friends except its army and its navy. -- 2 of 16 -- What he really meant was that Russia had to depend on itself to defend its national interests and its borders—whether in the Far East, in the Maritime Provinces, on the frontiers with Europe, in the South, or in the North with the Baltics. The two most important people in Narkomindel, the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, in the 1920s were Maxim Litvinov and Georgy Chicherin. Chicherin focused on the Soviet Union’s southern frontiers, while Litvinov focused on the frontiers with Poland, the Baltics, and Finland. Their primary interest was the security of Soviet Russia, and then of the Soviet Union after December 1922. Security, security, security—that was the number one concern of all three of those states. And it wasn’t necessarily an aggressive policy; it was a defensive one. “Peaceful coexistence,” for example, was a policy developed in the 1920s, reflecting the weakness of the Soviet state at that time. The Soviet Union always felt it was not as strong as its potential adversaries in the West, so it was always willing to improve relations with the West—always—except that the West interpreted Soviet policy as inherently aggressive, which it was not. #Pascal This is probably one of the biggest misunderstandings, right? Because even today, when people say, “Oh, today’s Russia is like the Soviet Union—it’s trying to expand,” well, the Soviet Union didn’t try to expand, did it? It tried to stabilize things and reach some kind of outcome, especially with Europe. But that never worked out. #Michael J Carley Well, if you look at the map, the frontiers of the Soviet Union, of Russia, and of the Russian Federation now—even in spite of the territorial losses after the disappearance of the Soviet Union— they’re huge. Mm-hmm. They’re huge. It’s a huge job protecting those frontiers. And naturally, the people who are tasked with that job sometimes feel on the defensive. So instead of being aggressive, they’re willing to work with other powers in order to have stability on their frontiers. That’ s the policy. It’s so obvious when you read the archives—it jumps out. That’s one of the things that’ s, if I can promote my own books—published, by the way, by the University of Toronto Press, mustn’ t forget that—it jumps out. It’s obvious. #Pascal The argument the other side usually brings up is, “But oh, look what they did to Poland, to Romania, to Bulgaria,” right? Subduing these states, installing regimes. But in your interpretation, this all happens for the sake of having buffers along the actual Soviet borders, right? #Michael J Carley -- 3 of 16 -- That’s in 1945. But when you mention Poland—well, Poland’s an interesting case, because the relationship between Poland and Soviet Russia, and later the Soviet Union, in the interwar years was not good. The Poles always said, “We have to fear Russia, whether it’s red or white.” But there was a war between Poland and Soviet Russia in 1919–1920, and it wasn’t Soviet Russia that was the aggressor. It was Poland, seeking to reestablish its frontiers of 1772. And during the interwar years— Poland’s a good example. That’s why I mention it. You know, Poland saw itself between two great powers—potentially hostile great powers—Germany on one side and Russia, whether it was red or pink or white, on the other side. And Poland said, well, we’ve got to keep a balance between the two. But they didn’t do that. They were more partial to the Germans than to the Soviet side. And proof of that is that the Soviet government, Soviet diplomats, sought on many occasions during the interwar years to improve relations with Poland. It’s absolutely clear from the archives. And the Poles always, more or less, refused those overtures. #Pascal Then why is it that Stalin, in the end, agreed with Hitler in this secret additional protocol to split up Poland and divide it between the two? Why not say, “No, no, no, we absolutely need this—Hitler, leave Poland where it is”? #Michael J Carley That's a complicated question. But let me go back to my point from before: the Soviet Union was always seeking to improve relations with the West—with everybody. Between 1933 and 1939, the Soviet government was, in my opinion, the first government to recognize the danger of Nazi Germany to peace and security in Europe. It sought, with all the great powers—Romania, Poland, the United States, France, Britain, and so on—to improve relations and to alert them to the rising danger of Nazi Germany. Nobody listened to them. #Pascal They didn’t even have diplomatic relations with everyone in Europe, right? Because a good number of European states at first didn’t recognize the Soviet Union as the successor government to Tsarist Russia. #Michael J Carley Well, that's right. But during the 1920s, you know, there was a gradual process of Western states recognizing the Soviet Union—for example, France, Britain, and Italy in 1924, and the United States in 1933, along with various other European states at different points in the interwar years. I can’t remember exactly when Japan recognized the Soviet government—it must have been, I don’t want to say for sure, but early 1920s. So it was a gradual process. The point is to go back to the Nazi– -- 4 of 16 -- Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which was the agreement that anticipated the changes in borders in Eastern Europe. The Non-Aggression Pact was not the Soviet Union's first choice. It was the last choice after six years of trying to improve relations with the West. It was the French and the British, primarily in Western Europe, who repeatedly refused Soviet overtures to improve relations. Stalin looked at this in August 1939 and said—well, he didn’t say “holy moly,” but something like “bonjour moi,” you know—basically, we can’t trust the French and the British to form a fighting alliance with us against Nazi Germany. We could end up with the French and the British sitting on their hands in Western Europe while we fight alone against Nazi Germany. We’re not going to do that. We're going to—however, uh, however smelly the agreement is—we're going to make an agreement with Hitler, not because we want to be allies with him and Nazi Germany, but because we want to stay out of harm's way and remain neutral. And as for Poland—Poland, right up until the last day before the war broke out on the 1st of September 1939, hated the Soviet Union and refused all overtures, the proffered Soviet hand. The Poles claimed that they were stabbed in the back, that they were victims of Soviet duplicity. That’s not true. They refused Soviet offers. They hated the Soviet Union. They acted as spoilers during the 1930s—spoiler