Why the German People Flee From the Red Army¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, published in Socialist Appeal in 1944, confronts the paradox of the Red Army’s advance into Germany: the German masses flee in terror rather than greet the army of the workers’ state as liberators. The core argument is that this flight is not a verdict on socialism, but on Stalin’s betrayal of it. The Red Army’s military miracle—the mightiest army in Europe smashing the Wehrmacht after calamitous defeats—is presented as a class phenomenon, rooted in the October Revolution’s transformation of Russia’s economic base and popular psychology. This material and moral strength, however, has been perverted by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
The key claim is that Stalin offers the German people nothing different from the Allied imperialists: slavery, subjugation, dismemberment, mass deportations, and national humiliation. The chapter cites Ilya Ehrenburg’s notorious exhortation—that Germans must flee because retribution has come, that they will be forced to plant potatoes and tend pigs—as the authentic voice of Stalin, not of socialism. This is contrasted directly with the internationalist policy of Lenin and Trotsky. Had the Red Army operated on that basis, its entry into Germany would have been the signal for socialist revolution across Europe; the German masses would have overthrown Hitler and welcomed the Red Army as an army of liberation from fascism and capitalism.
Evidence for the latent internationalism of the German working class is drawn from wartime incidents: German soldiers had to be threatened with death by their own General Staff for feeding Ukrainian women and children, and in Sofia, German troops fraternised with Bulgarian and Russian soldiers, giving the Red Front salute. Stalin, the chapter argues, hushed up such manifestations. The theoretical context is explicitly Trotskyist: the chapter invokes Tukhachevsky’s 1921 formulation that the Red Army, as an instrument of socialist revolution, would never fight unaided, but would recruit reinforcements from the workers of the enemy country. This is the class criterion—two classes, two nations, the exploited and the exploiters—that Stalin has abandoned.
The polemic is directed at two fronts. First, against Stalin and the bureaucracy, denounced as traitors to the world socialist revolution who have restored inequality and privilege. Second, against the Allied imperialists—Roosevelt and Churchill—who, the chapter warns, cannot tolerate even a degenerated workers’ state and will prepare a new imperialist onslaught. The chapter concludes with a prediction: the fumes of national hatred will pass, Allied workers will find the apple of victory rotten, and Soviet workers and peasants will demand the restoration of soviets, equality, and the internationalist policy of Lenin and Trotsky. The Red Army’s victories, it insists, are preparing the ground for the victories of Trotskyism.