Perhaps a non-Stalinist Russia would have avoided World War II entirely by failing to make the mammoth miscalculation that was the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. Stalin believed that he could divert Hitler by allying with him. Let Hitler absorb Poland, and then watch while he became embroiled in a war with the western democracies. They would exhaust themselves in trench-war stalemate as they engaged in World War I, round II. And the Communists would pick up the pieces, as revulsion against the fascists and capitalists who had again led them to the slaughter triggered general world revolution.

But Hitler did not cooperate. And a year and a half after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact Hitler had conquered France and the Low Countries, persuaded the Balkan countries into alliance, and was back ready to begin his war against Russia.