the Germans were not crazy to think that they would eventually have to fight the Russians.
In my model they absolutely were, because evil and stupidity do not always go together. Stalin was a rational psychopath who kept every promise he made to a foreign power. (If he believed or cared about Communist ideology at all, he thought it rendered war against another major power redundant and foolish.) He thought Hitler was the same, to the point of not listening to anyone who said otherwise, and finding the truth shocked him into paranoia.
I had in mind some specific remarks by Stalin, but let’s say Hitler’s invasion had no such effect.
What makes you think he was paranoid before this? His mass-murders didn’t stop him from dying in his bed at an advanced age, nor from forcing the Soviet people to defend him and his power from Germany. He could easily have enjoyed killing people. On what grounds would you call his behavior irrational?
Define terms. Do you use the word “paranoia” is its clinical meaning? as a shortcut for “he values his safety much more than lives of others”? and how does irrationality play into this? For one thing, without the purges of 1937, the Russian army would have been much more capable in 1941.
In my model they absolutely were, because evil and stupidity do not always go together. Stalin was a rational psychopath who kept every promise he made to a foreign power. (If he believed or cared about Communist ideology at all, he thought it rendered war against another major power redundant and foolish.) He thought Hitler was the same, to the point of not listening to anyone who said otherwise, and finding the truth shocked him into paranoia.
There is a bit of a problem with this theory in that Stalin’s paranoia was very visible starting from 1934 and, arguably, it peaked in 1937.
I had in mind some specific remarks by Stalin, but let’s say Hitler’s invasion had no such effect.
What makes you think he was paranoid before this? His mass-murders didn’t stop him from dying in his bed at an advanced age, nor from forcing the Soviet people to defend him and his power from Germany. He could easily have enjoyed killing people. On what grounds would you call his behavior irrational?
Define terms. Do you use the word “paranoia” is its clinical meaning? as a shortcut for “he values his safety much more than lives of others”? and how does irrationality play into this? For one thing, without the purges of 1937, the Russian army would have been much more capable in 1941.