Hitler and Stalin
On August 23rd, 1939, the world was stunned when Nazi Germany and the communist USSR, each avowedly dedicated to the other’s destruction, signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. The agreement was a benevolent neutrality treaty that effectively divided Eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR, and freed Hitler to kick off WWII a week later with an invasion of Poland, secure in the knowledge that he was free of the risk of a two-front war against Britain and France in the west, and the Soviets in the East.
Hitler, whose ultimate aim was an empire in the east necessarily at Soviet expense, intended the Pact as a temporary measure to free him to deal with Britain and France, before turning on the USSR. Stalin, however, was convinced that the Pact was more durable and that while war with Germany was inevitable, Hitler would not turn on the USSR until he settled the war with Britain.
Stalin was surrounded by yes men who dared not contradict him, and by 1939, was the center of a personality cult ascribing to his infallibility, and could not help believing some of the hype about his supposed omniscience, and that omniscience told him that Hitler would not attack anytime soon. A further incentive for the self-delusion was that Stalin had gone far out on an ideological limb by signing the treaty with communism’s avowed enemy, and for war to break out before the USSR was ready would mean that Stalin was wrong, and saying Stalin could be wrong was unhealthy in the USSR.
Thus, when evidence began mounting of an impending German attack, Stalin adamantly refused to believe it, dismissing it as fake news, incompetence on the part of Soviet agents, or part of a sinister plot by British intelligence to instigate a war with Germany in order to use the Soviets “as a cat’s paw to pull the capitalists’ chestnuts out of the fire“. When the German blow fell on June 22nd, 1941, the Soviets were caught off guard, surviving only by the skin of their teeth before the German advance finally ran out of steam that winter, literally within sight of the Kremlin.