The Soviets planned a global empire through insurrections and coups from 1917 well into the 1920s. Stalin in the final years of the 1940s believed the Soviets could rule the world. The Nazis thought they could form a world empire maybe together with the Japanese (Asia).
A Soviet World Empire
In 1917 the Russian revolution led to continued civil war on a world scale. The ideas of V.I. Lenin included calls for revolutionary violence: “Marxists have never forgotten that violence will be an inevitable accompaniment of the collapse of capitalism on its full scale and of the birth of a socialist society.” (Selected works, Vol. VIII, p. 215) Lenin predicted a whole era of wars – imperialist wars, civil wars, national wars. “Only insurrection can guarantee the victory of the revolution” (Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 327). “The purpose of insurrection must be, not only the complete destruction, or removal of all local authorities and their replacement by new…but also the expulsion of the landlords and the seizure of their lands” (Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 377). “Complete Communism will know no more war. A real, assured people’s peace is possible only under Communism. But the goal cannot be reached by peaceful, ‘pacifist’ means; on the contrary, it can be reached only by civil war against the bourgeoisie.” (Fundamentals of Communism, p. 31).
One of Lenin’s highranking officers in the secret police, Cheka, Latsis, in clear words expressed the fate of the bourgeois class: “We are not waging war against particular individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeois as a class. Don’t look for evidence to prove that the accused acted by deed or word against the Soviet power. The first question you should ask him is: To what class he belongs, what is his origin, his training, and his occupation. This should determine the fate of the accused. Herein lies the meaning and the essence of the Red Terror.” (S.P. Melgunov, Krasnyi Terror” v. Rossii, 1918 – 1923, Berlin 1924, second edition, p. 72).
Already in 1917 Lenin had declared: “The French revolutionary people…remoulded the whole system of strategy, they broke all the old laws and customs of war: and in place of the old army they created a new revolutionary people’s army and introduced new methods of warfare” (War and the Workers, London 1940, p. 7).
Bolsheviks were victorious in the Russian civil war and similar civil wars occured in Germany, Hungary and other European countries. Late in 1918 the Soviets had concluded a secret “treaty” with the German communist leader Karl Liebknecht. A Russian army would take to the offensive to support a communist uprising in Berlin. A similar treaty was concluded with Hungarian communist leader Bela Kun. In 1919 Soviet representative Karl Radek developed a plan for revolutionary war against Germany. Russian prisoners of war still in Germany would be offensively used.
Comintern was founded in 1919 and provided revolutionary training for communists from a large number of countries in the 1920s and the1930s. Comintern produced a number of manuals dealing with strategy and tactics of uprisings and irregular warfare (The Road to Victory, a theoretical discussion of Marxism and Revolution by Alfred Lange, The Armed Uprising by A. Neuberg, a pseudonym).
Stalin’s saw the road to conquest of the industrialised West as proceeding via Asia. Training was later continued on a global scale by CPSU in the Soviet Union. Also Stalin and the Soviets were active in fomenting unrest in Germany between communists and social democrats (“The Comintern engineered the fight between the German communists and the social democrats…to bring Hitler to power, not because they were political perverts but because they wanted a big war in the West…They would have preferred a military conservative government. They took Hitler. He was the lesser evil”, “I myself thought at first the Russian communist were just dumb. Gradually, I realized myself that this was a very big strategy to get one of the great wars of modern times going. This took some time, but it succeeded in 1939” (Testimony of Dr. Karl August Wittfogel, US Senate, Washington D.C. 1951, pp. 323 f.).
After decades of civil war the communists took power in China in 1949. The Chinese communists had undertake uprisings in the 1920s, but these failed. Mao Tse-tung now changed the strategy of revolutionary movement. He created a revolutionary army, went ahead and captured territory and proved his thesis in practice. Mao emphasized the need for a prolonged civil war.
Nazi Plans to Rule the World
In Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (Penguin Press, 2008, 768 pages) Hitler in 1940-41 found himself ruler of an empire larger than Napoleon’s. Nazi rule over this empire was bullyng and crude, just as was the rule of the Russians in the Soviet empire. domination, though bullying and crude, was not entirely negative, because it did get rid of feudalism.
In 1942, Albert Speer visited Hitler in Ukraine. He discussed with Hitler his favorite subject: what the world would look like after the German victory. He predicted the German forces with their allies would have taken the Soviet Caucasus:
If in the course of the next year we manage to cover only the same distance … by the end of 1943 we will pitch our tents in Teheran, in Baghdad and on the Persian Gulf.
The grand total of 127 million real or potential Germans would be available to colonize the conquered territories
The Nazis did not get to Baghdad. But they occupied large parts of Eastern Europe. General Plan East was the blueprint for these parts of the empire getting rid of around 60 million people. Visionary Nazis did not want to stop even at the Urals, the traditional border between Europe and Asia. What would happen if Germany was to rule Great Asia and an independent India? Reinhard Heydrich, the ruler of what had been Czechoslovakia, spoke of sending millions of Czechs to Siberia