Adolf Hitler saw the vast expanses of Eastern Europe as essential for Germany's Lebensraum. They happened to be inhabited by tens of millions of Slavs - largely Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians - whose identity or very existence would have to be annihilated to pave the way for German colonisation. Anti-Slavism was not, however, a pillar of Nazi ideology as antisemitism was. The attitude of Nazi ideologues towards Slavs might be best summed up as genocidal indifference. Tens of millions had to die not necessarily because they were Slavs, but because they were in the way. Those that weren't - Slovaks, Croats, Bulgarians - could be and did become allies or puppets. Insofar as Nazis had a Slav policy, it was to splinter Slavic peoples into as many small groups as possible (turning them into 'racial material' in Nazi lingo), Germanising some, working others to death, and dispensing entirely with those deemed racially worthless.

On 10 August 1941, Moscow witnessed the opening of the first All-Slavic Congress, gathering Slavic exiles from across Europe. It was made explicit that this new Slavic movement was entirely different from the Muscovite Pan-Slavism of the past. In the opening address Alexei Tolstoy called on the attendees to reject as reactionary 'the old ideology of Pan-Slavism. Slavs, as he expanded in an article published in Pravda the following year, were 'hard-working, lovers of liberty and peace and culture' who had spent all of history fighting against the despotism of an arrogant west and nomadic conquering east. Now they should unite, so that every Slavic nation 'may be entitled, as other nations are, to a free, peaceful existence - that the culture of our nations may flourish without restraint. The product of the congress was a new All-Slavic Committee. Its purpose was to propagandise the war as a joint struggle of Slavic nations against Hitler's genocidal plans, reaching not just Slavs in the Soviet Union, but even those in Latin America and Anglophone countries (London and Detroit would also host Slavic Congresses during the war). As Stalin warned on 7 November 1941 - the anniversary of the October Revolution - the fanatical German dictator was seeking to 'exterminate the Slav peoples' and annihilate 'the great Russian nation.

Unspoken here was Stalin's complicity in the first stages of this genocidal agenda. The Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland was unspeakably brutal, aimed at turning Poles from a state-forming nation into a helot class. The Soviets did not step in to save their 'Slavic brother' but took their own slice of Poland in which they pursued their own murderous policy targeting the Polish elites. It was an early indication that the new Slavic politics was not as far removed from the old Tsarist Pan-Slavism as many of its proponents insisted. But at a time when Stalin had seemingly convinced the entire world of his earnestness, when the Red Army was the only fighting force that could bring down Hitler's war machine, it was easy to fall prey to wishful thinking. There was no more poignant example than Benes. The 'new Slavic politics' was precisely what he and many generations of liberally minded Czechs had dreamed of. A Slavic world driven by the democratic spirit of the West but standing on its own two feet. In a series of articles for the All-Slavic Committee's house paper in 1943, Benes outlined his own practical, democratic vision, later expanded into a book that examined the whole history of the Slavic idea and its hopeful future. In December 1943 he travelled to Moscow seeking confirmation from Stalin himself that their visions of the new Slavic politics were as aligned as they seemed to be from Soviet Pan-Slavic propaganda. Over the course of his winding journey through Iraq and the Caucasus, he spent many days in lively conversation with the Soviet Deputy Foreign Commissar Alexander Korneichuk..

The Slavic War according to Stalin: For Czechs, Poles, and Russians, the Second World War was a war for Slavic survival — one that Stalin would hijack to forge an empire of his own engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-s... By @ljukic.bsky.social‬ #PanSlavism #Stalinism #Nazism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory