On the latest LGM podcast I had the good fortune to speak with Dr. Ian Ona Johnson about his book Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War. The subject is interwar cooperation between the Red Army and the Reichswehr, a subject near and dear to my own academic interests. Ian and I talk through the origins of the cooperation, the organizational dynamics at play in both the Reichswehr and the Red Army, the nature of the technical and intellectual collaboration, the German experience living in the Soviet Union, and finally the long-range outcomes of the cooperative projects.

From the cold open:

They want to test this new mustard gas equivalent, and they have 800 young conscripts march down a road and then an aircraft flies over them and sprays them. I don’t know if they’re briefed. Only the front row are given protective equipment. And then doctors come and they take a look at them. Even the Germans, who are using, interestingly enough, graduate students in some instances to do smaller scale testing voluntarily, they comment. They said, “The Soviets, you require extraordinary discipline of your soldiers.”

Transcript is here. The Vladimir Putin op-ed on the interwar period (referenced in the podcast) is available here.

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