Planning an attack on the USSR, Hitler and his Western customers considered Stalinist Russia a "colossus on clay legs" that would collapse from the first blow. Indeed, in the 1930s. the Soviet government was experiencing a serious crisis - opposition conspiracies, sabotage, "rebirth" of the party, bureaucratic lawlessness, "Bonapartism" and low combat effectiveness of the Red Army, rotting special services, nationalism of local "elites," remnants of state Russophobia.