Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941
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The underlying thinking, on the Soviet side, behind the notorious Hitler–Stalin Pact that so astonished the world in August 1939 rested on such considerations. In his speech to the 18th Party Congress on 10 March 1939, Stalin had outlined the growing danger from ‘the new imperialist war’ as the system of collective security had collapsed in the wake of British and French refusal to take a common and direct stand against Hitler. He ended by declaring that the Soviet Union would not ‘be drawn into conflict by warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull their chestnuts out of the fire for them’.46 As Stalin’s remarks indicated, loss of hope in the readiness of the western democracies to combat Hitler went hand in hand with deepened distrust of their motives. That the west would favour a German–Soviet war, and might even lend support to Germany’s fight, was a constant component of thinking in the Kremlin.
Five days after Stalin’s speech, Hitler occupied what was left of the Czech lands. This finally triggered the British and French to act. The guarantee for Poland resulted, followed by similar guarantees to Greece and Romania. But the Soviet Union refused Anglo-French proposals for a pact that offered the prospect of assistance to the USSR only after she had herself provided armed support on being dragged into a war against Germany launched solely on the initiative of Britain and France.47 Instead, the Soviet Union proposed a full-scale military alliance–a triple pact between the USSR, France and Great Britain to provide mutual security against German aggression towards any one of them.48 But Britain and France were unenthusiastic. Anti-Soviet feeling, and underestimation of Soviet military potential, still prevailed.49 On the other side, the dilatory western response could be seen as confirmation of the ‘unswerving line of policy–of setting Germany on to the USSR’.50 So nothing materialized in the last hope of containing Hitler short of all-out war. Foot-dragging by the western democracies continued to the point at which the sensational Hitler–Stalin Pact on 23 August 1939 abruptly turned international diplomacy on its head.
Behind the scenes, the pact had, in fact, been brewing for some months.51 Economic contacts provided the opening. German-Soviet economic relations had, in fact, continued–though trade declined–after Hitler had come to power, despite the severe worsening of the diplomatic climate and the shrill anti-Soviet rhetoric of Nazi leaders. The Soviet Union had made overtures in 1935–6 to improve economic links with Germany, and to use these as a vehicle to promote some degree of political détente. But nothing came of them. Soviet attempts to obtain armaments through new credit arrangements were predictably rebuffed. And hopes that Hitler’s vehement anti-Soviet policy might be diluted by those in the regime’s elite presumed to be less hostile were soon dashed.52 By early 1937 relations between the Soviet Union and Germany had ebbed to a low point. That is how they remained until spring 1939, when economic contacts were once again the starting point for an attempt to produce a new basis for political relations, and this time with startling results.
For this time not just the Soviets but the Germans, especially, were interested in a rapprochement. And from tentative beginnings, Germany’s interest became all the more urgent as the summer progressed and the likelihood grew that plans to attack Poland might result in war with the western democracies. A deal with the Soviet Union would at one and the same time head off any possibility of the mooted ‘grand coalition’ against Germany (a repeat of the constellation of 1914), deter Britain from intervention in the Polish conflict and leave Poland hopelessly exposed to the might of German arms. Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, for long made the running, with Hitler at first hesitant. From the Soviet point of view, improved political relations with Germany would at the very least ensure economic benefits, which were desperately needed for industrialization plans, and in particular for the build-up of the armed forces. Imports of industrial goods from Germany had fallen from 46 per cent of all Soviet imports in 1932 to a mere 4.7 per cent by 1938. Stalin himself took a direct and detailed interest in the advantages for Soviet armaments to be obtained from improved trade with Germany.53 But the Soviet interest in a rapprochement with Nazi Germany went much further than the economic advantages this would bring. The Soviet leadership (and not just Stalin) fully recognized that collective security was dead, was intensely suspicious of the intentions of the western powers, remained wary of the danger from Japan to the east and was desperate to buy time against a German threat presumed certain to be directed against the USSR at some point. For all these reasons, a political understanding with Nazi Germany was increasingly seen to make sense. Stalin, like Hitler for long cautious, finally committed himself only that August.
By then, the soundings which had been made during trade negotiations in the spring and had been accompanied by mutual suspicions had evolved into tentative steps towards a political agreement, and one involving the mutual territorial interests of both countries. The dilatoriness of the British and French during the spring and summer in agreeing to the trilateral pact of mutual assistance sought by the Soviet Union encouraged Molotov in his view that he was dealing with ‘crooks and cheats’54 and merely pandered to Stalin’s already capacious suspicions. That London and Paris had dispatched a low-level delegation, which appeared evasive and was in any case unable to give binding commitments, rather than a high-ranking minister, equipped with plenipotentiary powers, was also regarded as demeaning and lacking in seriousness.55 By mid-August, with the Polish crisis at fever-pitch and in the awareness of Hitler’s imminent aim to attack Poland,56 it was obvious to the Soviet leadership that nothing could be expected from the west. The alternative had now to be taken.
By the time the talks with British representatives were formally broken off, Stalin had already let Hitler know that he was ready to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany as soon as possible.57 Within four days, on 23 August, Ribbentrop was in Moscow and the most infamous diplomatic move in history was rapidly concluded. It suited both sides. At his Alpine retreat near Berchtesgaden, Hitler slapped his thigh in delight at the news of his diplomatic coup.58 At his dacha on the outskirts of Moscow, Stalin was equally pleased. But he was under no illusions about the Germans. ‘Of course it’s all a game to see who can fool whom,’ Nikita Khrushchev, at that time party boss in Kiev and a member of the Politburo, recalled Stalin saying. ‘I know what Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me, but actually it’s I who have tricked him.’ He told his dinner companions from the Politburo that night that ‘because of this treaty the war would pass us by for a while longer. We would be able to stay neutral and save our strength.’59
The Soviet Union and Germany, ideological polar opposites whose governments (as Stalin elegantly put it) had spent years ‘pouring buckets of shit over each other’s heads’,60 were now bound together through a non-aggression pact. A secret added protocol assigned the Baltic to the Soviet sphere of influence and drew a line halfway through Poland, with the western part earmarked for Germany. Soviet interests and security were, as they always had been, the only concerns at stake for the Kremlin. Cynical though the deal had been, these now seemed safeguarded for the foreseeable future. Stalin knew he had attained more secure borders in the Baltic. More than all else, he had staved off any imminent threat to the Soviet Union from Hitler’s Germany, and had gained vital time. This had to be utilized to prepare the Red Army for war. Stalin had read parts of Mein Kampf as he was on the threshold of the devil’s pact with Hitler. He had underlined the passages dealing with Germany’s need to acquire new lands in the east at the expense of Russia.61 He knew what was coming. But he thought the Soviet Union would have three years to be ready for the onslaught. And by the end of 1942 the Red Army would be fit for the showdown. In the meantime, the Soviet Union could benefit materially, and territorially, from its new friendship with the former arch-enemy.
III
Soviet leaders had grounds to feel satisfied with the fruits of the first months of their country’s new relationship with Nazi Germany. Under agreements of 19 August 1939 (just before the pact)
, widened in February 1940 and renegotiated to lay down new delivery schedules in January 1941, trade between the Soviet Union and Germany rapidly recovered from the nadir of the later 1930s to reach a level roughly in line with that when Hitler took power. Germany was the recipient of millions of tons of grain, timber and petroleum products as well as tens of thousands of tons of precious manganese and chromium. The Soviet Union received in return machinery, construction equipment, chemical products and other manufactured goods. The Germans came out better from the economic arrangements. The Soviet Union delivered its raw materials more or less on schedule whereas there were often delays in reciprocal deliveries of manufactured goods. And Germany still provided as good as nothing in response to Soviet demands for armaments.62 But from the Soviet perspective, the trading arrangements were secondary to the main aim of the pact: security. And in this respect, the balance sheet from the first period of German-Soviet cooperation was encouraging. ‘As regards safeguarding the security of our country, we have achieved no mean success,’ was Molotov’s verdict before the Supreme Soviet at the end of March 1940.63
Apart from keeping the Soviet Union out of the European war, the pact (and in particular its secret protocol) had opened the door to territorial aggrandizement, whose chief objective–in contrast to that of Nazi Germany, even if the effect of occupation was almost as dire for the subjected peoples–was to bolster security. The eastern part of Poland had been occupied in mid-September 1939–a cynical piece of realpolitik that marked the first step in constructing a cordon sanitaire around Soviet western borders. Before the end of the month, Ribbentrop was back in Moscow to sign the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, agreeing to transfer Lithuania into the Soviet sphere of influence in return for extended parts of central Poland, which passed to Germany. Alongside Lithuania, the other Baltic republics of Latvia and Estonia were also forced during the following weeks into subservience to the USSR, and compelled to allow Soviet troops to be based on their territory. Finland proved, however, a step too far. Pressure on the Finns in the autumn to make territorial concessions aimed at strengthening Soviet northern defences produced not compliance but defiance and, by the end of November, full-scale war. The bitter conflict through the depths of the winter saved Finland’s independence. By the time the Finns sued for peace the following March, 200,000 Soviet soldiers lay dead. The Red Army, which had sent over a million troops to fight in Finland, had been humiliated by the tiny Finnish forces. The Germans were not alone in the gross underestimation of Soviet fighting potential that was a legacy of the ‘Winter War’.
Stalin’s hopes in this first phase of the European war were that the western democracies and Nazi Germany would wear each other down and fight to a standstill. His worry was that they would at some point come to a deal–and together turn on the Soviet Union.64 The hopes were dashed by the speed of the German victory in the west in May and June 1940. The worry, on the other hand, was magnified.
The rapidity of France’s collapse took the Soviet leadership completely by surprise. All calculations now had to be revised. With western Europe prostrate at Hitler’s feet, apart from Great Britain (and how long would she hold out before being conquered, or, more likely, capitulating and joining Germany’s side, as long predicted?), the Soviet Union was more exposed than ever. Stalin immediately recognized this. Khrushchev was with Stalin as the news came through of France’s defeat. He later recalled Stalin’s reaction. ‘He’d obviously lost all confidence in the ability of our army to put up a fight. It was as though he’d thrown up his hands in despair and given up after Hitler crushed the French army and occupied Paris…He let fly with some choice Russian curses and said that now Hitler was sure to beat our brains in.’65
The Red Army, as Finland had exposed only too cruelly, was far from ready to counter the threat. In the wake of the disastrous showing in the Winter War, steps were taken to adjust as far as possible to the new situation. The pace of rearmament was sharply stepped up. Workers were subjected to even more draconian labour discipline than had previously existed in order to increase arms production. The armed forces were reorganized as some purged officers returned and the next generation of commanders (some to gain fame during the coming years) took up key posts.66 Without delay, too, the fragile remaining independence of the Baltic republics was ended. In June, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania were annexed under the flimsy pretext of alleged anti-Soviet activity and fully incorporated into the USSR in order to shore up the Soviet defensive position in the north. There were even contingency plans, laid down in September 1940 but never put into operation, for a new war against Finland.67
In southern Europe, as well, there was a new urgency to Soviet diplomatic moves. Here, the Balkans held the key. After France’s defeat, the Soviet leadership reckoned that Britain would before long be forced to the conference table. The Soviet Union needed to be strong enough to defend its interests in the face of German dominance in western and central Europe. Soviet influence over the Balkans, the Black Sea and the Turkish Straits, areas where Russia had traditionally sought to exert her power way back in Tsarist times, was seen as crucial to fending off likely German designs also on this vital region and protecting against any threat of invasion from the south. There was also the question of British strategic interests in this region, and the danger this would pose to the Soviet Union should Britain and Germany come to some ‘arrangement’ in a peace settlement. The perceived need to extend Soviet control of the Danube basin and the Balkans lay behind the annexation in July of Bessarabia, transferred to Romania in 1919 but prior to that falling within the Russian Empire, and northern Bukovina, historically a Romanian territory which had never previously belonged to Russia. For a time, in the summer of 1940, the Soviet Union even hoped to use the Italians to broker a deal to divide the Balkans into separate spheres of influence between the USSR and the Axis powers. This, predictably, held no attractions for Germany, keen to keep the Soviets out of such a strategically important region and especially anxious to gain a dominant hold over Romania, where the Ploesti oil wells were indispensable to the German armed forces.
German and Italian arbitration at the end of August–with the Soviet Union excluded–of the disputed Romanian-Hungarian borders then drew Romania directly into Germany’s orbit. The Soviets claimed that the arbitration–from their perspective a direct anti-Soviet move–violated the requirement to consult on matters of common interest laid down in the pact of the previous year. The Germans, naturally, ignored the complaint, and Soviet hopes of a sphere of influence in the Danube basin and Balkans were, with this, effectively ended. When, in September, German military ‘missions’, on ‘invitation’, entered Romania–and a little later in the month, Finland–the threat to Soviet interests was obvious.68
These territorial issues, where Soviet and German interests conflicted, unavoidably prompted a rise in tension between the two countries during the summer and autumn. The Tripartite Pact on 27 September, linking Germany (and Italy) with Japan, the USSR’s dangerous eastern enemy, did little to improve matters, even though its thrust was anti-American, not anti-Soviet. Then, at the end of October, Mussolini’s disastrous invasion of Greece lit the touchpaper to the Balkan powder keg, prompting British intervention and opening up the certain prospect of German military involvement in the region–something scarcely guaranteed to reverse the serious deterioration in relations between the Soviet Union and Germany that had set in during recent weeks. This was the climate in which Molotov, on Ribbentrop’s invitation, arrived in Berlin on 12 November for talks with the Reich Foreign Minister and with Hitler.
The talks went badly.69 Ribbentrop was mainly concerned with persuading the Soviet Union to join the Tripartite Pact and become part of what he saw as a Euro-Asiatic bloc which would divide the world into German, Italian, Japanese and Soviet spheres of influence. He encouraged Molotov to look to the Soviet Union expanding in the direction of the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and India. Hitler wanted above all to discover
more about Soviet intentions. But Molotov’s dogged persistence on matters of detail reminded him of a pedantic schoolmaster. He became increasingly irritated. The talks simply confirmed his negative views on the Soviet Union–probably what he had implicitly been looking for, anyway.
Molotov’s agenda, laid out in careful consultation with Stalin, was more specific and mainly directed at the issues which had led to the deterioration in relations between the Soviet Union and Germany in recent months.70 Finland, Romania and the Balkans were particularly sensitive areas, where the Soviet Union felt cause for grievance. But no headway was made. Mutual suspicion and underlying antagonism pervaded the talks, which led nowhere. Hitler felt wholly vindicated in his view that the conflicting interests of Germany and the Soviet Union could never be peacefully reconciled. A clash was inevitable. Hitler saw Molotov’s visit as confirmation that the attack envisaged since July could not be delayed. By mid-December, as we saw, a military directive had been devised, scheduling the invasion for the coming spring.