Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  Soviet isolation was ended by a move from the most unlikely quarter of all. While negotiations dragged on with Britain and France, lines began to reopen from Germany. There is still much speculation about Soviet motives, yet the answer is again more straightforward than any conspiracy theory. It was Germany that pursued the agreement with Stalin, not the other way round. German motives were transparent. In April 1939, after swallowing up Czechoslovakia and extorting the city of Memel from Lithuania, Hitler ordered his armed forces to plan a short, annihilating campaign against Poland for the autumn. Although Hitler was confident that Britain and France would not intervene, there were great risks. A revival of the old alliance from the Great War threatened Germany with a conflict on two fronts. In April Hitler began to tone down the propaganda attacks on the Soviet Union. On May 5 the first German feeler was put out. The Soviet chargé d'affaires, Georgei Astakhov, was told that Germany would honour Soviet trade agreements with arms firms in German-occupied Bohemia. On May 20 the German ambassador to Moscow asked Molotov to reconsider opening trade discussions. Molotov curtly rejected the offer: ‘The German government is playing some sort of game.’23 Ten days later the German Foreign Office, led by Joachim von Ribbentrop, ordered the German ambassador to begin political negotiations with the Soviet Union. It was a frustrating experience. For three months no progress was made. Soviet contacts agreed in general terms that it would be well to improve relations – which could hardly have been worse – but would agree to nothing specific. Privately, Molotov and Astakhov dismissed German efforts as ‘superficial’ and ‘non-committal’ and doubted that the fascist leopard was capable of changing its spots. By July nothing had changed. Molotov, and Stalin, too, we must assume, were unimpressed by ever more urgent hints from Berlin that Hitler wanted to talk.24

  Not until the end of July, only a month before war broke out between German y and Poland, did the German side finally provide some kind of agenda for discussion. On July 26 Germany's trade negotiator, Karl Schnurre, told Astakhov that Germany was prepared to discuss a political settlement in Eastern Europe, which amounted to a division of the spoils. Three days later Molotov told Astakhov to seek clarification. For the first time Soviet ears pricked up. On August 2 Ribbentrop, with remarkable candour, offered a settlement of the whole area from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Still Moscow did no more than listen. Molotov did not know what to make of the offers. Hitler was not someone to be trusted to keep his word. But the hints from Berlin touched on real Soviet interests. In the Baltic states, Poland and Romania were territories of the former Tsarist empire. The Soviet Union had been forced to abandon them, but had never lost the ambition to replace Tsarist imperialism in the region with Soviet imperialism. Soviet hesitation about Germany's flagrant advances stemmed partly from deep distrust of German intentions, but also from sheer incredulity. This was an offer, wrote Astakhov to Molotov, ‘that would have been inconceivable six months ago’. The Soviet side played their cards as close to the chest as ever.25

  Over the following few days the German negotiators, who were by now desperate for the diplomatic revolution they needed before attacking Poland, laid all their cards on the table in an untidy heap. There was a non-aggression pact; the possibility of a secret protocol on the territorial dismemberment of Eastern Europe; a top-level German mission to Moscow to sign an immediate agreement; generous trade settlements. One by one the Soviet side picked them up. On August 17, when it was already clear that hope for an alliance with Britain and France was dead, Molotov finally agreed to talks. He handed the German ambassador a note agreeing to a non-aggression pact and a secret protocol. This was all and more than Hitler wanted. On August 19 Stalin agreed that Ribbentrop should come to Moscow, but not until August 26 (the day Hitler had set for the attack on Poland). Frantic telephone calls followed. The German ambassador, Friedrich von der Schulenberg, conveyed Hitler's request that Ribbentrop come sooner; two hours later Stalin himself replied to Hitler with another date, August 23. The contrast with the Western approach to negotiation could not have been more marked. The stage was set for a remarkable diplomatic coup.

  On the evening of August 22 Ribbentrop boarded Hitler's private Focke-Wulf Condor aircraft with a staff of more than thirty. His aircraft flew to Königsberg in East Prussia, avoiding Polish air space on the way. He stayed the night there in a state of agitated expectation. At one o'clock in the afternoon of August 23 the plane landed in Moscow. The airport was festooned with swastika flags drawn back-to-front for Soviet anti-Nazi films.26 At three o'clock Ribbentrop and Schulenberg drove to the Kremlin. To the Germans' astonishment, they were greeted not by Molotov alone but by Stalin himself. Stalin greeted Ribbentrop with the words ‘It's been a lovely shoving match, has it not?’27 The two sides got down to business. The pact was quickly agreed to. The secret protocol took longer. Germany gave away almost everything previously promised, except for part of Latvia, which Hitler wanted to Germanize. It was a bizarre occasion, two sworn ideological enemies locked in secret session, carving up the states of Eastern Europe in an extravagance of Realpolitik. Latvia proved a stumbling block. At 6:30, after three hours of historic discussion, the two sides adjourned.

  Ribbentrop telegraphed the news to Hitler and asked him to give up Latvia. Two hours later came Hitler's reply: ‘Yes, agreed.’ At ten o'clock Ribbentrop returned to the Kremlin. He broke the news to Stalin, who seemed to give an involuntary shudder before shaking his hand. While the final drafts were prepared Stalin invited Ribbentrop to celebrate with him. Each side gave elaborate expressions of goodwill to the other. Stalin drank to Hitler's health; Ribbentrop drank to Stalin's. At two o'clock in the morning the documents were ready. Molotov signed for the Soviet Union, Ribbentrop for Germany. Two hours later Hitler was notified at Berchtesgaden. Champagne was ordered, and Hitler, a non-drinker, sipped a little. German delight was impossible to conceal. ‘Now Europe is mine!’ Hitler is said to have cried out on hearing the news. Ribbentrop returned to a hero's welcome, hailed as the saviour of peace.28

  In the event it was Stalin alone who got peace. The pact guaranteed that the Soviet Union could keep out of the war. Without a strong Western alliance, Soviet interests could be served in no other way. The third option available in 1939, to make a commitment to neither side, simply perpetuated an uneasy isolation. It has often been argued that Stalin was playing a double game in 1939, pushing for a Western alliance in order to compel Hitler to offer him the maximum not to make it. Such a view gives Stalin, and Soviet foreign policy, too much credit. It is true that Soviet leaders would have preferred a friendly Germany throughout the 1930s rather than one so self-consciously anti-Communist. Ideology made little difference to Stalin. On the far side of the Soviet frontier, raison d‘état took over. He could as easily make a pact with the imperialist West as he could with fascist Germany. In the Soviet view all the reactionary states of Europe would be ground to dust in the end under the iron wheels of socialism. Yet the German alliance was neither expected nor sought in 1939. Only when the German offer was on the table did it prove irresistible. ‘What could England offer Russia?’ asked a German official of Astakhov in July 1939. ‘At best participation in a European war and the hostility of Germany, but not a single desirable end for Russia. What could we offer, on the other hand? Neutrality and staying out of a European war…’29

  Above all Germany offered something the Soviet Union could only dream about in 1939: the possibility of rebuilding the old Tsarist empire in Europe. The fact that it came with German approval did not diminish the offer. The fact that it would bring a common German-Soviet border, instead of the network of small buffer states, was bearable. Stalin saw only profit. The photographs of the historic meeting with Ribbentrop show Stalin beaming with an unconcealed and childish pleasure. After the pact was safe Stalin told Nikita Khrushchev, the young Ukrainian ex-peasant and a rising star in the Party, ‘I know what Hitler's up to. He thinks he has outsmarted me, but actually it is I who have outsmarted him.’30 Seven days afte
r the pact was signed German armies invaded Poland. Two days later, on September 3, Britain and France, against Hitler's (and Stalin's) expectations, declared war. Stalin had a breathing space; Hitler had a war he did not want.

  What followed in Eastern Europe was a consequence of the pact only in an indirect sense. The secret protocol drawn up in August only delimited spheres of interest; it did not arrange partition or control. The Soviet advance in Europe rode on the back of German military successes. Stalin waited until he was sure of his ground before moving. The rapid advance of German troops promised swift Polish defeat. Stalin did not want Germany to drive on to the Soviet border, disregarding the secret protocol entirely. On September 9, after much hesitation, Molotov agreed to German requests to invade Poland from the east. Little had been prepared, and not until September 17, shortly before the Polish surrender, did the Red Army begin rolling across the frontier. For public consumption Molotov announced that the Soviet invasion had come about because of the ‘internal bankruptcy of the Polish state’ and the dangers this posed to Russia's blood brothers, the Ukrainians and Belorussians living under Polish rule, who had been ‘abandoned to their fate’.31

  This fate proved as terrible as any Stalin had yet imposed on his own people. Almost overnight Soviet liberators became Soviet jailers. Over one million Soviet troops poured into the seven provinces of Poland in the Soviet sphere. By September 24, following brief skirmishes, the whole area was pacified. On September 28 Ribbentrop again flew to Moscow to arrange the partition. The predominantly non-Polish areas were granted to the Soviet Union; the rest went to Germany. The provisional frontier agreed in August was adjusted. In a second secret protocol Hitler now gave up his claim to Lithuania as part of the German sphere. It was this second pact that formally divided the spoils. Stalin now had a free hand to extend the fruits of his revolution to the peoples of Belorussia and the western Ukraine who had escaped Soviet rule following the Polish victory in 1920.

  On 29 November 1939 the inhabitants of the new lands became by decree Soviet citizens. This meant nothing less than the extension of the revolution from above by thousands of NKVD troops and Soviet officials. In the first weeks of occupation the Soviet authorities permitted the law of the jungle to prevail. Thousands of the richer landowners and peasants, local officials and policemen, businessmen and politicians were rounded up and shot or imprisoned. The NKVD quickly established a network of informers who gave them lists of known nationalists and anti-Communists. Private wealth was seized by the state; the possessions of those deemed to be enemies of the revolution were stolen by neighbours or corrupt officials. Instructions from Moscow defining ‘anti-Soviet’ elements included stamp collectors and Esperanto speakers because they had foreign contacts. The NKVD brought in notorious thugs to run the new prisons that sprang up all across the region, where they routinely tortured everyone who fell into their hands to force out the names of yet other victims. When the usual instruments of interrogation were lacking, they improvised. Prisoners were beaten with railings broken from fences; their hands were crushed in the doors of their cells; thin books were placed on their heads, which were then beaten with hammers to induce concussion rather than fracture. When they were dragged, crushed in body and spirit, before NKVD kangaroo courts they were subjected to further indignities. One prisoner had his penis wrapped in paper and then ignited.32

  For ethnic Poles in the new Soviet provinces the descent into hell had one more staircase. In October a long and detailed set of instructions on deportations was drawn up. By February 1940 the authorities were ready. Two million Polish families were moved in four major deportation actions, ending in June 1941. They were sent to the bleakest areas of Siberia or to the harsh landscape of central Asia. They were allowed to take very little, and the male heads of the family were separated from their wives and children when they arrived at the railheads for deportation. They were destined for Russia's concentration camps. Their families were herded into cattle cars, with a tiny grille for ventilation and no water. At each stop along the line the dead were flung out onto the platform. The exact death toll may never be known. Thousands died of malnutrition and disease. Thousands more died at their destination, where they were left without shelter or food at the side of the track. They were forced to live in holes dug in the mud or huts of straw and branches, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, or worse. Those who survived were used as forced labourers.33

  Polish prisoners of war followed the deportees, except for the officers, for whom there was a different fate in store. By late September 1939 the Red Army had 230,000 Polish soldiers in captivity. Most suffered deportation and a regime of hard labour. But for the officers, military officials, gendarmes and border guards who fell into Soviet hands separate camps were set up in the former monasteries of Kozelsk, Starabelski and Ostashkov. They held over half of the Polish officer corps. On 3 April 1940 the first contingent of 300 officers was taken to a station near Smolensk and loaded into buses. A diary later found on one of the prisoners ended with the words: ‘They took us to a small wood. They took away rings, my watch, belts, knives. What will they do to us?’ A few minutes later the soldiers had their hands tied behind them, were led to a large pit dug among the trees near an NKVD rest home and were shot in the back of the head. They were laid in ten to twelve layers in the pits, the feet of one by the head of the next. The murders were over by May 2. The forest of Katyn where the Polish officers lay was restored; young birches and fir trees were planted above the mass graves and the dirt tracks which the buses had made on the grass were covered over. They were the victims of an order from Stalin himself.34 The death of Poland's military cadres was part of a calculated strategy to rid the occupied areas of any elements capable of raising the flag of national resurgence against the Soviet invader. When the graves were discovered in 1943 by the German army, the Soviet authorities insisted that they were the work of German killing squads.

  But in 1940 German y was still a Soviet ally. The last thing Stalin said to Ribbentrop when they met in August 1939 was that ‘on his word of honour’ the Soviet Union ‘would not betray its partner’.35 Stalin took the pledge seriously. The pact included a mutual commitment to revive trade between them. Soviet deliveries were made punctually and in full. During the seventeen months of the pact Germany was supplied with 865,000 tons of oil, 648,000 tons of wood, 14,000 tons of manganese ore, 14,000 tons of copper, almost 1.5 million tons of grain and much more besides. In addition Soviet traders bought up materials on world markets to be transhipped to Germany, including 15,400 tons of rubber, which came via Japan. Other military assistance was granted. The German navy was given a base to use near Murmansk for refuelling. Soviet icebreakers were offered to clear a way through Arctic waters for German merchant raiders, hunting down Allied sea traffic. Soviet weather ships sent back meteorological reports for the German air force during the Battle of Britain.36

  Stalin also saw to it that international Communism toed the new line. References to fascism mysteriously disappeared from Pravda. German Communists, sheltered in Moscow from the Gestapo, were handed back, 800 of them, to the sworn enemy of Marxism. The Comintern, many of whose members had been thrown into complete confusion by the conclusion of the Soviet-German Pact, was ordered to end its attacks on fascism and turn its attention instead to the Western warmongers, Britain and France. Molotov publicly declared in a speech in October 1939 that to continue the war was ‘not only senseless, but criminal’. Soviet soldiers were supplied with two simple diagrams to explain why Germany was now a friend. The first was a triangle with the word London at the apex and Moscow and Berlin at the other two corners. The heading was ‘What did Chamberlain want?’ The second was another triangle with Moscow written at the top, and London and Berlin below, under the caption ‘What did Comrade Stalin do?’37

  The sudden change in the European situation brought the Soviet Union a breathing-space. Very soon the conclusion of the pact and the German war with the West were rationalized as a delibera
te proletarian strategy. Stalin liked the idea of ‘manoeuvring and pitting one side against another’, because it fitted with his own analysis, first developed for the Central Committee in 1925 and expressed publicly in 1934, that war was essentially a phenomenon of imperialist rivalry from which a Communist state could only benefit by taking ‘action last’. Just as imperialist war brought revolution to Russia in 1917, so the new war would pave the way for popular revolutions in the rest of Europe, aided by Soviet armies. A few months later Molotov told the Lithuanian Foreign Minister that Lenin's vision of world revolution was unfolding before their eyes. The starving masses of warring Europe would rise up, the Soviet Union would move to liberate them and a final apocalyptic battle on the Rhine between the forces of capital and of labour ‘will decide the fate of Europe once and for all’.38

  This was a distant vision, though it must have looked like a possibility, given the Soviet belief that the new war would be a war of attrition like the war of 1914. In the autumn of 1939 Stalin and the Main Military Council looked for ways to strengthen the Soviet military position in the years of reprieve won by the pact. The main lines of strategy, laid down by the chief of staff, Boris Shaposhnikov, in 1938, were unchanged. The Red Army was expected to fight a stubborn defence on the frontier, then, in Voroshilov's terms, carry the war ‘on to the enemy land’ with ‘little loss of blood’. There is little doubt that such a strategic ambition fitted well with the image of a revolutionary state committed to exporting revolution and able to mobilize a whole society of workers and peasants to drive an invader back. However, two alterations to the 1938 plan were to have deadly consequences. It was decided that a new line of fortifications would be built along the German-Soviet border in Poland and the established fortified line abandoned. The ‘covering force’ that would conduct the stubborn defence was to be positioned behind a defensive line that was barely on the drawing-board. The second change concerned the tank force. In 1939 it was decided, on the basis of Voroshilov's evaluation of the lessons of the Spanish Civil War, to disband the separate tank corps and to split Soviet armour up among local infantry units. This move was intended to strengthen the defensive power of the covering force and enable small-scale incursions to disrupt enemy mobilization. But it meant that just at the time when German soldiers were about to demonstrate the extraordinary hitting power of massed armoured forces, the Soviet tank force faced fragmentation.39 In both decisions politics played a large part. After the purges, the balance of power between military and civilian now tilted towards the politicians.