Having absorbed half of Poland, and temporarily averted the German threat, Stalin was eager to press on with fulfilment of the terms set out in the secret German-Soviet protocols. The Baltic states were asked to sign treaties of mutual assistance in the two weeks following the Polish defeat. The treaties gave the Soviet Union the right to station troops in Baltic bases. A few weeks later, on October 5, similar demands were made of Finland: a naval and air base at the mouth of the Baltic at Hanko and cession of the Karelian isthmus north of Leningrad to provide a better defence of that vital city. In return Finland was offered a large area of Soviet territory in Karelia. The Finns refused and on November 13 negotiations were broken off. Stalin almost certainly would have preferred a political solution, but when the Finns refused to be intimidated he tore up the Soviet-Finnish non-aggression treaty and prepared for a military campaign to bring Finland entirely into the Soviet orbit. A puppet Communist government-in-waiting was established for Finland, and Stalin drew up plans to incorporate Finland into the Soviet Union as the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Republic. On November 30 Soviet artillery began to shell the Finnish frontier, and Soviet armies rolled forward, expecting a quick victory. Khrushchev later recalled Stalin's remark that ‘all we had to do was fire a few artillery rounds and the Finns would capitulate’. Stalin relied in turn on the conceited assurances of Voroshilov: ‘All is well, all is in order, all is ready.’40
The Finnish campaign was a disaster for the Red Army. It exposed to the world how feeble was the offensive capability of the purged forces and underlined foreign assessments of the damage the terror had done. Despite a numerical advantage, the armies assigned to the Winter War were broken on a solid set of fortifications, the Mannerheim Line. Soviet soldiers fought stubbornly but took exceptional casualties, a total of 126,875 dead in four months. Their frozen corpses lay in grotesque heaps where they fell. The troops were untrained for storming fixed defences; there were shortages of auto-matic weapons and winter clothing; the food-supply system soon broke down and transport was poorly organized. Frostbite and hunger added to the casualties inflicted by fast-moving Finnish ski troops and snipers. The commanders were too closely controlled from the centre by political officers who knew little about the battlefield. Initiative and flexibility were sacrificed to the rule book. Only after the appointment of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko to command the front, and the transfer of twenty-seven new divisions, strongly supported by tanks, was the Mannerheim Line breached. The Finns sued for an armistice, and the Red Army was too bloodied to go on to conquer the whole country. On 12 March 1940 peace was signed. Finland was forced to give up the territories and bases demanded the year before, but her independence was assured. The Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations for the act of unprovoked aggression.
The Winter War was the largest conflict undertaken by the Red Army since the civil war twenty years before, larger even than the border battles with the Japanese at Khalkhin-Gol fought the previous summer, where the Red Army's blushes were saved by the intervention of General Zhukov. Victory over the Japanese relied on Zhukov's exceptional battlefield skills, but also on the more effective deployment of modern weapons in open terrain against an enemy with poor mobility. Zhukov ensured that the logistical tail was well in place before risking battle. None of these things was present against Finland. Here the Red Army fought as an unmodernized army, relying on primitive infantry tactics, with poor intelligence, weak supply lines and, significantly, no Zhukov. Against the Japanese Zhukov acted with characteristic independence, rejecting recommendations from senior officers and instilling in poorly trained troops a better sense of purpose than their comrades displayed in Finland.41
The humiliation in the Winter War prompted reassessment at the highest level. In the middle of April 1940 a special session of the Central Committee and the Main Military Council met to consider steps to improve Soviet fighting power. Voroshilov, who had been a dominant voice as Defence Commissar for fifteen years, was subjected to a hostile cross-examination. Stalin dismissed what he called ‘the cult of admiration for civil war experience' and finally sacked his civil war comrade, the man Khrushchev regarded as ‘the biggest bag of shit in the army’.42 In his place Stalin appointed Timoshenko, who had brought the Finnish fiasco to a satisfactory close. Timoshenko's career had followed the conventional Soviet path. A former peasant labourer, he rose to become an NCO during the First World War, joined the Red Army in 1918, the Communist Party in 1919. He proved an able organizer and was regarded as politically reliable. In 1940 he was commander of the Kiev military district, the key area for the defence of the Soviet frontier. He was summoned to the Defence Commissariat as a reformer.
He set about his task with the urgency it deserved. Where Voroshilov had persisted in viewing the army as a branch of politics, as a revolutionary force, Timoshenko was determined to take up the torch lit by Tukhachevsky before his fall and to turn the Red Army into a professional force. He enjoyed wide support from other commanders, who wanted to abandon the political supervision of the army by Party commissars which Voroshilov had reintroduced in 1937. The ambition was to rely more on military expertise. General Kirill Meretskov, who had commanded an army against Finland, complained openly at a meeting in May 1940 about the sterility produced by political control:
Our people are afraid to say anything directly, they are afraid to spoil relations and get in uncomfortable situations and are fearful to speak the truth.43
It was evidence of the changing mood in the Party that Meretskov not only survived this outspoken challenge to Party interference, but was promoted to chief of staff in August. On the twelfth of that month Timoshenko, with Stalin's approval, reinstituted unitary command, returning the initiative to the military.
This was the most important of the reforms introduced in the summer of 1940, but not the only one. Timoshenko restructured the Defence Commissariat along functional lines; he resurrected the old officer corps. Over 1,000 were promoted to admiral or general, and traditional uniforms were reinstated. The right of junior officers to criticize their superiors was abolished. A tough new code of discipline was introduced, as was a new training regime that cut down on political propaganda, under the slogan ‘Teach the troops what they require in war, and only that.’ Training was altered to reflect more closely the arduous conditions of combat learned in Finland. At the expense of training for open, mobile warfare, every effort was now made to prepare the troops to attack fixed defences. Progress, however, was slow. At the end of the year Meretskov told the annual conference of the Defence Commissariat that training was still inadequate and blamed the failures on a lack of ‘military professionalism’.44
The reforms were intended to turn the Red Army and Navy into effective fighting forces, which in 1940 they were not. Timoshenko did not question the wider military strategy adopted in 1939 but concentrated his effort on producing commanders and troops who could carry it out. Like most senior officers, he accepted that modern war would be fought in two stages, a preliminary period following a declaration of war in which the two sides used a screen of forces in forward positions to disrupt the mobilization and deployment of the enemy's main forces, and a second in which the main forces, concentrated behind the first echelon, would mount a crushing offensive. This strategic outlook emphasized the offensive posture of Soviet forces, which the Finnish war had exposed as flawed. It also flew in the face of the evidence of the German campaign in Poland. Soviet commanders did not draw the obvious lesson that modern mechanized armies could deploy at once with remarkable striking power, without any preliminary skirmishing.
If further proof were needed, in May 1940 German armies swept through the Netherlands and Belgium and in six weeks defeated the French army and drove the British from the Continent. The defeat left Stalin's strategy in tatters. The whole object of the pact with Germany was to deflect the threat from Hitler westward for the foreseeable future. Stalin hoped that the war would develop like the war of 1914, and that Germany would e
merge from it ‘so weakened that years would be required for it to risk unleashing a great war with the Soviet Union’.45 Instead the war was over in a matter of weeks, leaving the Soviet Union exposed to a German-dominated Europe and without allies. When news of the surrender terms came through to Moscow, Stalin was angry and incredulous. Khrushchev watched him pacing nervously up and down ‘cursing like a cab driver’. ‘How could they allow Hitler to defeat them, to crush them?’46
The obvious military explanation was ignored. The General Staff blamed Polish and French defeat on unusually ‘favourable circumstances' for the German army, most prominent of which was the incompetence and operational immaturity of the Polish and French forces.47 In December 1940 Timoshenko was confident enough to assert during his annual review that the campaigns had revealed nothing new. Senior Soviet commanders clung to the contention that they could expect a two-stage campaign rather than a swift assault and that the defensive skills of the Red Army were sufficient to absorb and contain an initial attack. Four days after the French surrender, Timoshenko ordered work to begin on the fortified zones along the new frontier with Germany that Stalin had authorized the year before. The Stalin Line was abandoned, its guns and equipment placed in storage or sent forward to supply the new defences. A new urgency was evident. Without the eleven fortified zones of defence planned for construction along the length of the border, the Red Army would have nothing to stop a German attack. From the summer of 1940 until the new line was finished the Soviet Union was in a dangerously vulnerable position. Even with the new line, the failure to grasp the nature of German offensive strategy left Soviet forces unnecessarily exposed to a sudden and swift blow.
The sharp change in the strategic situation prompted Soviet leaders to take the remaining spoils assigned to the Soviet sphere under the terms of the secret protocols of the pact with Germany. On June 17, on the pretext that ‘acts of provocation’ from the Baltic states had to be met with force, half a million Soviet soldiers were sent into the three republics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which were subjected to the same regime of lawless terror that had been imposed in eastern Poland. Thousands were openly murdered. Thousands more were deported to distant Siberian camps, an estimated 127,000 in total. A list of names of Latvians shot by NKVD forces, discovered when the Germans occupied the area in June 1941, showed only the most feeble attempt to justify their murder: ‘she was caught singing Latvian folk songs’; ‘his ancestors were bourgeois’; ‘he was caught hiding in the woods’; and so on, a dreary litany of trumped-up charges. At the end of June it was the turn of Romania. Under strong diplomatic pressure the Government in Bucharest handed back the former Tsarist territory of Bessarabia, as well as a part of the Bukovina region that had not been included in the pact. The occupation of these areas was begun on June 28 under Zhukov's supervision, and was completed two days later. The Red Army now lay only 120 miles from the Ploesti oil fields, which provided almost all of Germany's wartime supply of crude oil.48
The sudden expansion of Soviet territory westward, although conceded in principle in 1939, produced fresh anxieties in Berlin. The Soviet-Finnish war had left Germany in a difficult position, for her sympathies were all with the Finns. After the end of the war German forces were stationed in Finland. The deliveries of machinery and weapons to the Soviet Union agreed upon in the pact were slow and irregular, in sharp contrast with the scrupulous provision by the Soviet side of materials and food. Despite constant Soviet complaints, the German suppliers dragged their heels whenever they could rather than allow the latest technology to fall into Russian hands. From Hitler's view the most unfortunate consequence of the pact was the rapid forward deployment of the Red Army in Eastern Europe. He was embroiled in a major war, which he had not wanted and which the pact had been supposed to avert. Now, instead of a powerful Germany dominating Eastern and Central Europe following Poland's defeat, Germany was engaged in an unpredictable war against the British Empire, while the Soviet Union was free to extend its influence unchecked. The occupation of Bessarabia was a final blow. A few weeks later Goebbels wrote in his diary: ‘Perhaps we shall be forced to take steps against all this, despite everything, and drive this Asiatic spirit back out of Europe and into Asia, where it belongs.’49
Hitler had anticipated him. On July 3 instructions were issued to the German armed forces, under the code name ‘Fritz’, to begin preliminary studies for an operation against the Soviet Union. At first the army believed that Hitler wanted to inflict only a local defeat on Soviet forces so as to push back the frontier between them and force Stalin to recognize ‘Germany's dominant position in Europe’. The army told Hitler on July 21 that a limited campaign could be launched in four to six weeks. But Hitler's ideas, which had at first been uncertain, hardened over the course of the month, as a stream of intelligence information came in showing how Soviet diplomats were now pushing on into the Balkans in their efforts to spread Soviet influence. When Hitler's Operations Chief, General Alfred Jodl, called together his senior colleagues on July 29, he had the most startling news. After making sure that every door and window in the conference room aboard a specially converted train was tightly sealed, he announced that Hitler had decided to rid the world ‘once and for all’ of the Soviet menace by a surprise attack scheduled for May 1941.50
Two days later Hitler called a council of war at his summer retreat. Seated in the main hall of the Berghof, his military chiefs learned for the first time of Hitler's motives. The arguments he presented were practical ones. The Soviet Union was Britain's last chance; with the Soviet threat knocked out, Britain would make peace, and America would no longer be a danger. What he had in mind was the annihilation of the enemy – ‘to smash the state heavily in one blow’. Two Army Groups would attack through the Baltic states and the Ukraine to converge on Moscow. A third Army Group would attack south towards the oil-rich Caucasus. It was a plan of startling audacity. That same month he had already ordered the build-up of an army ‘greater than all enemy armies together’.51 He would slowly deploy it eastward. Stalin was to be fooled into believing that the troops were for use in the west and were stationed there in order to avoid British air attack.
There can be no doubt that practical strategic issues did push Hitler towards the most radical of military solutions. But a great war in the east had always been part of his thinking. Here was the real stuff of Lebensraum – living-space. Hitler's plans assumed fantastic proportions. By August he had decided to seize the whole vast area stretching from Archangel to Astrakhan (the ‘A–A Line’) and to populate it with fortified garrison cities, keeping the population under the permanent control of the master race, while a rump Asian state beyond the Urals, the Slavlands, would accommodate the rest of the Soviet people. Planning moved forward on this basis. By the spring of 1941 comprehensive programmes for the racial, political and economic exploitation of the new empire had been drawn up. ‘Russia,’ Hitler is reported as saying, ‘will be our India!’52
Every effort was made to keep the whole enterprise camouflaged. Hitler maintained relations with his Soviet ally, though they became acutely strained. On 27 September 1940 he signed the Tripartite Pact with Japan and Italy, which divided the world into separate spheres of interest – ‘New Orders' in the Mediterranean, eastern Asia and Europe. This realignment was read with unease in Moscow. The same month German troops appeared in Romania for the first time, and in Finland. Hungary and Romania joined the Tripartite Pact. In October Italy, which had joined in the war on the German side in June, invaded Greece and opened up the prospect of fascist expansion into the Balkans. Then on October 13 Stalin received a long, rambling letter from Ribbentrop which ended with a tantalizing invitation to join the Tripartite Pact and revise the world order together.
It is not entirely clear why Hitler authorized Ribbentrop to send the invitation. He may have hoped that the growing threat of the Soviet Union might be neutralized by agreement after all. He may have used it as an opportunity to find out just what Soviet a
mbitions were. But for Ribbentrop there was reason enough. He hoped that he could create a powerful bloc opposing the Anglo-Saxon powers and pull off another remarkable diplomatic coup. Stalin gave a cautious reply. It was arranged that Molotov go to Berlin in November. The object of the visit, according to General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who accompanied him, was ‘to define Hitler's intentions’ and to ‘hold off German aggression for as long as possible’. The evidence now suggests that Molotov was pursuing more than this, that Stalin wanted a second pact defining spheres of influence in Eastern Europe.53
Molotov arrived by train on November 12. Two days of discussion followed which satisfied neither party. Molotov was so abrupt with Hitler that their meeting on the first afternoon became heated, and Hitler refused to attend the evening dinner to welcome the Soviet party. Hitler and Ribbentrop hinted that the Soviet Union should turn away from Europe towards British India. They talked in generalities, Molotov in details. His instructions were to discuss points that closely concerned Soviet security in Europe, but he found that the Germans were trying to get the Soviet Union embroiled in the war with Britain. There could be no agreement on this basis. In the middle of an embassy banquet on the 13th, Molotov found himself forced to take shelter from a British bombing raid. Taking advantage of the interruption, Ribbentrop presented Molotov with a draft treaty delimiting the Soviet ‘New Order’ ‘in the direction of the Indian Ocean’. With the noise of guns and bombs in the background, Molotov dismissed the suggestion and told Ribbentrop that what the Soviet Union really wanted was hard talking about Bulgaria, Turkey, Sweden, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Greece. The following day Molotov returned to Moscow. On November 25 he filed with the German ambassador a list of demands that represented the Soviet price for extending the alliance: German withdrawal from Finland, a free hand for the Soviet Union in Iran and the Persian Gulf and Soviet bases in Bulgaria and Turkey. Hitler ordered Ribbentrop not to reply.54
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