It is difficult to say how prominently emotional and moral considerations figured in Stalin’s thinking. Surely they were far outweighed by the immediate risk of war. There is a broad spectrum of opinion on the geo-strategic reasons for the agreement with Germany. At one end are those who point to the speech Stalin allegedly gave to the Politburo on 19 August 1939, just before the pact was signed. One version of this speech, published in France in late 1939, caused a sensation as a supposed exposé of Stalin’s expectations of what war would mean for the USSR. The French publication quotes him giving the following justification for the pact with Hitler: “We are absolutely convinced that if we conclude an agreement to ally with France and Great Britain, Germany would be forced to give up on Poland and seek a modus vivendi with the Western powers. War would be averted and the subsequent course of events would prove dangerous for us.”
43
This alleged speech made it seem as if Stalin believed war was needed to weaken the West, expand the USSR’s boundaries, and help spread communism in Europe. These supposed remarks compromised Stalin in Hitler’s eyes and made the French Communist Party look like an agent of hostile forces. Publication of this “top secret” document clearly served somebody’s interest.
Most historians have never assigned much significance to this forgery. Neither the Politburo archive nor Stalin’s own files contain even circumstantial evidence of such a speech—or even that the Politburo met on 19 August. This is not surprising. Based on what is known about Stalin’s dictatorship in the late 1930s, it is hard to believe he would speak so openly to his Politburo comrades, for whose opinions—and even existence—he felt no need whatsoever. The “transcript of Stalin’s speech,” like many other well-known forgeries, promotes a particular viewpoint in regard to Stalin and his actions. According to this extreme view, Stalin concluded a pact with Hitler because he wanted war in Europe as a means of carrying out his plans.
The views reflected in the forgery differ sharply from statements by Stalin for which we do have a reliable source. Georgy Dimitrov, the head of the Comintern at the time, recorded in his diary the following remarks by Stalin, made at a meeting on 7 September: “We would rather have reached agreement with the so-called democratic countries, so we conducted negotiations. But the English and French wanted to use us as field hands and without paying us anything! We, of course, would not go work as field hands, especially if we weren’t getting paid.”
44
Nobody should feel compelled to take Stalin’s words at face value. But the possibility that he was driven toward his pact with Hitler by his country’s isolation and a sense that he was undervalued by his Western allies deserves serious consideration.
The diversity of opinions concerning Stalin’s motives in August 1939 reflects the complexity of events and abundance of international intrigues during the lead-up to World War II. In recent times, however, pieces of historical evidence have become available that clarify the situation. The negotiations among the Soviet Union, England, and France were fraught with problems, and both the Soviet and the Western sides were to blame for their lack of progress. Stalin saw in the Western nations’ obstinacy further confirmation of their intent to appease Hitler at the expense of the USSR. Most likely, he thought war between Germany and Poland was inevitable however the other powers were aligned, and he was probably right. It was difficult to predict how such a war would affect his country. The Nazis would be right on Soviet borders. Hitler was prepared to pay a fair price for a pact that would grant Soviet blessing to this arrangement. For Stalin, the pact offered nearly risk-free expansion of Soviet territory and a chance to create a buffer between his country and the war about to be unleashed on Europe.
Then there were the Japanese. In the spring of 1939, clashes were already erupting between Soviet and Japanese troops in Mongolia. The first engagements did not end well for the Red Army, but by the time of the von Ribbentrop negotiations, the Soviet side was achieving significant victories. These strengthened Stalin’s position in his dialogue with Germany. The signing of the pact was a diplomatic blow to Japan. At least for the near term, it could not count on its German ally in its confrontation with the USSR. There is no serious argument against assuming that Stalin was guided by all these considerations.
In August 1939, Stalin had every reason to consider himself ascendant. He had concluded an agreement with the world’s strongest military power and averted a war with it, at least for the time being and possibly for a long time to come. He had won back much of the territory lost by Russia two decades earlier. He could anticipate reaping third-party benefits as the warring European countries created a new balance of power on the continent. The pact with Germany and secret protocol were morally distasteful and they diminished the Soviet Union’s reputation with progressives around the world, but these were relatively minor concerns. Was Stalin looking into the distant future and plotting the creation of a Communist empire extending over a large part of Europe? Such a prospect must have been hard to envision in 1939. Did he conclude the pact in order to provoke war in Europe? Given Nazi aggression, such a provocation seems hardly necessary. It is another matter that we will never know how the war would have played out had Stalin not signed the agreement with Hitler and continued to try to make common cause with England and France.
We will also never know how the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and secret protocol would look today had Stalin used these documents simply to restrain Germany and expand the Soviet sphere of influence. In that case, posterity would have seen the Soviet-German understanding as an unsavory but understandable and pragmatic maneuver by a savvy politician. But Stalin was the iron-fisted ruler of a totalitarian system. He used the agreement not simply to keep the Nazis out of the small countries along the USSR’s border, but also to assimilate new territories. And assimilation, in Stalin’s world, meant aggression and the brutal purging of society.
AS WAR RAGED
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Poland’s allies, Great Britain and France, responded with a declaration of war, and World War II was under way. The Nazis swept through Poland almost unopposed. The British and French forces that came to Poland’s defense assembled too slowly and seemed in no great hurry to fight. The Red Army’s entry into Poland, and the line dividing this country between Germany and the USSR, had been determined during the von Ribbentrop negotiations in Moscow the previous month, but Stalin was also in no hurry to begin military actions. The Soviet invasion began only on 17 September, after the outcome of Germany’s Polish campaign was fully evident. Clearly, Stalin preferred to wait until the risk of an invasion was minimal and Soviet aggression would not look like it had been coordinated with Germany’s. The Red Army primarily occupied the parts of western Ukraine and western Belarus that Poland had seized in 1921. The official propaganda claimed that Soviet actions were being taken on behalf of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples and described the invasion as an act of “liberation.” This interpretation suited Western politicians, who still hoped to win Stalin to their side.
The reality bore little resemblance to the image promoted by Soviet propaganda. The Soviet absorption of western Ukraine and western Belarus was not a joyous reunion of divided nations. For the first year and a half of their sovietization, the new territories underwent the same violent social engineering that the USSR had been experiencing for decades. The goal was to force them into the Soviet mold: do away with the capitalist economic system, inculcate a new ideology, and destroy any real or imagined hotbeds of dissent against the regime. The traditional methods were used. “Suspicious” people were shot, sent to labor camps, or exiled to the Soviet interior; private property was expropriated; and farming was brought into the kolkhoz system. The Stalinist regime was trying to eliminate, in just months, any potential for anti-Soviet collaboration. An important component of this bloody effort was the notorious Katyn massacre. On 5 March 1940 the Politburo adopted a decision to put to death many thousands of Poles held in prisoner-of-war camps or regular prisons in the western provinces of Ukraine and Belarus. The victims were largely members of the Polish elite: military and police officers, former government officials, landowners, industrialists, and members of the Polish intelligentsia. A total of 21,857 people were shot in April and May 1940.
45
In exterminating these people, Stalin was clearly attempting to head off any movement to restore the prewar Polish leadership.
Stalin proceeded more cautiously and gradually in the Baltic states, which the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had recognized as falling into the Soviet sphere of influence. Immediately after the partition of Poland and the settlement of various issues with Germany, in late September and October 1939 the Soviet leadership forced Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to permit Soviet military bases on their territory, including in the Baltic Sea ports. Molotov and Stalin personally took on the task of intimidating their Baltic neighbors during negotiations at the Kremlin. These meetings were tense. When the representatives of the Baltic governments insisted on preserving their sovereignty and neutrality, Molotov threatened them with war and refused to make the slightest concession. Stalin applied a softer touch and offered a few insignificant compromises, reducing, for example, the number of troops to be stationed in the Baltic countries. The intransigence of the Baltic representatives evidently irritated him, but he kept his temper. According to the Latvian foreign minister, Stalin wrote, doodled, strolled around the room, and picked up books and newspapers while others were speaking. At critical points he interrupted and went off on tangents, expounding at length on abstruse ethnographic or historical topics.
46
The Soviet side obviously had the advantage. Red Army units were already positioned along the Baltic nations’ borders. Germany—the only possible counterweight to the Soviet Union—was acting in concert with the USSR. Stalin, nevertheless, did not hurry to overwhelm his victims, instead taking what he wanted a little at a time. Until Soviet troops entered Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Stalin applied a tactic he shared with Comintern head Dimitrov: “It’s not good to rush ahead! … Slogans should be advanced that suit the particular stage of the war.… We think we’ve found in mutual assistance pacts (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) a form that permits us to bring a number of countries into the Soviet Union’s orbit of influence. But for this, we need to hold back—to strictly respect their internal regimes and independence. We won’t try to sovietize them. The time will come when they’ll do it themselves!”
47
The prediction Stalin makes in the last sentence of this explanation betrays his ultimate goal: to sovietize and absorb the countries and territories added to his country’s sphere of influence under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. From a historical standpoint, he could justify this goal as the reconstitution of the Russian Empire. As military strategy, it surely made sense to establish strong control over areas through which an attack might come. But the future—the who, what, when, and where of the impending war—was shrouded in uncertainty, and Stalin was forced to wait. For now, he preferred to play a balancing game and went out of his way to avoid unnecessarily irritating either Great Britain and France or, especially, the Führer. There were many small signs of Stalin’s caution during this period. We see it, for example, in his reaction to a report from Belarus on a speech given to the republic’s parliament by army group commander Vasily Chuikov. Intoxicated by his easy victory in Poland, Chuikov told his audience in this speech, which went out over the radio, “If the party says the word, we’ll march to that tune—first Warsaw, then Berlin!” Furious, Stalin wrote Chuikov’s boss, Voroshilov: “Com. Voroshilov. Chuikov is evidently at least a fool, if not an enemy element. I say he should be given a spanking. At the very least.”
48
While Chuikov apparently survived, many other Soviet citizens who expressed anti-Nazi sentiments were not so lucky. Between August 1939 and the beginning of war between Germany and the USSR, expressions of anti-Hitlerism were treated as a crime in the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s stealthy approach to expansion was bound to hit a stumbling block eventually, and that stumbling block was Finland. In October 1939, having won the concessions he wanted from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Soviet dictator turned his attention to his Nordic neighbor, which the Nazis had recognized as part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Finland was presented with much harsher demands than the Baltic countries. In addition to the placement of Soviet military bases in Finland, the USSR demanded a large portion of Finnish territory near Leningrad in exchange for land in less populated border regions. On the surface, these demands appeared perfectly reasonable. The USSR wanted to be able to defend Leningrad—the country’s second capital and a major center of defense production—and its approaches from the Baltic Sea. But Finland, a former province of the Russian Empire that had received its independence in 1917, suspected the USSR of imperial ambitions. The Finns remembered the horrors of the 1918 civil war, which had largely been provoked by their Communist neighbor. They also noted the recent example of Czechoslovakia, which had given up the Sudetenland only to be entirely taken over by Hitler. Finland categorically refused the Soviet demands. Stalin decided to use force.
The Red Army invaded Finland in late November, having every reason to believe that its campaign would be short and successful. Finland was a tiny country with no more than 4 million inhabitants—forty times smaller than the Soviet population. The territory, economic resources, and military might of the two countries were not comparable. The 26 tanks with which Finland began the war would have to fend off 1,500 Soviet ones. Furthermore, the USSR would be able to throw significant additional troops and resources into the battle, and it did so as the conflict—known as the Winter War—unexpectedly continued. Staking success on overwhelming force, Stalin decided to make Finland the site of his first experiment applying a different takeover model from the one used in the Baltic states. The Red Army brought with it the “people’s government of Finland,” consisting of Communists hand-picked in Moscow. This was the government that would be installed to rule a defeated Finland.