The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

^{CHAPTER 1} THE DEVIL’S POTION

SOON AFTER MIDDAY ON AUGUST 23, 1939, TWO FOCKE-WULF Condors emerged from the clouds and began their descent toward Moscow’s Khodynka airfield. The planes—sleek, modern, with four engines—had begun their journey the previous afternoon, stopping overnight at the eastern German city of Königsberg before continuing their route to the Soviet capital. Each contained around twenty officials: advisors, translators, diplomats, and photographers. The party was led by the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

As the planes circled, preparing to land, the passengers whiled away the time as best they could. It had been a five-hour flight from Königsberg, and many of them were restless. The vain, pompous Ribbentrop had endured a rather stressful night, fretting about his task, poring over official documents and making copious notes. Others were more relaxed. Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, for instance, was sleeping off the excesses of the previous night. Renowned as something of a drinker and bon viveur, he had earned the nickname of “Reichssäufer,” or “Reich Drunkard,” and, true to form, he had taken the opportunity of the hotel stay in Königsberg to spend a “cheery night” in a nearby bar. Woken just prior to landing, he was delighted to have “slept like a babe” for the entire flight.

Most of those on board peered down at the airfield and the city below. For all of them, flying was still a novel experience, and the bird’s-eye view could be both thrilling and terrifying. Moreover, Moscow itself had more than a whiff of the exotic about it. Not only was the Soviet capital geographically far removed from all that most of them knew, but it was also laden with sinister political connotations as the home of proletarian revolution: the fountainhead of world communism. “There was a feeling of ambivalence,” one of the party later wrote, “that fate should lead us to Moscow, which we had previously fought bitterly as the enemy of European culture.”

Once the two aircraft landed, it became clear that a substantial welcome had been arranged, as both the airfield and its two-story terminal building were bedecked with German and Soviet flags, the swastika juxtaposed incongruously with the hammer and sickle, a sight that Heinrich Hoffmann—like many others—had considered inconceivable only days before. Evidently, the Soviet authorities had considered it similarly implausible and encountered considerable difficulty in finding sufficient swastika banners for the purpose, finally requisitioning them from local film studios, where they had recently been used for anti-Nazi propaganda films.

As Ribbentrop descended the steps from the plane, a military band struck up “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” then the Soviet anthem, the “Internationale.” Introductions followed, with smart handshakes and smiles all round for the Soviet welcoming delegation and their German guests. A few of the German participants remembered the welcome with more than a dash of cynicism. Johnnie von Herwarth, a junior diplomat at the German embassy in Moscow, stood with a colleague watching a group of Gestapo officers shaking hands with their counterparts from the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. “They’re obviously delighted finally to be able to collaborate,” his colleague said, adding, “But watch out! This will be disastrous, especially when they start exchanging files.” Hitler’s senior interpreter, Paul Schmidt, meanwhile, was amused to see that they were being met by the Soviet deputy foreign minister, Vladimir Potemkin. An educated man, Schmidt knew that an eighteenth-century namesake of Potemkin, one of Catherine the Great’s regional governors, had constructed fake settlements in the Crimea to impress the visiting empress, and they became known as “Potemkin villages.” So, for Schmidt, the name Potemkin was neatly symbolic of the unreality of the scene. Pilot Hans Baur was less cynical. Watching Ribbentrop inspect a guard of honor taken from elite Soviet air force squadrons, he was simply struck by the surreal sight of watching the German foreign minister marching briskly along the line with his arm outstretched in the Hitler salute. “My God,” he said to himself. “Wonders will never cease!”

That sense of amazement would have been widespread on both sides. After all, the Nazis and the Soviets had spent most of the previous decade insulting one another. As an opposition politician in the later 1920s, Hitler had made political capital by portraying both communism and the Soviet Union as malevolent, alien forces threatening the German people and their way of life. He had persistently railed against Moscow, habitually referring to the “Jewish tyrants” and “bloodsuckers” in the Kremlin, and decrying Bolshevism as “an infamous crime against humanity” and an “infernal abortion.”

Once established in power in 1933, Hitler had scarcely softened his anti-Soviet rhetoric. In time, a tone of unremitting hostility had developed, with few opportunities being missed to deliver violent condemnations of Moscow and its agents and to laud Nazi Germany’s role in the front line of the fight against communism. Hitler’s keynote speech to the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg in September 1937 was perhaps typical. In it, he was keen to stress the community of civilized nations: the “great European family of peoples” who had “given each other models, examples and lessonspleasure and many things of beauty” and in whose company “we have every reason to harbour mutual admiration instead of hate.” Against this, he countered with the image of a “Bolshevist plague,” a “totally alien element which has not the slightest contribution to make to our economy or our culture, but instead wreaks only havoc.” Hitler was an opportunist politician, certainly, but anticommunism was one of his guiding principles.

The Soviets had reciprocated. As relations soured between Berlin and Moscow from the mid-1930s, an increasingly Germanophobic tone emerged, in which Stalin and his paladins competed to criticize Hitler and Nazi Germany in the press and in public speeches. Hitler was often portrayed as a lunatic, an “idiot,” or a man “possessed by a demon.” Members of the Nazi regime, too, were pilloried as “modern-day cannibalsthe descendants of Herostratus,” who would “drown in their own blood.” Blood, indeed, was a common leitmotiv, and rarely was fascism or Nazism mentioned in the Soviet press in the 1930s without the adjective “bloody” being appended to it.

The enmity was not merely cosmetic or tactical: it was underpinned by ideology. As the world’s first communist state and one that openly espoused the spreading of revolution, the Soviet Union had originally seen territorial expansion against a hostile outside world not only as desirable but as crucial to its survival. And though it had, in time, evolved less overtly bellicose ideas, Moscow still held a special place in its geopolitical ambitions for Germany. According to the precepts of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the establishment of communism in preindustrial Russia had been anomalous, the accidental product of the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution. In order to secure a future for itself, therefore, communism had to be exported to Europe’s industrial heartland—Germany—where it was expected that an advanced, ideologically sound proletariat was itching to throw off the shackles of bourgeois democracy and embrace the heirs of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.

German thinking, meanwhile, was also couched in geopolitics but drew on dubious theories of race, rather than the dry precepts of socioeconomics. Long before the Third Reich, German statesmen and generals had liked to envision the vast expanses of Russia and Ukraine as an area ripe for German expansion and colonization—a modern reimagining of the medieval Drang nach Osten, or “drive toward the East.” This attitude had been amply expressed by the punitive Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918, which had ended Russian involvement in World War I and forced Bolshevik Russia to cede vast swathes of territory—including Ukraine and the Baltic states—along with a quarter of its population, to the victorious Germans. Although the cessions proved short-lived, being superseded by Germany’s defeat on the western front later that year, the idea of German expansion at Russia’s expense refused to die.

As Germany endured postwar tribulations of her own, those on the right increasingly saw the concept of territorial expansion as a panacea for the combined ills of poverty, hunger, and overpopulation. In time, Hitler was to add a new ideological gloss to such sentiments, railing against the perversities and excesses of the Bolsheviks and advocating German expansion at their expense. In Mein Kampf, written in 1924, he had clarified his own rather half-baked ideas on the subject. Russia, he wrote, had been deprived of its “Germanic ruling class” by the revolution and taken over by the Jews, so now it was in a “ferment of decomposition” and “ripe for dissolution.” Consequently, he suggested, it was time for the German people to “turn [their] eyes towards the lands of the East,” for it was there that their shortage of living space—Lebensraum—would be rectified.

Of course, the partnership on offer in 1939 was a long way from the merciless conquest that Hitler had envisaged or the westward expansion foreseen by Stalin, but it could nonetheless be regarded by both as a first step along that road. For all their ideological obsessions, both were alive to the potential that lay in serendipity. Stalin would have been well aware of Lenin’s dictum that history proceeds not in straight lines but by “zig-zags and roundabout ways.” Hitler, meanwhile, had done much thus far to advance the Nazis’ ideological goals through opportunism and realpolitik, so it was not entirely illogical to believe that a nonaggression pact with the Soviets could be but a prelude to the latter’s subordination and eventual destruction. Both sides, then, could have been forgiven for believing that by engaging with the enemy they were fulfilling their ideological destiny.

The German foreign minister would certainly not have been immune to such grandiose thoughts. Conceited and arrogant, Ribbentrop was deeply unpopular, even among his fellow Nazis. A former champagne salesman, he had married into money, added a spurious aristocratic “von” to his name, and bluffed his way into the upper echelons of the Third Reich, where his international contacts had earned him a role as Hitler’s favorite foreign policy advisor. From there, his oleaginous and ingratiating manner had secured an appointment as ambassador to London in 1936, before he finally landed the position of foreign minister early in 1938. Bellicose and incompetent in equal measure, Ribbentrop had contributed greatly to the poisoning of international relations over the previous months. Faithfully and belligerently echoing his master’s voice, he had been instrumental in the slide toward what he viewed as an inevitable, even desirable, conflict to establish German hegemony in Europe. In this respect, Ribbentrop had also been a key player in the developing relationship with the Soviet Union, which—ideological differences aside—offered Germany not only a secure eastern flank but also the prospect of an economic collaboration that would be essential for the coming conflict. The pact that he was coming to negotiate would be a volte-face that would shock the world, but it would give Hitler his war on hugely favorable terms. Ribbentrop knew that this would be his finest hour.

After the welcome at Khodynka, the members of the German delegation were taken to the former Austrian legation building, which had been allocated to them as a residence. Many then took the opportunity to experience something of the city, and the regime, of which they were guests. Heinrich Hoffmann visited the Novodevichy Cemetery to see the grave of Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, which he described as one of the “most beautiful” he had ever seen. Paul Schmidt, meanwhile, opted for a short tour of the capital, accompanied by a translator. “At first sight,” he recalled, “there was an almost disappointing similarity to the other European cities. But, upon closer inspection, the key differences occurred to me. The happiness, that one was used to seeing upon the faces of people on the street in Berlin, Paris or London, appeared to be absent in Moscow. The people looked serious and stared straight ahead with a haunted air. Only very occasionally did I see a smiling face.”

If Schmidt was perhaps guilty of allowing his prejudices to color his experience, pilot Hans Baur was left in little doubt about the realities of life in the Soviet Union. Leaving the German military attaché’s residence by car, Baur’s guide pointed out the secret policeman whose task it was to inform the authorities of their departure and where they were going. Soon, the guide explained, “another car would tack itself on to us and follow fifty yards or so in the rear, and wherever we went and whatever we did, the [secret police] would be on our heels.” Politically naive, Baur had to be warned repeatedly not to take photographs and caused a scene when he tried to tip the Russian driver for his efforts. “The man was furious,” he recalled. “He wanted to know whether this was the thanks he got for having done his best for us—to get him into prison. We knew perfectly well that it was forbidden to take tips.”

At the embassy, meanwhile, a lavish buffet had been laid for the new arrivals. Heinrich Hoffmann was astonished, as he had not expected to find such opulence in the Soviet capital. He was soon disabused of the assumption that the food on display had been supplied locally, however: “Everything had come from abroad—the bread, even, from Sweden, the butter from Denmark and the rest from various sources.” The complexities of the food situation in Moscow had already been made plain to Hans Baur earlier at the airfield. Seeking to dispose of food left over from the inbound flight, Baur had offered rolls, biscuits, and chocolate to the team of Soviet mechanics and cleaners busying themselves with his planes. To his surprise, his offer had been declined, with the foreman telling him that to accept was forbidden and that the Russian people had enough to eat. Bemused but determined not to let the food go to waste, Baur resolved to leave the items out on a bench in the hangar; very soon, they all duly disappeared.

While his entourage thus acquainted themselves with the Soviet capital, Ribbentrop was eager to open talks with his Soviet counterparts. Against the advice of his embassy colleagues—who had suggested a more measured approach so as not to appear too keen—Ribbentrop hurried, upon arrival, straight into his first session of discussions with the Soviets. There were other concerns. Embassy advisor and translator Gustav Hilger recalled being pulled aside by Ribbentrop in an unexpected show of paternal concern as they left for the Kremlin. “You look so worried” Ribbentrop said. “Is there any reason?” Hilger, who was born in Moscow and had lived in Russia for most of his life, voiced his misgivings about their mission: “I believe that what you are about to do in the Kremlin will go well only as long as Germany remains strong.” Ribbentrop was unmoved, replying, “If that is all, then I can only tell you that Germany will be able to deal with any situation that comes up.”

With that, Ribbentrop and Hilger, accompanied by the German ambassador to Moscow, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, and the chief of Stalin’s bodyguard, Nikolai Vlasik, climbed into a limousine of the Soviet NKVD to be whisked through Red Square. Entering the Kremlin beneath the impressive Spassky Gate, the party was driven to the Senate, an elegant, three-story building on the Kremlin’s northeastern side, just across the wall from Lenin’s mausoleum. Throughout, an unseen bell tolled ominously to mark their arrival.

Descending from the car, the party was met by the bald, fleshy Alexander Poskrebyshev, chief of Stalin’s personal chancellery, and led up a short flight of stairs to the prime minister’s office, located on the first floor. There, amid the spartan, functional furnishings, stood Stalin himself, simply attired in a plain tunic jacket over baggy woolen trousers and calf-length leather boots. With his narrow, yellowing eyes and pockmarked skin, the Soviet leader, or Vozhd, as he was popularly known, was instantly recognizable. Alongside him stood Vyacheslav Molotov, his foreign minister, a diminutive, nondescript figure in a plain gray suit, his signature pince-nez perched on his nose above a neatly trimmed, graying moustache. It was rare for a foreigner to encounter such a concentration of Soviet power, and Schulenburg reportedly gave a squeak of surprise when he saw Stalin; despite serving in Moscow for five years as ambassador, he had never met the Soviet leader. Ribbentrop, too, was impressed and would later wax lyrical about Stalin as “a man of extraordinary calibre,” who merited his reputation. For his part, Stalin usually avoided foreign visitors on principle, so his presence was most probably a tactic calculated to intimidate his guests and throw them off guard. Whatever the motivation, it was certainly proof of how seriously the negotiations were being taken.

After an initial exchange of introductions and pleasantries, in which Stalin was “simple and unpretentious,” behaving with “jovial friendliness” toward his guests, the four principal players—Stalin and Molotov, Ribbentrop and Schulenburg—seated themselves around a table and proceeded to the business at hand. To Stalin’s rear sat his translator, the youthful Vladimir Pavlov, while Hilger, acting as Ribbentrop’s interpreter, positioned himself between his foreign minister and Ambassador Schulenburg. The negotiations they began that afternoon would cause something like a political earthquake.

THE PROCESS HAD STARTED IN EARNEST A FEW MONTHS EARLIER. Despite the opprobrium that both sides had heaped upon one another during the mid-1930s, contacts between the Nazis and the Soviets had never been entirely broken off, and talks—first on economic ties, then political matters—had tentatively begun in May 1939. Hitler’s position had been fairly clear. He had been irritated by what he saw as Western meddling in frustrating his ambitions the previous autumn at Munich, where the British and French had contrived to dismember Czechoslovakia to satisfy his demands and preserve the peace. Consequently, he had resolved to accelerate Germany’s expansion—by force if necessary—while his perceived advantage in armaments and trained personnel still held good. And if that meant thinking outside of the ideological box, then so be it.

To this end, Ribbentrop had initially courted the Poles with a view to enticing them away from the Anglo-French camp. The flirtation had begun in October 1938, when Ribbentrop had sought to open up a dialogue with Warsaw, requesting the disputed Free City of Danzig—German in character and tradition but severed from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles—in return for a twenty-five-year guarantee of the German-Polish border. The following January, the Polish foreign minister, Józef Beck, had been invited for talks with Hitler at the Berghof above Berchtesgaden, and German support for Polish ambitions in Ukraine had been dangled as an incentive to broker a deal over Danzig. The flirtation was no ruse. Hitler initially directed toward the Poles little of the hatred that he reserved for the Czechs and had lauded Poland’s role as a bulwark against communism. Indeed, true to his anti-Soviet instincts, he had even floated the idea of a joint anti-Soviet alliance, with Poland—naturally—as Germany’s junior partner. “Great possibilities” existed in Polish-German cooperation, Ribbentrop minuted optimistically to the German ambassador in Warsaw, above all in the pursuit of “a common Eastern policy” against the USSR.

Yet the Poles would not be swayed, either by German offers or by veiled threats. Poland’s territorial integrity and independence, newly restored only a generation before after 123 years of foreign occupation, were far too precious to her politicians to be bartered away in return for dubious promises and vassal status, so a strict policy of even-handedness—the so-called Doctrine of Two Enemies—governed her relations with her two largest neighbors. Thus, while Warsaw was willing to negotiate on minor details, neither the seizure of Danzig nor the surrender of the Polish Corridor was open to discussion, and any attempt to take them by force would be interpreted in the Polish capital as an act of war.

This brief, aborted dalliance with Poland would not be without consequence. That same spring, as Ribbentrop was flirting with Warsaw, Hitler had designs on another European capital. On the morning of March 15, German troops had marched—at Czech “invitation” and unopposed except by a snowstorm—into the Czechoslovak capital, Prague. Hitler, following in their wake, had proclaimed the final dissolution of the Czechoslovak state—Slovakia had been persuaded to declare its independence the previous day—and announced that the remaining Czech lands, Bohemia and Moravia, would henceforth become a “protectorate” of the Greater German Reich.

Hitler’s motives for invading the rump of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939 are not entirely clear. He certainly seems to have wanted to thumb his nose at the Western powers, whose representatives, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Édouard Daladier, had so frustrated him the previous autumn. As he commented to an aide at the time of Munich, “That fellow Chamberlain has spoiled my entry into Prague.” Hitler was not a man to be denied his wishes for long. There were other, more cogent, justifications, however. Bohemia and Moravia were rich in raw materials and industry, and the two territories represented a vast salient protruding into Greater Germany’s southeastern flank. But the move was also calculated to intimidate Poland. At a time when Poland’s intransigence in negotiations was stymying Hitler’s strategic ambitions, the taking of the Czech lands demonstrated both German power and—Hitler hoped—Western impotence. Hitler gambled that the British and French would do nothing to aid the state that they had “defended” barely six months before at Munich, and the clear implication was that the Poles should accede to German demands.

Yet the West would not be nearly as supine as Hitler had hoped. The annexation of Bohemia and Moravia served belatedly to galvanize Western opinion, representing as it did Hitler’s first acquisition of a substantial non-German population and thereby giving the lie to his earlier protestations that he was merely righting the historic wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles and returning ethnic German populations “home” to the Reich. Those in London, Paris, and elsewhere who had been skeptical of the appeasement of Hitler’s Germany were now clamoring for a much more robust response.

Consequently, on March 31, 1939, the British government extended a guarantee to Poland, which it considered to be the next target of Hitler’s aggressive intentions, stating that “if any action clearly threatened Polish independence, and if the Poles felt it vital to resist such action by force, Britain would come to their aid.” Of course, Britain could do very little practically to aid Poland in the event of a German invasion: her resources of men and material simply did not make active intervention in central Europe a realistic proposition. But the guarantee was nonetheless an expression of solidarity and support intended not only to bolster Polish resolve but also to reassure the French that Britain remained committed to continental European affairs. Most importantly, it drew a line in the sand for Hitler, signaling that further German aggression would not be tolerated. It was the diplomatic equivalent of a game of “chicken.”

Hitler was predictably furious at this British checkmate. When he received word of the guarantee, he was in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, and—as Admiral Wilhelm Canaris reported—he could barely contain his annoyance: “Hitler flew into a passion,” Canaris recalled. “With features distorted by fury, he had stormed up and down his room, pounded his fists on the marble table-top, and spewed forth a series of savage imprecations. Then, with his eyes flashing with an uncanny light, he had growled the threat: ‘I’ll brew them a devil’s potion.’”

The following day, before a mass rally at Wilhelmshaven, Hitler gave his public response. “No power on earth,” he warned, would be able to break German might, and if the Western Allies thought Germany would stand by while they marshaled their “satellite states” to act in their interests, then they were sorely mistaken. Hitler concluded ominously that “whoever declares himself willing to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the great powers should expect to burn his fingers.”

At this point the idea of a new rapprochement with Moscow seems to have occurred to the leadership in Berlin. Initially intended as a petit jeu to intimidate the Poles, it was first aired in mid-April, with Hitler’s confederate Hermann Göring, rather than Ribbentrop, playing a key role. In his diary, Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg wrote that he had spoken with Göring about the possibility of an alignment such as this. “When Germany’s life is at stake,” he wrote, “even a temporary association with Moscow must be contemplated.” Hitler was also lukewarm on the idea, reminding his ministers that he had “fought communism” all his life, but according to Ribbentrop, he changed his mind in early May, when he was shown footage at the Berghof of Stalin reviewing a military parade. Thereafter, Ribbentrop alleged, Hitler was intrigued, taking “a fancy” to Stalin’s face and saying that the Soviet leader looked “like a man one could do business with.” With that, Ribbentrop got permission to pursue his negotiations. It remained to be seen, however, whether the idea would gain any traction with the Soviets.

In fact, the Soviet Union was ripe for a change of tack in foreign policy. A late convert to the principle of “collective security” to deter fascist aggression, it had hoped that concerted action—whether via the “Popular Front” policy of the Communist International, the so-called Comintern, or via the high ideals of the League of Nations, which it finally joined in 1934—might contain and defeat Hitler. By the spring of 1939, however, it had begun to shift its position. With “collective security” already discredited by the international failure to confront German expansionism or Italian aggression against Abyssinia, the Soviets were terminally disillusioned by the West’s lack of vigor at Munich and became increasingly convinced that the British and the French would be happy to cut a deal with Hitler at their expense. At around the same time as Göring was hatching his petit jeu, therefore, Stalin was open to new suggestions in foreign policy, even erring toward a new policy of unilateralism, in which practical bilateral arrangements would replace previous multilateral commitments.

In a speech to the 18th Communist Party Congress on March 10, 1939, only days before Hitler sent his troops into Prague, Stalin had struck a novel note in vociferously attacking the West. A “new redivision of the world” was under way, he said, in which the “aggressor states” were gaining spheres of influence and colonies at the expense of the “nonaggressor states.” Yet, instead of standing up to aggression as the principles of collective security had proscribed, he explained, the British and the French were colluding with the aggressor states, drawing back and retreating, “making concession after concessioneager not to hinder [them] in their nefarious work.” Far from being motivated by mere cowardice, Stalin went on, the Western powers wanted to encourage the aggressors to become mired in a war with the Soviet Union, whereby both sides would “weaken and exhaust one another” until the “enfeebled belligerents” were ready to have conditions dictated to them once again by the capitalist world. This, he said, was the “true face” of “the policy of non-intervention.”

Although a few of the more hawkish anti-Bolsheviks in the West would have undoubtedly subscribed to this view, it was certainly not a fair reflection of mainstream Western opinion or policy. Rather, it was very much the result of Stalin trying to make sense of the outside world through the blinkers of communist ideology and the fog of his own paranoia. Stalin’s primary ideological problem was his inability—following the precepts of Marxism-Leninism—to differentiate clearly between Nazism and “ordinary” Western capitalism. Both were, according to communist doctrine, merely two sides of the same malevolent coin, albeit with Nazism considered to be further down the road to its supposedly inevitable demise. Consequently, from the Soviet perspective, relations with the outside world—democratic and totalitarian alike—could never be normal. Every relationship was viewed in Moscow as a zero-sum game, with the only governing ideal being the benefit and security of the USSR.

The Soviet Union therefore had little interest in assisting its ideological enemies in maintaining the status quo and was unafraid of instead fomenting conflict between its rivals so as to then be able to exploit the unrest and upheaval that might follow to its own benefit. In this regard, Soviet thinking was actually much closer to that of the Nazis. As Stalin later explained—somewhat clumsily—to British ambassador Stafford Cripps, “The USSR had wanted to change the old equilibrium. England and France had wanted to preserve it. Germany had also wanted to make a change in the equilibrium, and this common desire to get rid of the old equilibrium created the basis for the rapprochement with Germany.”

In private, of course, Stalin was more honest about his motivations. It is often suggested that he made his thoughts plain in a secret meeting of the Soviet government, the Politburo, on August 19, 1939, in which he advocated accepting Hitler’s proposal of a nonaggression pact in the expectation that conflict between the Germans and the Western powers would be inevitable and that the USSR could “remain on the sidelines” and “hope for an advantageous entry into the war.” Stalin, it is said, went further, giving a number of resulting scenarios in which the prospects for “world revolution” were enhanced. He supposedly closed by stating that the USSR “must do everything to ensure that the war lasts as long as possible in order to exhaust both sides.”

This text, which Stalin himself dismissed as “nonsense,” is now generally considered to have been a wartime forgery, intended to discredit the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, much of its content rings broadly true and indeed chimes with comments made by Stalin and others at the time. Sergo Beria, the son of Stalin’s NKVD chief, Lavrenti Beria, certainly remembered events in that way. In his memoir, he wrote of Stalin’s motivations in agreeing the pact, stating simply, “He aimed to set Germany against France and Britain.” A couple of weeks after the pact was signed, moreover, Stalin himself elaborated, explaining to his acolytes that the agreement and the ensuing war presented a vital opportunity to undermine capitalism itself: “A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries for the redivision of the world, for the domination of the world! We see nothing wrong in their having a good hard fight and weakening each other. It would be fine if, at the hands of Germany, the position of the richest capitalist countries (especially England) were shaken. Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system. We can manoeuvre, pit one side against the other to set them fighting with each other as fiercely as possible.”

Molotov expanded on those ideas in a meeting the following summer with the Lithuanian communist Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius, at which he mused on what the war might mean for the Soviet Union: “We are more firmly convinced now than ever that our brilliant comrade, Lenin, was not mistaken when he assured us that the Second World War will help us to gain power throughout all Europe as the First helped us to gain power in Russia.” Molotov then elaborated, explaining how the pact with Nazi Germany dovetailed with this overarching ideal.

This last part was almost certainly a flight of Stalinist fancy—a calculated exaggeration to enthuse and inspire a provincial communist functionary—but it is nonetheless telling that such grand ambitions were being floated in Moscow at all, as it shows that they were undoubtedly part of the narrative.

Soviet policy in 1939 is still routinely described—particularly by those who cleave to a rosy view of the Soviet Union—as essentially “defensive” in nature, motivated by a desire to hold Hitler off and buy time to prepare for an inevitable attack. This has, at the very least, a modicum of retrospective logic to it, but it finds no contemporary echo whatsoever. When Molotov confessed, much later in life, that his task as minister for foreign affairs was “to expand the borders” of the USSR, he was not simply exaggerating or playing to the gallery; he was expressing a fundamental truth. The Soviet Union saw territorial expansion and the spreading of communism as part of its raison d’être: it had sought to expand west in 1920 and would do so with spectacular results in 1944 and 1945. There is no reason to suppose that westward expansion was not part of the plan in 1939. Far from being defensive, therefore, Stalin’s motives in 1939 are at the very least passive-aggressive, exhibiting a profound underlying hostility to the outside world in general, yet portraying it as nonaggression and neutrality. The Nazi-Soviet Pact presented Stalin with a golden opportunity to shake the tree, to set world-historical forces in motion, while remaining outwardly neutral, preserving the Red Army for future battles—be they on the Rhine or elsewhere.

In seeking to take advantage of the opportunity that a rapprochement with Germany might represent, Stalin needed first to remove longtime foreign minister Maxim Litvinov. Litvinov, already in his sixties by 1939, was very much a Bolshevik of the old school—a man who had spent a good deal of his career prior to 1917 in exile, aiding the communist cause as a gunrunner and propagandist and only later as a diplomat. From 1930, he had served as Stalin’s foreign minister and in this capacity had become synonymous with the policy of collective security, using his urbane charm to bring the Soviet Union back in from the cold and into a modicum of diplomatic respectability.

Yet, by the early summer of 1939, Litvinov was on thin ice. In fact, given that the policy of collective security had so demonstrably failed, it is remarkable that Litvinov had not been removed beforehand. By May, his close connections to the discarded policy made him surplus to Stalin’s requirements. Moreover, as a Jew and a persistent critic of the Nazis—who loved to refer to him mockingly as “Litvinov-Finkelstein”—Litvinov clearly lacked the flexibility that might be required in a new and challenging international situation. Citing his foreign minister’s “disloyalty” and failure to “ensure the pursuance of the party line,” Stalin had Litvinov removed from office. Far from receiving a gold watch and being shuffled into retirement, however, Litvinov was arrested by the NKVD, his office surrounded, his telephone cut off; many of his aides were also arrested and interrogated, evidently in an attempt to elicit some compromising information. He would be fortunate to survive the experience.

Litvinov’s successor as foreign minister was Stalin’s most faithful acolyte, Vyacheslav Molotov, a man whose loyalty to the party line—and to Stalin personally—was unswerving. Born Vyacheslav Skryabin in 1890, he had enjoyed a stereotypical apprenticeship as a revolutionary: the conspiratorial existence, the spells of Siberian exile, even the adoption—in common with Lenin and Stalin—of a nom de guerre, his deriving from the Russian word for “hammer,” molot. With the Revolution of 1917, Molotov had found himself in Petrograd editing the Communist Party newspaper, Pravda; he soon emerged as a leading member of the Petrograd Soviet and, in time, as a protégé of Stalin. Never a military man or an inspiring orator, the slight, bespectacled Molotov considered himself primarily a journalist. According to his contemporaries, he was somewhat colorless: a plodding bureaucrat, a stickler for Bolshevik doctrine, who was dubbed “Comrade Stonearse” for his ability to sit through interminable Kremlin meetings. As pedantic as he was loyal, he was even known to correct those who dared to use the moniker, claiming that Lenin himself had christened him “Ironarse.” He did not do so with a smile. Petty and vindictive, he did not hesitate to recommend execution for those who crossed him.

These qualities enabled Molotov to climb the greasy pole of Soviet politics, becoming first the head of the Moscow party organization, then chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in 1930, in which capacity he oversaw the brutal collectivization campaign in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. Absolutely and unquestioningly loyal to Stalin, Molotov survived the purges of the late 1930s, even personally authorizing thousands of executions. As he later admitted with brutal flippancy, “I signed most—in fact almost all—the arrest lists. We debated and made a decision. Haste ruled the day. Could one go into all the details?” So by the time he was appointed as Stalin’s foreign minister, Molotov was not so much a colorless bureaucrat: he was thoroughly steeped in blood. Yet he had no experience of foreign affairs, knew little about the outside world, spoke no foreign languages, and had only once briefly been abroad. As one commentator noted, he was “one of the most inexorably stupid men to hold the foreign ministership of any major power in this century.” Molotov’s only qualification was that he was Stalin’s man.

Stalin’s appointment of Molotov was a bold move, then, and an indication that foreign policy was now very much in his own hands. It did not necessarily signify that collective security was dead, but it did send a strong signal to the outside world—and to Nazi Germany in particular—that all foreign policy options were now up for consideration in Moscow. In case the message of Litvinov’s demise was missed in Berlin, Stalin also instructed that the Foreign Ministry was to be purged of Jews, for good measure. “Thank God,” Molotov faithfully remembered later in life. “Jews formed an absolute majority in the leadership and among the ambassadors. It wasn’t good.”

Just as Stalin’s appointment of Molotov had concentrated the levers of foreign policy in the Soviet dictator’s hands, a similar process had taken place the previous year in Berlin, with Ribbentrop’s appointment as Hitler’s foreign minister. Although Ribbentrop had refrained from ushering in any wholesale clearing out of Foreign Office mandarins, he nonetheless was not above promoting his own, often ill-qualified favorites into important positions. The rise of Martin Luther is instructive in this regard. Brought into the German Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse on Ribbentrop’s coattails in February 1939, Luther headed the new Party Liaison Office, which essentially concerned itself with protecting Ribbentrop’s interests in the endemic infighting of the Third Reich. In due course, he would end up as one of Wilhelmstrasse’s most influential players, even representing the Foreign Office at the infamous Wannsee Conference in 1942, where the Holocaust was coordinated. Yet his pedigree for such exalted office was dubious to say the least: Luther’s primary qualification was that he had been Ribbentrop’s interior decorator, furniture remover, and “fixer” during the latter’s spell as ambassador in London.

Ribbentrop’s questionable choice of acolytes aside, his fawning sycophancy toward Hitler was the prime instrument of his advancement. This made his career a curious parallel with that of Molotov. The appointment of both—“yes-men” and nonentities—marked the concentration of decision making effectively in the hands of Hitler and Stalin themselves. With no moderating voices to restrain them or advise otherwise, the two dictators were free to negotiate with one another.

Despite this, however, German policy had actually been slow to wake up to the possibilities that an arrangement with Stalin might present. Of course, some in the German Foreign Office—“Easterners” such as Moscow ambassador Schulenburg—had long advocated some sort of reimagining of the Rapallo Treaty of 1922, whereby Germany and Soviet Russia had enjoyed a season of economic and military cooperation while jointly thumbing their noses at the Western powers. But, for all the appeal that such an arrangement might have had, its advocates had generally been drowned out in the 1930s by those who were more in tune with the anti-Bolshevik zeitgeist. Göring’s petit jeu, however—cynical maneuver though it was—had momentarily given the Easterners their head, and for a brief period at least, their ideas were taken seriously. They had much to argue in their favor: not only might a pact with Moscow free Hitler to “deal” with Poland and the Western powers, but it could also ensure that Germany insulated itself from the worst effects of any British blockade by sourcing its food and raw materials from the USSR.

In order to square the ideological circle, some in Berlin managed to convince themselves that the Soviet Union was “normalizing,” with Stalin’s policy of “Socialism in One Country” supposedly marking a departure from the expansionist communism of old in a new, more nationally minded direction. Ribbentrop said as much when explaining the pact to his foreign missions in August 1939. “Russian Bolshevism has undergone a decisive structural change under Stalin,” he wrote. “In place of the idea of world revolution there has emerged an attachment to the idea of Russian nationalism and the concept of consolidating the Soviet state on its present national, territorial and social bases.” In other words, Moscow’s dark days of fomenting class war and spreading worldwide revolution were now to be considered a thing of the past.

This was largely ex post facto wishful thinking, of course, but other, wiser heads than Ribbentrop’s also claimed to see similarities between the Nazis and the Soviets. A month earlier, in late July, for instance, German negotiator Karl Schnurre had drawn the attention of his Soviet counterpart to the question of ideology. “Despite all the differences in their respective worldviews,” he said, “there is one common element in the ideologies of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union: opposition to the capitalist democracies. Neither we nor Italy have anything in common with the capitalist West. Therefore it seems to us rather unnatural that a socialist state would stand on the side of the Western democracies.”

Ribbentrop struck a similar note in the opening salvoes of his flirtation with Moscow in August 1939, stating that “differing philosophies do not prohibit a reasonable relationship” and suggesting that “past experience” should dictate that it was “the capitalistic Western democracies” that were “the implacable enemies of both National Socialist Germany and Soviet Russia.” If nothing else, it seems, the Nazis imagined that they and the Soviets could at least find common ground in their shared antipathy toward Britain and France. Stalin and Hitler, it seemed, were edging ever closer.

For his part, Hitler was largely immune to such ideological flourishes. For him, the logic behind the pact was brutally simple. According to his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, he had arrived at the idea of the pact with Stalin partly due to the dawning realization that he had backed himself into a corner. “The Führer believes he’s in the position of scrounging for favours and beggars can’t be choosers. In times of famine,” Goebbels noted darkly, “the devil feeds on flies.” Hitler put a slightly more positive gloss on the decision. At the Berghof, on August 22, he addressed his paladins and senior generals on the challenges that lay ahead of them. In justifying the pact with the Soviets, he explained, “There are only three great statesmen in the world, Stalin, I and Mussolini. Mussolini is the weakest.” What was more, he added, Stalin was “a very sick man.” The pact was only temporary, he explained, serving to isolate Poland and defeat the expected British blockade by providing access to Russian raw materials. Then, “after Stalin’s death we will break the Soviet Union. Then there will begin the dawn of the German rule of the earth.”

Meanwhile, the British and French had not been idle and had made a tentative effort to bring Stalin onside, sending a joint delegation consisting of a British admiral and a French general, which arrived in the USSR in mid-August. Everything about that mission, however, appeared almost comically counterproductive. First, finding a secure route to Moscow had proved difficult, and the delegation had opted to travel aboard an ageing merchantman, the City of Exeter, whose leisurely six-day voyage up the Baltic did little to convince the Soviets of Allied seriousness. Second, the head of the mission, Admiral Sir Reginald Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, was unlikely to curry much favor with the prophets of proletarian revolution with his quadruple-barreled name. Even the British newsreel coverage of the delegation’s arrival in Moscow struck a strangely jocular tone, quipping that the admiral was met “by a whole lot of charming Russian gentlemen, with quite unpronounceable names.”

But there were also more practical concerns. For all their evident status, Admiral Drax and his French counterpart, General Joseph Doumenc, were not foreign ministers, and they lacked the authority to undertake serious material negotiations with the Soviets. Moreover, it is highly doubtful that striking any deal was ever really intended. Many in the West were just as wary of Moscow as Moscow was of them. In March 1939, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain confessed to a friend “the most profound distrust of Russia.” “I distrust her motives,” he explained, “which seem to me to have little connection with our ideas of liberty, and to be concerned only with getting everyone else by the ears.” It is easy to understand, therefore, why the Allied delegation to Moscow was sent with the instruction to “go very slowly,” dragging out any resulting negotiations so as to effectively “talk out” the summer campaigning season and thereby rob Hitler of his opportunity to invade Poland. Motivated by their governments’ instinctive anti-Bolshevism, its members were going through the motions—holding their noses while talking to the Soviets—apparently in the hope that their mere presence in Moscow, raising the specter of an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance, would suffice to deter Hitler. Never, one historian has written, has an alliance been pursued less enthusiastically.

The shortcomings of that approach were exposed almost immediately. Poland was naturally key to the negotiations. As Hitler’s next target and the country geographically doomed to be squeezed between the rock of Berlin and the hard place of Moscow, Poland was bound to loom large in the diplomatic horse trading of that summer. Yet Drax quickly found that he could offer the Soviets little beyond participation in a principled preservation of the status quo. Hemmed in by the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland, made earlier that year, he and his party could give nothing of substance and even failed to secure agreement from the Poles for a suggested passage of Soviet troops through the east of the country to meet any German threat. Polish intransigence was not mere obstinacy. Poles were acutely mindful of the Soviet invasion of their homeland during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919 to 1921—an earlier attempt by Moscow to spread communism westward that was only narrowly defeated at the gates of Warsaw. In addition, given that Poland’s eastern regions contained fractious minorities of Byelorussians and Ukrainians, Warsaw rightly had its doubts that the Red Army, once allowed in, would ever leave.

As Drax and Doumenc sat down with the Soviet defense commissar, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, on August 14 to discuss the possibilities for common action, this flaw in the Anglo-French plan was swiftly made clear. When Voroshilov pointedly asked whether Soviet forces would be allowed passage across Polish territory, the general and the admiral could only squirm and prevaricate, answering with platitudes and evasions, promising vaguely that such matters would be cleared up in due course. Voroshilov was unimpressed and brought the meeting to a close by expressing his “regret” that this “cardinal question” had not been considered. It was no great surprise, perhaps, that negotiations stalled.

The Germans, however, had no such inhibitions and were happy to offer genuine territorial and strategic gains to the Soviets—at other people’s expense—to secure agreement. As Johnnie von Herwarth would confess after the war, “We were able to make a deal with the Soviets because we were able without any problems with German opinion to deliver the Baltic states and eastern Poland to Russia. This the British and the French, with their public opinions, were unable to do.” Thus, in stark contrast to the hesitancy and impotence exhibited by Admiral Drax, Ribbentrop’s attitude—exemplified in a telegram to his Moscow ambassador on August 14—exuded confidence and optimism. “There exist no real conflicts of interests between Germany and Russia,” he wrote. “There is no question between the Baltic and the Black Sea which cannot be settled to the complete satisfaction of both parties.”

What was more, Ribbentrop was willing to fly to Moscow to negotiate in person. Berlin had considered sending Hitler’s legal expert and later governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, to carry on the negotiations, but Ribbentrop was selected in his stead. It is not clear from the archival record whether this change was the result of a fit of ego on Ribbentrop’s part or the hardheaded calculation that a senior minister would have more impact in the Soviet capital. Ribbentrop’s own account of the episode claims that he was selected by Hitler because he “understood things better.” Whatever the truth, it is certain that Molotov was most impressed by the prospect of the German foreign minister coming to negotiate in person; as Schulenburg noted to Berlin on August 16, Molotov found it “very flattering personally” and “proof of our good intentions,” contrasting very favorably with the status of previous foreign visitors.

Impressed by this ecumenical and businesslike approach, the Soviets continued their clandestine negotiations with Berlin while maintaining their public, and increasingly desultory, talks with the British and the French. For all the Machiavellianism on show in the Soviet capital, there seemed to be a genuine sentiment at its core. As Johnnie von Herwarth recalled, there was “near unanimity amongst the Western embassies in Moscow that summer that Stalin had a higher regard for the Germans than for the other Western powers, and that he certainly trusted them more.” Consequently, through most of August, soundings with Berlin were taken, meetings conducted, and respective positions clarified, such that by the last week of the month, draft treaties had already been drawn up, exchanged, and provisionally agreed. The process had been driven on by Hitler’s overriding desire to wrap up the pact in time for his invasion of Poland, initially planned for August 26, and so present the West with a fait accompli. Drawing upon these discussions, a German-Soviet Economic Agreement was signed in Berlin in the early hours of August 20, allowing for an exchange of Soviet raw materials for German finished goods and a credit facility of 200 million reichsmarks. Goebbels was unusually laconic in his diary comment of “Times change,” but he knew very well that the agreement’s primary significance was that both sides saw it as the necessary precursor to the all-important political treaty.

That same day, events far to the east further contributed to Soviet decision making. In its flirtation with Berlin, Moscow had been keen to bring an end to German support for the Japanese military campaign against the Red Army in the Far East, raising the issue several times in negotiations. On August 20, however, the problem appeared to have finally solved itself. After a summer of inconclusive skirmishing on the border between Mongolia and Manchuria, Soviet forces attacked the Japanese Imperial Army that day, close to the river Khalkhin Gol, seeking the decisive result that would drive the Japanese back. While the ensuing battle raged—and it would last for eleven days before the Japanese forces were finally routed—Stalin would be unsure whether further military commitments were necessary on his eastern border and consequently would have been wary of entering new commitments in the west—particularly those of the sort suggested, however halfheartedly, by the British and the French. If Hitler’s offer of territorial gain for nonbelligerence was not already attractive enough, the battle at Khalkhin Gol must have conspired to make Stalin’s mind up for him.

From there, events moved with astonishing rapidity. On the morning of August 21, a final meeting was held between Drax’s delegation and their Soviet partners, but neither side, it appeared, had anything further to report, so the meeting was adjourned sine die. The Western policy of procrastination had run out of tomorrows. In contrast, discussions with the Germans on the draft text of the pact were progressing apace, and though Stalin would have welcomed a delay, pending some clarity in the situation on his eastern frontier, Hitler was determined to force matters along. The previous evening, the Führer had sent a personal telegram to Stalin in which he asked that Ribbentrop be received in Moscow to tie up the final details without delay. This highly unorthodox move would have made a distinct impression on the Soviet leader. Accustomed to being treated as a toxic and malevolent outsider in world politics, Stalin craved the recognition and respect that a direct approach such as Hitler’s implied. That afternoon, his reply—agreeing to Ribbentrop’s arrival for talks on August 23 and expressing the hope that the proposed pact would be a “turn for the better” in Soviet-German relations—was telegraphed to Hitler on the Obersalzberg. According to Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, who witnessed the scene at the Berghof, the Führer “stared into space for a moment, flushed deeply, then banged on the table so hard that the glasses rattled, and exclaimed in a voice breaking with excitement, ‘I have them! I have them!’”

STALIN MIGHT HAVE COUNTERED WITH A QUERYING “KTO KOGO poimal?” (Who has whom?). Certainly when the negotiations with Ribbentrop opened in the Kremlin on the afternoon of August 23, he performed like a man convinced that he held all the cards. After the opening pleasantries had been concluded, the four—Ribbentrop, Stalin, Molotov, and Ambassador Schulenburg—got down to business. Draft treaties had already been agreed in the preceding days, so all that needed to be done was to finalize terms and draw up the necessary paperwork. Nonetheless, Ribbentrop began with a bold suggestion, most likely calculated to steal the initiative, proposing on Hitler’s behalf that the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact should have a hundred-year term. Unfazed, Stalin’s response was cool. “If we agree to a hundred years,” he said, “people will laugh at us for not being serious. I propose the agreement should last ten years.” Deflated, Ribbentrop meekly concurred.

Discussion swiftly moved to the essence of the Nazi-Soviet arrangement, the so-called secret protocol by which both parties were to divide the spoils of their collaboration. The initiative came from the Soviet side. Realizing that Hitler was impatient to proceed with his invasion plans for Poland, Stalin sought to extract the maximum possible territorial concession. “Alongside this agreement,” he announced, “there will be an additional agreement that we will not publish anywhere else,” adding that he wanted a clear delineation of “spheres of interest” in central and eastern Europe. Taking his cue, Ribbentrop made his opening offer. “The Führer accepts,” he said, “that the eastern part of Poland and Bessarabia as well as Finland, Estonia and Latvia, up to the river Dvina, will all fall within the Soviet sphere of influence.” This was exceedingly generous, but Stalin was not satisfied and demanded all of Latvia. Ribbentrop stalled. Although he had been given the authority to agree to terms as was necessary, he utilized the negotiating trick of breaking off talks to refer a question to a higher authority. Replying that he could not accede to the Soviet demand for Latvia without consulting Hitler, he asked that the meeting be adjourned while a call was made to Germany.

Hitler was still at the Berghof on the Obersalzberg, anxiously awaiting news of the negotiations. It was a hot summer’s evening, and he spent his time on the terrace, enjoying the spectacular view north across the valley to the Untersberg where, according to legend, King Frederick Barbarossa lay sleeping, waiting to reemerge at Germany’s hour of need. As Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, recalled, the highly charged mood of anticipation seemed to be mirrored by the weather. “As we strolled up and down,” he wrote in his memoir, “the eerie turquoise-coloured sky to the north turned first violet and then blood-red. At first we thought there must be a serious fire behind the Untersberg mountain, but then the glow covered the whole northern sky in the manner of the Northern Lights. I was very moved and told Hitler that it augured a bloody war. He responded that if it must be so, then the sooner the better; the more time went by, the bloodier it would be.”

Shortly afterward, the mood had scarcely lightened when word came through from Moscow. “Groups of ADCs, civilian staff, ministers and secretaries were standing around the switchboard and on the terrace,” recalled Schutzstaffel (SS) Adjutant Herbert Döhring. “Everybody was tense, they waited and waited.” When the telephone finally rang, Hitler was initially silent as he listened to Ribbentrop’s brief summary of progress and Stalin’s demand for all of Latvia. Within half an hour, after consulting a map, Hitler returned the call, consenting to the alteration with the words, “Yes, agreed.” According to Johnnie von Herwarth, who received the call in Moscow, the speed of Hitler’s reply was testament to his eagerness to conclude the pact. For Stalin, it marked a signal victory: with a single evening’s negotiation and a single phone call, he had regained almost all of the lands lost by the Russian Empire in the maelstrom of World War I.

Once the “spheres of interest” had been cleared up, the essential business of the pact was concluded, and discussion in Moscow turned to current events and the wider ramifications that a Nazi-Soviet agreement and nonaggression pact might have. Japan was at the top of the agenda, and Stalin was keen to know the status of Germany’s links with Tokyo. Ribbentrop reassured him that German-Japanese friendship was in no way directed against the Soviet Union and even offered to intercede in settling disagreements between Moscow and Tokyo. Stalin was again rather cool in response, stating that he would be happy for an improvement of relations and for German assistance in that regard, but he did not want it known that the initiative had his sanction.

Talks then ranged over Italy, Turkey, France, and Britain, the last of which, it seems, excited both Ribbentrop and Stalin greatly and provided an arena for common ground and some competitive damnation of “perfidious Albion.” England was weak, Ribbentrop opined, echoing the tone of Stalin’s speech of March that year, and was keen to use others to further its “arrogant claims to world domination.” Stalin concurred, stating that the British army was feeble and that the Royal Navy longer merited its reputation. “If England has dominated the world it is only because of the stupidity of other countries,” he said. “It is astonishing that only a few hundred British ruled India.”

But, Stalin warned, the British could fight stubbornly and skillfully. Ribbentrop replied that—unlike the British and French—he had not come to ask assistance: Germany was perfectly capable of dealing with both Poland and her western allies on its own. According to Ribbentrop, Stalin thought for a moment before responding, “The viewpoint of Germany deserves attention. However, the Soviet Union is interested in preserving a strong Germany, and in the event of military conflict between Germany and the Western democracies, the interests of the Soviet Union and Germany coincide completely. The Soviet Union shall never tolerate letting Germany fall into difficult straits.”

By the end of their discussions, there was evidently even room for some wit. When Ribbentrop began an unconvincing explanation of how the Anti-Comintern Pact—the anticommunist alliance agreed between Germany and Japan three years earlier—had been directed not against the Soviet Union but against the Western democracies, Stalin replied that the city of London and “English shopkeepers” had been most frightened by the move. Ribbentrop concurred, adding that German opinion on the matter was clear from a recent Berlin quip that Stalin himself was now considering joining the Anti-Comintern Pact. For the otherwise humorless Ribbentrop, it was almost funny.

After this tour d’horizon, a draft communiqué, hastily drawn up in two languages in an anteroom, was presented to the negotiators for their consideration. Ribbentrop had scripted an elaborate, gushing preamble to the original Soviet draft of the treaty, full of references to the “natural friendship” between the Soviet Union and Germany. Stalin, however, who was soberer in his senses, was unmoved. “Don’t you think,” he asked, “that we have to pay a little more attention to public opinion in our two countries? For many years now, we have been pouring buckets of shit on each other’s heads, and our propaganda boys could not do enough in that direction. And now, all of a sudden, are we to make our peoples believe that all is forgotten and forgiven? Things don’t work so fast. Public opinion in our country, and probably in Germany too, will have to be prepared slowly for the change in our relations that this treaty is to bring about.”

Outplayed again, Ribbentrop could only humbly agree, and the preamble reverted to that of the original Soviet draft. With a few minor alterations, the text of the treaty—a short document of only seven brief paragraphs—was then checked and accepted by the parties. Each agreed to desist from any aggressive action against the other and to maintain constant contact for the purposes of consultation on their common interests. Disputes were to be settled by the friendly exchange of opinion or, if necessary, through arbitration. Unusually, the treaty would come into force immediately upon signature rather than upon ratification.

The secret protocol accompanying the treaty was similarly terse, with only four articles delineating the Nazi and Soviet “spheres of influence” that were to apply “in the event of a territorial and political rearrangement.” Accordingly, the Soviet Union laid claim to Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, up to the border of Lithuania, with the latter earmarked for Germany. In Poland, the boundary between the two signatories would be the line of the San, Narew, and Vistula rivers, neatly dissecting the country. To the south, Moscow expressed its “interest” in the Romanian province of Bessarabia, whereas Germany registered its “complete political disinterest.” Finally, both sides agreed that the protocol was to be treated as “strictly secret.” With its pious, high-flown rhetoric about the pernicious “imperialists” and their cynical “spheres of interest,” the Soviet Union could scarcely admit to having similar arrangements of its own. Such was the sensitivity of the secret protocol, indeed, that some have speculated that, on the Soviet side, only Stalin and Molotov knew of its existence.

The hard work done, the signatories and their respective entourages were treated to a small, impromptu reception. At around midnight, samovars of black tea appeared, followed by caviar, sandwiches, vodka, and finally Crimean champagne: “our treat,” as Molotov would later recall. Glasses were filled, cigarettes were lit, and the atmosphere became—according to one of those present—“warmly convivial.” As is the Russian way, an interminable round of toasts followed. Stalin began by exclaiming to a hushed room, “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer. I should therefore like to drink to his health.” Once the glasses had been refilled, Molotov proposed a toast to Ribbentrop, and Ribbentrop in turn toasted the Soviet government. All of them then drank to the nonaggression pact as a symbol of the new era in Russo-German relations.

In the early hours of August 24, after the draft treaty had been retyped, the photographers were ushered in to record its ceremonial signing. Entering the “smoke-laden room,” Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, introduced himself to Molotov and received a “hearty handshake” from Stalin. Then he set to work. Flanked by a Soviet photographer with “a prehistoric camera and an antediluvian tripod,” as well as his own colleague Helmut Laux, Hoffmann began recording the scene for posterity. Stalin insisted on only one condition: that the empty glasses be cleared before the photographers began; he clearly did not want anyone to think that he had signed the pact while drunk. At one point, soon after, Laux took a photograph of him and Ribbentrop together, with glasses of champagne raised in a toast. Spotting him, Stalin remarked that it would probably not be a good idea to publish the picture, in case it gave a false impression to the German and Soviet peoples. With that, Laux immediately began to take the film out of his camera, ready to hand it over to Stalin, but the latter stopped him by waving his hand, assuring him that he “trusted the word of a German.”

After that brief halt, Hoffmann and Laux resumed their work. Between them they would produce the iconic images of the pact’s signing: Molotov and Ribbentrop, seated at the desk, pen in hand; to their rear, Chief of the General Staff Boris Shaposhnikov, looking like a silent-film star with his slicked, parted hair; the interpreters Hilger and Pavlov seemingly startled to be sharing the limelight; and finally Stalin, beaming broadly in his smart, light-colored tunic. Behind them all, Lenin glared down from a large framed photograph.

Taking their turn, Molotov and Ribbentrop then appended their signatures to the treaty and smiled for Hoffmann’s camera. With that, the lives of millions of Europeans would be changed forever.