Stalin's Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941 - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Weeks (ч. 11)

4 Nazi–Soviet Agreements (1939–40)

The ideological contradictions between National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union were in past years the sole reason Germany and the USSR stood opposed to each other in two separate and hostile camps. The developments of the recent period seem to show that differing world outlooks do not prohibit a reasonable relationship between two states, and the restoration of cooperation of a new and friendly type.

—German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop

The Reich Government and the Soviet Government, judging from all experience, must count it as certain that the capitalistic Western democracies are the unforgiving enemies of both National Socialist Germany and of the USSR.

—German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop

On the whole, there are only three great statesmen in the world. Stalin, myself and Mussolini. Mussolini, the weakest, has not been able to break either with the power of the Crown or of the Church. Stalin and I are the only ones that see only the future.

—Adolf Hitler

In the case of an armed showdown between Germany and the Western democracies, the interests of the Soviet Union and of Germany would certainly run parallel to each other. The Soviet Union would never stand for Germany’s getting into a difficult position.

—Josef Stalin

Ekh, together with the Germans we would have been invincible.

—Josef Stalin

We don’t have a mutual assistance pact with the Germans, but if the English and the French declared war on us, we would fight alongside the Germans.

—Josef Stalin, to the Turkish minister of foreign affairs,

October 1, 1939

The hatred Stalin felt toward England was much more intense than his hatred of Hitler. He considered the British Empire to be the bastion of capitalist civilization. He was convinced that the destruction of this fortress would help spread Communist forces worldwide.

The twentieth century, rivaling all other centuries in surprises, delivered to mankind a number of world-historical shocks and wake-up calls. In 1914 the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and the modern world’s bloodiest war to date got the century off to a tragic start. Then followed the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the demise of the 300-yearlong dynasty of the Romanovs, who had ruled the world’s largest, most resource-rich country and contiguous empire stretching over eleven time zones. This was followed by the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia and the establishment of history’s first totalitarian state. This set a grim precedent that other such autocratic, totalitarian regimes followed in Italy and Germany in the twentieth century. Their leaders duly admitted their indebtedness to the Bolsheviks.

In the third decade of the century, the Far East ignited in war as Japan began forcibly expanding its empire to the Asian mainland—to Korea, Manchuria, and all of China as well as southward to Southeast Asia. It euphemistically called this ambitious enterprise a “Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Besides threatening Soviet Russia and the British Empire in Asia, Japanese expansionism, now marching in step with the German–Italian Axis in Europe by virtue of a tripartite agreement with those countries, was to cause another great shock: its attack against the United States at Pearl Harbor.

Before that momentous event the world had been staggered by three other incredible shocks: first, the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, announced seemingly out of the blue in August 1939, which created an alliance between the world’s two most powerful totalitarian states. Out of this agreement came the secret Soviet–German plans to jointly invade and destroy Poland while giving a nod to Stalin to expand the Soviet Empire further to the west—north in the Baltic region and south bordering Rumania.

Above all, the Soviets under Stalin also agreed eagerly to supply Hitler with the raw materials that he required in order to conquer most of Western, democratic Europe. Destruction of European and British-imperial “plutocracy,” the two sides agreed, was a common goal shared by the an-tiplutocrat, “socialist” regimes of both Hitler and Stalin.

With the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in September 1939 came British and French declarations of war against Germany, marking the formal start of World War II. The war was to turn into a much bloodier, world-girdling conflict than even the preceding Great War. On March 10, 1939, six months before the war began, Stalin declared openly at the Eighteenth Communist Party Congress that World War II had already begun. ¹

As the midcentury point approached, the world was in for still another huge shock. Within twenty-one months of the signing of the Nazi–Soviet pacts, the first partner of the emerging German–Soviet alliance launched a large-scale invasion against the second partner’s country on June 22, 1941. This started the second war that Stalin was to call the “Great Fatherland War” (sometimes translated the “Great Patriotic War”). The latter was World War II’s war-within-a-war on the Eastern Front that took upward of 35 million civilian and military lives on the Soviet side alone.

When this war ended amid the usual postwar calls for “no more wars,” Stalin and the Soviet Union resumed the pursuit of Soviet expansionism approximately where it had left off before June 1941. The “buffer” territory seized by the Soviets to the west of its frontiers in 1940—deemed by Moscow and fellow travelers abroad merely as insurance in order to absorb any future German attack—was absorbed into the USSR. It became permanently sovietized as a part of the ever expanding Soviet Empire. Then began a period of additional expansion and determined sovietization in Eastern, Central, and Southeastern Europe.

In other words, another “struggle,” to use the Soviet term, had begun. This one was a cold one but a Cold War with very hot overtones and violent episodes, such as the Soviet-supported proxy conflicts fought on the Korean and Vietnamese Peninsulas in the 1950s and 1960s. Over 100 other conflicts, as tabulated in the 1970s by the Yugoslav paper Polytika, were also part of the post–World War II landscape. All these wars, the paper says, had a Marxist-Leninist edge to them.

To some observers it seemed in retrospect that, as far as Stalin and the “lodestar” of Marxism-Leninism were concerned, World War II and the “strange alliance” in it of East and West against the common Axis foe had only been a passing interlude. It appeared that the Soviet dictator was serious when he remarked to the Yugoslav Communist aide, Milovan Djilas, in Moscow in 1946 that soon, as he put it, “We’ll have another go at it”—meaning another “big war”—World War III—a war that, as Molotov said of the preceding big war in an interview in the 1980s, would further “extend socialism” worldwide.

SOVIET–GERMAN FEELERS

In the previous chapter, I surveyed the beginnings under Lenin and Stalin of a deepening German–Russian relationship after World War I. These ties were being forged, as we saw, on the basis of several uniting principles. The lines of magnetic attraction involved the two countries’ uniquely common interests: political, military, and economic (trade). Yet this process seemed to be abruptly interrupted by the coming to power of Hitler and one-party rule under his National Socialist German Worker’s Party (the Nazis). In calling such a regime “fascist” (a term borrowed from Italy’s own dictatorship under the Fascisti “Black Shirts”) and terming it an “advanced stage” of imperialistic capitalism, Stalinite Russia, it appeared, had thereby put itself on a collision course with this new regime that was now ensconced in the Soviets’ “favorite” Central European country of Germany.

But the ideological gulf seemingly opening between the two states after 1933, while real in certain respects, was in a bigger sense a chimera, a figment of propaganda but not a substantial element of Realpolitik. Their mutual animosity—anti-Soviet and antifascist—in any case was soon to dissolve. More tangible factors would draw the two nation-state dictatorships together.

How did this process start? Surprisingly, it actually started early on with the consolidation of the Hitler regime in Berlin in 1933. It was taking place even as Hitler was haranguing the Reichstag with fulminations against the “Jewish Bolshevists.” Yet in a speech on March 23,1933, Hitler declared significantly that “the struggle with Communism in Germany is our internal affair.... Our political relationship to other powers with whom we have common interests will not be affected by this.”² This was a clear signal directed at Moscow and was received as such. It indicated, namely, that ideological differences between the two states need not interfere with their long-standing common interests. (For the earlier origins of these ties, see chapter 3.)

A number of other straws in the wind in the early 1930s likewise pointed in a friendly direction as concerned Moscow and Berlin. This process began when initiatives began emanating from the Soviet side,³ as per the following events:

In 1933–34 Lev Lebedev, a Communist Party Central Committee apparatchik in Moscow, visited Berlin on a secret mission to study Gestapo techniques. This was followed by transfer to the Germans of the table of organization used by the Soviet Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) for establishing Soviet labor camps as well as the design for mobile, poison gas “liquidation wagons,” invented in the USSR and used against recalcitrant peasants in Stalin’s collectivization drive.⁴

According to Leon Gelfand, former counselor at the Soviet embassy in Rome, who defected to the United States in 1941, “Stalin had been obsessed with the idea of an agreement with Germany since 1933.”⁵

On a visit to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin, on December 21, 1935, Sergei Bessonov suggested openly that it would be highly desirable if the neutrality agreement signed between Germany and Soviet Russia in 1926 were supplemented by a “mutual nonaggression pact,” as official German documents from the period show. Bessonov again brought up this idea to German officials in July 1936.⁶ In this it is clear, of course, that no Soviet official, especially one on assignment in a foreign country, would ever make such bold statements unless they were approved by the Kremlin.

Ex-Soviet security officer Walter Krivitsky relates that in 1936 one A. Slutsky, chief of a foreign intelligence section of the Russian secret police, confided in him, “We have set our course towards an early understanding with Hitler and have started negotiations.”⁷

In December 1936 and February 1937 David Kandelaki, Soviet trade emissary with the cover designation of “Commercial Attaché” and one of Stalin’s personal aides, had an audience with Hitler’s finance overseer, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. Kandelaki read a statement, presumably coming directly from Stalin, that said in effect that Soviet-German trade should be stepped up sharply while with it a bold improvement should be made in overall Soviet-German relations.⁸

There were several other wrinkles in the pre-1939 “feelers” period that signaled significant rapprochement between Moscow and Berlin. Some of the initiatives originated on the Soviet side, others, on the German.⁹ But the milestone year in the process of forming a Soviet-German alliance, of course, was 1939. Early in that year Stalin sounded the first undeniable hint, a hint so strong that during the later Nazi–Soviet negotiations in Moscow in August 1939 Ribbentrop specifically referred to it favorably. So did Stalin.

Speaking from the rostrum of the Eighteenth Party Congress in the Bolshoi Theater, March 10, Stalin made some startling statements. They were delivered in the typically subtle, low-toned, droning way in which the Soviet dictator customarily exploded his verbal bombshells. First, Stalin blasted the Western democracies for trying to incite, he claimed, the Soviet Union against Germany and “to poison the atmosphere and to provoke a conflict with Germany without any visible grounds.”¹⁰ Then, after making overtures to Germany, with which the Soviets, he indicated, surely should have better relations than they did presently, he dropped his classic “chestnuts-out-of-the-fire” remark, how, he implied, the Soviets were not about to come to the aid of other threatened capitalist states. The remark clearly indicates that Stalin was not about to engage in any serious collective-security negotiations with the Western capitalist states. This would be the case despite appearances or the fond hopes nurtured among pro-Soviet observers or officials in the West (such as British envoy and ambassador to Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps).

Both Austria and Czechoslovakia, after all, would have been such “chestnuts” in 1938. In both cases, Moscow reacted more or less disinterestedly to Hitler’s bold annexations of both of those states in the preceding year. The fact that a country had been occupied by Germany did not cause any radical change in Communist tactics. In Czechoslovakia the Communists accused the government officials there of being lackeys of French and British capitalism. In France, the Communists spread defeatism.

Later, the memoirs of Czechoslovak and Polish diplomats show, as the memoirists claim, a pattern of false Stalin pursuit of “collective security.” One of these diplomats has reported that he viewed Moscow as actually playing the role of instigator of war. He says he detected a Soviet plan to provoke war with Germany by urging the Czechs to stand fast against the Germans while at the same time ostentatiously offering, and while not delivering any, military support to the former—support that was never, in fact, forthcoming and was never intended to be.¹¹

No such capitalist-state chestnuts would be pulled out of the fire. The fire of future war, it seemed, was too valuable to Stalin. Or, at the very least, he intended to keep the Soviet Union out of it until an appropriate time.

STALIN’S GAMBIT WITH FRANCE AND ENGLAND

Soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, the Soviet government launched the policy of collective security. Sometimes known as the “Litvinov policy” —it was named for Maxim M. Litvinov, whose real name was Vallach and who served as commissar of foreign affairs from autumn 1930 to May 1939. The policy was seemingly designed to rally West European opposition to Hitler. That the Soviet Union would take a truly active part in stopping Hitler in the military sense is regarded by some latter-day historians, especially Russian scholars, as, if not doubtful, at best problematical.

As we have seen, Stalin had opted for a policy of staying out of the “inevitable” coming war until the last moment. At that propitious time, he predicted, the USSR would enter the war and tip the balance in its own favor. In his speech to the Eighteenth Party Congress, March 1939, Stalin made a telltale accusation against the then-neutral Western countries. He imputed to them a policy that seemed to presage the very one designed by Stalin himself for the USSR: “The official policy of neutrality [as pursued by France and Britain] can be described as one that says in effect, ‘Let each country fend for itself from aggressors any way that it can. For our part,’ it says, ‘we will trade with aggressors as well as with their victims.’ In reality, however, the policy of noninvolvement means giving a go-ahead to aggressive war.”

The case of Czechoslovakia, which was abandoned to the Nazis by the Western powers after the Munich Agreement of 1938, is instructive in terms of illustrating Soviet policy. The Soviet Union itself made no concrete effort to defend Czechoslovakia when it became obvious that the Wehrmacht would settle the issue of the so-called oppressed German population in the Czechoslovak territory of the Sudetenland. For their part the Germans were well aware of Moscow’s uninterest in defending Czechoslovakia. German Ambassador to the USSR Schulenburg observed at the time:

The Russians are not making great efforts. [It is obviously] no pleasant thought for them to have to go to war on account of Czechoslovakia.... The Soviet Government, with an eye on the internal situation in Russia and fearing a war on two fronts, must hold aloof from military enterprises for the time being.... It follows, therefore, [their] proved tactics of mobilizing other powers, particularly France, against its foes, or fomenting those conflicts which do break out—as for example in Spain and China—by delivering war materiel, and of spreading [such conflicts] as much as possible by political agitation and intrigues of all kinds.¹²

As though to buttress its collective-security policy, the USSR in September 1934 became a member of the League of Nations—which Lenin had called a “band of robbers” and an “imperialist conspiracy” directed against the Soviet Union. This had been a long-standing Soviet ideological line that undoubtedly reflected basic Soviet uninterest in collective efforts against aggression launched under the league aegis. For his part, Stalin reiterated this basic Bolshevik attitude toward the league. Yet, for the USSR to have influence in Europe, league membership was an obvious prerequisite. During the short time the USSR was a member, it used the international forum largely as a sounding board for Soviet propaganda and as a way of contrasting the “good” Soviet Union with the “bad” capitalist states (not unlike Soviet policy in the United Nations Organization after World War II).

Also, Moscow supported the French proposal, put forward in 1934 by Premier and Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, for an “Eastern Locarno” pact. By its terms the USSR was to take over France’s obligations to defend her “allies,” Poland and Czechoslovakia, if they were attacked by Germany. However, neither of these two countries, nor indeed any other East European state, wanted or requested direct Soviet military aid. Least of all did Poland want such Soviet assistance, given her experience with Russian domination and an offensive Soviet war waged against her just fifteen years before in 1920. (Czechoslovakia was willing to accept Soviet help—but only if France helped first.)

Furthermore, Germany did not want to sign any such pact, nor would Great Britain support it unless Germany did. In any case, Barthou was most interested in an alliance with the USSR. He and successive French governments saw this as a diplomatic means of keeping Hitler in check. So, although it is true that Polish opposition counted for something, it was not decisive in the failure of the Eastern Locarno or “Eastern security pact” project.

Evidence brought forward by historians in recent years seems convincing, moreover, by demonstrating that Stalin never seriously considered collective security to be anything more than a ploy to involve the West European capitalist nations, sans the USSR, in an effort to block Hitler. Collective actions undoubtedly would entail the kind of intra- or intercapitalist state war that Stalin, like Lenin before him, expected as a means of defeating “capitalist imperialism” and eliminating the so-called capitalist encirclement of the Soviet Union. It would also ensure the latter’s domination of the Continent, as top NKVD foreign intelligence officer at the time, Pavel Sudoplatov, frankly points out in his memoirs.

Furthermore, France and Britain did not see eye to eye on Germany; they had not agreed on this point since 1919. In early May 1935, on its own France signed an alliance with the Soviet Union, and so did Czechoslovakia. These alliances were interconnected but, significantly, were not accompanied by military conventions. Their primary goal was to deter Hitler by diplomatic means from using force but not to fight him. This was partly because the French did not have a high opinion of Soviet military power and partly, too, because they mistrusted the Soviets. In any case, the distrust was mutual. Just as important was the fact that France was committed to the doctrine of a “defensive war” protecting its own territory, not another’s. Under Popular Front rule, France was hardly “war minded.”

At the same time, Benes, as foreign minister and later president of Czechoslovakia, inserted into the Czechoslovak–Soviet Pact of 1935 the provision that the USSR would help his country only if France did so first. He assumed that this condition would secure French military aid while averting accusations that Czechoslovakia was pro-Communist.

For its part, London, disagreeing with the French approach to Germany, sought above all not to antagonize Germany. On the contrary, under Prime Minister Chamberlain’s administration, Britain wanted to reach some sort of settlement with Berlin that would somehow ward off war anywhere on the Continent. In fact, London was fundamentally opposed to concluding any peacetime alliances with any countries, even with France. The British regarded themselves primarily as an imperial power with overseas interests. To pursue these interests while maintaining their empire, the British needed peace, not war. It was a policy that was based in part, one might say, on the old “Manchester Doctrine.” This principle assumes that commercial and imperial priorities dwarf all other considerations while they also, by their peaceful nature, preclude war.

So, in March 1935, London made only a weak protest when Hitler restored conscription—which was forbidden by the Versailles Treaty of 1919. Moreover, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, signed in June 1935, allowed Germany to build a navy (“pocket battleships”) up to one-third of total British surface tonnage and to an even greater percentage in submarines. The British rationales for this step were (1) they did not want to go to war with Germany over her violations of the military part of the Versailles Treaty, whose revision they considered inevitable; (2) they believed it would take Germany years, in any case, to challenge the British navy; and (3) they assumed that Hitler would honor agreements he had signed or if not, as a result, lose face. This belief, of course, reflected British thinking, not Hitler’s.

At the same time, the naval agreement reflected widespread British pacifism as well as the view that swift rearmament would be disastrous to trade, which was, after all, the lifeblood of Britain. British public opinion, expressed as late as summer 1939, strongly opposed British involvement in war (this was to change dramatically within a year). Chamberlain’s much criticized policy (pilloried in the famous American musical comedy of the time, The Red Mikado) nevertheless reflected this public sentiment, which can be seen in the results of public opinion polls held in England in that era. Popular sentiment in France was similar.

Another important consideration was the danger of Japanese expansion in the Far East. This constituted a threat to British et al. colonial possessions and interests there. At the same time Anglo-Italian relations were endangered by the aggressive Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. Speaking of a new “Roman Empire,” he was ready to use force to acquire Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Indeed, il Duce’s forces, after launching brutal aerial bombing attacks, invaded this country in October 1935.

This overall state of affairs led the British chiefs of staff to advise the civilian government that Britain, in its essentially weak military condition, could not simultaneously fight Italy in the Mediterranean, Japan in the Far East, and Germany on the Continent. Britain was in no shape to fight any of the three powers singly and certainly not a group of them at once. Finally, it should borne in mind that not until 1939 did the British choose to consider an alliance even with France against Nazi Germany. Still less did it seek an alliance with her putative East European “allies” such as Poland, and least of all with the USSR.

The goal of British policy was a European settlement agreeable to Berlin. Until about 1936, British statesmen, such as Prime Minister Chamberlain, believed that such a settlement would avert a European war. Later, by 1938–39, while still hoping to save the peace, the British by now—among much of the officialdom, at least—were more than aware of war dangers. They wanted to gain time for gradual British rearmament. The latter policy was strongly advocated by Winston Churchill, Conservative Party rival of Chamberlain.

Meanwhile, however, by assenting to a buildup of the German navy (even though it was expected to take a long time), Britain indicated that she did not care if the Baltic Sea were dominated by Germany, albeit Germany could then threaten Poland and the Baltic states, not to mention the USSR. The fact is that Britain was not all that seriously concerned about the security of Eastern Europe. This “remote” region, after all, had never played a major role in the scheme of British trade or foreign policy. As a result, most British statesmen believed that it was not a sphere of Britain’s truly vital interests. Instead, they viewed Eastern Europe as a natural sphere of German influence provided British trade was not excluded. However, this reservation seems to have been mainly a matter of prestige with London. Eastern Europe accounted for only 2 percent of total British foreign trade.

For their part, it would seem that the Soviets—Stalin and Molotov in particular—interpreted London’s policy to mean tacit British support for German eastern expansion. This Stalin saw as being directed primarily at the USSR. Yet this may not have been the case at all. At any rate, it has never been proved. On the other hand, one can question Soviet sincerity and ask if the Soviets on their part were serious in calling for overarching “collective security” to prevent such German expansion. Had they been serious, would they have erected so many verbal impediments to its realization? Would they have left Czechoslovakia in the lurch when the Wehrmacht got on the move? Any alliance, collective-security arrangements, and so on with the Western capitalist nations were, in any case, anathema to Stalin. Obviously, he had other fish to fry.

Doubt about Soviet motives at the time, moreover, arises from the fact, for instance, that the ink was hardly dry on the Franco-Soviet alliance of May 2, 1935, when Litvinov—ironically, titular spokesman for collective security—himself suggested to the German ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich von Schulenburg, that now was the time to improve German–Soviet relations by concluding a mutual nonaggression pact.¹³ Other pro-German Soviet initiatives followed (see chapter 3). One might thus conclude that Stalin supported collective security merely as a means of pressuring Hitler to cut a deal with the Soviet Union. This was a form of “blackmail,” as several Russian and some Western authors have suggested.

To judge from Litvinov’s proposal, Stalin seems as early as 1935, perhaps even as early as 1933, to have envisaged a pact with Germany. So might one assume from examining the papers of Karl Radek, Stalin’s secret go-between with Berlin. (Radek was among the purge victims of 1936–37, many of whom knew too much for their own good.) This proposal would be renewed at the turn of 1936–37. It finally bore fruit, as we will see in the next section, in the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 23, 1939.

THE WATERSHED YEAR

In the crucial year of 1939, however, not only did Germany and Soviet Russia make concerted approaches to each other, many of them in secret. Simultaneously, Stalin began to respond, it now appears disingenuously, to intense British and French feelers aimed at possibly closing ranks with Stalin in opposing Hitler. The latter by now was all but universally perceived as a menace to peace. As Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky writes, from Stalin’s vantage point “Hitler was really drawing Europe into war and Germany would bring down in ruins the whole capitalist system. It was no longer a [Marxist-Leninist] mirage, no longer a dream—world revolution was advancing on empire. All that was needed was to egg Hitler on.”¹⁴ NKVD foreign intelligence officer Pavel Sudoplatov, as we saw, confirms this Stalin ploy in his memoirs.

Thus, Stalin began playing a new game well beyond the frontiers of his own country and its “geopolitical borderlands.” Besides opening the way to an accord with Germany, the Soviet dictator began simultaneous negotiations with France and England—in effect, creating a kind of ersatz “Popular Front at the top.” This was a “typical Stalin ploy,” Radzinsky writes. He continues:

He knew in advance that the Western democracies [against which he had directed so many venomous attacks] would never trust the new Genghis Khan. He inspired in them only fear and revulsion. The talks [between the French and British and the Soviets in Moscow] were meant to gain leverage on Hitler. This gambit worked. Fearing an alliance between Stalin and the Western democracies, Hitler was soon responding to Soviet advances.

The customary fulminations against the USSR disappeared from official German statements, and the campaign of mutual insult petered out. A New phase had begun: the irreconcilable foes seemed to have stopped noticing each other.

In midsummer 1939, Hitler told Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels that he no longer expected London and Moscow ever to reach an agreement. “That leaves the way open for us,” Goebbels wrote in his unpublished diary: “Stalin doesn’t want either a won or lost war. In either case, he’d be history.”¹⁵

Goebbels cleverly ordered German editors not to express glee at Stalin’s stalling of the Anglo-French negotiations in Moscow or to comment on differences emerging between Moscow and Tokyo. Newspapers were also told to ignore German–Soviet trade talks. After the first, August 23 Nazi–Soviet agreement, Goebbels’s comment was laconic: “How times change,” he wrote.

However, a few weeks later Hitler fully described to Goebbels the deal he had made with Stalin. To the Führer, “the question of Bolshevism,” Goebbels wrote in his diary, “is for the time being of lesser importance.” Then to the press he controlled Goebbels ordered: “You can indicate that the purpose of this [nonaggression] pact is to enable Germany and Russia alone to settle all outstanding problems in the Lebensraum [living space] between them, i.e., in eastern Europe.... Newspapers are permitted to display a degree of Schadenfreude [malicious pleasure], though not in their editorial columns.”

Nineteen thirty-nine, as already indicated, was the cardinal year in the process of forming an active Soviet–German alliance. Early that year it was Stalin who sounded the first undeniable hint of impending Soviet–German rapprochement at the highest level. It was a hint so strong that during the Nazi–Soviet negotiations in Moscow in August 1939, Ribbentrop in Stalin’s presence specifically referred back to it as the spur to Hitler that got rapprochement going between Germany and the USSR. To Ribbentrop’s observation, Stalin replied, “That was precisely my intention.”¹⁶

Speaking from the rostrum of the Eighteenth Party Congress in the Bolshoi Theater on March 10, 1939, Stalin made his several startling statements. He had entirely rewritten the draft of the speech he was to give and that had been prepared for him, as usual, by the Administrative Department of the Communist Party Central Committee. The gist of his speech was the following:

The French and British were trying to poison relations between the USSR and Germany by means of “malicious rumors.” In fact, he went on, nothing stands in the way of sharply improving those relations.

He reassured his audience that Germany had no base designs against Soviet Russia, least of all any plans to seize the Ukraine.

Referring to Western hopes of Soviet cooperation in stopping Hitler and dashing such hopes to pieces, Stalin bluntly asserted: “We will not allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers [podzhigatel’yami voiny] who are accustomed to getting others to pull chestnuts out of the fire for them.”¹⁷

To make sure Berlin understood what Stalin was saying in Aesopian language between the lines, he ordered the Soviet press to soften its “antiFascist” line. Then he made an undeniably friendly gesture: On May 3 he fired Maxim Litvinov, formerly promoted as a collective-security advocate, as longtime Soviet commissar of foreign affairs. Stalin even removed him from the Central Committee. In Litvinov’s place he appointed his closest aide, Vyacheslav Molotov (real name Scriabin, a Great Russian, who was untainted in Nazi eyes because he was not, as Litivinov was, Jewish; that Molotov was married to a Jewish woman was of little concern). As soon he was in charge of that ministry, Molotov (who had in any case supervised the ministry for many years) weeded out some of the deputy commissars and other officials closely associated with Litvinov. (As we will see, Litvinov, always willing to oblige The Boss, was later—after the German attack on the USSR in June 1941—brought out of limbo and appointed ambassador to the United States. By that time it was useful to have such a personality in Washington helping to arrange Lend-Lease aid for Soviet Russia.)

Berlin got this politically telegraphed message, too. During the Nazi-Soviet honeymoon German officials acknowledged that the departure of Litvinov (as well as that of the Jewish Soviet ambassador to Berlin, Georgi Astakhov) was welcome news. It signified, they concluded, that Stalin was adopting a form of “national Bolshevism” and was virtually “de-ideologizing” his foreign policy and returning it to a “non-Jewish-Bolshevik, Great Russian orientation” without global pretensions. This, obviously, was a foolish assumption on the Germans’ part. The details and events immediately leading up to signing the final Nazi–Soviet Nonaggression Pact are related in many books. A brief summary follows here.

Marshal Voroshilov had been assigned to sounding out the Germans on the precise designs of the ensuing agreements; Molotov, too, was active in the preparatory period of July and early August. All told, two major pacts and several other agreements together with several secret protocols came out of the August–September negotiations in Moscow in which Stalin personally always played a key role. (Documents made available to researchers since 1991 show a pattern of the Soviet dictator’s deep, personal involvement in all aspects of Soviet foreign policy as well as defense policy.)

Before the memorable day of August 23 arrived, Stalin ordered all talks with the French and the British—this “silly game,” as he called the negotiations—to be terminated. Diplomats such as the pro-Soviet British Ambassador Sir Stafford Cripps were enraged and disillusioned. They had tried for months to win Stalin over, little suspecting that the Soviet dictator, as it turned out, had bigger game in his cross hairs. Such talks with the British and French by now, of course, had become pointless if they were not from the start.

First came the Soviet–German Nonaggression Pact, signed on August 23. The secret protocol attached to it, whose existence was denied by the Soviets up to and during the Gorbachev period of putative glasnost’, was designated top secret (sovershenno sekretno)—and for good reason. The Polish state was to be utterly destroyed. Its corpse was to be divided in two—Germany acquiring the western half and the Soviets, the eastern, but with the eastern demarcation line drawn to Soviet advantage considerably further west of the old post–World War I “Curzon Line.”

Furthermore, with Germany’s blessing, Moscow won its long-prized “spheres of influence” in the Baltic region as well as to the south bordering Rumania. (Previous attempts under Lenin in 1918 to sovietize the Baltics had failed; the three countries had been independent ever since; Lenin, earlier in 1917, had disingenuously acknowledged their independence.) This meant that soon Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania would be absorbed into the Soviet Union, thus increasing the number of Soviet republics to sixteen. Bessarabia, to which Stalin laid claim without any historical basis for it, likewise was assigned to the Soviet sphere and was duly absorbed in 1940 to become the thirteenth Soviet republic, the Moldavian SSR. Thus, what publicly was touted as a “nonaggression pact” actually turned out to be a deal for joint Soviet-German carving up and occupation of foreign lands.

The pact was duly ratified by the rubberstamping Soviet “parliament,” the USSR Supreme Soviet, at its next meeting, on August 31. In his speech to the assembly, Molotov described the pact as being “in the interests of universal peace [that every sincere supporter of peace will realize].... It is a turning-point in the history of Europe, and not only of Europe.” Within a month that same speaker was to announce that Poland “has ceased to exist as a state.” Too, it was ironic that the text of the first Nazi-Soviet agreement, unlike the texts of other nonaggression treaties signed by Moscow with several other countries in the 1920s and 1930s, stated that the provisions should apply only in the case of defensive war. This suggested that if either Germany or the Soviet Union launched an offensive war against whatever other state, it would not affect their agreement.

The “booty” thus acquired by the USSR by 1940 via its deal with Germany was considerable: at least 130,000 square miles of land, counting Carpathian Ruthenia, where the Soviets were granted sovereignty. Populations in the new territories totaled about 16,000,000. Stalin himself had predicted the Soviet rationale for such seizures. Back in 1920 he had written:

Central Russia, that hearth of World Revolution, cannot hold out long without assistance from the border regions [former territories of the tsarist empire], which abound in raw materials, fuel, and foodstuffs. The border regions of Russia in their turn are inevitably doomed to imperialist bondage unless they undergo the political, military, and organizational support of the more developed Central Russia.¹⁸

Before the next major Nazi–Soviet agreement was concluded in mid-September, Poland had been invaded by the Wehrmacht—on September 1. Two days later Ambassador Schulenburg agreed with Molotov that the Red Army should move into the territory designated as the “Russian sphere of influence.” However, the “sphere of influence” became annexed Soviet territory.

NAZI–SOVIET PACT DETAILS

When the two sides got down to business in August, amid friendly toasts and extravagant ceremonies staged by the Soviets for the visiting German emissary, Joachim von Ribbentrop, two major agreements with their secret protocols followed:

The Treaty of Nonaggression, known as the Nonaggression Pact, was signed on August 23, 1939. By its terms each side pledged not to attack or support an attack against and not to ally itself with any group of powers directed against the other contracting party. Each promised to consult the other on all questions of common interest. A secret protocol was attached to the pact that established the northern boundary for Lithuania, an independent, sovereign state, so that German and Soviet spheres of influence would be divvied up between the two powers. Likewise with sovereign, independent Poland, its boundary was redrawn so that its western half at the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San would fall to Germany while the eastern portion would fall to the Soviet—details of which were to be settled later “by friendly agreement.” Germany declared her “disinterestedness” in the Soviet demand that Bessarabia fall under Soviet “influence” but had not intended that the Soviets would usurp Lithuania as they did in August 1940. (Between August 4 and August 6, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia became the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth union republics, respectively.)

The Soviet-German trade agreement was signed on August 19 and then augmented and reaffirmed on August 29, and two days later the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. Soon from the USSR the Germans were receiving oil, phosphate, food, platinum, and other raw materials in exchange for German machines, machine tools, and munitions. Over 50 percent of Soviet foreign trade at this time was with Nazi Germany.

By September 6, foreign observers noticed a diametrical shift in Soviet propaganda. It began to assume to a friendly, pro-German stance while the Western powers, England, and France, Czechoslovakia, and others were scorned in the Soviet press. Later, when the German Army triumphantly entered the Polish capital of Warsaw, Moscow sent its hearty congratulations to Berlin.

On September 9, the Kremlin indicated that Soviet military action against Poland would begin in “several days.” On September 14, Molotov asked Berlin to clarify when exactly it thought Warsaw would fall and Poland would collapse so that Moscow could say that Russian minorities would be “protected.” Then, on September 16, Molotov stated that Soviet military action in eastern Poland was “imminent.”

On September 17, Stalin announced that the Red Army would cross the Polish frontier that day, which it did, occupying its (larger) half of Poland, whose boundary, as noted, was jointly drawn to Soviet advantage west of the Curzon Line. On September 20, Molotov proposed that the Soviet Union and Germany should finalize their joint Soviet–German destruction and occupation of Poland, or “Polish settlement,” as they termed it euphemistically, respecting the former Polish state that was now moribund. On October 1, 1939, Stalin sent Hitler a congratulatory telegram in which he stated: “The friendship of Germany and the Soviet Union, sealed in blood, has the necessary foundation upon which to become long-term and solid.” In remarks to members of the Comintern on September 7, 1939, and in his address to the Politburo on the same day, Stalin observed with typical sangfroid:

The war is going on between the two groups of capitalist countries—namely, the poor ones vs. the rich ones for colonies, sources of raw materials, etc.—is for the redivision of the world, for world domination! We have no objection if they fight very hard and weaken one another. It’s not bad at all if at the hands of Germany the wealthiest capitalist countries are shattered and the capitalist system undermined.... We can maneuver and instigate one against the other so that they can fight against each other all the better. The nonaggression pact [with Germany] to a degree helps Germany. But at the next moment it instigates one against the other.¹⁹

Thus followed on September 28 the second major Soviet–German agreement of 1939: the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty. As with the first pact, this one was accompanied by a secret protocol respecting the status of Lithuania and other matters. The protocol also affirmed joint Soviet–German suppression of any hostile “agitation” within Polish society. This “suppression” took the usual harsh Soviet and German forms. The Katyn Forest Massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD troops is one such example. Like the very existence of the secret Nazi–Soviet protocols, the Katyn Massacre was vehemently denied by Soviet authorities (as well as by foreign fellow travelers) right up to and during the Gorbachev period after 1984.

An apparently major spin-off for the Germans from the secret protocols was use of a northern naval base on Soviet territory near Murmansk known as Basis Nord. The Germans were given the right to use the base facilities for their surface naval ships and submarines. As a specialist on Hitler’s northern war has observed, “The securing of a Soviet base illustrated the ability of the Germans and Soviets to work together in accordance with the secret Protocols and to labor toward the implementation of their cozy agreement—the division of Europe.”²⁰

Other cooperative Soviet–German talks and agreements followed in late 1939 and early 1940. The most important of these was the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement signed in Moscow on February 11, 1940. By this deal, the Soviets were to ship billions of Reichsmarks’ worth of war-related materials and goods to the Germans. These were freighted to Brest-Litovsk, then offloaded from the wide-gauge Soviet railroad cars to freight cars on the narrower-gauge tracks and hauled west to Germany. In the first eighteen months following the signing of this important agreement, the following were shipped to the Germans:

1,000,000 tons of grain for cattle plus legumes valued at 120 million Reichsmarks;

900,000 tons of mineral oil costing about 115 million Reichsmarks; 2

00,000 tons of cotton costing approximately 90 million Reichsmarks;

500,000 tons of phosphates;

100,000 tons of chrome ore;

500,000 tons of iron ores;

300,000 tons of scrap metal and pig iron;

2,000 kilograms of platinum; and manganese ore, metals, lumber, rubber, and numerous other raw materials including especially grain.

In addition the Russians granted Germany the right of transit for German traffic to and from Rumania, Iran, Afghanistan, and other countries of the Near and Far East. Russian freight rates for any foodstuffs purchased by the Germans from Manchukuo (under Japanese occupation) were reduced by 50 percent.

The goods received in return by the USSR from Germany as part of the trade deal did not substantially enhance the Soviets’ defense posture. One such example is the German “gift” of the unfinished German battle cruiser, the Lutzow (whose design resembled that of the Bismarck). It had been towed through the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland to Leningrad. The work on the cruiser by German engineers, assigned to the project, continued for over a year until it was “interrupted” by the German attack of June 22,1941. By the end of the war in 1945 the unfinished hulk of this German ship lay on the bottom of the gulf near Leningrad.

CARVING UP THE WORLD

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Nazi–Soviet negotiations and discussions during 1940 were those that revolved about joint German–Soviet “carving up of the world” into zones of influence. Such vast concepts became part of the cooperative, “geopolitical” discussions that took place between Molotov and Ribbentrop in Berlin in November 1940. The deception in such talks on the German foreign minister’s part only became known later. (For instance, on November 12,1940, Hitler had issued his secret “Instruction No. 18” to prepare for war in the east “irrespective of the results yielded by these discussions [with Molotov in Berlin].”)²¹ After the war the secret documents revealed Hitler’s earlier decision in July 1940 to consider an attack on the USSR. Ribbentrop himself had been let in on this decision. Yet he presented Molotov with an invitation to join the Axis (that also included Japan), which Molotov dispassionately said “interested” him.

It was the Soviets who proffered a draft of a proposal for such a joint Soviet–Nazi redivision of the world. By its terms the USSR would become a formal ally of the three other Axis powers (the concept of Quadripartite Axis); Moscow proposed that this could become an additional “secret protocol.” In the Soviet draft of this protocol, which was to become part of the Nazi–Soviet global carve-up, it was stated that Soviet “territorial aspirations center south of the national territory of the Soviet Union in the direction of the Indian Ocean.” Later this was refined by both sides to read in the concluding phrase “south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf.” Stalin obviously had his eye, as Peter the Great had 200 years before, on warm-water egress into the Indian Ocean. (Russia has historically resented being “locked out of the seas” by ice in the north, by Copenhagen guarding egress from the Baltic Sea to the west, and in the south where the Turkish Straits potentially block Russian exit from the Black Sea.)

NEW TENSIONS

Such an agreement for a Quadripartite Pact including the Axis powers and Soviet Russia never materialized. It seems not to have been realized largely because of new demands put on the Germans by Moscow, the latter prioritizing these demands in the short term above the Soviet–Axis global carve-up of the long term. The new, barbed Soviet demands were mixed with complaints about German moves in closing ranks with Finland, which had been the victim of Soviet aggression from December 1939 to March 1940 and which sought German aid.

Molotov made other demands, especially concerning the Balkans. Among other things he stipulated that Bulgaria should be part of the Soviet security sphere. A Soviet military base should be built at the Dardanelles. Both Italy and Germany should assist the Soviet Union in realizing its goals in the Balkans and at the straits, especially if Turkey should resist Soviet pressures toward the latter. “Hitler had every reason to fear,” writes historian Ernst Topitsch,

that as soon as their present wishes were granted, the Soviets would be making new and even more dangerous demands.... Molotov’s further extravagant claims amounted to nothing less than an encircling movement from Poland to the Balkans—one which would have made a successful defense against [Soviet] attack from the east impossible, and which would reduce Germany’s role from representative to satellite.²²

Dimitrov recorded in his diary on November 25 that Molotov had remarked to him, upon the latter’s return from Berlin, that “our relations with the Germans look lively but there exist serious differences between us.... We are pursuing a course of demoralizing the German troops that are occupying the various countries. But we’re going about this without shouting about it.” To which Dimitrov responded, “But won’t this interfere with Soviet policy [toward Germany]?” Molotov replied: “Of course. But it must be done anyway. We wouldn’t be Communists if we didn’t follow such a course. It’s only that it must be done quietly.”

The same day, Stalin told Dimitrov that in the event that Moscow concluded a mutual-assistance treaty with Bulgaria and helped it realize its own expansionist ambitions throughout the Balkans, “we would not only not object if Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact [with Italy, Germany, and Japan]. We ourselves would join it.” This was the same date on which Molotov submitted his statement to the German ambassador on Soviet readiness to draw up a proposal for a Four-Power Pact that would include itself and the Axis powers—Molotov adding some provisos (concerning Soviet “rights” to the straits and other extravagant demands) that stunned Berlin.

In aggravating relations in this way, Stalin may have also perceived that Germany had entered a difficult phase in the post–May 1940 period of occupying part of France and coping with British military pressure in North Africa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. It appeared that by autumn 1940 Nazi Germany for all intents and purposes had reached the pinnacle of its expansionist power. It now had to face, Moscow may have perceived, a downhill peril in the form of a strengthened Britain and the looming danger from America. “Interventionist” Roosevelt’s reelection in November 1940 and the defeat of the “peace monger,” Wendell Willkie, only underlined this perilous future for Germany.

Topitsch notes that in his meeting with Molotov in November 1940 the Führer “let slip the remark that Germany was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Britain”—an unusual admission on Hitler’s part. Molotov replied that “obviously Germany was fighting for her life [but that] Britain was fighting for her death.”

The Soviet–German relationship was further strained by German thrusting into the Balkans. By late 1940 Molotov and Stalin on their part were claiming this region as their own exclusive sphere of influence. Here Rumanian oil and German access to it were on Stalin’s mind, not to mention the strategic “lake” of the Black Sea and the geostrategic straits providing Soviet egress from the Black Sea.

In retrospect it appears that by 1940 both sides were well aware of the other’s ultimate war plans. As the new archival documents in Russia now show, Stalin was on to Hitler’s Drang nach Osten war plans. Yet he evidently thought the Germans would not launch their attack against the USSR at least until they had defeated England in the ongoing air battle to conquer it and in their plans to attempt an invasion over the English Channel code named Operation Sea Lion, which was later tabled.

Stalin may also have been aware of Germany’s relative unreadiness as of late 1940 to wage war in the east. By the time the Wehrmacht would be ready for further adventures, the Soviets, too, would be ready—at least by 1942 if not earlier—to overcome any such offensive threat from the Wehrmacht. The Soviets also were wondering, given a German two-front war, east and west—assuming the Germans had not yet brought England to its knees—how Hitler could possibly think he could conquer Soviet Russia, especially considering Russia’s eleven-time-zone breadth as well as its actual and potential military might.

However, because of faulty military intelligence and in its overestimation of the debilitating effects of the military purges in the USSR of 1937–38, Hitler and his military intelligence entourage had grossly underestimated overall Soviet strength.²³ Such assumptions on Stalin’s part—known, of course, to the Germans—fed the Soviet dictator’s doubts about the presumed imminence of a German attack by mid-1941 (see chapter 6).

POST-SOVIET RUSSIAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS

Tangential to the above discussion are the latter-day treatments of the Nazi–Soviet agreements found in contemporary Russian history texts widely read at public and private secondary school levels and in the institutions of higher learning in today’s Russia. One of the most salient post-Communist developments in that country—one that up to now has received little or no attention from Western observers—has been “operation textbook-rewrite” taking place in the Russian Federation. One of the main topics discussed in the new texts is the period of Nazi–Soviet collaboration.

Throughout Russia today, high school and college textbooks are being entirely recast and rewritten. The old Soviet-period schoolbooks and the propaganda in them, except for in a few independent schools that choose to educate in Soviet ways, no longer are used in the public secondary schools and in the institutions of higher learning.

I have collected a half dozen of these new texts that have been published since 1991. As one reviews how the new volumes treat major, “sensitive” events related to Soviet foreign relations, Marxist-Leninist ideology, the Nazi–Soviet pacts and their secret protocols, the Great Fatherland War, the Cold War, and so on, it soon becomes obvious that a significant change—though not in all respects or in similar ways in all of the new history textbooks that I have examined—has come over Russian education. Russian society, the intellectual community, and the state now seek to educate the youth and college-aged men and women on subjects touching Soviet and post-Soviet history.

One of the examined history textbooks, unlike some of the others (see appendix 4) follows a much more conventional line on the run-up to the signing of the Nazi–Soviet pacts of spring and summer 1939.²⁴ The collegium of authors of this particular text, in fact, place the blame for the failure to reach common ground with England and France on collective-security arrangements with the USSR to oppose Hitler’s expansionism, namely, on those two Western countries. This textbook introduces events of this period in non-Soviet fashion as follows:

The prospect of a future war led the Soviet leadership to mobilize domestic resources for the rapid building of heavy industry and a well-developed military-industrial complex which in turn further led to a harsher regime in the country.... As a result of the Bolshevik victory in Russia stabilizing the post-World War I correlation of forces in the international arena could not take place.... The rise of totalitarianism in both Russia and Germany signified their joint rejection of universal human values.... They became “genetically” united.

Continuing in this vein, the authors allege that the 1938 Munich appeasement policy of France and England, the passive “wait-and-see attitude” toward Hitler’s Germany assumed by both countries, and “above all, their attempt to use Germany against the Bolshevik threat merely increased Hitler’s appetite.... Munich was a gigantic miscalculation on the part of Western diplomacy and opened the door to military expansion of fascism bringing nearer the beginning of a ‘big war’ in Europe.” The Russian authors then claim that, given the appeasement policy and the West’s rejection of Soviet proposals for collective security, “a great change” in Soviet policy perforce resulted “as Maxim Litvinov was dismissed in favor of V. M. Molotov as Commissar of Foreign Affairs.”

Another textbook reviews, in objective fashion and without editorial comment, the contents, including the secret protocols, of the Nazi–Soviet agreements of late 1939.²⁵ The book makes no value judgment; it simply reports the seizure of territory by the USSR (Poland, the Baltic countries, etc.) under terms of the agreements and their protocols. Nor does the textbook make any reference to Soviet–German discussions in 1940 for dividing up regions of the world into zones of influence, German and Soviet. Instead, it mentions only that the Axis powers sought to “carve up the world.”

Although the Nazi–Soviet agreements shook the world, a few astute observers were not taken by surprise at the time. Some officials in Britain actually worried over the likelihood of such an alliance. Perhaps they were aware of that long tradition of Russian, and particularly Lenin’s own, admiration of Germany.

In retrospect it seems that London (and certainly not Washington, which had no leverage at all with the Kremlin) could not have prevented this Moscow–Berlin alliance—to be activated in war, present and future—no matter how forthcoming and accommodating the British were toward the Soviets in spring and summer 1939. In any case, there was precious little of that given democratic Britain and its establishment’s scorn for Soviet Communism. Moreover, it seems to me to be untenable to allege metahistori-cally that if London had been more accommodating toward the Kremlin during the negotiations in 1939 prior to the first Soviet–German pact of August, Stalin could have been “enticed” away from his tilt toward Nazi Germany. There were too many impediments for that to happen, not the least being Stalin’s own scorn for and suspicions toward the British.

It is even possible to argue, as some Russian and Western researchers and historians have, that Soviet talks with British envoys in Moscow were a mere Soviet game, a ploy or “inducement” to goad Hitler into coming to terms with Moscow in ways, as we saw, that were extremely favorable to the latter—at least in the short term. Even in the long term, by these agreements Stalin had won large amounts of territory from the Baltic south to the borders of Rumania that were to become part of the large bloc of post–World War II captive nations known as the Central, East, and Southeast European “People’s Democracies” along with the permanently established Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

It could be said that Stalin had, indeed, honored the famous “behest” made in his funeral oration over Lenin’s bier in January 1924 to carry Soviet-style revolution abroad. In his memoirs, Stalin’s No. 1 aide, Molotov, remarked to his interviewer, Felix Chuev, that Stalin, to be sure, had not done too badly in this respect.

NOTES

The first epigraph is from German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop’s message to the German ambassador in Moscow, August 14, 1939, in Nazi–Soviet Relations 1939–1941 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 1948), p. 50.

The second is from Nazi–Soviet Relations 1939–1941, p. 51.

The third is from Conspiracy and Aggression, vols. 1–8, Office of the U.S. Chief Counsel of the Prosecution of Axis Criminality (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946).

The fourth is from Nazi–Soviet Relations 1939–1941, p. 125.

The fifth is from Svetlana Alliluyeva, Tol’ko odin god (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 392.

The sixth is quoted in S. Z. Sluch, “Sovetsko-Germanskiye otnosheniya v Sentyabre-Dekyabre 1939 goda I vopros o vystupolenii SSSR vo vtoruyu mirovuyu voinu,” Otechestvennaya Istoriya, no. 5 (2000), p. 55.

The seventh is quoted from the magazine Free Europe, October 4, 1940, reproduced in Robert Ivanov, Stalin i Soyuzniki 1941–1945 (Smolensk: Rusich, 2000), p. 83. Ivanov is a historian working at the Institute of General History, Russian Academy of Sciences.

J. V. Stalin, Otchetnyi Doklad na XVIII S“ezde Partii o Rabote Ts.K. VKP(b) (Moscow: Ogiz, 1948), p. 8.

Quoted in Ernst Topitsch, Stalin’s War: A Radical New Theory on the Origins of the Second World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 26.

William L. Shirer has observed: “The first suggestion ... for a Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact came from the Russians—at the very moment they were negotiating with France and Great Britain to ... oppose further German aggression” (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959], p. 521). The author fails to note, however, that the primary voice himself of collective security, Maxim Litvinov, served as one of the first major purveyors of Stalin’s wish to close ranks with the Nazis.

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, The Time of Stalin: Portrait of Tyranny (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1980), p. 257. See also various editions of the post-Soviet weekly Argumenty i Fakty.

Mikhail Geller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power (New York: Summit Books, 1986), p. 322.

John Kolasky, Partners in Tyranny (Toronto: McKenzie Institute, 1990), p. 30. In sharp contrast to Rossi, Kolasky, Krivitsky, Tucker, Conquest, and a few others, defensist writer Gabriel Gorodetsky staunchly maintains that British, Polish, et al. recalcitrance toward Soviet overtures of collective security “drove the Russians into German arms” (Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999], p. 6). Retired Red Army officers General Oleg Sarin and Colonel Lev Dvoretsky write in their 1996 book, based on their research from the archives: ”We have found documents that disclose quite another picture“—namely, that the initiative for Nazi-Soviet collaboration originated in Moscow, not Berlin, and manifested itself well before Soviet-British talks got under way in mid-1939 (Alien Wars: The Soviet Union’s Aggressions against the World, 1919–1939 [Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1996], p. 41). To the ambassador of Turkey, on October 1,1939, Stalin remarked: “We don’t have a mutual-assistance pact with Germany. But if the French and British declared war on us, we’d fight alongside the Germans” (quoted from archival documents in Sluch, “Sovetsko–Germanskiye otnosheniya v Sentyabre-Dekyabre 1939 goda i vopros o vystuplenii SSSR vo vtoruyu mirovuyu voinu,” p. 55). Some historians claim that the British had contingency plans to bomb the Caucasian oil fields in retaliation for the Soviet war against Finland in December 1939. Soviet “neutrality” was indeed abandoned with the era of collaboration between the Kremlin and Berlin. “Ours is a unique kind of neutrality. Without fighting, we acquire territory,” declared A. A. Zhdanov with heavy irony to the plenum of the Leningrad Province Party Committee, November 20, 1940, amid laughter from the delegates.

Kolasky, Partners in Tyranny, p. 31, quoting W. G. Krivitsky.

Kolasky, Partners in Tyranny, p. 32; Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 197. Kandelaki was executed in the purges of 1937. Like others whom Stalin liquidated, he probably “knew too much.”

Several authors give some of these particulars. Besides those already cited above are two especially useful sources: Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; and Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1992). See the concluding chapter of the present book for a roundup of views.

Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany and the Soviet Union 1939–1941 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1954), p. 12. Weinberg’s two excellent books, this one and his monumental A World at Arms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), contain some of the best, most balanced analyses of prewar Soviet-German relations. Weinberg is critical of Gorodetsky’s “defensist” position on Soviet actions in 1939–41.

R. C. Raack, Stalin’s Drive to the West 1938–1945: The Origins of the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 185.

Quoted in Jiri Hochman, The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, 1934–1938 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 151–52.

On Litvinov’s proposal, see the telegram from German Ambassador to Moscow Schulenburg, May 8, 1935, in Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945, ser. C, vol. 4, no. 78, p. 138.

Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin (New York: Doubleday Publishing Co., 1996), p. 440.

David Irving, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (London: Focal Point Publishers, 1996), pp. 306–08. Irving unearthed Goebbels’s unpublished diaries. Doubtlessly, the Soviets as well were aware of Hitler’s attitude toward the fruitlessness of British overtures to Moscow.

A. Rossi, The Russo-German Alliance August 1939–June 1941 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951), p. 9. Note the word order used by Rossi in his title. Some historians note that the term Nazi–Soviet to describe the pacts of 1939–40 was deliberate on the part of whoever coined that word order in order to indicate that the initiative for making the Soviet–German alliance was Nazi rather than Soviet. Whether or not deliberate, this word order affectation began to be discarded by Russian historians around 1991. They began to employ the expression “Molotov–Ribbentrop pacts,” which has become the common expression used in Russian histories. It carries the implication that the primary impetus for the alliance had come from the Soviet, or “Molotov,” side.

Weinberg, Germany and the Soviet Union 1939–1941, p. 12.

Albert L. Weeks, The Other Side of Coexistence: An Analysis of Russian Foreign Policy (New York: Pitman, 1970), pp. 32–33. In his book Grand Delusion, defensist author Gorodetsky insists that Stalin’s motive for annexing half of Poland was “to bring war to a hasty end before Russia too became involved in the conflict.” Yet Stalin, following the dismemberment of Poland, immediately embarked on a policy of supplying Hitler with war-related matériel so that he could wage war more effectively against France, Britain, et al. See discussion of Dimitrov above. Far from wishing the war to stop, he hoped to keep it going.

See A. N. Yakovlev, ed., 1941 god. Dokumenty, vol. 2 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodniy Fond “Demokratiya,” 1998), p. 584; from Comintern General Secretary Georgi Dimitrov’s diary. (For the full text, see appendix 3.)

Adam A. Claasen, Hitler’s Northern War: The Luftwaffe’s Ill-Fated Campaign 1940–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), p. 11.

Topitsch, Stalin’s War, pp. 86–87. This author quotes an English biographer of Churchill, E. Hughes, to the effect that Molotov (and Stalin) were actually encouraging Hitler to attack the USSR: “Molotov curtly demanded further concessions in the Balkan area and the Dardanelles, fully knowing that this would enrage the Fuehrer and so lure him to declare war on Russia” (Stalin’s War, p. 88). The idea is that if Hitler were provoked into attacking the Soviets, the latter would not only easily defeat the aggressor but be seen as the victim of an “unjustifiable act of aggression.” Russian researchers so far have remained silent about the possibility that it was Stalin’s intention to provoke Hitler into “committing suicide” by attempting the impossibility of invading, conquering, and occupying the huge USSR.

Topitsch, Stalin’s War, pp. 84–85.

This is based on new research by Russian historians. Historian M. I. Mel’-tyukhov argues uniquely that the decimation of Red Army staff and line officers from the 1930s purges may have been exaggerated in terms of the purges’ alleged crippling effect on the Red Army’s overall war-fighting capabilities (Upushchennyi shans Stalina Sovetskyi Soyuz i bor’ba za Yevropu 1939–1941 [Moscow: Veche, 2000], pp. 368–69).

M. Yu. Brant et al., Rossiya I mir. Uchebnaya kniga po istorii (Moscow: Vlados, 1994), pp. 173–75.

O. S. Soroko-Tsyupi, ed., Mir v XX veke (Moscow: Proveshcheniye, 1997), pp. 168–72. For other accents in the new Russian textbooks, see appendix 4.