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

^{CHAPTER 3} SHARING THE SPOILS

RIBBENTROP WAS THOROUGHLY FETED IN MOSCOW ON HIS SECOND visit to the Soviet capital on September 27 and 28, 1939. Although he was there for the serious business of negotiating and signing the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, the prevailing mood of success infecting both parties after their joint destruction of Poland was so pervasive that he was treated with all the pomp and ceremony that the Soviet state could muster, including a performance of Swan Lake and a twenty-four-course gala banquet.

As Ribbentrop was returning to Molotov’s office for an evening session of talks, however, he had the opportunity to see the other side of Soviet hospitality. Waiting in an anteroom with his entourage, he encountered the Estonian foreign minister, Karl Selter, as he was leaving a meeting with Molotov. The two certainly knew one another; Selter had been in Berlin only four months earlier to sign a nonaggression pact with Ribbentrop. Yet, their chance meeting in Moscow was certainly more strained. History does not record whether the two exchanged anything other than the usual diplomatic platitudes, but Selter had a hunted look—and for good reason.

It was Selter’s second visit to Moscow that week. A tall, seasoned diplomat, considered one of the ablest politicians in the Estonian government, he had trained as a lawyer before entering politics and held a number of ministerial and diplomatic posts prior to being appointed foreign minister the previous year. This would be his sternest test. In his September 24 meeting with Molotov, Selter had expected to sign a new trade treaty with the USSR, but instead the Soviet foreign commissar had wanted to discuss political matters. Soviet-Estonian relations were in something of a crisis, with the Estonians still unsettled by the potential meaning of the Nazi-Soviet Pact for them and the Soviets agitated by the ongoing war. To add to the tensions, the previous week, the Polish submarine Orzeł had escaped from Tallinn harbor, and Moscow was aggrieved, arguing that the Estonian authorities should have done more to detain the vessel. In response to this perceived “provocation,” Red Army troops had been massed on Estonia’s eastern border, and the Red Air Force was overflying Estonian airspace, apparently carrying out reconnaissance.

When Molotov met Selter for talks that evening in the Kremlin, therefore, the mood was commensurately fraught. Molotov began by airing his concerns about the implications of the recent Orzeł crisis for Soviet security, claiming that the Estonian government was either unwilling or unable to “keep order in its country” and demanding guarantees to the contrary, embodied in the proposal of a mutual assistance pact. Selter gamely replied that there were no shortcomings in Estonia’s ability to keep order and that the suggested pact was unnecessary and unwanted by the Estonian people and would impair Estonian sovereignty. Molotov was unmoved, however, assuring Selter that the pact with the Soviet Union would bring no perils. “We are not going to force Communism on Estonia,” he said, adding, “Estonia will retain her independence, her government, parliament, foreign and domestic policy, army and economic system. We are not going to touch all this.” When Selter protested further, Molotov cut to the chase: “The Soviet Union is now a great power whose interests need to be taken into consideration. If you do not want to conclude a mutual assistance pact with us, then we will have to guarantee our security in other ways, perhaps more drastic, perhaps more complicated. I ask you: do not compel us to use force against Estonia.”

If Selter had the impression of being a mouse caught in the claws of a playfully malevolent cat, he would not have been far wrong. Requesting leave to discuss the Soviet “proposal” with his government, he was told that the matter “cannot be delayed,” and a direct telephone line to Tallinn was produced. Selter protested that such delicate discussions could not be carried out in that way and asked that he be permitted to return to the Estonian capital the following day. As he left, Molotov told him, “I advise you to yield to the wishes of the Soviet Union in order to avoid something worse.”

An hour after leaving the Kremlin, Molotov’s office telephoned Selter, requesting another meeting at midnight the same evening. This time, he was presented with a unilateral Soviet draft of the disputed “mutual assistance pact” and badgered into a discussion of the locations—including Tallinn—that might be “of interest to the Soviet Union” as possible military bases. Once again, Molotov hectored him on the urgency of the matter and the inadvisability of any delay, adding that the agreement was “ready for signature.”

Returning to Tallinn the next day, Selter discussed the Soviet proposal with his cabinet colleagues. German diplomatic circles were also sounded out, but their response—that Estonia was essentially on its own—caused consternation. Given the nonaggression pact made with Germany in June 1939, the Estonian cabinet was justified in expecting some assistance from the Germans when faced with blatant Soviet intimidation. German inaction, therefore, tended to confirm what some of them already feared: that the political constellation had shifted with the signing of the pact between Hitler and Stalin, and Estonia was being cut adrift. Despite some defiant rhetoric, sober pragmatism was the order of the day, and Selter was dispatched again to Moscow with instructions to conclude the best terms possible with the Soviet Union. The alternative was unthinkable: “To refuse the Soviet proposal,” President Konstantin Päts intoned, “would mean to knowingly send the entire Estonian people to their death.”

Yet, when Selter returned to Moscow on September 27—accompanied, rather superfluously, by two Estonian experts on international law—he found that the goalposts had already shifted. Just as the Soviet foreign minister had exploited the case of the Orzeł to undermine the Estonian position three days earlier, Molotov now used the alleged sinking of the Soviet merchantman Metallist in the Baltic, the previous day, to undermine Selter once again. On the unsubstantiated claim that the Metallist had been sunk by the Orzeł, Molotov asserted that the previous proposals were no longer sufficient: Soviet security now required additional Estonian concessions.

In response to Selter’s protestations of his country’s innocence in the affair, Molotov called upon Stalin himself to join the discussion. The Soviet leader showed his avuncular side upon entering the room soon after, joking with the Estonians, but he quickly got down to business. Once apprised of the essentials, he stated ominously, “What is there to argue about? Our proposal stands and that must be understood.” What passed for negotiations continued for the next couple hours, the Soviets insisting on placing 35,000 Red Army troops in Estonia to “protect order” and demanding a base in Tallinn itself, and the Estonians desperately trying to resist while sticking to the diplomatic niceties that their opponents had long since abandoned. Browbeaten, berated, and bullied, the Estonian delegates returned the following day having decided that they had no choice but to yield. Yet, with Ribbentrop waiting in the wings, they were again met with additional demands and the threat that “other possibilities” existed for ensuring Soviet security. The mutual assistance pact was finally signed at midnight on September 28 and ratified by the Estonian president a week later. Nominally, the treaty obliged both parties to respect each other’s independence; yet, by allowing for the establishment of Soviet military bases on Estonian soil, it fatally undermined Estonian sovereignty. Estonia was effectively at Stalin’s mercy.

IF THE ESTONIANS HAD THOUGHT THAT THEY WERE ALONE IN THEIR tortuous negotiations with the Soviets, they were mistaken. They were just the first on the list. Once the treaty with Estonia had been settled, Moscow’s focus turned to the other countries promised to it by the secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the follow-up agreement signed by Ribbentrop. Stalin was putting down a marker, as much for Berlin’s attention as for the rest of the world, that the Baltic states were now under his “protection.”

A week after the Estonian treaty, a similar pact was forced on Latvia, requiring the cession of bases at Liepāja, Pitrags, and Ventspils on the Baltic coast and the stationing of Red Army garrisons totaling 30,000 troops. Again, Latvian sovereignty was supposedly not affected by the agreement, and the government in Riga was left untouched for the time being. Yet, like their Estonian neighbors, the Latvians were under few illusions about their predicament and knew that little help would be forthcoming from Germany. Molotov would later boast that he “pursued a very hard line” with the Latvians, telling their minister for foreign affairs, Vilhelms Munters, that he “would not go home” until he had signed an agreement. Stalin was even blunter, informing the hapless minister “frankly” in early October 1939 that “a division of spheres of interest has already taken place. As far as Germany is concerned, we could occupy you.”

In Lithuania, Soviet advances received a slightly more positive response, if only because the October 10, 1939, mutual assistance pact had been sweetened by Moscow’s agreement to hand the disputed city of Vilnius (the former Polish Wilno) over to Lithuanian control. Nonetheless, the terms on offer were identical in their essentials to those presented to Estonia and Latvia: mutual aid in event of attack and the stationing of large numbers of Red Army troops. Moreover, Soviet methods, it seemed, were unchanged: as one of the Lithuanian delegation noted, arguing with Molotov was akin to “throwing peas against a wall.” The threat of violence, implicit or explicit, combined with the new strategic realities of war, had left Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia helplessly exposed to Moscow’s designs. Unable to resist sensibly, they had been forced to accommodate Soviet demands and now existed very much in the Soviet shadow. By mid-October 1939, barely six weeks after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin had moved to exercise control of most of the territory promised him by Hitler, extending his reach to the Baltic coast and securing the stationing of around 70,000 Red Army troops in the three Baltic states, a larger force than the combined standing armies of the three countries.

While the Baltic politicians had wrestled, the Germans had merely squirmed. Right from the opening of the Soviet invasion of Poland, the Baltic governments had telegraphed Berlin repeatedly, requesting that Germany explain its position, not least given the nonaggression pacts that she had signed with Latvia and Estonia only four months before. Berlin was well aware of the Baltic predicament; indeed, Stalin had informed Hitler of his intentions in late September, at which point German negotiations on a “defense treaty” with Lithuania had been halted, effectively abandoning that country to the Soviet sphere of influence. Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, himself born in Tallinn, was clear on the potential consequences, confiding to his diary, “If the Russians now march into the Baltic States, then the Baltic Sea will be strategically lost to us. Moscow will be more powerful than ever.” Yet, in response to repeated requests for clarity, if not assistance, Ribbentrop was unyielding, finally replying, in a circular to all three German legations in the region, with an explanation of the new frontier arrangements agreed with Moscow and stating tersely that “Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland do not belong to the German sphere of interest.” He added that his representatives in the affected countries were to “refrain from any explanations on this subject.” The Baltic states were being abandoned to their fate.

As if to reinforce the sense of foreboding and isolation spreading in the Baltic states, Hitler chose that autumn to call all ethnic Germans Heim ins Reich (home to the Reich), thereby further signaling his abandonment of the region to Stalin. While Ribbentrop was in Moscow in late September, the possible “repatriation” of the Volksdeutsche in those areas was raised for discussion, ostensibly in response to Stalin’s intention to assert his influence in the Baltic. With agreement secretly reached with the Soviets, the Germans approached the still independent Estonians and Latvians to agree on procedures and compensation. In wooing the Volksdeutsche themselves, Berlin stressed primarily the supposed benefits of joining the German “national community,” but the secondary message was an implicit warning of the difficult times to come. Many Baltic Germans took a good deal of persuading, not least because some of them were leaving lands where they had lived for generations. Aside from their personal tribulations, some saw it as a betrayal not only of their own history and culture but of a civilization. “I found it very difficult,” one evacuee recalled after the war, “that an old culturally European land, a land in which the Germans had, for centuries been the leading stratum and that in many respects bore a German face, was simply relinquished with a few words and the stroke of a pen.” Even some staunch National Socialists were appalled. One noted in his diary the “terrible shock” that news of the resettlement brought. “Everything for which we had lived,” he wrote, “everything our ethnic group had established in the course of 700 years was to disappear, just like a melting snowman.”

Nonetheless, despite the profound upheaval involved in relocating to a country of which many of them had little knowledge, the Baltic Germans responded to Hitler’s call in large numbers. As soon as mid-October 1939, the first ship carrying ethnic Germans left Riga en route for Germany. Over the ensuing two months a further eighty-six vessels would depart from the region’s ports, carrying over 60,000 people “home” to the German Reich, or at least to the annexed region of the Warthegau. In fact, such was the growing anxiety about the future in the Baltic states that the operation even attracted some Jewish applicants. For the Baltic populations that remained, the departure of the Volksdeutsche was an ominous sign, an augury of an uncertain future. As one Estonian-German remembered, “They [the Estonians] saw the danger from the east [and] they understood how difficult it was for us to leave Estonia. And, as we boarded ship in Tallinn to leave our homeland and ‘Deutschland über Alles’ was played, followed by the Estonian national anthem, many broke into tears.”

Events in Finland that winter would spur the exodus. Like their Baltic neighbors, the Finns were invited to Moscow to discuss “political questions” in early October 1939. Like their neighbors, they attended, sending a delegation led by the veteran diplomat Juho Paasikivi to receive the Soviet proposals, which included a northward extension of the border in the Karelian Isthmus, close to Leningrad, and a thirty-year lease on the port of Hanko at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland. For their part, the Soviets seem to have assumed that the Finns would be as cowed and helpless as the Baltic governments before them; as Nikita Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs, “All we had to do was raise our voice a little bit and the Finns would obey.” Certainly there would be no intervention from Berlin. As with the Baltic states, Ribbentrop refrained from any comment beyond a pious wish that Finland might “settle matters with Russia in a peaceful manner,” and he reacted with horror at the prospect of the former Finnish president coming to Berlin for talks. The German ambassador in Finland, meanwhile, was privately instructed to “avoid any commitments which would disturb German-Soviet relations.”

Despite their isolation, however, the Finns saw fit to resist Soviet threats. They tabled two counterproposals and sought to draw out negotiations for much of the following month, convinced that Moscow was bluffing and that right was on their side. Molotov, it seemed, had met his match in the wily Paasikivi and snapped ominously at the final meeting between the two men that “since we civilians don’t seem to be making any progress, perhaps it’s the soldiers’ turn to speak.”

In due course, the soldiers would indeed find their voice. On November 26, 1939, a Soviet border post near the village of Mainila in Karelia came under artillery fire, killing four Red Army men and wounding nine. Molotov hurried to blame the Finns for the “deplorable act of aggression,” despite the fact that the post was beyond the range of Finnish gunners, who had been withdrawn from the frontier as a precaution. Summoning Helsinki’s representatives to Moscow once again, he declared that his government was henceforth freed from the obligations of the existing Soviet-Finnish nonaggression pact and that normal relations could no longer be maintained. Just as Hitler had manufactured the Gleiwitz incident three months earlier, a false-flag operation to provide him with a casus belli against Poland, Stalin had done the same at Mainila, giving communists worldwide the spurious argument they needed to justify Soviet aggression. Within four days the Red Army was on the march.

At first glance, it is difficult to imagine more of a military mismatch. The twenty-six divisions and 500,000 soldiers deployed by the Soviets should have been sufficient to easily sweep aside the 130,000 soldiers fielded by the Finns. In every sphere, the Red Army had an overwhelming advantage, with three times as many soldiers and thirty times as many aircraft. On the Karelian Isthmus, for example, where the main Soviet attack was expected, the Finns could field only 21,000 men with 71 artillery pieces and 29 antitank guns against a Red Army force comprising 120,000 men, 1,400 tanks, and over 900 field guns. In addition to its numerical advantage, Moscow was convinced that the Finnish working class would rise up in support of their communist “liberators” and serve as a “fifth column” behind enemy lines, disrupting logistics and undermining morale. Soviet confidence was naturally high, therefore, with senior military personnel allocating only twelve days to the operation and anticipating such a swift advance that Red Army commanders were even warned not to cross the border into neutral Sweden—three hundred kilometers distant—by mistake.

The reality was to be rather different. Material and numerical advantages would count for little in the extreme conditions of a Finnish winter, when temperatures plummeted as low as –40°C. In addition, much of the terrain through which Soviet soldiers would have to trudge was a trackless, snowbound wasteland of deep pine forests, punctuated by frozen rivers, lakes, and swamps—all but impassable to a modern mechanized army. Making the situation harder still, the Karelian Isthmus, north of Leningrad, had been fortified in the interwar period and now boasted an extensive (though incomplete) network of bunkers, trenches, natural obstacles, and earthworks, known as the Mannerheim Line, after Finland’s military commander in chief. The Red Army would clearly not be having things all its own way.

The Soviets’ numerical superiority was also lessened by the differing quality of the opposing troops. For its part, the Red Army was mired in crisis. Still reeling from the purges that had cut a murderous swathe through its ranks in the mid-1930s and accounted for over 85 percent of senior officers, it was hamstrung by poor leadership, defective training regimes, and low morale. And though well armed in comparison with the Finns, its ranks lacked winter clothing, skis, and camouflage, with both the infantry and their tanks going into battle that November sporting their traditional olive green color scheme, making them an easy target for their opponents. Tactically, too, the Red Army was lacking, with invention and initiative among the officer class proving a secondary casualty of the purges. What passed for military doctrine, then, was often simply a massed, frontal assault, with shortcomings exacerbated by an insufficient coordination between the various branches of the armed forces.

The Finns, meanwhile, were highly motivated. And far from welcoming the Soviets as Moscow had predicted, they were imbued with a staunch patriotism, which ensured that what their soldiers might have lacked in materiel, they made up for in morale. They were also able to draw on a large pool of trained reservists to bolster their standing forces, and many of them brought vital local knowledge with them, as well as excellent fieldcraft and survival skills. One quip that did the rounds that winter summed up their optimism in the face of such an apparently powerful foe: “They are so many and our country is so small,” they would say. “Where will we find room to bury them all?”

Typically, the Soviet assault on Finland was both political and military. So, as Soviet bombers hit Helsinki and Viipuri and tanks and infantry made their first sallies against the Mannerheim Line, a pro-communist puppet government was established at Terijoki, the first small town across the old Soviet-Finnish border. The Finnish Democratic Republic was led by veteran communist Otto Kuusinen, whose main claim to fame was that he had survived the Soviet purges. Yet, despite assiduously courting the trade unions and the moderate Left, Kuusinen found himself ignored, recognized solely by his Moscow masters, with his writ running only in those areas “liberated” by the Red Army.

Such political misjudgments were allied to serious strategic failings. For all its material superiority, the Red Army could be remarkably inflexible—the archetypal “colossus with feet of clay.” Its tactical naivety, it seems, was often matched by a very cautious approach, in which the slightest Finnish resistance could hold up an advance for hours. In the conditions—with only a few roads and tracks providing a passage through largely impenetrable forests—this naturally played into the defenders’ hands, and Soviet assaults quickly deteriorated into enormous armored traffic jams.

As the Red Army advance stalled, the Finns moved to counterattack, showing all the guile and ingenuity that their opponents lacked. Small units of mobile ski troops would outflank the invaders and separate them from their supply columns, using the long nights of the Scandinavian winter to harry and ambush their foes under cover of darkness. Infantry, meanwhile, employed improvised explosives, such as satchel charges, or the famed “Molotov cocktail,” a petrol bomb containing kerosene and tar, which could be remarkably effective when aimed at the air intakes of Soviet tanks. The weapon got its nickname after Molotov claimed in public that Soviet bombing missions were in fact dropping food packages over Finland. Soviet cluster bombs were then ironically dubbed by the Finns as “Molotov breadbaskets,” and the humble petrol bomb was named as “a drink to go with the food.” For all the mocking humor, the Molotov cocktail—mass-produced in a Finnish distillery—would prove a formidable weapon.

In time, Finnish tactics, which had hitherto been largely ad hoc, evolved into a recognized method. After isolating and containing each Soviet advance, the Finns would systematically reduce the enemy columns, with relentless probing attacks and the harsh winter weather combining to sap Soviet resistance. This tactic became known as the motti, from the Finnish word for timber stacked prior to being chopped. The sinister implication was that Soviet forces, thus encircled, were merely waiting to be dealt with, either by Finnish soldiers or by the elements.

The harsh Nordic winter could be a fearsome foe. While the Finns were used to the freezing conditions and tended to dress appropriately, the Red Army soldiers had little protection against the cold. All too often, the weather wrought as great a death toll as military action, and Finnish troops grew grimly accustomed to finding their enemies frozen solid where they crouched or lay, supposedly poised for action. In some cases, the survivors made for an even more gruesome spectacle. On one occasion, a Finnish officer took delivery of two Red Army prisoners brought in with snow blindness and severe frostbite to their hands and feet. “After a while” an eyewitness reported, “the Russians became aware of the heat from the stove and stumbled towards it. Then they both put their hands on the red-hot iron. They kept them there. They couldn’t feel a thing. And there they stayed with their hands sizzling like rashers of bacon.”

Aided by the weather and their own ingenuity, the Finns scored some remarkable successes. By Christmas Eve 1939, both the Soviet 139th and 75th Rifle Divisions had been effectively wiped out at the Battle of Tolvajärvi, north of Lake Ladoga, while the 44th and 163rd Divisions were annihilated further to the north at Suomussalmi in early January. The latter battle was perhaps the most exemplary of Finnish methods. After the Red Army’s 163rd Division encountered stiff resistance, the elite 44th Division was sent in support, but both suffered a similar fate. Strung out along the narrow roads, hemmed in by lakes and forests with their forward progress prevented by a fortified Finnish roadblock, the two divisions were harassed by fast-moving ski troops and ambushes and gradually broken up into smaller and smaller sections, exposing the enemy soldiers to the ravages of cold and hunger as well as combat. Each dwindling pocket was then wiped out, one by one. When the two divisions were finally eliminated, the Finns discovered over 27,000 frozen corpses littered along the forest road, amid the scattered remains of their equipment. It was a horrific scene. As a reporter discovered, the dead were everywhere: “On the sides of the road; under the trees; in the temporary shelters and dugouts where they had tried to escape the relentless fury of the Finnish ski-patrols. And all along both sides of the road, for all these four miles, are lorries, field-kitchens, staff-cars, ammunition carts, limbers and every other kind of vehicle you can imagine.”

In the face of such morale-sapping setbacks, Red Army justice was swift and harsh. The commander of the 44th Division, General Aleksei Vinogradov, who had escaped the slaughter and returned to Soviet lines, was court-martialed a few days later and executed in front of his few surviving soldiers. NKVD reports suggested that the rank and file approved of the punishment.

In the motti battles, the Finns used snipers to devastating effect. Their deployment had an important psychological aspect, as they were able not only to spread fear but also to maximize the mental anguish suffered by their opponents, by targeting commanding officers, for instance, or concentrating their fire on field kitchens or on men huddled around a campfire. A few snipers even targeted soldiers while they were relieving themselves, reinforcing the impression among survivors that nowhere was safe. Using their exceptional camouflage and fieldcraft skills, the Finnish marksmen were expert at concealing their positions and took a heavy toll on the Soviet troops. As one Red Army colonel later complained, “We couldn’t see [the Finns] anywhere, yet they were all over the place.[I]nvisible death was lurking from every direction.”

Most famous among the snipers was Simo Häyhä, a slight, unassuming thirty-four-year-old corporal serving with the 34th Jäger Regiment in the snowy wastes north of Lake Ladoga. Although working with only an aged variant of the Russian Moisin-Nagant bolt-action rifle, equipped with standard iron sights, he was able to “score” over five hundred confirmed kills in barely one hundred days in the front line: the highest figure of any sniper in World War II. Targeted with artillery strikes and countersniping, Häyhä survived the war, despite being shot through the face. He was known to the Soviets as “Belaya Smert” (White Death).

As the Red Army’s forces ground to a halt in early January 1940, stalemate ensued. Bolstered by their successes, the Finns were also buoyed by expressions of international support. Right from the outset, Helsinki had benefitted from an outpouring of sympathy, most tellingly perhaps when the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations for its attack and the League Council called for its members to assist the Finns. For many in the West, Finland became a cause célèbre, a moral test case, and a fillip for all those still dismayed by their impotence over Poland. In this spirit, perhaps mindful of Poland’s fate, Neville Chamberlain declared in January 1940 that “Finland must not be allowed to disappear from the map.” First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill echoed that sentiment in his own inimitable style: “Only Finland,” he said in a radio address, “superb, nay sublime, in the jaws of peril, shows what free men can do.”

The case of Finland, it seemed, suggested a juxtaposition of Stalin’s aggression with that of his political partner Hitler, as the British Daily Sketch newspaper argued in an editorial: “Our task in this war is to defeat Hitlerism, but it is still Hitlerism if the aggressor is called Stalin.” As a result of such sentiments, a huge relief effort was launched, with Sweden, Britain, and France in the vanguard, collecting military hardware to be sent to Helsinki: 500,000 hand grenades, 500 antiaircraft guns, and nearly 200,000 rifles. Meanwhile, some 11,000 volunteers—mainly Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians—registered their willingness to fight for Finland’s cause, with the American president’s cousin Kermit Roosevelt among them. Some citizens of Finland’s Baltic neighbors joined up too, in many cases eager for the fight that their own governments had not dared to invoke. In the former Lithuanian capital of Kaunas, for instance, over two hundred volunteers crowded into the Finnish consulate to enlist.

Altruism is a rare quality in politics, of course, and it should be noted that there was precious little of it in Allied planning to aid the Finns. Although high principles and ideals may well have motivated individuals, the politicians had other concerns, not least using any putative campaign to help Finland as an opportunity to hinder Hitler. Consequently, when drawing up tentative plans to assist the Finns, the Allies rather ambitiously foresaw that any landing force would travel via Narvik in northern Norway and Luleå in northern Sweden, both of which lay on the route used by the Germans for the extraction of the Swedish iron ore so vital to the German war effort. In this way, the Western Allies neatly subsumed Finland’s cause into the wider one of fighting Hitler. Unsurprisingly perhaps, given its grand geostrategic ambition, the plan came to naught.

Stalin, meanwhile, was furious: a campaign that should have lasted only two weeks had lasted three times that, with no success in sight. The Red Army was being humiliated before the eyes of an outside world that was growing restive, and—as Khrushchev believed—the Germans were watching events with “undisguised glee.” Certainly, the Red Army’s difficulties in the Winter War had been noted with interest in Nazi military and political circles, with many doubtless seeing the apparent weaknesses of the Soviets as an important revelation. Joseph Goebbels, for instance, clearly noted the Red Army’s failings: “Russia, as expected, is not making especially swift progress,” he wrote in his diary on December 4, adding, “Her army is not much good.” Elsewhere, the appropriate conclusions were being drawn. As the German ambassador in Finland wrote to Berlin in January 1940, “In view of this experience the ideas on Bolshevist Russia must be thoroughly revised.” The Red Army’s inability to “dispose” of such a small country as Finland, he argued, suggested that a change of approach toward Moscow might be advisable. “In these circumstances,” he wrote, “it might now be possible to adopt an entirely different tone toward the gentlemen in the Kremlin from that of August and September.”

Yet, for all that, Nazi Germany’s attitude toward the conflict was more nuanced than Khrushchev would have imagined. Public opinion, for instance, broadly sympathized with the Finns and was perturbed to see a Nordic nation and a traditional ally of Germany apparently being sacrificed to communist expansion. At the same time, concerns were expressed about the wisdom of Helsinki’s decision to stand firm against the might of Moscow. Some were more forthright in their opinions. The conservative diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, for instance, decried Germany’s collusion with the Soviet Union, stating, “In such company, in the eyes of the world, we now appear to be a big gang of robbers.” The Italian foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, would have concurred. He noted in early December 1939 a growing anti-German sentiment in Italy and claimed that the fate of the Finns would be of much less concern to the Italian people were it not for the fact that the Soviets were the allies of Germany: “In all Italian cities,” he wrote, “there are sporadic demonstrations by students in favour of Finland and against Russia. But we must not forget that the people say ‘Death to Russia’ and really mean ‘Death to Germany.’”

Berlin’s official position, meanwhile, was one of resolute nonintervention and disinterest. Indeed, the line circulated to all Foreign Office personnel from Wilhelmstrasse was that “Germany has no part in these events [and that] sympathy is to be expressed for the Russian standpoint.” For good measure, it was requested that Germany’s representatives should “refrain from any expression of sympathy for the Finnish position.” True to the letter of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the German government refused to allow any support to be given to its partner’s opponent, even halting Italian deliveries of weapons in transit though Germany destined for Finland. Any remaining debate on the issue within Germany was settled by a Völkischer Beobachter article—thought to have been penned by Hitler himself—stating that, though “the German Volk has nothing against the Finnish people,” it was “both naïve and sentimental” to expect Germany to support Finland, when Finland had treated Germany with such “haughty disapproval” in the years since the Nazi seizure of power. This line was echoed more bluntly in Goebbels’s diary: “The Finns are whining that we offer them no help,” he wrote, when they “never helped us.”

In fact, if Berlin was offering any help, it was to the Soviets. Talks began on the provisioning of Soviet submarines operating in the Gulf of Bothnia immediately on the outbreak of the Finnish War, with the Germans keen to cooperate in anticipation of a quid pro quo elsewhere. A merchantman was found and converted, and a crew was raised, compete with three undercover Soviet officers. But then the Soviets seemingly got cold feet and called the operation off, perhaps wary about being too heavily indebted to their new partner. Berlin’s alacrity in the matter had been noticed, however, and the Finns consequently tended to view Germany more as an “accomplice of the Soviet Union” than anything else.

Despite such expressions of support, Stalin’s annoyance at the humiliation of his Red Army at this most sensitive juncture was barely assuaged. At a meeting at his dacha outside Moscow in January 1940, he raged at the commander of the Finnish campaign, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who replied in the same tone, claiming that Stalin was to blame for the fiasco because he had had all the best generals killed during the purges. Voroshilov then smashed a plate of food in fury. With that, a wholesale reorganization of the Finnish operation became inevitable, and Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, one of the Red Army’s ablest commanders and the mastermind of the Polish invasion four months earlier, was brought in to replace Voroshilov.

Timoshenko quickly set to work. Abandoning the costly eastern front, where the motti battles had so decimated Soviet forces, he concentrated his efforts on the Karelian Isthmus, packing the Soviet side of the front with 600,000 troops, backed by massed artillery and the newest tanks. In addition, he tightened the control and cooperation between the different branches of service in the Red Army and issued a revised tactical doctrine. The Finns were to be forced to fight a conventional war for the narrow strip of the Mannerheim Line against crushingly superior enemy forces. Finland would have its Thermopylae.

Timoshenko’s assault began at dawn on February 1, 1940, with a rolling barrage of 300,000 shells pulverizing defenses and reviving memories of World War I. In the town of Summa, for instance, four hundred Soviet shells per minute rained down on Finnish positions. Over the days and nights that followed, repeated artillery barrages, combined with probing attacks by armored columns with massed infantry support, systematically degraded the defensive strongpoints, blockhouses, and bunkers of the Mannerheim Line. After ten days of intense combat, the Finnish defenders were forced to withdraw to a secondary line of fortifications, but even that they could not hold. Soviet spearheads were once again breaching the Finnish lines, with some Red Army infantry even circumventing the defenses by a perilous detour across the ice of Lake Ladoga. By the end of the month, Finland’s forces were no longer able to resist.

Facing the inevitable, a Finnish delegation traveled to Moscow for negotiations on March 7. In truth, there was little to negotiate, but keen to end the war and forestall the looming foreign intervention on Finland’s side, Stalin offered remarkably moderate terms. Karelia, including the city of Viipuri and all of the Mannerheim fortifications, was to be ceded to Moscow, with further territorial losses mainly in the Arctic North and East. In addition, the Hanko Peninsula at the western end of the Gulf of Finland would be leased to the USSR as a naval base for a period of thirty years. Beyond that, there would be no Soviet occupation, no puppet government, and no infringement of Finnish sovereignty. Kuusinen was pensioned off to run the rump Kare-lo-Finnish Soviet Republic, which incorporated the ceded lands and stood in wait to incorporate more Finnish territory—or indeed all of Finland—should the opportunity arise. The resulting Treaty of Moscow was signed on March 12, and the guns fell silent the following day. Twenty-five thousand Finns had been killed over barely one hundred days of fighting. The Soviet death toll—still disputed—is estimated at over 200,000, but as Khrushchev candidly admitted, “our people were never told the truth.”

Considering such losses and the horrors of the Winter War itself, the people of the Baltic states might have been forgiven for thinking that they had got off lightly by acceding to Moscow’s demands and submitting merely to the establishment of Soviet bases on their territory. Certainly, Molotov was keen to emphasize the benign nature of the new arrangements. As he stressed to the Supreme Soviet in October 1939, “These pacts are inspired by mutual respect for the governmental, social and economic system of each of the contracting parties,” adding that “foolish talk of sovietisation of the Baltic States is useful only to our common enemies.” His Baltic counterparts, meanwhile, did their best to put a positive spin on events, but they were soon to be disabused of any such optimism.

The emptiness of Soviet promises of “nonintervention” in the internal affairs of the Baltic states was exposed almost from the very outset. Although relations were outwardly correct, behind the scenes there was considerable friction. Arriving teams of Soviet military personnel, charged with setting up the bases agreed on with Moscow, routinely demanded more than set out in the treaties. In Latvia, for instance, an additional fifty-kilometer-wide coastal strip was requested as a Soviet “military zone,” while in Lithuania the Red Army demanded the right to establish a garrison in Vilnius. In Estonia two additional airfields and further bases were ceded to the Soviets. Across the region, the numbers of incoming troops quickly exceeded those initially arranged, and rental and compensation packages—stipulated by the treaties—were ignored. The attitude of one Soviet major was perhaps emblematic of Moscow’s high-handed attitude toward its new “allies”: “The Red Army knows only one government,” he said, “and that is the government of the Soviet Union.”

Despite such distinctly unneighborly attitudes, the degree of premeditation and conspiracy involved in the Soviet subversion of the Baltic states is traditionally exaggerated. Most writers on the subject cite an NKVD document from October 1939, known as Order 001223, which is presented as proof of Moscow’s intention to “cleanse” the Baltic states of all “anti-Soviet elements,” in effect anticipating the deportations of 1941 already in 1939, at a time when the Baltic states had not yet been annexed. However, this is incorrect. Order 001223, which has never been published in the West, is thought to relate to affairs in newly annexed eastern Poland but has habitually been confused with the instruction with regard to the Baltic states issued by Ivan Serov in the spring of 1941 (see Chapter 8). In fact, it seems sensible to suggest that Soviet plans regarding the Baltic states were much more gradualist in nature, evidently based on the belief that the close relationship fomented by the “bases agreements” would inevitably lead to a groundswell of popular enthusiasm in favor of union with the USSR. When Comintern chief Georgi Dimitrov wrote about the Baltic mutual assistance pacts in his diary in the autumn of 1939, he betrayed Moscow’s rather optimistic thinking on the issue. “We have found the right form to allow us to bring a number of countries into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence,” he wrote. “We are not going to seek their sovietisation. The time will come when they will do that for themselves!”

The reality would be more prosaic. The decision to occupy and sovietize the Baltic states likely crystallized gradually through the early spring and summer of 1940. In the first instance, underground communist activity in the Baltic region spiked in March of that year, provoking an inevitable deterioration in relations between the Baltic governments and Moscow. In due course, incidents involving the Soviet “guests” began to multiply: in Estonia, Soviet warships fired on an Estonian aircraft over Tallinn, and in Latvia a local man was shot dead by two drunk Soviet officers. Increasingly, local populations, already predominantly anticommunist, began to view the Soviets with open contempt, and tensions rose further. Although politicians tried to play down such incidents and maintain a positive commentary on relations with Moscow, in private some were beginning to feel the chill. At the end of April 1940, for instance, the Lithuanian ambassador in Moscow reported home that “a black cat [had] crossed the road of Soviet-Lithuanian relations.”

The black cat did not go unnoticed. Already in May 1940, contingency plans were being prepared by the Latvian and Lithuanian governments, arranging for powers to pass to selected diplomatic representatives in the event that contact with the home country was broken. The Estonians, meanwhile, arranged for some of their gold reserve, along with a part of the state archives, to be shipped abroad. In desperation, the Lithuanian president, Antanas Smetona, even offered his country to the Germans as a protectorate.

For their part, the Soviets presented a litany of complaints. They protested that the Baltic elites had hampered the deployment of the Red Army the previous autumn, delaying negotiations and dragging their feet on construction. They also claimed to have been troubled by the inevitable climate of hostility. They suggested, for instance, that in Latvia civilians who so much as spoke to Soviet personnel were liable to arrest, and a “malevolent atmosphere” encouraged espionage against Red Army installations. Moscow was doubtless also frustrated because it had been obliged to revise its earlier idea that the ordinary working people of the Baltic states would welcome its soldiers’ presence and prove amenable to a Soviet-style revolution. Unsurprisingly, then, relations had become strained by the early summer of 1940. In time, events far to the west would provide the catalyst for a further, terminal deterioration.

Hitler’s share of the spoils from the Nazi-Soviet Pact had not been insubstantial. Not only did he get his desired campaign against the Poles, dividing Poland with Stalin in the process, but he also had the prospect of Soviet economic aid helping him to sidestep the worst effects of the expected British blockade of Germany. Yet, perhaps most important for Hitler was the question of Rückendeckung: the fact that the pact with Stalin had covered his rear, allowing him to turn west with impunity and avoid the specter of a two-front war. So it was that Hitler sent his troops into Scandinavia in April 1940, essentially to forestall a planned British operation to occupy Narvik in northern Norway and to secure the strategically vital Norwegian western coast. The occupation went relatively smoothly; in Denmark only a few dozen casualties were incurred in an operation that lasted barely six hours. The operation in Norway was more complex, seeing stiff resistance from the Norwegian army as well as an attempted Allied intervention at Narvik, which was finally defeated in mid-June.

By that time, after six months of the so-called Phony War—during which German and Anglo-French forces faced each other in a state of war but without opening hostilities—the campaign in the west of Europe was already under way. When Hitler’s tanks finally rolled into France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, it appeared to the rest of Europe and the world that the battle had finally been joined—that the crucial contest to decide who would control the continent of Europe was now afoot. As the British general Alan Brooke noted in his diary on the first day of the campaign, “one of the greatest battles in history” had begun.

It was certainly substantial. Between them, the opposing forces on the western front amounted to 285 divisions and over 7 million men. They were evenly matched in manpower and materiel—with French tanks even considered superior—but a German advantage in morale and strategy was decisive. Bypassing the Maginot Line and driving through the Ardennes forest, German armored spearheads outthought and outpaced the British and French, forcing them inexorably backward and into one of the most catastrophic defeats of modern military history. Far from the static, plodding rerun of World War I that Stalin and others had envisaged, the campaign was characterized by rapid movement—the very epitome of what came to be known as the blitzkrieg.

With the world’s attention thus focused on events on the Maginot Line, in the French city of Sedan, and in the forests of the Ardennes, Moscow appears to have sensed an opportunity to consolidate its grip on the Baltic. On May 16, an article in Izvestia, the Soviet government’s mouthpiece, used the recent experience of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands to claim that “the neutrality of small states is a mere fantasy” and advise such states that “the policy of neutrality could not be called anything but suicide.” The warning was grimly prophetic.

Two days before the Izvestia article, Molotov’s Lithuanian counterparts had informed him about the case of a junior Red Army officer by the name of Butaev who had apparently been kidnapped in Lithuania and since died under mysterious circumstances. Ordinarily, perhaps, such an event, though troubling, would not cause an international incident, but May 1940 was no ordinary time. The Soviet response was not slow to materialize. On May 25, just as British and French forces were reeling under the German onslaught in the West, Molotov requested the presence of the Lithuanian ambassador in the Kremlin. He informed his guest that, in addition to Butaev, two additional Red Army soldiers had gone missing in Lithuania, alleging that they had been plied with drink, involved in criminal activities, and induced to desert. In truth, Butaev had deserted of his own volition to live with a prostitute but, when apprehended by NKVD officers, shot himself in broad daylight on a Vilnius street. Not to be swayed by details, however, Molotov asserted that responsibility for such events lay with the Lithuanian authorities, who, he said, clearly desired to provoke the Soviet Union; he closed by demanding that the Lithuanian government “take the necessary steps to halt such provocative action” lest he be forced to “take other measures.”

Soviet ire was evidently not restricted to the Lithuanians. On May 28, an article in Pravda criticized the “loyal attitude” that it perceived among the Estonian intelligentsia toward Great Britain, complaining that the University of Tartu, for instance, was a veritable hotbed of “pro-British propaganda.” An Estonian delegation at a book exhibition in Moscow personally experienced the abrupt change of climate. Arriving on May 26, its members had been warmly welcomed and feted, but two days later the atmosphere became so hostile that they were obliged to return home ahead of schedule.

As the British and French faltered before German aggression in the west, the Baltic states were exposed to the full fury of Molotov’s diplomatic offensive. On May 30—as the evacuation of British and French forces at Dunkirk was at its height—formal accusations were leveled at the Lithuanian government, alleging official collusion in the recent “outrages” against Red Army soldiers. Hurrying to Moscow, Lithuanian prime minister Antanas Merkys found Molotov in an unyielding mood. On June 7, the Soviet foreign minister demanded that two prominent members of the Lithuanian cabinet be removed; two days later he accused Lithuania of conspiring with Estonia and Latvia to establish an anti-Soviet military alliance. At a third meeting, on June 11, with Merkys and the Lithuanian cabinet offering everything possible to placate him, Molotov, determined not to be mollified, poured scorn on Lithuanian protestations of innocence. After only an hour, the meeting broke up, and Merkys returned to Vilnius, unaware that his efforts had served little purpose because the Red Army was already preparing its invasion.

On the night of June 14, 1940, while the world was transfixed by the entry of German troops into Paris, Molotov delivered the coup de grâce. Submitting an ultimatum to the Lithuanians, he demanded the arrest and trial of the two cabinet members of whom he disapproved and the formation of a new government capable of repairing relations with Moscow. Finally, an unspecified number of additional Soviet troops were to be allowed to enter Lithuanian territory to help preserve order. An answer was required by 10 a.m. the following morning.

Lithuania’s neighbors soon shared her agony. On June 15, as the government in Vilnius collapsed in acrimony and the Red Army began its unopposed invasion, Estonia was already blockaded. Now, Latvia and Estonia received the same ultimatum handed to the Lithuanians. As if to heighten tensions still further and warn of the perils of non-compliance, Soviet forces staged provocations against Baltic targets. At Masļenki on June 15, NKVD troops ambushed and killed five Latvian border guards and civilians; the day before, Soviet bombers en route to Helsinki from Tallinn had shot down a Finnish civilian aircraft, the Kaleva, with the loss of all nine passengers and crew on board, as well as a bag of French diplomatic mail, which was picked up by a Soviet submarine. The Soviet invasions quickly silenced the furor following both incidents.

Events at either end of the European continent that June had a chilling symmetry. On June 16, the same day that Wehrmacht troops paraded down the Champs Elysees in Paris, the Red Army trundled into the streets of the Latvian capital, Riga. The watching civilian populations of both cities were similarly dismayed and fearful. While the world had been distracted by Hitler’s spectacular victory over the French and the British in the west, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had quietly surrendered their independence. Two days later, Molotov extended his “warmest congratulations” to German ambassador Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg on the “splendid success of the German armed forces” in France. He might have expected the compliment to be returned.

As the respective national leaders of the Baltic states shuffled their governments, trying desperately to find communists and fellow travelers acceptable to Moscow, a few of the senior national politicians stayed in place, hoping perhaps that something of value might be salvaged from the crisis, an attitude typified by the response of the Latvian president, Kārlis Ulmanis, who stressed continuity to his people in a radio address: “I will stay in my place, you stay in yours.” He would remain in office until he was arrested by the NKVD.

Others would not be so accommodating. General Ludvigs Bolšteins, commander of the Latvian Border Guards, committed suicide, leaving a scathing note to his superiors: “We, the Latvians, built ourselves a brand new house—our country. Now an alien power wants to force us to tear it down ourselves. In this I cannot take part.” The Lithuanian president, Antanas Smetona—who had been an advocate of armed resistance against the Soviets—fled to the safety of German East Prussia by wading across a brook; the Soviet press reported mockingly that he turned his trousers up to do so. Smetona’s foreign minister, Juozas Urbšys, who was already in Moscow on diplomatic business, was simply arrested. Such people were soon replaced. On the same day that Smetona fled, Stalin’s representative, Vladimir Dekanozov, arrived in Vilnius, followed by Andrei Zhdanov in Estonia and Andrei Vyshinsky in Latvia. These three senior Moscow officials would oversee the rapid incorporation of the Baltic states into the USSR. As Molotov made clear to the new Lithuanian foreign minister, Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius, there was to be no alternative: “You must take a good look at reality and understand that in future small nations will have to disappear. Your Lithuania, along with the other Baltic nations will have to join the glorious family of the Soviet Union. Therefore you should begin to initiate your people into the Soviet system, which in future shall reign everywhere, throughout all Europe.” To his credit, Krėvė-Mickevičius would resign in protest once he had returned home, exclaiming that he did not want to participate in the burial of Lithuanian independence.

Events moved with dizzying speed that summer. After their experience in eastern Poland the previous autumn, the Soviets were already well practiced in the art of democratic demolition. Within a month, across all three Baltic states, parliamentary elections were called by the newly formed, Moscow-friendly governments. This in itself would have been quite a novelty, as all three states had spawned authoritarian—albeit largely benign—governments in the 1930s, but the Soviet variant of democracy was even less worthy of the name. Only approved candidates were permitted to stand; all others were removed from the ballot and arrested. Voting was compulsory, with those spoiling their ballot or refusing to vote risking arrest: “Only enemies of the people stay at home on election day,” warned one Estonian newspaper. To reassure the populace, Soviet representatives were at pains to stress that the independence of the Baltic nations would be respected, vehemently denying that incorporation into the USSR was in the offing. The results were preordained, to the point that they were even accidently announced in Moscow before the polls had closed: 97.2 percent of voters in Latvia, 99.2 percent in Lithuania, and 92.8 percent in Estonia were said to have voted for the approved list. Voter turnout was also unfeasibly high, ranging between 84 and 95 percent; one electoral precinct in Lithuania even achieved the remarkable feat of voter turnout reaching 122 percent. The true figure across all Lithuania has been estimated at barely 16 percent.

Once compliant “people’s parliaments” were installed, they merely had to vote themselves out of existence. The first act of each, therefore, upon meeting in late July was to petition Moscow for accession to the USSR as a constituent republic. After a period of “consultation,” the Supreme Soviet in Moscow duly granted the requests: Lithuania became a Soviet republic on August 3, 1940; Latvia followed two days later, and Estonia, on August 6. In Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius, there was confusion and humiliation as people sought to take in what had happened to them and to the independent states they had once inhabited. In desperation, a few took to the forests to fight the Soviet occupiers; others chose more passive forms of protest, such as placing flowers at national memorials or singing patriotic songs. Khrushchev would later write in his memoirs, without a hint of irony, that the annexation of the Baltic states was a “great triumph” for the Baltic peoples, as it gave them “the chance to live in conditions equal to those of the working class, peasantry, and labouring intelligentsia of Russia.”

Germany’s leadership was swift to recognize the new reality—all of which, of course, accorded with the terms of the secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its successor agreement—but it was a little more difficult to carry domestic opinion, which still tended to be distrustful of the Soviet Union. As if to sweeten the pill, Hitler ordered another round of evacuations of ethnic Germans from the Baltic region, which proved a godsend for those Volksdeutsche who had previously opted to remain behind and had now seen their worst fears realized. Accordingly, once procedures were formalized in January 1941, there was a second wave of evacuations from the former Baltic states, this time including many with only the most tenuous claims to German nationality. In Lithuania, over 50,000 volunteered to leave for Germany, even though the country’s remaining German population was estimated at barely 35,000. In Estonia, meanwhile, one official observed that, if the Soviets had allowed it, the vast majority of the Estonian population would have asked to be resettled.

German largesse was very much restricted to the Volksdeutsche, however. If the Baltic states had imagined that they would receive a sympathetic hearing in Berlin, they were sorely mistaken. In the German Foreign Ministry on Wilhelmstrasse, the procedures followed during and after the Soviet occupations were scrupulously correct but perceptibly chilly. A circular from June 17, 1940, reminded all staff that Soviet actions in the region “are the concern of Russia and the Baltic States” and warned them to “refrain from making any statement which could be interpreted as partisan.” A week later, after Latvian and Lithuanian diplomats in Berlin had both lodged notes of protest with their German counterparts over the formal incorporation of their countries into the Soviet Union, those notes were duly returned—“in a friendly manner”—with a reminder that such protests could only be accepted if presented in the name of their governments. As the diplomats no longer spoke in this capacity, they were effectively redundant. For one of them, it was all too much. Lithuanian chargé d’affaires Kazys Škirpa had questioned German press reporting on the crisis, complaining that only the Soviet version of events had been aired and that no sign of sympathy for Lithuania was in evidence. When told that German officials were refraining from any comment on the issue, according to the Foreign Office record, he “burst into tears and could not recover for some time.” While German officials obfuscated, Goebbels—in his diary at least—was brutally honest: “Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia transferred to the Soviet Union” he wrote. “This is the price we pay for Russian neutrality.”

The West withheld its blessing. The British, painfully aware of their own impotence, refused to recognize the Soviet annexations but refrained from making any specific comment on events and continued to deal as before with the—now exiled—representatives of the Baltic governments. Nonetheless, in British government circles the idea of a de facto recognition of the annexations was soon floated as a possible sop to bring Stalin onside. The American reaction was more principled. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles issued a formal statement—the Welles Declaration—condemning Soviet aggression and refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Soviet control in the region, citing “the rule of reason, of justice and of law,” without which, he said, “civilization itself cannot be preserved.” In private he was even more forthright, and when the Soviet ambassador, Konstantin Oumansky, opined that the United States should applaud Soviet action in the Baltic, as it meant that the Baltic peoples could enjoy “the blessings of liberal and social government,” his response was withering. “The US government,” Welles explained, “sees no difference in principle between the Russian domination of the Baltic peoples and the occupation by Germany of other small European nations.” Strong words, perhaps, but the point they expressed was moot; barely six weeks after the Red Army invasion, the Baltic states had effectively ceased to exist.

At the same time that the Baltic region was drawn inexorably into Moscow’s orbit, Stalin turned his gaze southwest toward Romania and the province of Bessarabia, which Moscow had lost in the aftermath of World War I. As in the Baltic example, Molotov’s sense of urgency was spurred by the awareness that the fall of France offered a unique opportunity for him to act while the world was looking the other way. France and Britain had offered a guarantee to Romania in March 1939, so with the defeat of the Western Allies on the continent, Bucharest was effectively at Moscow’s mercy. As Deputy Defense Commissar Lev Mekhlis wrote the day before France fell, “Bessarabia must be snatched from the thieving hands of the Romanian aristocrats.”

Officially at least, Germany’s position on Bessarabia mirrored that which she had adopted toward the Baltic states. When sounded out to ascertain Berlin’s intentions with regard to the region, the German ambassador in Moscow, Schulenburg, gave Molotov the green light, reiterating the “political disinterest” expressed when the secret protocol had been drawn up nearly a year before. Yet, beyond that, there was a concern in Berlin that the Soviets were edging ever closer to Germany’s vital interests—the Romanian oilfields at Ploiești—and to this end Ribbentrop had privately sought to defuse the crisis, fearing that the region could become a battleground. However, flushed with his recent successes, Molotov would not be deterred, and on June 26, 1940, he issued an ultimatum to the Romanian government in Bucharest, demanding the evacuation of all civil and military representatives from Bessarabia and requesting a reply within twenty-four hours. Bessarabia, it read, had been taken by Romania while the Soviet Union was weak and was now to be returned. In addition, by way of “compensation for the tremendous loss” that the Soviet Union had suffered, the neighboring region of Northern Bukovina was to be transferred to Soviet control as well.

Like its unfortunate Baltic counterparts, the Romanian government toyed with the idea of resistance—the firebrand former prime minister Nicolae Iorga exclaimed, “Curse us all if we don’t fight!”—but cooler heads within the cabinet prevailed, particularly when urged to comply by their German allies. On the morning of June 28, they agreed to submit to Soviet demands: “In order to avoid the serious consequences which might follow the use of force and the opening of hostilities in this part of Europe, the Romanian government finds itself obliged to accept the evacuation.” The Romanians’ withdrawal from the region began that same day, and within two days the Red Army had taken their place.

The Soviet arrival often came as a shock to the inhabitants. At Cernăuți (Czernowitz) on the morning of June 28, an eyewitness recalled, “you had the feeling that hell was upon the earth.” Another described the reaction: “Churches rang their bells, as if tolling a death-knell. People were running. Some knelt down to pray. Many were in a state of shock. A low wail was resounding down the streets.” He went on to describe the desperate civilian evacuation: “The atmosphere of desolation was intensifying hour by hour. Hundreds upon hundreds of people were heading for the railway station carrying what they had collected in just a few hours. All goods, vans and cattle waggons were lined up in a hurry. People were asked to pack in so that the space should hold as many as possible.”

As the last train left Cernăuți at 2 p.m. that afternoon, the first Soviet spearheads were already entering the city. Communists, naturally, were much more positive. Jacob Pesate had journeyed from Budapest to Cernăuți the day before the Red Army’s arrival—just as many Bessarabians were fleeing in the opposite direction—as he wanted to greet the soldiers personally “with flowers.” Meanwhile, Red Army marshal Timoshenko took the time to pay a propaganda visit to his native village of Furmanivka in southern Bessarabia, where he was supposedly greeted as a returning hero.

Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were swiftly incorporated. In early August 1940, the two provinces were merged with neighboring Soviet districts to make the new Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, adding 3.5 million citizens and 50,000 square kilometers of territory to the Soviet Union. In total, as Molotov would gleefully inform the seventh session of the Supreme Soviet, the annexations of that summer had brought an additional 10 million souls under Moscow’s control, in addition to the 13 million added with the expansion into eastern Poland the year before. Although the two former Romanian provinces were erased from the map, they would not disappear from popular memory. As diplomat Alexander Cretzianu recalled, their loss and the brutal circumstances of their annexation caused a “deep-seated resentment” in Romania and a “desire for revenge.”

Life in the new Soviet Socialist Republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldavia was quickly coordinated to conform to that in the rest of the Soviet Union. Over the weeks and months that followed the annexations, the Soviet constitution and law code were adopted, and all political parties deemed “unfriendly” to the Soviet Union were banned. The old regional administrations were ruthlessly purged: in Lithuania, for instance, 11 out of 12 mayors of principal cities were removed, as were 19 of 23 town mayors and 175 out of 261 regional governors. Police forces were disbanded and replaced by communist militias, often comprised of former political prisoners. Planned economies were introduced, with private property outlawed and businesses and industries nationalized and placed under central administrative control. A partial collectivization of the land was carried out, affecting the largest estates, with a number of collective farms being established and land redistributed. All youth and student organizations were banned or else forcibly incorporated into the youth organizations of the Soviet Union, with cultural and pedagogical output being thoroughly sovietized and Marxist-Leninist principles adopted across academic and intellectual life. A list of banned books—those with nationalist or “reactionary” content—was produced, and all offending titles were removed from bookshops and libraries to be pulped or in some cases burned. Schoolbooks were also “edited,” with offending pages simply being torn out and discarded. The churches, although nominally spared closure, were nonetheless harassed and persecuted, with clergy and congregations placed under surveillance or subjected to arbitrary arrest and services disrupted by “atheist brigades.”

Some certainly did not experience the change as dramatically as others. One Latvian, for instance, remembered the early period after the annexation as surreal rather than immediately threatening, with everyday life continuing on its course, despite the ubiquitous presence of Soviet troops and the jaunty marches incessantly played by Red Army bands. Yet, for all the apparent normality, the Soviet regime was already showing its teeth, with those who displeased the NKVD facing arrest, interrogation, and torture. The first to feel Soviet wrath were the old political elites. Now surplus to requirements, the former president of Latvia, Kārlis Ulmanis, and the acting president of Lithuania, Antanas Merkys, were arrested by the NKVD and deported. They had stayed on in the hope of salvaging something from the catastrophe but instead formed the vanguard of their countrymen shipped to an uncertain fate in Siberia. They would be followed by the majority of their fellow politicians: fifty-one of the fifty-three former ministers of the Estonian government, for instance, were arrested in 1940 and 1941, as were all but one of the thirteen serving ministers of the Latvian government, the sole exception being social affairs minister Alfrēds Bērziņš, who escaped to Finland in 1940. In Lithuania the situation was no different. Already on the eve of the elections that summer, the NKVD had rounded up 2,000 or so of the political class who were deemed to be a potential threat. One of them was the former minister of justice, Antanas Tamošaitis, a professor of law and a socialist, who had chaired a commission to investigate the earlier Soviet claims about Red Army soldiers being “encouraged” to desert. He was tortured to death in Kaunas prison.

One story testifies to the collective horror. Konstantin Päts was already sixty-six when arrested by the NKVD in the summer of 1940. A veteran politician who was in many ways the godfather of independent Estonia, he had served in most senior positions in government and finally as president from 1938. In 1940, when the Soviets arrived, Päts had hoped that by remaining at his post, he could ameliorate the worst effects of Soviet rule, but he was mistaken. Arrested with his family on June 29, he was deported a month later and spent a year in provincial obscurity at Ufa in the Urals under house arrest. In July 1941, he was picked up by the NKVD once again, separated from his family and sent to prison, convicted of counterrevolutionary sabotage. Päts would end his days consigned to a psychiatric hospital, declared insane by the Soviet authorities because he persistently claimed that he was the president of Estonia—which, morally perhaps, he still was.

Like the political class, the military forces of the Baltic states also faced violent upheaval and “coordination.” Although the vast majority of ordinary soldiers were simply incorporated wholesale into the Red Army in the autumn of 1940—many would subsequently desert—their officers faced a much more sinister fate. NKVD methods were simple: suspect elements would be ordered to attend special “training courses” at remote army camps, where they would then be selected for deportation to the Soviet interior or simply shot. As one Lithuanian eyewitness recalled, “Commanders of battalions, companies and some platoons were called to the headquarters of the regiment, told that they were going on reconnaissance training, put into trucks, and taken into the forest. There they were brutally disarmed, robbed, squeezed into cattle cars at the Varėna railroad station and deported.”

As many as 6,500 officers and men of the Lithuanian army are thought to have been deported in this way or simply shot. A similar fate awaited members of the Latvian armed forces. At Litene, for example, around two hundred officers were executed and over five hundred were deported to the camp complex at Norilsk in the Soviet Far North—dubbed the “Baltic Katyn”—where they would perform hard labor in horrific conditions in nickel and copper mines. As one of the deportees noted years later, “A quick death would have been a far kinder fate than all of those terrible years spent in the hell camps of the north.” Fewer than one in five of his fellows would survive the experience.

Once the political and military elites had been dealt with, the Soviets moved on to ordinary citizens picked up for minor transgressions or considered guilty by association. Those arrested would generally be charged under the catchall of “anti-Soviet activities,” whether carried out privately or in public life. In this first phase, it is estimated that over 7,000 persons in Estonia, 7,000 in Latvia, and 12,000 in Lithuania were arrested or deported. In Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, meanwhile, some 48,000 are thought to have been arrested, with 12,000 deported and as many as over 8,000 executed or dying during NKVD interrogation.

Many of those who survived the NKVD’s jails testified to the bestial nature of the tortures they endured, with sleep deprivation, threats, and casual violence forming the basis for most interrogations. Other methods included electrocution, choking or drowning, and the infamous “manicure,” during which needles were inserted beneath the victim’s nails. After enduring such techniques, many exhausted prisoners were willing to sign their “confessions,” especially if doing so would remove the threat of further questioning. As one prisoner recalled, “NKVD official Sokolov began talking to me in a calm voice, saying, ‘You see what we have made of you. We know how to turn a man into nothing, to push him into the dark. But we also know how to wash dirt from a man. If you admit your guilt, we will call off the interrogation.’” It took a brave man to resist.

Some of the “crimes” recorded were extremely petty. Andres Raska, for instance, was a twenty-four-year-old student imprisoned in 1940 for distributing lapel ribbons in the Estonian national colors. Deported to the Soviet Union, he died in a camp in Kirov in the summer of 1942. Ironically, at the time of Raska’s arrest, the prewar Estonian flag still held official status, but in the Kafkaesque world of the Soviet occupation, its distribution was enough to earn him deportation to the Gulag.

Other cases reflected the prevailing Soviet paranoia or the mania for revenge against former anti-Bolsheviks. Ex-“Whites” from the civil war were often among the first to be targeted. One was Oleg Vasilkovski, who was over sixty when he was arrested in the summer of 1940. A general in the tsarist army in World War I, he had drifted into the anti-Bolshevik White Army in 1919 before settling in Tallinn, where he had eschewed politics and worked as a chandler. Deported to Leningrad in 1941, he was sentenced to death. His precise fate is unknown.

Priests, too, were singled out for especially harsh treatment. In Bessarabia, in late August 1940, NKVD troops interrupted mass at an orthodox church in Călăraşi and attempted to arrest the priest, Alexandru Baltagă. Baltagă gamely refused to leave his flock until mass was finished, so the officers returned the following night and took him for interrogation to nearby Cernăuți, where he was accused of having supported the union of Bessarabia with Romania back in 1918 and challenged to “show his God.” Predictably, after a lengthy interrogation, he was sentenced to a spell of reeducation in the Gulag. Already frail, Baltagă did not survive the experience: he died, aged eighty, in 1941.

Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, recorded a final chilling example. Born in Brest, Begin had fled to Vilnius at the outbreak of war in 1939 but was arrested by the NKVD in September 1940, accused of being a British agent. Under interrogation, he was alarmed to discover that Soviet justice was an extremely elastic concept unrestricted by time or national borders. When asked by his interrogator if he knew the section of the Soviet law code under which he was being charged, Begin confessed that he did not. “You are charged under Section 58 of the Criminal Law of the Soviet Socialist Russian Republic,” he was told, with the added detail that the section had been “written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself.” Begin was confused. “But how can it apply to what I did in Poland?” he asked. “Ach! You are a strange fellow, Menachem Wolfovitch,” the NKVD officer replied. “Section 58 applies to everyone in the world. Do you hear? In the whole world. It is only a question of when he will get to us, or we to him.”

AND SO STALIN AND HITLER DIVIDED MUCH OF EUROPE BETWEEN them in 1940. Hitler occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and northern France—a total of more than 800,000 square kilometers. Although Great Britain remained technically undefeated, she was confined to her island; the United States, while increasingly antagonistic toward Germany, was still neutral. Nazi Germany, therefore, became the preeminent power on the continent of Europe. Stalin did less well territorially, with only around half of Hitler’s haul at 422,000 square kilometers, but was arguably better placed to actually absorb his gains, given that all of them were long-standing Russian irredenta with some tradition of rule from Moscow and all were neatly contiguous to the western frontier of the USSR.

In occupying those lands, Stalin was only taking that which Hitler had promised him in August 1939. Only the tiny territory of Northern Bukovina—barely 5,000 square kilometers—lay beyond the list of lands ascribed to him under the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Hitler could have few complaints, therefore. This was the price he had agreed to pay to secure his rear while he turned west to fight the British and the French; it was the price of his dramatic solution to the “Polish question” and of the economic relationship that was supposed to render the British blockade ineffective.

Neither can Hitler have seriously cried foul over Soviet tactics in securing and “pacifying” its new territories. Certainly the NKVD operated with exemplary rigor and brutality in annexing the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina and “coordinating” their respective societies with Soviet norms. Yet Hitler’s Gestapo and SS were no less rigorous or brutal in enforcing their “new order” in Poland, the Balkans, and parts of occupied western Europe; the two sides even employed similar tactics: deportation, hard labor, and execution.

And yet, Hitler was clearly disquieted by Soviet actions in the summer of 1940. He first learned of the Soviet intention to occupy Bessarabia while he was visiting Paris in late June with his architect Albert Speer and sculptor Arno Breker in tow. He is said to have flown into a rage, demanding that Ribbentrop show him a copy of the secret protocol as he could not believe that he would have agreed to such a move. When presented with the proof, he could do nothing but seethe and have Ribbentrop register a protest. His irritation was such that his Moscow ambassador, Schulenburg, sought desperately to conceal Stalin’s strategic motives from Hitler, instead attributing the move to the influence of a mythical Ukrainian clique in the Kremlin. Acknowledging the truth, Schulenburg knew, would imply a looming clash of interests.

Hitler had no particular love for Romania, seeing that country as a corrupt Francophile kingdom that had received an Anglo-French guarantee eighteen months earlier. But Romania’s loss of Bessarabia nonetheless worried him not only because of the proximity of Soviet forces to the vital Romanian oilfields but also because he interpreted it as a dangerous westward move and a symbol of Stalin’s undiminished territorial ambition. Although he said nothing in public, Hitler complained to his adjutants that the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia signified “the first Russian attack on Western Europe.”

Goebbels concurred, at least in his diary. On June 28, when the Romanian government submitted to a Soviet ultimatum, he was damning. “King Carol is a coward,” he said, “but Stalin is seizing the moment. Grave-robber! All down to our success. We make victory easy for others.” Already in the following week, he was speculating whether “maybe we will have to move against the Soviets after all.” A month later, doubtless echoing his master’s voice, he had clearly begun thinking seriously of some sort of reckoning with Stalin’s USSR. Writing in his diary in August 1940, he pondered whether “perhaps we will be forced to take steps against all this, despite everything. And drive this Asiatic spirit back out of Europe and into Asia, where it belongs.”