Stalin: A Biography

active foreign policy. In the 1920s, when military commanders Mannerheim and Pilsudski held power in Finland and Poland, the Politburo was perpetually worried about their depredatory intentions. In the following decade these fears diminished. The Red Army was a power to be reckoned with. In 1939 its forces were at war with Japan and holding their own. The People’s Commissariat of External Affairs could deal with bordering states — Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria — from a position of strength. Their potential to cause damage to the USSR would only be realised if they concerted their efforts. But after Hitler’s rise to power they were more concerned about being conquered by the Germans than exercised by thoughts of bringing down Bolshevism in Moscow.

Germany, though, could act independently. Its successive campaigns of expansion had been condoned by the United Kingdom and France. Soviet diplomatic attempts to organise resistance had been rebuffed. Stalin had offered assistance to Czechoslovakia before its destruction in March 1939. Whether he was seriously intending to commit the Red Army is doubtful. He was making a public statement of the USSR’s anti-fascism in the knowledge that the British and French were most unlikely to take a stand against Hitler. The Czechoslovaks themselves were reluctant to have Soviet armed units on their soil. In spring and summer 1939 Hitler increased the pressure on Poland. He evidently had his eyes on Danzig on the Baltic coast. Poland was under military threat, and yet its politicians refused to ally with the USSR. Soviet–Polish enmity was an irremovable feature of Warsaw’s calculations. In these circumstances it was hardly surprising that Stalin began to consider whether a deal with Hitler might be preferable to standing wholly outside developments in eastern Europe.

Stalin relied primarily upon military power, intelligence reports and diplomatic finesse to see him through. The Comintern was a weak source of assistance. The Chinese communists were incapable of defeating the Japanese and had yet to crush the Kuomintang. The German communists were dead or in concentration camps — and a few were emigres in the USSR. Communism as a political force in central and eastern Europe was on its knees. In Spain and Italy too it was battered. In the rest of the world, including North America, it still counted for little. In the United Kingdom it was a minor irritant to the status quo, mainly to the British Labour Party. In only one country, France, did the communist party retain a mass following. But the French communists were but one party on the left. Although they could organise industrial strikes and political demonstrations, they were chiefly a disruptive factor in national politics. Stalin was often criticised, especially by Trotski’s Fourth International, for turning away from the Comintern in the 1930s. The reality was that the world communist movement offered little hope of making revolutions.

Even if a revolution had broken out, there would have been complications for Soviet military and security policy. The USSR had few options in the last years of the decade. Stalin, who had always been sceptical about forecasts of a European revolutionary upsurge, reposed his immediate confidence in the activity of the Soviet state. This did not mean that he had abandoned belief in the inevitability of socialist revolution around the world. The global ‘transition’, he thought, would eventually take place as had been predicted by Marx, Engels and Lenin. But he was realistic about the current weakness of the world communist movement; and being a man who liked to operate with a broad programmatic scheme at any given time, he put his trust in his army, in his intelligence agencies and — above all — in himself and his subordinate partner Molotov.

Stalin and Molotov, with their limited diplomatic experience, assumed dual responsibility; and although Molotov occasionally stood up to Stalin in matters of ideology,¹² they never clashed about foreign policy. But this commonalty increased the country’s jeopardy. Stalin could scarcely have fashioned a more perilous arrangement in which decisions of state might be taken. He alone took the supreme decisions. On his mental acuity depended the fate of his country and peace in Europe and the Far East. Most leaders would have lost sleep over this burden of responsibility. Not Stalin. He was supremely self-confident now that he had liquidated those prominent intellectuals who had made him feel edgy and — deep down in his mental recesses — inadequate. He learned fast and prided himself on his mastery of detail. He had never lacked will power. The rest of the Politburo, terrified by the purges of 1937–8 and immersed in their other vast functions of governance, left foreign policy to the Boss. Steadily the inner group was left out of discussions. Yet its members remained impressed by his competence and determination. This was a situation which beckoned to disaster. Disaster was not long in paying a visit.

36. THE DEVILS SUP

An event occurred in the early hours of 24 August 1939 which shocked the world when the USSR and Germany sealed a ten-year non-aggression pact. The ceremony took place in Molotov’s office in the Kremlin with Stalin in attendance,¹ and the two foreign ministers — Molotov and Ribbentrop — appended their signatures. Six years of mutual vilification between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich ended. Pravda ceased to excoriate Hitler and Nazism in its editorials and Hitler stopped criticism of ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’. Anti-German films were withdrawn from Soviet cinemas; anti-Soviet pamphlets and books were taken down from the shelves of German bookshops. Two dictatorships which had supported opposite sides in the Spanish Civil War embraced each other.

Stalin in his dog-eared tunic looked over Molotov’s left shoulder as he signed the document. Like Lenin with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he kept back in case things turned out badly. Stalin was delighted with the way things had turned out since Ribbentrop’s arrival at the Central Aerodrome on the previous day. Ribbentrop had come to the Kremlin in mid-afternoon, where Stalin and Molotov met him. For Ribbentrop, this was a sign that the Soviet leadership really had a serious interest in a deal with the Third Reich. Diplomatic notes had passed between Berlin and Moscow for three weeks. Ribbentrop had come to propose an agreement to settle the Soviet–German relationship from the Baltic Sea down to the Black Sea. Hitler’s immediate objective was an invasion of Poland, but the enterprise would be perilous without the USSR’s collusion. The Fuhrer authorised Ribbentrop to arrange a non- aggression treaty between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The proposed treaty anticipated the division of the northern regions of eastern Europe into two zones of Soviet and German influence; it also laid down a scheme to increase mutually beneficial trade. Ribbentrop had flown to Moscow to stress that Hitler, despite being the author of Mein Kampf, was in earnest.

The willingness of Stalin to enter such an arrangement with Nazi Germany had been strengthened by the half-heartedness of diplomatic efforts by alternative powerful partners. By mid-August the prospect of alliance with Britain and France had disappeared, and each day made any German offer more tempting. Molotov on Stalin’s instructions sent a confidential note agreeing to diplomatic talks. Germany’s impatience was growing. Hitler needed to invade and subjugate Poland before winter set in. On 19 August Stalin intimated that Moscow was ready to receive Ribbentrop. Such was the haste of the rapprochement that Hitler had no time to attend — or perhaps he would not have gone to Moscow in any case.

Stalin, though, was pleased. Three hours of quiet negotiation in the afternoon of 23 August left just one divisive matter. This involved the fate of Latvia. Hitler had instructed Ribbentrop to keep Latvia, with its influential German minority, in Germany’s zone of influence. But Stalin and Molotov were intransigent. The old Imperial frontiers were something of a preoccupation for Stalin. There was also the factor of strategic security. If Hitler were to overrun Latvia, he would have a territorial wedge cutting into the USSR’s borderlands. Talks were adjourned at 6.30 p.m. for Ribbentrop to withdraw to consult his Fuhrer. Hitler quickly conceded, and Ribbentrop went back to the Kremlin to tell Stalin the news. Stalin, who was normally as impassive as stone when he wanted to be, could not stop shaking. But he got a grip on himself and as the two groups finalised the text of a treaty, Stalin brought out the bottles and proposed a toast ‘to the Fuhrer’s health’. Ribbentrop reciprocated on the Fuhrer’s behalf.² Deep in the night the formal ceremony took place with Stalin grinning at Molotov’s shoulder. Teetotaller Hitler was told at his Eagle’s Nest retreat above Berchtesgaden and allowed himself a small glass of champagne.³

Hitler had need of the assurance that the USSR would not oppose his conquest of most of Poland. This was a temporary compromise: he had not dropped his objective of an eventual invasion of the USSR. But what about Stalin himself? In the light of what happened in 1941, when Hitler ordered Operation Barbarossa, was he prudent to do what he did in 1939?

This raises the question of whether Stalin had a realistic alternative. Evidently the reconciliation with Germany was his personal decision after consultation with Molotov. Staff in the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs were given no advance warning and were not asked to prepare background briefings.⁴ There