“Warsaw, as the capital of the Polish State, no longer exists. No one knows the whereabouts of the Polish government. Poland has become a fertile field for any contingency that may create a menace for the Soviet Union.”
In these words, V. M. Molotov announced on September 17, 1939, first by note to the Polish ambassador and then by radio to the world, that the Soviet Army was marching into Poland.
The British saw the meaning of that march better than did the Americans. Americans still speak of Stalin as “Hitler’s accomplice” in cynically dividing Poland. But Winston Churchill said in a radio broadcast October 1: “The Soviets have stopped the Nazis in Eastern Poland; I only wish they were doing it as our allies.” Bernard Shaw, in the London Times, gave “three cheers for Stalin,” who had given Hitler “his first set-back.” Even Prime Minister Chamberlain sourly told the House of Commons, October 26: “It has been necessary for the Red Army to occupy part of Poland as protection against Germany.” The Polish government-in-exile, which was in flight through Romania at the time but reached London some weeks later, never ventured to declare that Soviet march an act of war.
The population of the area did not oppose the Russian troops but welcomed them with joy. Most were not Poles but Ukrainians and Byelo-Russians. U.S. Ambassador Biddle reported that the people accepted the Russians “as doing a policing job.” Despatches told of Russian troops marching side by side with retiring Polish troops, of Ukrainian girls hanging garlands on Russian tanks. The Polish commander of the Lvov garrison, who for several days had been fighting against German attack on three sides, quickly surrendered to the Red Army when it appeared on the fourth side, saying: “There is no Polish government left to give me orders and I have no orders to fight the Bolsheviks.” That there was some opposition but only from small bands was shown by the casualty figures later released by the Red Army—737 dead and 1,862 wounded. Many of these occurred in the taking of Vilna by a small motorized force which was ordered to “reach Vilna by midnight“ from seventy miles away.
The American view that Stalin and Hitler had partitioned Poland in advance is not borne out by the way the partitioning occurred. The boundary between Germans and Russians changed three times before it was fixed at a conference, September 28. It is unlikely that German troops drove all the way to Lvov and attacked it for several days in order to give that city to the USSR. Nor is it likely that the Russians would have incurred casualties by rushing to Vilna, if the city had been allocated to them in advance. It seems probable that some statement of Russia’s interest in the non-Polish areas of Poland had been made, but that the march as it took place was not agreed in advance.
The view in East Europe was that Hitler planned not only to take Poland, but to drive southeast into the Balkans, and perhaps northeast into the Baltic states as far as he could go, using Lvov as the capital for a Nazi-Ukraine. German strategy indicated this, for after cracking the Polish front, the Germans did not wait to mop up Poland, but drove clear across the country, southeast to Lvov, and northeast to Vilna. Wide uprisings were said to have been planned by the Iron Guard in Romania to meet the German troops. Corroboration was seen in the assassination of Premier Calinescu as the Germans approached, and in an uprising that actually came off in a Romanian town on the Polish border but which fizzled out when it was seen that the troops across the river were Russians, not Germans.
“The action of the Soviets has checked whatever designs Hitler had on Romania,” was the London view, as cabled to the NY Times, September 28. “Respect for Russia has greatly increased; the peasants unquestionably prefer Russians to Germans along their border,” read an AP cable from East Europe, September 27.
The march into eastern Poland, thus, seems not a connivance with Hitler but the first great check the Soviets gave to Hitler under the Non-Aggression Pact. It seems to have been timed to the split second. Half a day earlier, a Polish government might have been found somewhere in Poland, functioning enough to declare the Russian march an act of war, thus putting Russia into war with Britain, Poland’s ally. Half a day later, the Russians might have found the Germans already slipping into Romania in the south and the Baltic states in the north. The Red Army marched on the precise half-day when the Polish government had fled into the unknown, but before the Germans took the strategic cities, Lvov and Vilna.
From that time on, Russia used the breathing-space granted by the Pact, not only to prepare for defense but to block Hitler’s penetration of East Europe through measures short of war. Hitler revealed this later in his declaration of war against the USSR and bitterly listed the Russian acts that blocked him.
Moscow’s first move was to build a wide buffer belt along her western border by alliances. Having prepared for friendly intercourse by giving Lithuania her ancient capital, Vilna, which the Poles had seized twenty years earlier in defiance of the League of Nations, Moscow invited Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia to send foreign ministers to Moscow to discuss an alliance. One by one, they went and signed on the dotted line. By October 10, 1939, less than a month after the Soviets marched into Poland, they had secured military alliances with these three Baltic states, which in the past had been highways for invasion. A powerful chain of naval bases, originally built by Peter the Great, thus came under Soviet control. While most American comment denounced the action, Walter Lippmann got the point, saying: “Every day it becomes clearer that Russia is constructing a great defense area from the Baltic to the Black Sea.” The Baltic States, themselves, resented the term “vassal” applied to them by the Anglo-American press. They thought themselves not badly off. Their internal organization was not at the time affected; they merely gave bases to the USSR in return for help in their defense.
The dramatic expulsion of half a million Germans from the Baltic States followed. How bitterly Hitler resented this was shown in his declaration of war when he told how “far more than 500,000 men and women … were forced to leave their homeland. … To all this I remained silent, because I had to.” These are not words of a complacent victor. The Baltic Germans were the upper class in the Baltic States; some had been there as landed barons for centuries. It was they who, at the time of the Russian Revolution, brought in the German troops to overthrow local red governments. Their expulsion scattered what was for the USSR the most dangerous fifth-column in Europe.
Having secured the southern Baltic against surprise attack, Moscow approached Finland, which holds the gateway of the north. Though Finland’s independence was a free gift from the Russian Revolution, Finland was known as the most hostile of the Baltic States. That early democratic Finland had been bloodily overthrown by Baron Mannerheim, ex-tsarist general, with the aid of the kaiser’s troops. Finland had become a base for international actions against the USSR. The Mannerheim Line—a system of forts well devised to shield a large force in an attack on Leningrad— was built under British direction. Later, Finland’s airfields were built by the Nazis. Made to accommodate 2,000 planes, when Finland had 150, they were clearly designed for use by a major power.
Moscow knew that Finland would not welcome an alliance. But the Soviets had something to offer. Finland’s foreign trade was ruined by the Anglo-German war, which closed the Baltic. Finland, gripped by a depression, wanted trade with the USSR and the use of the Leningrad-Murmansk Railway for access to the world. So when Moscow, on October 5, 1939, invited Finland to send a plenipotentiary to discuss “pending questions,” the result was a surprise. The Finnish government, before replying, declared partial mobilization, sent large armed forces to the border, closed the Stock Exchange, asked women and children to leave the capital Helsinki and appealed to America for “moral support.” The Soviet press expressed ironic irritation at the “inspired panic.”
The Finnish delegation came to Moscow October 11. The Soviets proposed an alliance, but dropped it since the Finns were unwilling. Then they proposed an exchange of territory to protect Leningrad. They asked that the border be moved back enough to take Leningrad out of gun-shot and that some small islands, guarding the sea approach, be given to the USSR. They offered in return twice as much territory, equally good but less strategic. They also asked a 30-year lease of Hangoe or some other point at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland—that long thin waterway that leads to Leningrad—as a naval base. President Cajander, of Finland, broadcast the statement that the terms did not affect Finland’s integrity.
A month of bargaining went on in which Moscow raised her offers. Finland stood to get nearly three to one in the territorial trade; and Hangoe base would be held, not thirty years, but only during the Anglo-German war and would then come to Finland fully equipped. Many Finns were boasting of the “smart bargain” their diplomats were getting. Then, suddenly, the Finnish negotiators broke off discussions with the cryptic remark that circumstances would decide when and by whom they would be renewed. The N. Y. Times reported that “diplomatic quarters in Washington” thought the Finns were influenced by hope of loans from the U.S.A. Since the Finnish parliament had not even been summoned, Moscow took it as clear that the Finnish cabinet acted on secret pressures from those forces in the West that wanted to “switch the war.”
So when Finnish artillery shot over the border in late November and killed Red Army men, Moscow sharply protested, and, when Finland disregarded the protest, Soviet troops marched into Finland on November 30, 1939. Finland declared war and appealed for foreign aid. The League of Nations expelled the USSR for “aggression.” Few acts of the USSR have alienated more friends than the Soviet-Finnish War. Nor were the Russians proud of it; nobody is proud of preventive war. Russians considered it a preventive war for defense of Leningrad.
To understand the Soviet-Finnish War, we must see it in the setting of the Second World War, of which it was a part. In late 1939, the Second World War was not yet total. Hitler was consolidating gains in Czechoslovakia and Poland. The Russian advance had blocked whatever further plans he had in the cast. Neither Hitler nor the West had yet attacked each other seriously. The Western Front was in what was called “the phony war”; both sides sat in their fortifications. Hitler was not yet prepared for an all-out assault westward; this took time to organize. And Hitler was also aware that he had friends in the British and French upper class who might yield to his demands. Important voices in the press of Britain, France and America urged that “the wrong war” had started, that the war should be switched against the USSR as the greater enemy.
This press campaign was not caused by the war in Finland. It began even when Hitler was marching through Poland; it was the continuation of the Chamberlain line. So when Finland broke negotiations, Moscow assumed that the Finns planned to keep the border boiling with winter incidents, leading up to intervention by stronger powers in the spring. “The idea of coming to the aid of Finland” explained Swedish Foreign Minister Guenther defending Sweden’s neutral policy after the war was over, “opened new vistas to the allied powers. The deadlock on the Western Front was not popular and the press of France spoke of the hunt for new battlefields.”
For the rest of the winter, the war in the West was off the front pages. The world’s eyes were fixed on the war in Finland, and on the attempts in the West to make it a joint attack against the USSR. Moscow’s aim was to get it over before the major powers could intervene. The Russians made both military and political mistakes in this war but not as many as Americans commentators assume.
The military campaign had four phases. The objective in the first phase was to move the border back from Leningrad and to take Finland’s Arctic port so that world war would not pour through Finland against the USSR. This objective was attained in two weeks; the land frontier was pushed back forty miles from Leningrad, and Petsamo, Finland’s Arctic port, was taken. The second period was one of relative passivity because the coldest winter for decades had set in. The third phase consisted of air-bombardment of Finland’s military establishments—war industries, railways, ports, airfields. Civilian casualties were few; Finland reported only 640 civilian deaths from air-bombing during the entire war.
The fourth phase was the cracking of the Mannerheim Line, a system of forts “in some respects stronger than the Maginot Line.”[7] Considered impregnable, it was cracked in a month by a shrewd plan, the first time a line of such strength had ever been taken by assault. Heavy artillery pounded the earth around the fortifications until their guns were thrown out of line. After that the line was assaulted. With the smashing of the Mannerheim Line, Finland’s resistance collapsed. The peace treaty was signed in Moscow, March 12, 1940.
London and Paris tried hard to prevent that signing. Britain refused to transmit Finland’s appeal, so Sweden served as intermediary. The French premier, Daladier, told Finland that an Anglo-French expedition was ready to sail to her aid and unless Finland asked for it, the Allies would not even guarantee her continued existence after the war. Chamberlain and Daladier pressured Sweden to let this expeditionary force pass through to Finland, though it would have involved Sweden in the war. On March 10, Chamberlain told the House of Commons that he was considering ways to break Sweden’s neutrality and compel continuance of the Finnish war. “London is buzzing with rumors of war on a much wider front and perhaps war with Russia,” cabled the N. Y. Times London correspondent, March 11.
The buzzing came too late. The attempt to “switch the war” into a world line-up against the USSR broke on Sweden’s insistent neutrality and on General Mannerheim’s underestimation of Soviet strength, Mannerheim had told the Anglo-French allies that he would not need help till May; by that time Chamberlain expected to force Sweden to let the troops pass. Neither the Finns nor the British dreamed that the Mannerheim Line could be cracked in a winter assault. Two months before the time Mannerheim set for the reinforcements, the Finns had sued for peace and the Soviet-Finnish war was over.
In the peace terms, the Soviets took the Mannerheim Line and the naval base at Hangoe, protecting both land and sea approaches to Leningrad. But they returned Petsamo and its nickel mines; they asked no indemnities but agreed to supply a starving Finland with food. As terms go, these were not excessive. Sir Stafford Cripps, British ambassador to Moscow in 1940, told me, as I sat at tea in his embassy, that the Russians might some day be sorry they had not taken more when they could. He was thinking of Petsamo, which was soon to be a Nazi base against Allied shipping on the Murmansk run. But Sir Stafford was wrong; Stalin’s political sense was better than Sir Stafford’s. The Soviets were well advised to make easy terms. Had their demands gone beyond the obvious needs of Leningrad’s security, Sweden’s neutrality might have been shaken. Then the world front that finally crystallized against Hitler, might have crystallized a year sooner—against the USSR.
The Finnish war had victories outside Finland. The sequence of Soviet acts, from the march into Poland to the treaty with Finland, had convinced East Europe that the USSR was strong and knew what she wanted and was serious about it to the point of war, but that her demands had reasons and limits. One thing she clearly wanted in 1940 was a broad buffer belt from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
So Romania knew that the time had come to give back Bessarabia, which she seized from the young Soviet power in its days of weakness, in 1918. Its people were not Romanians; they had made 153 uprisings against Romania in six years. The USSR had never recognized the seizure but never thought it worth a war. The Soviets had waited twenty years for the right moment. When Hitler was busy with the conquest of France, Moscow asked Romania for Bessarabia and got it without war. Russian ships again sailed up the Danube, a branch of whose delta became the Soviet frontier.
So the long buffer belt across Europe was completed—from Hangoe on the Baltic to the Danube mouth on the Black Sea—when Hitler, from his ravaging of Western Europe, turned east.
According to Hitler, Russia’s advance into Bessarabia saved Britain from a German invasion. Hitler was bragging a bit, and piling up a case to justify his Russian invasion, but there was a basis of fact in his declaration. To understand this, we must turn back to the war on the Western Front.
While the Finnish war lasted, Hitler made no serious attack against the West for reasons given above. But in spring of 1940, the Germans launched a rapid, successful blitz against the West; they seized Denmark, Norway, crashed through Holland and Belgium, smashed the French army in eleven days. They occupied the Atlantic coast of Europe, all set for invasion of Britain. The British army, disorganized by defeat in France, had abandoned its best equipment on the beach at Dunkirk. I passed through Berlin that summer on my way to Moscow, and found them bragging that they would be in London in early fall. Military experts of all lands expected the invasion; and most said the British defenses were inadequate. The British gold reserve was evacuated to Canada; columnists discussed the possible evacuation of the government.
Suddenly Hitler withdrew his main forces from the Atlantic Coast and threw them across Europe, southeast into the Balkans. The reason he later gave was that he could not expend the tremendous strength needed for an invasion of Britain while the Russians were picking up territory in his rear. Bessarabia was rich in grain; its fall to the USSR both disturbed Hitler’s economic base and stirred the anti-Nazi forces in the Balkans. He must clean up the Balkans first.[8]
The war in the Balkans was not expected by Hitler to be a long campaign. He had everything to lose by a long war in an area on which he relied for food and oil. It was to his interest to control it by economic penetration or seize it in a rapid blitz that would not destroy the harvests and industries. His aim was to consolidate the Balkan Peninsula against the USSR, smash the British-Greek armies in Greece and then take the eastern Mediterranean and Suez by a simultaneous advance through Turkey and Africa. American aid was increasing to Britain, the conflict was likely to be long, so Hitler needed the Near East oil.
“From that time on,” declared von Ribbentrop later, “Soviet Russia’s anti-Gennan policy became more apparent.” He thus described the fact that the USSR undermined and slowed the German Balkan campaign. It was done by diplomatic notes: a protest to Bulgaria for yielding, a non-aggression pact with Yugoslavia, a statement to Turkey that if she should resist the passage of German troops this would be “sympathetically understood.” Von Ribbentrop charged that the Soviets “secretly assisted Yugoslavia in arming.” It was common knowledge among correspondents in Moscow, that autumn, that the Soviets were sending food both to Greece and Yugoslavia. If they sent arms, that was within their rights as a neutral nation, and within the terms of the Non-Aggression Pact. The USSR had promised not to take part in aggression against Germany; but help to Hitler’s victims could not be defined as aggression.
Meantime, a swift internal struggle was on for control of the three small Baltic States—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. They had military alliances with the USSR, to whom they had given naval bases; but their governments were semi-fascist dictatorships, somewhat pro-Nazi. Hitler’s eastward march encouraged pro-Nazi groups in these stales. The USSR demanded the right to send larger forces of troops into these countries “in view of the increasingly disturbed conditions of Europe.” On June 15, 1940, technically as allies, considerable forces of the Red Army marched in. The local pro-German officials fled.
“Stalin beat Hitler into the Baltic by about twenty-four hours,” said a correspondent in Vilna. Most Lithuanians I met agreed.
I had the luck to be passing through from Berlin to Moscow. Learning what was happening in Lithuania, I remained and saw the amazing picture of a take-over from within. It was very constitutional and very happy. When the pro-German president fled, this brought the vice-president to power. He appointed a new premier and then resigned. This brought to power Justas Paletskis, a progressive journalist. Political prisoners were let out of jails; trade unions began to organize freely; all kinds of organizations came alive. Day and night, the singing did not cease in the streets of Kaunas, the capital. New elections were held for a “people’s government.“ There was a tremendous turnout to vote. The new assembly met, declared Lithuania a Soviet Republic, and applied for admission to the USSR. All this time, the jubilant workers and farmers, glad of the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship, thought they were only expressing their own desire. The Red Army did not mix in the politics, except as it exchanged balls and theatrical performances with the Lithuanian army, on a basis of “fraternal equality.”
Only once did I hear the role of Moscow mentioned. Some Kaunas intellectuals thought that everything went too fast. They wanted slower elections, to organize political parties and debate. The workers and farmers weren’t worried; they put up slates through the unions and voted. But westernized intellectuals wanted more time.
“A lot of us think it’s too speedy,” said the chief of the Telegraph Agency to a woman who complained. “I understand Paletskis wanted six months to take us into the Soviet Union but Molotov said there wasn’t time.”
A gasp arose from the group. The woman who had objected spoke. “You mean that Hitler may get us? Then let the Russians take us quick.”
On July 21, 1940, Lithuania applied for admission to the USSR. I went with their delegation by special train to Moscow; it was greeted by garlands and delegations along the way. By early August, the Supreme Soviet in Moscow received three new constituent republics—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Paletskis was saying: “Our path to socialism is the easiest ever known. … We have done it by the will of the Lithuanian people through constitutional forms. … There arc no boundaries any more from Kaunas to Vladivostok, from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean.”
It was a masterpiece of political planning by Moscow, accomplished by the will of the Lithuanian people, which Moscow had known how to arouse.
The USSR stood solidly now on the Baltic, ready for any future test.
The German campaign dragged out in the Balkans. German troops crushed the Greeks and drove the British into the sea from southern Greece. They terrorized Romania and Bulgaria into submission and devastated Yugoslavia, which resisted. They reached the borders of Turkey and experts predicted that their next move would be through the Dardanelles. But Moscow’s pressure on Turkey, added to British pressure, worked. Experts predicted the fall of Suez, and Hitler’s troops were rumored already in Syria. But they had gone in the other direction—to the borders of the USSR.
Hitler saw that the USSR, as a neutral, was the immediate barrier in his path to world rule. In the twenty-two months of the Non-Aggression Pact, the USSR had three times blocked the Nazi advance. The Soviet march into Poland had checked for a year Hitler’s advance to the East; the Soviet return to Bessarabia had pulled him back from invading Britain; and Moscow’s power politics in the Balkans and Baltic had delayed him at the Dardanelles.
Hitler saw that the lone neutral hand of the Soviets had checked him more than he had been checked by all Europe’s armed forces combined—Poles, Danes, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, French, Greeks, Yugoslavs and British. He therefore turned and struck at the Soviet Union in the mightiest assault in human history.