Soviet Foreign Policy from September 1938 until June 1941
The climax of appeasement came in September 1938 at Munich. Great Britain and France capitulated to Hitler's demand for Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland, a largely ethnically German area of Czechoslovakia; Chamberlain and Daladier flew to Munich and sealed the arrangement with Hitler and Mussolini. The unpreparedness and unwillingness of the Western democracies to fight, rather than any collusion of the West with Hitler against the U.S.S.R., motivated the Munich surrender. Still, the extreme Soviet suspicion of the settlement can well be understood, especially since the Soviet government was not invited to participate in it. Although it had expressed its readiness to defend Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union had been forced to remain a helpless bystander when France failed to come to the aid of the Czechs and Prague had to accept its
betrayal by the great powers. Moreover, after Munich the Franco-Russian alliance appeared to mean very little, and the U.S.S.R. found itself, in spite of all its efforts to promote collective security, in highly dangerous isolation.
His appetite whetted by appeasement, Hitler in the meantime developed further aggressive designs in eastern Europe. In March 1939 he disposed of what remained of Czechoslovakia, establishing the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and another one of Slovakia. This step both destroyed the Munich arrangement and made plain Nazi determination to expand beyond ethnic German boundaries. Next Hitler turned to Poland, demanding the cession of Danzig to Germany and the right of extraterritorial German transit across the Polish "corridor" to East Prussia. The alternative was war.
Poland, however, did not stand alone against Germany in the summer of 1939. France and Great Britain finally saw the folly of appeasement after Germany had seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia. At the end of March they made clear their determination to fight if Poland were attacked. As war clouds gathered, the position of the Soviet Union became all the more significant. In May Molotov replaced Litvinov as commissar for foreign affairs, retaining at the same time his office of Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, equivalent to prime minister, as well as his membership in the Politburo. Thus for the first time since Trotsky in 1918 a Communist leader of the first rank took charge of Soviet foreign policy. Moreover, in contrast to his predecessor Litvinov, Molotov had not been personally committed to collective security and, therefore, could more easily undertake a fresh start. In retrospect commentators have also noted the fact that Molotov, again in contrast to Litvinov, was not Jewish. After an exchange of notes in the spring of 1939, Great Britain and France began in the summer to negotiate with the U.S.S.R concerning the formation of a joint front against aggression. But the Western powers failed to come to terms with the Soviet Union, or even to press the negotiations, sending a weak and low-ranking mission to Moscow. The Soviet government, on its side, remained extremely suspicious of the West, especially after the Munich settlement, and eagerly sought ways of diverting impending hostilities away from its borders. On August 23 a German-Russian agreement of strict neutrality was signed in Moscow - secret talks had begun as early as May - an event which produced surprise and shock in the world. Fortified by the pact, Hitler attacked Poland on the first of September. On the third, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. The Second World War became a reality.
The Bolsheviks and the Nazis hated each other and considered themselves to be irreconcilable enemies. That no illusions were involved in their agreement is indicated, among many other things, by the fact that Molotov, who signed the treaty for the Soviet Union and thus represented the "pro-German orientation," retained his position and Stalin's favor after Hitler attacked the U.S.S.R. Yet both parties to the pact expected to gain major temporary advantages by means of it. Germany would be free to fight Western powers. The Soviet Union would escape war, at least for the time being. Besides, the agreement was accompanied by a secret protocol dividing the spheres of influence and enabling the Soviet Union to expand in eastern Europe.
The Red Army occupied eastern Poland, incorporating its White Russian and Ukrainian areas into the corresponding Soviet republics. Next the Soviet government signed mutual assistance pacts with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, obtaining a lease of Baltic bases. But in July 1940 these states were occupied by Soviet troops, and, following a vote of their beleaguered parliaments, they were incorporated into the U.S.S.R. as union republics - a procedure that the Western democracies with excellent reasons failed to recognize. Finland was more troublesome: the Finnish government turned down the Soviet demand that they move the Finnish boundary some twenty miles further away from Leningrad, abandoning a Finnish defense line, in exchange for a strip of Karelia; a war between the two countries resulted and lasted from the end of November 1939 until mid-March 1940. In spite of the heroic Finnish defense and the surprising early reverses of the Red Army, the Soviet Union eventually imposed its will on Finland. Finally, in the summer of 1940 the U.S.S.R. utilized its agreement with Germany to obtain from Rumania, by means of an ultimatum, the disputed region of Bessarabia as well as northern Bukovina. The new Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was formed from the territory acquired from Rumania. In April 1941 the Soviet Union signed a five-year nonaggression treaty with Japan, which had chosen to expand south rather than into Siberia.
But, although the Soviet government did not know it, time was running short for its efforts to strengthen its position on the European and Asiatic continents. Following his stunning victory in the west in the summer of 1940, Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union. In December he issued precise instructions for an attack in May 1941. The defeat that Germany suffered in the autumn in the aerial Battle of Britain apparently only helped convince the Nazi dictator that he should strike his next major blow in the east. The schedule, however, could not quite be kept. A change of
government in Yugoslavia made the Germans invade Yugoslavia as well as Greece, which had stopped an earlier Italian offensive. While brilliantly successful, the German campaign in the Balkans, together with a certain delay in supplying the German striking force with tanks and other vehicles, postponed by perhaps three weeks the invasion of Soviet Russia. The new date was June 22, and on that day German troops aided by Finnish, Rumanian, and other units attacked the U.S.S.R. along an enormous front from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
The Soviet Union in the Second World War
The blow was indeed staggering. Hitler threw into the offensive some 175 divisions, including numerous armored formations. A huge and powerful air force closely supported the attack. Moreover, perhaps surprisingly, the German blow caught the Red Army off guard. Apparently, although Stalin and the Politburo were preparing for war, they had ignored Western warnings as well as their own intelligence and did not expect such an early, sudden, and powerful offensive. The Germans aimed at another Blitzkrieg, intending to defeat the Russians within two or three months or in any case before winter. Although it encountered some determined resistance, the German war machine rolled along the entire front, particularly in the north towards Leningrad, in the center towards Moscow, and in the south towards Kiev and Rostov-on-Don. Entire Soviet armies were smashed and taken prisoner at Bialystok, Minsk, and Kiev, which fell in September. The southern wing of the invasion swept across Ukraine. In the north, Finnish troops pushed to the Murmansk railroad, and German troops reached, but could not capture, Leningrad. The city underwent a two-and-a-half-year siege, virtually cut off from the rest of the country; its population was decreased by starvation, disease, and war from four to two and a half million. Yet the city would not surrender, and it blocked further German advance north.