Another appeal on the following day also failed. Even when faced with doom, Poland stuck to her principles with a kind of magnificent obstinacy. When the French ambassador passionately protested, Marshal Rydz-Smigly replied coldly: “With the Germans we run the risk of losing our freedom. With the Russians we lose our soul.”129 Even on the night of August 22, when the dramatic news of Ribbentrop’s impending journey to Russia arrived, Poland remained unimpressed. The world order had been virtually turned upside down, the country was as good as lost, but Poland’s politicians commented that the visit merely showed how desperate Hitler’s situation was.
Distraught by the way things were going, France at last decided to wait no longer for Warsaw’s consent but to act on her own initiative. On the evening of August 22 General Doumenc informed Marshal Voroshilov that he had received full powers from his government to conclude a military convention granting the Red Army passage through Poland and Rumania. But when Voroshilov insistently demanded proof of Poland’s and Rumania’s consent, Doumenc had to be evasive and could only repeat that he had come to conclude the agreement. At last, alluding to Ribbentrop’s impending visit, he said: “But time is passing.” Marshal Voroshilov replied ironically: “Undoubtedly time is passing.” They parted with nothing accomplished.
Next day, in spite of strenuous efforts by Georges Bonnet to change Beck’s mind, Polish consent had still not been obtained. Toward noon Ribbentrop arrived in the Soviet capital and almost immediately went to the Kremlin. And as though the participants wanted to show the world a spectacle of uncomplicated totalitarian diplomacy, the Nonaggression Pact and the delimitation of spheres of interest was agreed upon with the first conference of three hours’ duration. A query from Ribbentrop about an unforeseen Soviet demand was answered by Hitler with a terse wire: “Yes, agreed.”
Only now was Poland ready to consent, in an involuted announcement, to the French demand. General Doumenc had permission to declare, Beck conceded, that he had “obtained assurance that in case of a joint action against a German aggression a collaboration between Poland and the U.S.S.R. under technical conditions that are to be settled later is not excluded.” The Western powers noted with satisfaction that Poland had yielded. But while Hitler, with his “Yes, agreed,” had offered the Soviet Union half of Eastern Europe, including Finland and Bessarabia, “the Western powers promised that the Poles would promise to allow the Russians to use the desired area under certain circumstances in limited fashion for a limited time as a base of operations under Polish control.”130
During the night hours of August 23 Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Nonaggression Pact and the secret supplementary protocol, which became known only after the war when it played into the hands of the German defense lawyers at the Nuremberg trial.131 In the protocol the contracting parties agreed that “in the event of a territorial and political transformation” Eastern Europe would be divided into spheres of interest along a line running from the northern border of Lithuania south along the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San. The question was explicitly left open “whether the interests of both parties make the maintenance of an independent Polish State appear desirable and how the frontiers of this State should be delimited.” These dry formulas exposed the fundamentally imperialistic character of the agreement, and bluntly made plain the connection with the planned war.
That connection has proved to be the rock on which all the elaborate Soviet attempts at self-exoneration have foundered. Of course Stalin could offer numerous sound reasons for the Nonaggression Pact. It let him have the famous “breathing space,” gave the country a buffer zone of possibly vital importance toward the West, and above all insured that the vacillating Western powers would be irrevocably engaged in conflict with Germany if Hitler returned to his real aim and attacked the Soviet Union. Stalin’s apologists have also asserted that on that August 23, 1939, he had done only what Chamberlain had done the previous year in Munich. Chamberlain had sacrificed Czechoslovakia, as Stalin was now abandoning Poland, in order to buy time. None of these arguments, however, allow us to forget the secret protocol which, as it were, converted the Nonaggression Pact into an Aggression Pact. Chamberlain, after all, despite Hitler’s repeated offers, had never carved out spheres of interest with the German dictator. Rather, he had scotched Hitler’s great dream of unhindered attack upon the Soviet Union, whose leaders now were proving far less scrupulous. Whatever validity we may grant the Soviet justifications on the grounds of Realpolitik, the supplementary agreement was “unworthy of an ideological movement which claimed to have the deepest insight into the historical process,”132 a movement that had never represented world revolution as an act of naked expansionism, but had championed and upheld it as the moral necessity of the human race.
Significantly, the evening in Moscow took an almost comradely turn. Ribbentrop later reported that Stalin and Molotov had been “very nice,” that being with them “felt like being among old party comrades.”133 Although he was, somewhat embarrassed when, in the course of the night the conversation turned to the Anti-Comintern Pact, of which Ribbentrop was the author, Stalin’s geniality encouraged him to scoff at the pact. According to the account of a German participant, he declared that the agreement had “basically not been directed against the Soviet Union, but against the Western democracies…. Mr. Stalin interjected that the Anti-Comintern Pact in fact had alarmed chiefly the City of London and the English shopkeepers. The Reich Foreign Minister agreed and remarked jokingly that Mr. Stalin was surely less alarmed by the Anti-Comintern Pact than the City of London and the English shopkeepers.” The report continues:
In the course of the conversation Mr. Stalin spontaneously proposed a toast to the Führer in the following words: “I know how much the German people love their Führer and I therefore should like to drink to his health.”
Mr. Molotov drank to the health of the Reich Foreign Minister and Ambassador Count von der Schulenburg. Furthermore, Mr. Molotov toasted Mr. Stalin, remarking that it had been Stalin who by his speech of March this year, which was well understood in Germany, had initiated the reversal of relations. Messrs. Molotov and Stalin drahk repeatedly to the Nonaggression Pact, the new era in German-Russian relations, and to the German people….
In parting Mr. Stalin addressed the following words to the Reich Foreign Minister: The Soviet Union takes the new Pact very seriously; he could guarantee on his word of honor that the Soviet Union would not betray her partner.134
It truly seemed as if, amid toasts and clinking glasses, the deceptive veil of old hostility had been parted and that only now, in the fateful intimacy of that night, the closeness between the two regimes was revealed to themselves and the world. In fact August 23, 1939, has been repeatedly cited by those who wish to prove a conformity in nature between the two regimes. In truth, it was much more a conformity in methods and, as now became evident, in the men. Stalin’s toast to Hitler was no empty phrase; he kept his promise with pedant loyalty. In spite of all the omens and warnings from experts, in June, 1941, barely two years later, he refused to the last to believe that Hitler was going to attack the Soviet Union. Even as the German troops advanced, the freight cars rolled westward with the supplies the Russians were obligated to deliver under the economic accord. The astonishing gullibility of the crafty Soviet ruler rested to a considerable degree upon the admiration he felt for a man who, like himself, had risen from low estate to historic importance. In Hitler he respected the only man of the period whom he regarded as his equal; and as we know, Hitler reciprocated this feeling. All “deadly enmity” could never diminish the two men’s mutual sense of the other’s greatness; and beyond ideologies they felt themselves linked by the rank that history confers. In his memoirs, Rumanian Foreign Minister Grigore Gafencu has cited the observations of the French historian Albert Sorel on the first partition of Poland: “Everything that increased Russia’s distance from other powers brought it closer to Prussia. Like Russia, Prussia was a parvenu on the great stage of the world. It had to clear the way for its own future, and Catherine saw that it had every intention of doing so with great methods, great possibilities and great aims.”