The Finns, however, held steadfast. The Reds, racked by the effects of the Great Terror, fought hard but incompetently. The Winter War turned into a bloody stalemate in the northern snows. The Finnish government was aware that the total defeat of the Red Army was beyond it. Discussions were resumed and a peace treaty was signed in March 1940. The realistic Finns gave up much territory and several military bases. The Soviet frontier with Finland was moved hundreds of miles to the north of Leningrad. Stalin had achieved his ends but at a terrible price. One hundred and twenty-seven thousand Red Army soldiers perished.9 More importantly for Stalin (who cared nothing for the number of deaths), the military might of the USSR had been exposed as weaker than the world had thought. If the Soviet armed forces could not crush Finland, what would they be able to do against the Third Reich if ever war broke out with Hitler?
The shock was general in the Kremlin. With so large a force, the Red Army had been expected to thrust back the Finns without difficulty and enable the establishment of a Finnish Soviet Republic which would apply for incorporation in the USSR. Stalin was beside himself with fury. He rebuked Voroshilov. Drink and old friendship loosened Voroshilov’s tongue. Despite the Great Terror, he kept a sense of personal honour and was unwilling to accept criticism from the Leader who had supervised every large decision about security and defence in recent years. Voroshilov had had enough: he picked up a plate of suckling pig and crashed it down on the table.10 This sort of outburst would have condemned most men to the Gulag. (They would usually have gone to the Gulag long before they got round to shouting at the Leader.) The war, though, gave Stalin reason to take stock strategically and necessitated a reorganisation of the Red Army. Stalin dismissed the inadequate Voroshilov and appointed Semën Timoshenko, a professional commander, to lead the People’s Commissariat of Defence.
The urgency of the task was demonstrated in summer 1940 as the Wehrmacht raced through the Low Countries into France, forcing Paris’s capitulation and the emergency evacuation of British forces from the beaches of Dunkirk. The fall of the United Kingdom seemed imminent. Timoshenko, with Stalin’s consent, restored a sense of pride to the Soviet officer corps. Political education was reduced as a proportion of required military training. Plans were put in hand for a new line of defence works to be constructed along the boundaries separating the German and Soviet spheres of interest. In order to realise this aim it appeared necessary to bring Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania under the USSR’s control. There was to be no repetition of the Finnish débâcle. A brief charade was played out. Incidents of ‘provocation’ were arranged for the Kremlin to have a pretext to intervene. Baltic politicians had to be intimidated. Ministers were summoned from the capitals of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Stalin and Molotov were bullies with decades of experience. The visitors to Moscow were given no choice but to accept annexation. Molotov snarled to the Latvian Foreign Minister: ‘You’re not going to return home until you give your signature to your self-inclusion in the USSR.’11 The three governments were militarily helpless. Resistance would lead to national disaster.
Compliance, of course, would also bring disaster since Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would undoubtedly undergo the same treatment as eastern Poland. In fact the bully-boy methods did not immediately result in signed requests for incorporation in the USSR. The Red Army therefore moved in force to secure Stalin’s aims, and NKVD units — some of which had been operating in Poland — were close behind. A façade of constitutionalism was maintained. Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov, closely liaising with his master Stalin, was sent to the Baltic region to carry out his orders behind the scenes. Police arrests took place under the cover of a news black-out. Executions and deportations ensued as the Soviet-dominated media announced fresh elections. Only candidates belonging to the communists, or at least supporting them, were allowed to stand. Parliaments assembled in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius in July and declared total agreement with Moscow’s wishes. All petitioned, as Stalin had demanded, for incorporation in the USSR. For form’s sake Stalin declined to admit the three on the same day. Lithuania entered the USSR on 3 August, Latvia two days later and Estonia a day after that.
Stalin was playing the geopolitical game for all it was worth. Communist political prospects in Europe had vanished. For Stalin, an inveterate opportunist, this was no problem. While not ceasing to believe in the superiority of communism over capitalism, he waited for the next chance to promote his kind of dictatorship abroad. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were not the only places he had in his sights as lying within the zone of the USSR’s special interest. Stalin and his representatives persistently specified Romania and Bulgaria in this way. Nor did he fail to argue that Turkey fell within the Soviet zone of hegemony. And Stalin, while delivering abundant quotas of grain and oil to a Germany at war with France and the United Kingdom, demanded German technology in exchange. Berlin had to sanction the sale of Messerschmitt fighters, a Panzer-III tank and the cruiser Lutzow; it also showed the construction plans for the battleship Bismarck to Soviet specialists.12 Stalin has the reputation of having been gulled by Hitler. This was not how things appeared to Berlin in 1939–40. Stalin had driven a hard bargain and insisted on its complete fulfilment. As he pushed his case at the risk of raising tension between Moscow and Berlin, Hitler described him as a ‘cold-blooded blackmailer’.13
What changed Stalin’s attitude was nothing that happened in eastern Europe or the Far East. France’s collapse in summer 1940 transformed everything. Soviet military planning had been based on the assumption that Hitler would encounter more effective resistance from the French armed forces than had been met in Poland. Geopolitics in Europe were turned upside down. Few observers gave the United Kingdom much chance of survival in the following months. For Stalin, the implications were dire. The Wehrmacht looked as if it was close to completing its tasks in the West. It would no longer face a two-front war if it turned its power against the USSR. Stalin’s relations with Hitler immediately reflected the consequences of France’s collapse. Truculent since August 1939, he began to appease. War with Germany had to be averted at any cost.14
Appeasement was practised without any express declaration of a change in stance. But Stalin’s statements behind the scenes, recently made available, reveal his worries. At the October Revolution anniversary dinner in the Kremlin on 7 November 1940 he indicated his shock at the military developments. He did not limit himself to the French débâcle. The Soviet–Japanese War had indicated weaknesses in the country’s air force if not in its tanks. The Winter War with Finland had gone much worse for the USSR, revealing gross defects in organisation and planning. Then Germany had overwhelmed France in the summer campaign and driven the British back over the Channel. Stalin was blunt: ‘We’re not ready for war of the kind being fought between Germany and England.’15 Molotov was to recall him concluding around that time that ‘we would be able to confront the Germans on an equal basis only by 1943’.16 The diplomatic ramifications were enormous. Hitler had to be reassured that Soviet military intentions were entirely peaceful. His requests for raw materials had to be met even if German technology was not immediately available in exchange: late delivery, once complained about, was now forgivable.
As the diplomatic world darkened in the first half of 1941, Stalin revised several of his political judgements. Already he had added to the Russian national ingredients in Marxism–Leninism. Steadily, as he looked out on the countries of Europe under the Nazi jackboot, he reached the conclusion that the Comintern’s usefulness had come to an end. If communism was going to appeal to broad popular opinion, it had to be regarded as a movement showing sensitivity to local national feelings. Perhaps Stalin also urgently wanted to reassure Hitler that Soviet expansionism was a defunct aspiration. He mentioned this to Dimitrov in April 1941; communist parties, he asserted,17