This alleged speech made it seem as if Stalin believed war was needed to weaken the West, expand the USSR’s boundaries, and help spread communism in Europe. These supposed remarks compromised Stalin in Hitler’s eyes and made the French Communist Party look like an agent of hostile forces. Publication of this “top secret” document clearly served somebody’s interest.
Most historians have never assigned much significance to this forgery. Neither the Politburo archive nor Stalin’s own files contain even circumstantial evidence of such a speech—or even that the Politburo met on 19 August. This is not surprising. Based on what is known about Stalin’s dictatorship in the late 1930s, it is hard to believe he would speak so openly to his Politburo comrades, for whose opinions—and even existence—he felt no need whatsoever. The “transcript of Stalin’s speech,” like many other well-known forgeries, promotes a particular viewpoint in regard to Stalin and his actions. According to this extreme view, Stalin concluded a pact with Hitler because he wanted war in Europe as a means of carrying out his plans.
The views reflected in the forgery differ sharply from statements by Stalin for which we do have a reliable source. Georgy Dimitrov, the head of the Comintern at the time, recorded in his diary the following remarks by Stalin, made at a meeting on 7 September: “We would rather have reached agreement with the so-called democratic countries, so we conducted negotiations. But the English and French wanted to use us as field hands and without paying us anything! We, of course, would not go work as field hands, especially if we weren’t getting paid.”44 Nobody should feel compelled to take Stalin’s words at face value. But the possibility that he was driven toward his pact with Hitler by his country’s isolation and a sense that he was undervalued by his Western allies deserves serious consideration.
The diversity of opinions concerning Stalin’s motives in August 1939 reflects the complexity of events and abundance of international intrigues during the lead-up to World War II. In recent times, however, pieces of historical evidence have become available that clarify the situation. The negotiations among the Soviet Union, England, and France were fraught with problems, and both the Soviet and the Western sides were to blame for their lack of progress. Stalin saw in the Western nations’ obstinacy further confirmation of their intent to appease Hitler at the expense of the USSR. Most likely, he thought war between Germany and Poland was inevitable however the other powers were aligned, and he was probably right. It was difficult to predict how such a war would affect his country. The Nazis would be right on Soviet borders. Hitler was prepared to pay a fair price for a pact that would grant Soviet blessing to this arrangement. For Stalin, the pact offered nearly risk-free expansion of Soviet territory and a chance to create a buffer between his country and the war about to be unleashed on Europe.
Then there were the Japanese. In the spring of 1939, clashes were already erupting between Soviet and Japanese troops in Mongolia. The first engagements did not end well for the Red Army, but by the time of the von Ribbentrop negotiations, the Soviet side was achieving significant victories. These strengthened Stalin’s position in his dialogue with Germany. The signing of the pact was a diplomatic blow to Japan. At least for the near term, it could not count on its German ally in its confrontation with the USSR. There is no serious argument against assuming that Stalin was guided by all these considerations.
In August 1939, Stalin had every reason to consider himself ascendant. He had concluded an agreement with the world’s strongest military power and averted a war with it, at least for the time being and possibly for a long time to come. He had won back much of the territory lost by Russia two decades earlier. He could anticipate reaping third-party benefits as the warring European countries created a new balance of power on the continent. The pact with Germany and secret protocol were morally distasteful and they diminished the Soviet Union’s reputation with progressives around the world, but these were relatively minor concerns. Was Stalin looking into the distant future and plotting the creation of a Communist empire extending over a large part of Europe? Such a prospect must have been hard to envision in 1939. Did he conclude the pact in order to provoke war in Europe? Given Nazi aggression, such a provocation seems hardly necessary. It is another matter that we will never know how the war would have played out had Stalin not signed the agreement with Hitler and continued to try to make common cause with England and France.
We will also never know how the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and secret protocol would look today had Stalin used these documents simply to restrain Germany and expand the Soviet sphere of influence. In that case, posterity would have seen the Soviet-German understanding as an unsavory but understandable and pragmatic maneuver by a savvy politician. But Stalin was the iron-fisted ruler of a totalitarian system. He used the agreement not simply to keep the Nazis out of the small countries along the USSR’s border, but also to assimilate new territories. And assimilation, in Stalin’s world, meant aggression and the brutal purging of society.
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Poland’s allies, Great Britain and France, responded with a declaration of war, and World War II was under way. The Nazis swept through Poland almost unopposed. The British and French forces that came to Poland’s defense assembled too slowly and seemed in no great hurry to fight. The Red Army’s entry into Poland, and the line dividing this country between Germany and the USSR, had been determined during the von Ribbentrop negotiations in Moscow the previous month, but Stalin was also in no hurry to begin military actions. The Soviet invasion began only on 17 September, after the outcome of Germany’s Polish campaign was fully evident. Clearly, Stalin preferred to wait until the risk of an invasion was minimal and Soviet aggression would not look like it had been coordinated with Germany’s. The Red Army primarily occupied the parts of western Ukraine and western Belarus that Poland had seized in 1921. The official propaganda claimed that Soviet actions were being taken on behalf of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples and described the invasion as an act of “liberation.” This interpretation suited Western politicians, who still hoped to win Stalin to their side.
The reality bore little resemblance to the image promoted by Soviet propaganda. The Soviet absorption of western Ukraine and western Belarus was not a joyous reunion of divided nations. For the first year and a half of their sovietization, the new territories underwent the same violent social engineering that the USSR had been experiencing for decades. The goal was to force them into the Soviet mold: do away with the capitalist economic system, inculcate a new ideology, and destroy any real or imagined hotbeds of dissent against the regime. The traditional methods were used. “Suspicious” people were shot, sent to labor camps, or exiled to the Soviet interior; private property was expropriated; and farming was brought into the kolkhoz system. The Stalinist regime was trying to eliminate, in just months, any potential for anti-Soviet collaboration. An important component of this bloody effort was the notorious Katyn massacre. On 5 March 1940 the Politburo adopted a decision to put to death many thousands of Poles held in prisoner-of-war camps or regular prisons in the western provinces of Ukraine and Belarus. The victims were largely members of the Polish elite: military and police officers, former government officials, landowners, industrialists, and members of the Polish intelligentsia. A total of 21,857 people were shot in April and May 1940.45 In exterminating these people, Stalin was clearly attempting to head off any movement to restore the prewar Polish leadership.