Stalin

Stalin proceeded more cautiously and gradually in the Baltic states, which the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had recognized as falling into the Soviet sphere of influence. Immediately after the partition of Poland and the settlement of various issues with Germany, in late September and October 1939 the Soviet leadership forced Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to permit Soviet military bases on their territory, including in the Baltic Sea ports. Molotov and Stalin personally took on the task of intimidating their Baltic neighbors during negotiations at the Kremlin. These meetings were tense. When the representatives of the Baltic governments insisted on preserving their sovereignty and neutrality, Molotov threatened them with war and refused to make the slightest concession. Stalin applied a softer touch and offered a few insignificant compromises, reducing, for example, the number of troops to be stationed in the Baltic countries. The intransigence of the Baltic representatives evidently irritated him, but he kept his temper. According to the Latvian foreign minister, Stalin wrote, doodled, strolled around the room, and picked up books and newspapers while others were speaking. At critical points he interrupted and went off on tangents, expounding at length on abstruse ethnographic or historical topics.⁴⁶

The Soviet side obviously had the advantage. Red Army units were already positioned along the Baltic nations’ borders. Germany—the only possible counterweight to the Soviet Union—was acting in concert with the USSR. Stalin, nevertheless, did not hurry to overwhelm his victims, instead taking what he wanted a little at a time. Until Soviet troops entered Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Stalin applied a tactic he shared with Comintern head Dimitrov: “It’s not good to rush ahead! … Slogans should be advanced that suit the particular stage of the war.… We think we’ve found in mutual assistance pacts (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) a form that permits us to bring a number of countries into the Soviet Union’s orbit of influence. But for this, we need to hold back—to strictly respect their internal regimes and independence. We won’t try to sovietize them. The time will come when they’ll do it themselves!”⁴⁷

The prediction Stalin makes in the last sentence of this explanation betrays his ultimate goaclass="underline" to sovietize and absorb the countries and territories added to his country’s sphere of influence under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. From a historical standpoint, he could justify this goal as the reconstitution of the Russian Empire. As military strategy, it surely made sense to establish strong control over areas through which an attack might come. But the future—the who, what, when, and where of the impending war—was shrouded in uncertainty, and Stalin was forced to wait. For now, he preferred to play a balancing game and went out of his way to avoid unnecessarily irritating either Great Britain and France or, especially, the Führer. There were many small signs of Stalin’s caution during this period. We see it, for example, in his reaction to a report from Belarus on a speech given to the republic’s parliament by army group commander Vasily Chuikov. Intoxicated by his easy victory in Poland, Chuikov told his audience in this speech, which went out over the radio, “If the party says the word, we’ll march to that tune—first Warsaw, then Berlin!” Furious, Stalin wrote Chuikov’s boss, Voroshilov: “Com. Voroshilov. Chuikov is evidently at least a fool, if not an enemy element. I say he should be given a spanking. At the very least.”⁴⁸ While Chuikov apparently survived, many other Soviet citizens who expressed anti-Nazi sentiments were not so lucky. Between August 1939 and the beginning of war between Germany and the USSR, expressions of anti-Hitlerism were treated as a crime in the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s stealthy approach to expansion was bound to hit a stumbling block eventually, and that stumbling block was Finland. In October 1939, having won the concessions he wanted from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Soviet dictator turned his attention to his Nordic neighbor, which the Nazis had recognized as part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Finland was presented with much harsher demands than the Baltic countries. In addition to the placement of Soviet military bases in Finland, the USSR demanded a large portion of Finnish territory near Leningrad in exchange for land in less populated border regions. On the surface, these demands appeared perfectly reasonable. The USSR wanted to be able to defend Leningrad—the country’s second capital and a major center of defense production—and its approaches from the Baltic Sea. But Finland, a former province of the Russian Empire that had received its independence in 1917, suspected the USSR of imperial ambitions. The Finns remembered the horrors of the 1918 civil war, which had largely been provoked by their Communist neighbor. They also noted the recent example of Czechoslovakia, which had given up the Sudetenland only to be entirely taken over by Hitler. Finland categorically refused the Soviet demands. Stalin decided to use force.

The Red Army invaded Finland in late November, having every reason to believe that its campaign would be short and successful. Finland was a tiny country with no more than 4 million inhabitants—forty times smaller than the Soviet population. The territory, economic resources, and military might of the two countries were not comparable. The 26 tanks with which Finland began the war would have to fend off 1,500 Soviet ones. Furthermore, the USSR would be able to throw significant additional troops and resources into the battle, and it did so as the conflict—known as the Winter War—unexpectedly continued. Staking success on overwhelming force, Stalin decided to make Finland the site of his first experiment applying a different takeover model from the one used in the Baltic states. The Red Army brought with it the “people’s government of Finland,” consisting of Communists hand-picked in Moscow. This was the government that would be installed to rule a defeated Finland.

But the people’s government of Finland never took office. The Finns showed the Red Army fierce and capable resistance. As the war dragged on, a strongly anti-Soviet mood spread throughout the rest of the world. The USSR was expelled from the League of Nations, and France and England prepared to intervene on the Finnish side. Stalin decided not to tempt fate. Despite a series of victories made possible by a major buildup of forces, in March 1940 he signed a peace treaty with Finland. Plans to sovietize the USSR’s northern neighbor were set aside. The Finns wound up losing a significant portion of their territory and economy, but they maintained their independence. The Red Army lost approximately 130,000 troops, either killed in combat, dying from wounds or disease, or missing in action. More than 200,000 were wounded or frostbitten. The Finnish losses were significantly lower: 23,000 killed or missing in action and 44,000 wounded.⁴⁹ The war, a major symbolic defeat for the USSR and Stalin personally, exposed weaknesses in every component of the Soviet military machine. Historians have proposed that it was this conflict that prompted Hitler to push forward his timetable for invading the Soviet Union.

Soviet failure in Finland contrasted ominously with Hitler’s triumphant advance. Soon after the Winter War, in April–June 1940, Germany occupied a number of West European countries, forcing France to capitulate in just weeks. British troops were evacuated from the continent, and Italy entered the war on Germany’s side. France’s quick and inglorious fall radically changed the situation in the world. Khrushchev later described how upset and worried Stalin was about the French defeat, lamenting the country’s inability to put up a fight.⁵⁰ Even if Khrushchev’s account is tainted by hindsight, there is no reason to doubt Stalin’s general sense of alarm. The Soviet leader had lost his former maneuvering room between the warring sides. A strategy that had looked rock solid had suddenly turned to dust. Now there would be no easy way out through a mutually convenient treaty. A huge threat hung over the Soviet Union. The nation that had been its sole if unreliable ally began to look like a mortally dangerous enemy.