Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

Berlin’s official position, meanwhile, was one of resolute nonintervention and disinterest. Indeed, the line circulated to all Foreign Office personnel from Wilhelmstrasse was that “Germany has no part in these events [and that] sympathy is to be expressed for the Russian standpoint.” For good measure, it was requested that Germany’s representatives should “refrain from any expression of sympathy for the Finnish position.” True to the letter of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the German government refused to allow any support to be given to its partner’s opponent, even halting Italian deliveries of weapons in transit though Germany destined for Finland. Any remaining debate on the issue within Germany was settled by a Völkischer Beobachter article—thought to have been penned by Hitler himself—stating that, though “the German Volk has nothing against the Finnish people,” it was “both naïve and sentimental” to expect Germany to support Finland, when Finland had treated Germany with such “haughty disapproval” in the years since the Nazi seizure of power. This line was echoed more bluntly in Goebbels’s diary: “The Finns are whining that we offer them no help,” he wrote, when they “never helped us.”

In fact, if Berlin was offering any help, it was to the Soviets. Talks began on the provisioning of Soviet submarines operating in the Gulf of Bothnia immediately on the outbreak of the Finnish War, with the Germans keen to cooperate in anticipation of a quid pro quo elsewhere. A merchantman was found and converted, and a crew was raised, compete with three undercover Soviet officers. But then the Soviets seemingly got cold feet and called the operation off, perhaps wary about being too heavily indebted to their new partner. Berlin’s alacrity in the matter had been noticed, however, and the Finns consequently tended to view Germany more as an “accomplice of the Soviet Union” than anything else.

Despite such expressions of support, Stalin’s annoyance at the humiliation of his Red Army at this most sensitive juncture was barely assuaged. At a meeting at his dacha outside Moscow in January 1940, he raged at the commander of the Finnish campaign, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who replied in the same tone, claiming that Stalin was to blame for the fiasco because he had had all the best generals killed during the purges. Voroshilov then smashed a plate of food in fury. With that, a wholesale reorganization of the Finnish operation became inevitable, and Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, one of the Red Army’s ablest commanders and the mastermind of the Polish invasion four months earlier, was brought in to replace Voroshilov.

Timoshenko quickly set to work. Abandoning the costly eastern front, where the motti battles had so decimated Soviet forces, he concentrated his efforts on the Karelian Isthmus, packing the Soviet side of the front with 600,000 troops, backed by massed artillery and the newest tanks. In addition, he tightened the control and cooperation between the different branches of service in the Red Army and issued a revised tactical doctrine. The Finns were to be forced to fight a conventional war for the narrow strip of the Mannerheim Line against crushingly superior enemy forces. Finland would have its Thermopylae.

Timoshenko’s assault began at dawn on February 1, 1940, with a rolling barrage of 300,000 shells pulverizing defenses and reviving memories of World War I. In the town of Summa, for instance, four hundred Soviet shells per minute rained down on Finnish positions. Over the days and nights that followed, repeated artillery barrages, combined with probing attacks by armored columns with massed infantry support, systematically degraded the defensive strongpoints, blockhouses, and bunkers of the Mannerheim Line. After ten days of intense combat, the Finnish defenders were forced to withdraw to a secondary line of fortifications, but even that they could not hold. Soviet spearheads were once again breaching the Finnish lines, with some Red Army infantry even circumventing the defenses by a perilous detour across the ice of Lake Ladoga. By the end of the month, Finland’s forces were no longer able to resist.

Facing the inevitable, a Finnish delegation traveled to Moscow for negotiations on March 7. In truth, there was little to negotiate, but keen to end the war and forestall the looming foreign intervention on Finland’s side, Stalin offered remarkably moderate terms. Karelia, including the city of Viipuri and all of the Mannerheim fortifications, was to be ceded to Moscow, with further territorial losses mainly in the Arctic North and East. In addition, the Hanko Peninsula at the western end of the Gulf of Finland would be leased to the USSR as a naval base for a period of thirty years. Beyond that, there would be no Soviet occupation, no puppet government, and no infringement of Finnish sovereignty. Kuusinen was pensioned off to run the rump Kare-lo-Finnish Soviet Republic, which incorporated the ceded lands and stood in wait to incorporate more Finnish territory—or indeed all of Finland—should the opportunity arise. The resulting Treaty of Moscow was signed on March 12, and the guns fell silent the following day. Twenty-five thousand Finns had been killed over barely one hundred days of fighting. The Soviet death toll—still disputed—is estimated at over 200,000, but as Khrushchev candidly admitted, “our people were never told the truth.”

Considering such losses and the horrors of the Winter War itself, the people of the Baltic states might have been forgiven for thinking that they had got off lightly by acceding to Moscow’s demands and submitting merely to the establishment of Soviet bases on their territory. Certainly, Molotov was keen to emphasize the benign nature of the new arrangements. As he stressed to the Supreme Soviet in October 1939, “These pacts are inspired by mutual respect for the governmental, social and economic system of each of the contracting parties,” adding that “foolish talk of sovietisation of the Baltic States is useful only to our common enemies.” His Baltic counterparts, meanwhile, did their best to put a positive spin on events, but they were soon to be disabused of any such optimism.

The emptiness of Soviet promises of “nonintervention” in the internal affairs of the Baltic states was exposed almost from the very outset. Although relations were outwardly correct, behind the scenes there was considerable friction. Arriving teams of Soviet military personnel, charged with setting up the bases agreed on with Moscow, routinely demanded more than set out in the treaties. In Latvia, for instance, an additional fifty-kilometer-wide coastal strip was requested as a Soviet “military zone,” while in Lithuania the Red Army demanded the right to establish a garrison in Vilnius. In Estonia two additional airfields and further bases were ceded to the Soviets. Across the region, the numbers of incoming troops quickly exceeded those initially arranged, and rental and compensation packages—stipulated by the treaties—were ignored. The attitude of one Soviet major was perhaps emblematic of Moscow’s high-handed attitude toward its new “allies”: “The Red Army knows only one government,” he said, “and that is the government of the Soviet Union.”

Despite such distinctly unneighborly attitudes, the degree of premeditation and conspiracy involved in the Soviet subversion of the Baltic states is traditionally exaggerated. Most writers on the subject cite an NKVD document from October 1939, known as Order 001223, which is presented as proof of Moscow’s intention to “cleanse” the Baltic states of all “anti-Soviet elements,” in effect anticipating the deportations of 1941 already in 1939, at a time when the Baltic states had not yet been annexed. However, this is incorrect. Order 001223, which has never been published in the West, is thought to relate to affairs in newly annexed eastern Poland but has habitually been confused with the instruction with regard to the Baltic states issued by Ivan Serov in the spring of 1941 (see Chapter 8). In fact, it seems sensible to suggest that Soviet plans regarding the Baltic states were much more gradualist in nature, evidently based on the belief that the close relationship fomented by the “bases agreements” would inevitably lead to a groundswell of popular enthusiasm in favor of union with the USSR. When Comintern chief Georgi Dimitrov wrote about the Baltic mutual assistance pacts in his diary in the autumn of 1939, he betrayed Moscow’s rather optimistic thinking on the issue. “We have found the right form to allow us to bring a number of countries into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence,” he wrote. “We are not going to seek their sovietisation. The time will come when they will do that for themselves!”