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

The reality would be more prosaic. The decision to occupy and sovietize the Baltic states likely crystallized gradually through the early spring and summer of 1940. In the first instance, underground communist activity in the Baltic region spiked in March of that year, provoking an inevitable deterioration in relations between the Baltic governments and Moscow. In due course, incidents involving the Soviet “guests” began to multiply: in Estonia, Soviet warships fired on an Estonian aircraft over Tallinn, and in Latvia a local man was shot dead by two drunk Soviet officers. Increasingly, local populations, already predominantly anticommunist, began to view the Soviets with open contempt, and tensions rose further. Although politicians tried to play down such incidents and maintain a positive commentary on relations with Moscow, in private some were beginning to feel the chill. At the end of April 1940, for instance, the Lithuanian ambassador in Moscow reported home that “a black cat [had] crossed the road of Soviet-Lithuanian relations.”

The black cat did not go unnoticed. Already in May 1940, contingency plans were being prepared by the Latvian and Lithuanian governments, arranging for powers to pass to selected diplomatic representatives in the event that contact with the home country was broken. The Estonians, meanwhile, arranged for some of their gold reserve, along with a part of the state archives, to be shipped abroad. In desperation, the Lithuanian president, Antanas Smetona, even offered his country to the Germans as a protectorate.

For their part, the Soviets presented a litany of complaints. They protested that the Baltic elites had hampered the deployment of the Red Army the previous autumn, delaying negotiations and dragging their feet on construction. They also claimed to have been troubled by the inevitable climate of hostility. They suggested, for instance, that in Latvia civilians who so much as spoke to Soviet personnel were liable to arrest, and a “malevolent atmosphere” encouraged espionage against Red Army installations. Moscow was doubtless also frustrated because it had been obliged to revise its earlier idea that the ordinary working people of the Baltic states would welcome its soldiers’ presence and prove amenable to a Soviet-style revolution. Unsurprisingly, then, relations had become strained by the early summer of 1940. In time, events far to the west would provide the catalyst for a further, terminal deterioration.

Hitler’s share of the spoils from the Nazi-Soviet Pact had not been insubstantial. Not only did he get his desired campaign against the Poles, dividing Poland with Stalin in the process, but he also had the prospect of Soviet economic aid helping him to sidestep the worst effects of the expected British blockade of Germany. Yet, perhaps most important for Hitler was the question of Rückendeckung : the fact that the pact with Stalin had covered his rear, allowing him to turn west with impunity and avoid the specter of a two-front war. So it was that Hitler sent his troops into Scandinavia in April 1940, essentially to forestall a planned British operation to occupy Narvik in northern Norway and to secure the strategically vital Norwegian western coast. The occupation went relatively smoothly; in Denmark only a few dozen casualties were incurred in an operation that lasted barely six hours. The operation in Norway was more complex, seeing stiff resistance from the Norwegian army as well as an attempted Allied intervention at Narvik, which was finally defeated in mid-June.

By that time, after six months of the so-called Phony War—during which German and Anglo-French forces faced each other in a state of war but without opening hostilities—the campaign in the west of Europe was already under way. When Hitler’s tanks finally rolled into France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, it appeared to the rest of Europe and the world that the battle had finally been joined—that the crucial contest to decide who would control the continent of Europe was now afoot. As the British general Alan Brooke noted in his diary on the first day of the campaign, “one of the greatest battles in history” had begun.

It was certainly substantial. Between them, the opposing forces on the western front amounted to 285 divisions and over 7 million men. They were evenly matched in manpower and materiel—with French tanks even considered superior—but a German advantage in morale and strategy was decisive. Bypassing the Maginot Line and driving through the Ardennes forest, German armored spearheads outthought and outpaced the British and French, forcing them inexorably backward and into one of the most catastrophic defeats of modern military history. Far from the static, plodding rerun of World War I that Stalin and others had envisaged, the campaign was characterized by rapid movement—the very epitome of what came to be known as the blitzkrieg.

With the world’s attention thus focused on events on the Maginot Line, in the French city of Sedan, and in the forests of the Ardennes, Moscow appears to have sensed an opportunity to consolidate its grip on the Baltic. On May 16, an article in Izvestia , the Soviet government’s mouthpiece, used the recent experience of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands to claim that “the neutrality of small states is a mere fantasy” and advise such states that “the policy of neutrality could not be called anything but suicide.” The warning was grimly prophetic.

Two days before the Izvestia article, Molotov’s Lithuanian counterparts had informed him about the case of a junior Red Army officer by the name of Butaev who had apparently been kidnapped in Lithuania and since died under mysterious circumstances. Ordinarily, perhaps, such an event, though troubling, would not cause an international incident, but May 1940 was no ordinary time. The Soviet response was not slow to materialize. On May 25, just as British and French forces were reeling under the German onslaught in the West, Molotov requested the presence of the Lithuanian ambassador in the Kremlin. He informed his guest that, in addition to Butaev, two additional Red Army soldiers had gone missing in Lithuania, alleging that they had been plied with drink, involved in criminal activities, and induced to desert. In truth, Butaev had deserted of his own volition to live with a prostitute but, when apprehended by NKVD officers, shot himself in broad daylight on a Vilnius street. Not to be swayed by details, however, Molotov asserted that responsibility for such events lay with the Lithuanian authorities, who, he said, clearly desired to provoke the Soviet Union; he closed by demanding that the Lithuanian government “take the necessary steps to halt such provocative action” lest he be forced to “take other measures.”

Soviet ire was evidently not restricted to the Lithuanians. On May 28, an article in Pravda criticized the “loyal attitude” that it perceived among the Estonian intelligentsia toward Great Britain, complaining that the University of Tartu, for instance, was a veritable hotbed of “pro-British propaganda.” An Estonian delegation at a book exhibition in Moscow personally experienced the abrupt change of climate. Arriving on May 26, its members had been warmly welcomed and feted, but two days later the atmosphere became so hostile that they were obliged to return home ahead of schedule.

As the British and French faltered before German aggression in the west, the Baltic states were exposed to the full fury of Molotov’s diplomatic offensive. On May 30—as the evacuation of British and French forces at Dunkirk was at its height—formal accusations were leveled at the Lithuanian government, alleging official collusion in the recent “outrages” against Red Army soldiers. Hurrying to Moscow, Lithuanian prime minister Antanas Merkys found Molotov in an unyielding mood. On June 7, the Soviet foreign minister demanded that two prominent members of the Lithuanian cabinet be removed; two days later he accused Lithuania of conspiring with Estonia and Latvia to establish an anti-Soviet military alliance. At a third meeting, on June 11, with Merkys and the Lithuanian cabinet offering everything possible to placate him, Molotov, determined not to be mollified, poured scorn on Lithuanian protestations of innocence. After only an hour, the meeting broke up, and Merkys returned to Vilnius, unaware that his efforts had served little purpose because the Red Army was already preparing its invasion.