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

Other cases reflected the prevailing Soviet paranoia or the mania for revenge against former anti-Bolsheviks. Ex-“Whites” from the civil war were often among the first to be targeted. One was Oleg Vasilkovski, who was over sixty when he was arrested in the summer of 1940. A general in the tsarist army in World War I, he had drifted into the anti-Bolshevik White Army in 1919 before settling in Tallinn, where he had eschewed politics and worked as a chandler. Deported to Leningrad in 1941, he was sentenced to death. His precise fate is unknown.

Priests, too, were singled out for especially harsh treatment. In Bessarabia, in late August 1940, NKVD troops interrupted mass at an orthodox church in Călăraşi and attempted to arrest the priest, Alexandru Baltagă. Baltagă gamely refused to leave his flock until mass was finished, so the officers returned the following night and took him for interrogation to nearby Cernăuți, where he was accused of having supported the union of Bessarabia with Romania back in 1918 and challenged to “show his God.” Predictably, after a lengthy interrogation, he was sentenced to a spell of reeducation in the Gulag. Already frail, Baltagă did not survive the experience: he died, aged eighty, in 1941.

Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, recorded a final chilling example. Born in Brest, Begin had fled to Vilnius at the outbreak of war in 1939 but was arrested by the NKVD in September 1940, accused of being a British agent. Under interrogation, he was alarmed to discover that Soviet justice was an extremely elastic concept unrestricted by time or national borders. When asked by his interrogator if he knew the section of the Soviet law code under which he was being charged, Begin confessed that he did not. “You are charged under Section 58 of the Criminal Law of the Soviet Socialist Russian Republic,” he was told, with the added detail that the section had been “written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself.” Begin was confused. “But how can it apply to what I did in Poland?” he asked. “Ach! You are a strange fellow, Menachem Wolfovitch,” the NKVD officer replied. “Section 58 applies to everyone in the world. Do you hear? In the whole world . It is only a question of when he will get to us, or we to him.”

AND SO STALIN AND HITLER DIVIDED MUCH OF EUROPE BETWEEN them in 1940. Hitler occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and northern France—a total of more than 800,000 square kilometers. Although Great Britain remained technically undefeated, she was confined to her island; the United States, while increasingly antagonistic toward Germany, was still neutral. Nazi Germany, therefore, became the preeminent power on the continent of Europe. Stalin did less well territorially, with only around half of Hitler’s haul at 422,000 square kilometers, but was arguably better placed to actually absorb his gains, given that all of them were long-standing Russian irredenta with some tradition of rule from Moscow and all were neatly contiguous to the western frontier of the USSR.

In occupying those lands, Stalin was only taking that which Hitler had promised him in August 1939. Only the tiny territory of Northern Bukovina—barely 5,000 square kilometers—lay beyond the list of lands ascribed to him under the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Hitler could have few complaints, therefore. This was the price he had agreed to pay to secure his rear while he turned west to fight the British and the French; it was the price of his dramatic solution to the “Polish question” and of the economic relationship that was supposed to render the British blockade ineffective.

Neither can Hitler have seriously cried foul over Soviet tactics in securing and “pacifying” its new territories. Certainly the NKVD operated with exemplary rigor and brutality in annexing the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina and “coordinating” their respective societies with Soviet norms. Yet Hitler’s Gestapo and SS were no less rigorous or brutal in enforcing their “new order” in Poland, the Balkans, and parts of occupied western Europe; the two sides even employed similar tactics: deportation, hard labor, and execution.

And yet, Hitler was clearly disquieted by Soviet actions in the summer of 1940. He first learned of the Soviet intention to occupy Bessarabia while he was visiting Paris in late June with his architect Albert Speer and sculptor Arno Breker in tow. He is said to have flown into a rage, demanding that Ribbentrop show him a copy of the secret protocol as he could not believe that he would have agreed to such a move. When presented with the proof, he could do nothing but seethe and have Ribbentrop register a protest. His irritation was such that his Moscow ambassador, Schulenburg, sought desperately to conceal Stalin’s strategic motives from Hitler, instead attributing the move to the influence of a mythical Ukrainian clique in the Kremlin. Acknowledging the truth, Schulenburg knew, would imply a looming clash of interests.

Hitler had no particular love for Romania, seeing that country as a corrupt Francophile kingdom that had received an Anglo-French guarantee eighteen months earlier. But Romania’s loss of Bessarabia nonetheless worried him not only because of the proximity of Soviet forces to the vital Romanian oilfields but also because he interpreted it as a dangerous westward move and a symbol of Stalin’s undiminished territorial ambition. Although he said nothing in public, Hitler complained to his adjutants that the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia signified “the first Russian attack on Western Europe.”

Goebbels concurred, at least in his diary. On June 28, when the Romanian government submitted to a Soviet ultimatum, he was damning. “King Carol is a coward,” he said, “but Stalin is seizing the moment. Grave-robber! All down to our success. We make victory easy for others.” Already in the following week, he was speculating whether “maybe we will have to move against the Soviets after all.” A month later, doubtless echoing his master’s voice, he had clearly begun thinking seriously of some sort of reckoning with Stalin’s USSR. Writing in his diary in August 1940, he pondered whether “perhaps we will be forced to take steps against all this, despite everything. And drive this Asiatic spirit back out of Europe and into Asia, where it belongs.”

IN THE FIRST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 1939, HARRY POLLITT SAT DOWN in his office in London’s bustling Covent Garden to write a pamphlet. Round-faced with a receding hairline and prominent dark eyebrows, the forty-eight-year-old Pollitt was general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and it was part of his role as leader to provide a commentary on current events that not only delineated the position of the Communist International but also explained matters in terms that the thousands of ordinary workers who made up the party’s membership could readily digest. To this end, he had penned numerous titles in previous years, including “Towards Soviet Power,” “Save Spain from Fascism,” and “Czechoslovakia Betrayed.” This, however, would be his most controversial piece of work.

Pollitt was certainly well regarded within the communist movement. Growing up in Manchester, he had imbibed his socialist radicalism with his mother’s milk, trained as a boilermaker, and graduated as an industrial militant working in the Southampton docks during World War I. Joining the nascent Communist Party upon its foundation in 1920, he was a talented and impassioned public speaker, so much so that he was even kidnapped briefly by his fascist opponents in 1925 to prevent him from attending a party meeting in Liverpool. Rising through the ranks, propelled by the power of his oratory as well as by his unswerving loyalty to the communist cause and the Soviet state, Pollitt was appointed general secretary in 1929.