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

In seeking to take advantage of the opportunity that a rapprochement with Germany might represent, Stalin needed first to remove longtime foreign minister Maxim Litvinov. Litvinov, already in his sixties by 1939, was very much a Bolshevik of the old school—a man who had spent a good deal of his career prior to 1917 in exile, aiding the communist cause as a gunrunner and propagandist and only later as a diplomat. From 1930, he had served as Stalin’s foreign minister and in this capacity had become synonymous with the policy of collective security, using his urbane charm to bring the Soviet Union back in from the cold and into a modicum of diplomatic respectability.

Yet, by the early summer of 1939, Litvinov was on thin ice. In fact, given that the policy of collective security had so demonstrably failed, it is remarkable that Litvinov had not been removed beforehand. By May, his close connections to the discarded policy made him surplus to Stalin’s requirements. Moreover, as a Jew and a persistent critic of the Nazis—who loved to refer to him mockingly as “Litvinov-Finkelstein”—Litvinov clearly lacked the flexibility that might be required in a new and challenging international situation. Citing his foreign minister’s “disloyalty” and failure to “ensure the pursuance of the party line,” Stalin had Litvinov removed from office. Far from receiving a gold watch and being shuffled into retirement, however, Litvinov was arrested by the NKVD, his office surrounded, his telephone cut off; many of his aides were also arrested and interrogated, evidently in an attempt to elicit some compromising information. He would be fortunate to survive the experience.

Litvinov’s successor as foreign minister was Stalin’s most faithful acolyte, Vyacheslav Molotov, a man whose loyalty to the party line—and to Stalin personally—was unswerving. Born Vyacheslav Skryabin in 1890, he had enjoyed a stereotypical apprenticeship as a revolutionary: the conspiratorial existence, the spells of Siberian exile, even the adoption—in common with Lenin and Stalin—of a nom de guerre, his deriving from the Russian word for “hammer,” molot . With the Revolution of 1917, Molotov had found himself in Petrograd editing the Communist Party newspaper, Pravda ; he soon emerged as a leading member of the Petrograd Soviet and, in time, as a protégé of Stalin. Never a military man or an inspiring orator, the slight, bespectacled Molotov considered himself primarily a journalist. According to his contemporaries, he was somewhat colorless: a plodding bureaucrat, a stickler for Bolshevik doctrine, who was dubbed “Comrade Stonearse” for his ability to sit through interminable Kremlin meetings. As pedantic as he was loyal, he was even known to correct those who dared to use the moniker, claiming that Lenin himself had christened him “Ironarse.” He did not do so with a smile. Petty and vindictive, he did not hesitate to recommend execution for those who crossed him.

These qualities enabled Molotov to climb the greasy pole of Soviet politics, becoming first the head of the Moscow party organization, then chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in 1930, in which capacity he oversaw the brutal collectivization campaign in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. Absolutely and unquestioningly loyal to Stalin, Molotov survived the purges of the late 1930s, even personally authorizing thousands of executions. As he later admitted with brutal flippancy, “I signed most—in fact almost all—the arrest lists. We debated and made a decision. Haste ruled the day. Could one go into all the details?” So by the time he was appointed as Stalin’s foreign minister, Molotov was not so much a colorless bureaucrat: he was thoroughly steeped in blood. Yet he had no experience of foreign affairs, knew little about the outside world, spoke no foreign languages, and had only once briefly been abroad. As one commentator noted, he was “one of the most inexorably stupid men to hold the foreign ministership of any major power in this century.” Molotov’s only qualification was that he was Stalin’s man.

Stalin’s appointment of Molotov was a bold move, then, and an indication that foreign policy was now very much in his own hands. It did not necessarily signify that collective security was dead, but it did send a strong signal to the outside world—and to Nazi Germany in particular—that all foreign policy options were now up for consideration in Moscow. In case the message of Litvinov’s demise was missed in Berlin, Stalin also instructed that the Foreign Ministry was to be purged of Jews, for good measure. “Thank God,” Molotov faithfully remembered later in life. “Jews formed an absolute majority in the leadership and among the ambassadors. It wasn’t good.”

Just as Stalin’s appointment of Molotov had concentrated the levers of foreign policy in the Soviet dictator’s hands, a similar process had taken place the previous year in Berlin, with Ribbentrop’s appointment as Hitler’s foreign minister. Although Ribbentrop had refrained from ushering in any wholesale clearing out of Foreign Office mandarins, he nonetheless was not above promoting his own, often ill-qualified favorites into important positions. The rise of Martin Luther is instructive in this regard. Brought into the German Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse on Ribbentrop’s coattails in February 1939, Luther headed the new Party Liaison Office, which essentially concerned itself with protecting Ribbentrop’s interests in the endemic infighting of the Third Reich. In due course, he would end up as one of Wilhelmstrasse’s most influential players, even representing the Foreign Office at the infamous Wannsee Conference in 1942, where the Holocaust was coordinated. Yet his pedigree for such exalted office was dubious to say the least: Luther’s primary qualification was that he had been Ribbentrop’s interior decorator, furniture remover, and “fixer” during the latter’s spell as ambassador in London.

Ribbentrop’s questionable choice of acolytes aside, his fawning sycophancy toward Hitler was the prime instrument of his advancement. This made his career a curious parallel with that of Molotov. The appointment of both—“yes-men” and nonentities—marked the concentration of decision making effectively in the hands of Hitler and Stalin themselves. With no moderating voices to restrain them or advise otherwise, the two dictators were free to negotiate with one another.

Despite this, however, German policy had actually been slow to wake up to the possibilities that an arrangement with Stalin might present. Of course, some in the German Foreign Office—“Easterners” such as Moscow ambassador Schulenburg—had long advocated some sort of reimagining of the Rapallo Treaty of 1922, whereby Germany and Soviet Russia had enjoyed a season of economic and military cooperation while jointly thumbing their noses at the Western powers. But, for all the appeal that such an arrangement might have had, its advocates had generally been drowned out in the 1930s by those who were more in tune with the anti-Bolshevik zeitgeist. Göring’s petit jeu , however—cynical maneuver though it was—had momentarily given the Easterners their head, and for a brief period at least, their ideas were taken seriously. They had much to argue in their favor: not only might a pact with Moscow free Hitler to “deal” with Poland and the Western powers, but it could also ensure that Germany insulated itself from the worst effects of any British blockade by sourcing its food and raw materials from the USSR.

In order to square the ideological circle, some in Berlin managed to convince themselves that the Soviet Union was “normalizing,” with Stalin’s policy of “Socialism in One Country” supposedly marking a departure from the expansionist communism of old in a new, more nationally minded direction. Ribbentrop said as much when explaining the pact to his foreign missions in August 1939. “Russian Bolshevism has undergone a decisive structural change under Stalin,” he wrote. “In place of the idea of world revolution there has emerged an attachment to the idea of Russian nationalism and the concept of consolidating the Soviet state on its present national, territorial and social bases.” In other words, Moscow’s dark days of fomenting class war and spreading worldwide revolution were now to be considered a thing of the past.