AND IKE WAS SURPRISED THAT GI'S DIDN'T CONSIDER RESCUING THE USSR OUR WAR?:

At the end of September 1939 Ribbentrop flew to Moscow once more to arrange some border deals that would carry out the Secret Protocol. Throughout the war, of all Germany's high officials, he was the most inclined to seek and keep agreements with the Russians. (His counterpart among the Russians, Molotov, had often reciprocal inclinations.) In this respect we may also notice the reciprocal tendencies of Hitler and Stalin. Hitler thought it necessary to carry out the terms of the alliance with Stalin; Stalin, for his part, was more enthusiastic about it than Hitler. One example is his perhaps unnecessary toast to Hitler after the signing of their pact on August 24, 1939: "I know how much the German nation loves its Führer, I should therefore like to drink to his health." More telling for the historical record and more consequential for the peoples of Eastern Europe were the Soviets' intentions and their aggressive behavior soon after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

On the day of Ribbentrop's second visit to Moscow the Russian pressure on the Baltic states began. Russia demanded changes in the Baltic governments, first in Estonia, then its neighbors Latvia and Lithuania. More important, now Russia stationed many troops in those countries, particularly in their seaports, drastically reducing their independence. Their governments were under pressure to defer to Soviet orders and, except for Finland, did so. Two months later the Winter War with Finland began. The small Finnish army fought well and courageously, a fact that even Stalin had to accept; the result was a treaty that gave up pieces of territory to the Soviet Union but for the most part maintained Finnish independence.

Far more ominous and horrible was the situation in Poland. There the Soviet occupation was at least as brutal and murderous--if not more so--than in the parts of Poland subjugated by the Germans. The Russians deported at least one million people--including entire families, without any of their belongings--to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Russian far north, with very few ever seeing their homelands again. In April and May 1940, some 22,000 Polish officers were shot to death near Katyn. More than a million Polish prisoners and workers were deported to Germany for forced labor during the war.

It is telling that many of these practices began soon after the Soviets occupied eastern Poland in September 1939. Some Poles, including Jews, welcomed the Russian soldiers, thinking that they had come to relieve them from the Nazis. (Their subsequent disappointment in the Russians was such that some Jews in eastern Poland thought it better to escape to the Nazi zone, even though they knew how the Germans treated Jews.) Between 1939 and 1941 perhaps the majority of Jewish people in the world lived in Eastern Europe, most of them in eastern Poland, western Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia. Their final extermination by the Germans was not decided by Hitler until September 1941 and not put into effect before January 1942: but in many ways their fate had been foreshadowed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

On June 14, 1940, the very day the German army marched into Paris, Moscow finally decided to implement the Secret Protocol. Within a day or two it declared the total incorporation of Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania into the Soviet Union. Their governments were imprisoned or exiled. Many of their former officers were executed, and at least 25,000 of the Baltic peoples were deported to the Soviet Union. Hitler transported the German minorities in the Baltics to Germany on German ships.

In November 1940 Molotov traveled to Berlin. His journey was not a success. His diplomatic manner was characteristically stiff. In view of the German conquest of almost all of Europe, he proposed to include Bulgaria in the Russian sphere. The Soviet Union would thus have a presence near the Bosphorus, at the expense of Turkey. The Germans did not respond to this. Sometime in December 1940 Hitler began to plan for an eventual war against Russia.

Stalin was somewhat critical of Molotov's behavior in Berlin; he thought his foreign minister may have been too rigid. This was typical of Stalin during the next six months. He could not and would not believe that Hitler would start a war against him while Germany still had Britain to deal with.

Stalin made some moves to improve Russia's situation. He negotiated a friendly pact with Yugoslavia, which amounted to nothing, since Hitler invaded Yugoslavia on the day of its signing. He invited the Japanese foreign minister, Yōsuke Matsuoka, to visit Moscow on his way back to Japan after his visit to Berlin. Surprisingly, he then signed a Non-Aggression Pact with Japan. (Soon after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Matsuoka, back in Tokyo, suggested a Japanese invasion of Russia from the east. So much for the value of Non-Aggression Pacts in 1941. But he didn't get his way, since Japan's main enemy was now the US.)

Stalin ordered many friendly gestures toward Germany, including speeding up the deliveries of Soviet products there. He did not in the least react to a warning from Churchill about a prospective German attack against the Soviet Union. During the ten days before the Nazi invasion--all kinds of information about the German threat notwithstanding--Stalin did his best or, rather, his worst, to affirm his faith in Hitler and in Germany. I do not know of a single instance of such abject behavior (for that is what it was) by a statesman of a great power.

The German attack shocked Stalin into silence at first. (Molotov's words after the German declaration of war were also telling: "Did we deserve this?") Stalin's first orders for the Soviet army were not to respond at all. It took him hours after the invasion--until noon--before he ordered the army to resist.

There is still a controversy about how shaken he was during the first days of the Nazi onslaught. Eventually he pulled himself together. On July 3, 1941--eleven days after the German invasion--he addressed the peoples of the Soviet Union as a patriot. By that time some Nazi troops were more than one hundred miles inside the western Soviet Union and advancing toward Moscow. Roger Moorhouse concludes his modest introduction: the history of the Nazi-Soviet Pact "deserves to be rescued from the footnotes and restored to its rightful place.... I can only hope that this book makes some small contribution to that process." It does.

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