Stalin полностью

There was no Soviet declaration of war. Potyomkin summoned Polish ambassador Grzybowski at 3:15 a.m. and read aloud a note, in the name of Molotov, unilaterally abrogating the Soviet-Polish nonaggression pact; the envoy refused to take the document.²⁵⁵ Poland’s high command had predicted back in June that the Red Army would attack Poland “only in the final period of a war, when disadvantageous developments had turned against us and the Russian government would have concluded that the Poles had lost the campaign.”²⁵⁶ On the radio, Molotov announced a Soviet military action supposedly necessitated by the disappearance of the Polish state and the possible ensuing chaos. “The Soviet government regards as its sacred duty to proffer help to its Ukrainian and Belorussian brothers in Poland,” he stated.²⁵⁷ In fact, the Polish government continued to function, having relocated to Kuty, in the southeast, on the Polish side of the border with Romania. Although Poland’s high command had effectively lost contact with its armies, the latter retained about 50 percent of their troop strength, and were still fighting the Wehrmacht in central and southeastern Poland.²⁵⁸

Such was the extreme narrowness of the Soviet regime that Nikolai Kuznetsov, the naval commissar, had not been informed beforehand of the Soviet invasion of Poland. He went to Molotov to complain, averring that if he was not trusted, he should not occupy such a high post. “In response, [Molotov] recommended that I read the TASS summaries of foreign news, which he ordered be sent to me from that day,” Kuznetsov recalled. “But is that really the way—the naval commissar should learn about major military and (especially important) political events which affect him, from foreign sources?!”²⁵⁹

German generals, meanwhile, had crossed the secretly agreed-upon German-Soviet demarcation line (which ran along the Pissa, Narew, Vistula, and San rivers). Schulenburg had warned Molotov, back on September 4, that the Wehrmacht, in hot pursuit of Polish forces, might have to cross over temporarily into the Soviet section of Poland. The next day, Molotov had replied in a conciliatory manner, “We understand that as the operations proceed, one of the parties or both parties might be forced temporarily to cross the line of demarcation between the spheres of interest of the two parties; but such cases must not prevent the strict execution of the plan adopted.”²⁶⁰ Whether German generals knew about the Pact’s secret protocol on the precise territorial division remained uncertain, however. Stalin had no guarantee the trespass would be temporary, or that the entire Pact had not been a ruse. When had these Nazis kept their word—over the Munich Pact? General Köstring, in the Little Corner with Schulenburg in the wee hours of September 17, had requested a delay in the Red Army offensive so that the Germans would have time to get out of the way. Stalin had declined. As some 600,000 Red Army troops poured into eastern Poland, they encountered few Polish troops, but some German units came under Soviet fire. Hitler himself was in Poland. He had set out on September 3 in his armored train, Amerika, trailed by weaponized railcars, and traveled through the front in Pomerania and Upper Silesia, on his way to Danzig, which he would reach on September 19.²⁶¹ He billeted, along with Himmler, Ribbentrop, and a huge entourage, at the Kasino Hotel in Sopot (Zoppot, in German), a Baltic Sea resort adjacent to Danzig.

On September 18, Schulenburg reported that Stalin had told him “that on the Soviet side there were certain doubts as to whether the German high command at the appropriate time would stand by the Moscow agreement and would withdraw to the line that had been agreed upon.” In response to assurances, he said that Stalin “replied that he had no doubt at all of the good faith of the German government. His concern was based on the well-known fact that all military men are loath to give up occupied territories.”²⁶² Earlier that day in Berlin, with General Wilhelm Keitel and his chief of operations, Major General Alfred Jodl, away on the eastern campaign, Walter Warlimont, senior operations staff officer, had shown the deputy Soviet military attaché a map indicating that the Lwów/Lviv/Lvov region and its valuable Drohobycz oil fields, as well as a direct train line south from Polish Kołomyja down to Romania, fell within the German sphere. But on the map that Ribbentrop had signed with Molotov in Stalin’s presence, these territories were on the Soviet side. Warlimont either had no knowledge of the secret protocol, was deliberately pretending not to know, or was just indicating the location of German forces at that moment. Molotov, on the evening of September 19, summoned Schulenburg and stated that “the Soviet government as well as Stalin personally are surprised at this obvious violation of the Moscow agreement.” Schulenburg called it a misunderstanding.²⁶³