Hitler took Stalin’s Baltic annexations badly. The secret protocols of the Pact delimited “spheres of influence” but did not specify the actions permitted—or forbidden—within the respective spheres. There was not a word in the Pact about Soviet occupation of any countries, let alone implanting clone regimes. Stalin was well aware that Hitler had not authorized him to annex former tsarist possessions. But for a long time the despot had cultivated the idea that a fratricide among the imperialist powers might afford unique opportunities to expand “the revolution” in the resulting chaos and destruction. At the Bolshoi back on January 21, 1940 (the sixteenth anniversary of Lenin’s passing), he had boasted, of eastern Poland’s Sovietization, that “Red Army activities are also a matter of world revolution.”72 Then, in the face of the lightning German conquest of France, he had decided to unleash his revolutionary opportunism again. In the seemingly endless rows about whether Stalin’s Kremlin was pursuing Soviet security, defensively, or revolutionary expansionism, the answer was: both, if someone else provided the opportunity.
On June 26, Molotov conveyed an ultimatum to Romania for former tsarist Bessarabia, which again surprised Germany. German officials pressured the Romanian government not to resist the landgrab and thereby afford Moscow a pretext for a full takeover of the country, whose oil fields thirty-five miles north of Bucharest were a life-or-death resource for the Wehrmacht. The Romanians hastily—and angrily—withdrew as the Red Army occupied Bessarabia. Hitler refrained from public criticism but told his adjutants that this was “the first Russian attack on Western Europe.”73 The Führer became angrier still at the Soviet seizure of northern Bukovina, which had never been tsarist, was not covered by the Pact, and was full of ethnic Germans. Molotov told Schulenburg that “Bukovina constitutes the last part that is still missing from a unified Ukraine.”74 The mass-circulation magazine Ogonyok printed photographs of Romanians greeting the Red Army (“the Great Liberator”) with flowers and smiles.75 The Nazi inner circle seethed. The Wehrmacht had smashed Poland on the battlefield while the Soviets had waltzed in and grabbed the Polish territory with the oil. This time, the Wehrmacht had smashed the French land army while the Soviets seized large pieces of Romania, as well as the defenseless Baltic states. “Grave robber!” Goebbels wrote of Stalin in his diary.76
Berlin demanded transfer to Germany of the 125,000 Volksdeutsche in Bessarabia and Bukovina, receipt of the 100,000 tons of grain from Bessarabia specified in a German contract with Romania, and guarantees for all German property as well as the railroad tracks transporting Romanian oil to the Reich.77 Stalin began stationing what would increase to 34 divisions on former Romanian soil, linking what was now Soviet Lvov (Lwów, Lemberg) with Soviet Chernovitsy (Cernăuţi, Czernowitz), in the Ukrainian SSR, while improving the security of Odessa. The fundamental clash of interests between Moscow and Berlin and the Soviet need to counterbalance Germany’s continental aggrandizement could scarcely have been plainer. Just as the Winter War had definitively pushed Finland into the German camp, the seizure of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina consolidated Romania as a staunch German ally.78
