It would be wrong to say that he underestimated him. He saw that Hitler had somehow managed to take only a short time to organise the German people. There had been a large communist party and yet it had disappeared — it was wiped out! And Hitler took the people with him and the Germans fought during the war in such a way that this was palpable. So Stalin with his dispassionate approach to the consideration of grand strategy took all this very seriously.
This has the ring of truth. In public it was necessary for a Marxist to stress that Nazism was supported mainly by the middle class. Yet Stalin knew that he was up against a Führer whose people were behind him. He also had no reason to believe that Hitler would quickly crush the armies of the French after defeating Poland. Like most observers, Soviet leaders assumed that the Third Reich would be enmired in difficulties in the West and that this would enable the USSR to go on preparing for war rather than having to fight one against the Wehrmacht.
There were two sections to the Treaty of Non-Aggression: one was public, the other secret. The public section stipulated that the USSR and the German Reich agreed not to make war on each other either individually or in concert with other powers. Disputes between them were to be settled by negotiations or, if this proved ineffective, by an arbitration commission. The treaty entailed that, if either party became engaged in war with another power, no support should be forthcoming to that other power. The treaty was to remain valid for ten years with provision to extend it for five years. The USSR and Germany were to increase their trade on a mutually advantageous basis. Yet the treaty’s secret section was still more significant. Its clauses demarcated ‘spheres of interest’ for the Soviet and German regimes in eastern Europe. Germany was recognised as having freedom of action from its existing eastern frontier across to Lithuania. Influence in Poland was to be divided between the USSR and the Third Reich. Without expressly saying so, Hitler and Stalin intended to occupy their ‘spheres’ and reduce them to direct political subservience.
Hitler quickly realised his geopolitical objective. On 1 September 1939 a Blitzkrieg was started against Poland. Within days the Polish military resistance had been crushed. Warsaw fell on 27 September. The British and French governments, somewhat to Hitler’s surprise, delivered an ultimatum to Berlin on the first day of the war. Hitler ignored it. To German dismay, Stalin at first refused to sanction the movement of the Red Army into the territory agreed as falling within the Soviet sphere of interest. The reason was that the USSR and Japan remained at war in the Far East, and the military risk of deploying forces in eastern Poland was too great until the two countries agreed to make peace on 15 September. The Red Army moved into Polish territory two days later. A second agreement — the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Demarcation — was agreed on 28 September. Stalin demanded not only Estonia and Latvia but now also Lithuania as part of the Soviet sphere. He aimed both to recover the land of the Russian Empire and to secure a compact area of defence for the USSR. Hitler, who already was thinking about attacking France, quickly acceded.
Stalin’s established procedures for dealing with ‘enemies of the people’ came into effect. Political, economic and cultural leaders were rounded up. Army officers too were arrested. Some were shot, others were sent to labour camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan. The NKVD, learning lessons from the Great Terror, had prepared itself carefully with lists of people to be seized. Stalin wanted to be sure that police action hit exactly those groups which he had identified as hostile to Soviet interests. He and Beria did not confine themselves to persecuting individuals. Whole families were arrested and deported. Poland was the first country to suffer.8 Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were next on the agenda as Stalin and Molotov ordered their governments to sign pacts of mutual assistance. A similar command was conveyed to Finland. The consolidation of the entire region under Soviet hegemony was pursued. The problem was that Finland, which was diplomatically close to Germany, was unwilling to lie down. Negotiations ceased. Stalin set up a government-in-waiting with Moscow-based Finnish communists and, on 30 November, the Red Army attacked confident that it would soon reach Helsinki.
