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Part Six

“Collectivization, Industrialization, and the Great Purge, 1929-1940” (Second Part of Chapter 4 of Text)

The New Foreign Policy Threat to Soviet Security

Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy: The policy of class against class advanced by the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928 proved to be a grave mistake for Soviet security. For by calling for a sectarian policy of Communist parties against Social-Democratic parties as supporters of bourgeois democracy, it divided the political left against a new right-wing tide of Nazi and Fascist ideology throughout Western Europe. And this was an especially a grave pitfall in Germany in allowing Hitler and the Nazi Party to come to power when Adolph Hitler appointed Chancellor on January 31, 1933, as head of the Nazi Party which was the leading vote-getter in November 1932 Reichstag elections. Within a year, Hitler used his political rule to abolish the constitutional structure of the Weimar Republic and establish his own supreme power as the Die Fuhrer (the “Supreme Leader”) of a new German Third Reich.

In his work Mein Kampf, written in 1925, Hitler had declared that not only was Soviet Bolshevism the chief ideological enemy of Nazism insofar as it called for a divisive national class struggle against a unified national Germanic racial consciousness; but also because the Russian rich agricultural Ukraine was the historical entitlement of a superior Germanic race to “living space” for its expanding population. In this, Hitler made it clear in Mein Kampf that Nazi Germany was destined for an apocalyptic clash of world historic forces against the Soviet Union. Hitler’s accession to power in Germany therefore put an end to the remaining political-military military ties between the Soviet Union and former Weimar Germany; and, as already pointed put, the new threat of Nazi German power under Adolph Hitler was critical to the Soviet industrial-military buildup of the five-year plans from 1928 to 1940.

Benito Mussolini had come to power in Italy in his march on Rome in 1922 as a political strongman supported by his paramilitary “Black Shirts,” that called for a corporatist organization of the Italian state under his supreme power, which would be able to establish a “new Roman empire” based on national colonial expansion in North Africa and the southwestern Balkans. Its emphasis on the persona of the nation-state, as opposed to the individual self, paralleled Nazi ideology, especially in its condemnation of any divisive Marxist notion of a class struggle. And the Italian expansionist design in the southwestern Balkans posed a threat to Soviet influence in the southeastern Balkans and Black Sea access to the Mediterranean Sea.

Based on their common domestic ruling ideologies and expansionistic foreign policies, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy signed a “Rome-Berlin Axis” in October 1936 which proclaimed their mutual support to establish the future foundation of European politics. For the immediate, Mussolini was looking Italian occupation of Albania and Greece in the Balkan Peninsula and Hitler was looking toward German occupation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in Eastern Europe. Imperial Japan: Japan, which had been forced out of the Soviet Maritime Province at the Washington Conference in 1922, posed a new threat to Soviet security as authoritarian and expansive military rule in the 1930s, headed by General Hideki Tojo, replaced a more moderate semi-parliamentary rule of the 1920s. Using the “Mukden Incident” of September 18, 1931, as the alleged blowing up of railroad tracks of the South Manchurian Railway by Nationalist Government military forces of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese military overran all of Manchuria, including northern Manchuria where the Russian Chinese Eastern Railway was located. By March 9, 1932, the Japanese installed a puppet government over the whole of Manchuria under Pu Yi of the former Manchus Dynasty. This meant that Japanese Manchuria included a 1,500-mile Amur River border around the southern Soviet Far-East, including the more than 450 miles along the southern Russian Maritime Peninsula.

The Soviet government reacted to the immediate threat of a military clash with Japanese troops along the Chinese Eastern Railway running through northern Manchuria by finally agreeing to terms to sell the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Japanese government for some $39,368,000, which was only a fraction of the original cost of Russian construction. The Soviet government could afford to make the transfer because the Tsarist government by 1913 had already constructed a separate tracking around northern Manchuria to Vladivostok. But Japanese political control of the whole of Manchuria likewise also led to a change to Soviet political support for the Chinese

87 Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek in the 1930s, as an emerging ally against Japanese power in the Far East (see below) after the total rupture in 1927 in the Kuomintang Northern Expedition.

On November 25, 1936, Japan signed an “Anti-Comintern Pact,” with Nazi Germany, and in July 1937, Italy joined the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact which effectively called for a tripartite alliance of Germany, Japan, and Italy against Soviet opposition to their respective expansionist designs in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Far East. The Anti-Comintern Pact, specifying Communist subversion emanating from its “international center,” clearly identified the Soviet Union as its chief potential target. The reason for this was that, beginning in the mid-1930s, Soviet foreign policy, recognizing the new threat of fascist rule to its national security, had made another abrupt about-face and called for a global defense against “fascist aggression” (see below). By a new Tripartite Pact of Military Assistance signed on September 27, 1940, the signatories to the Anti-Comintern Pact agreed to a direct mutual military defense pact against an attack by any foreign power not currently engaged in the Second World War in Europe or Asia. The Tripartite Pact was primarily directed military intervention by the United States.

The Soviet Response to the New Fascist Threat

The Rising Tide of Fascism Throughout Europe: Characteristic of fascist authoritarian rule was the brutal annihilation of all political opposition, starting with national Communist parties. In Germany, for example, within three months of coming to power, Hitler had erased the existence of the German Communist Party as the first step in soon erasing the existence of all political parties other than the Communist Party as well. As such, Moscow came to realize that, denouncing bourgeois democracy as an authoritarian model of capitalist rule, and ordering the German Communist Party not to cooperate with the Marxist German Social-Democratic Party in the 1932 German elections, and thus allowing the Nazi Party to come to power, had been a disastrous mistake. Worse still, the Comintern had ordered the same political strategy for all other West European parliamentary governments, when fascism, seen by many as the political order of the future, was sweeping across all Europe. The lesson was demonstrably brought home in the politics of France. There, a Communist Party controlling some 12 percent of the vote and a Socialist Party controlling some 30 percent of the vote were, like all other Communist and Socialist Parties, in isolated competition with one another under the 1928 Comintern instructions of “class against class.” This meant that the bourgeois parliamentary government of the Third Republic in France was also threatened by a large-scale fascist movement from the right in the Croix de Feu, France Solidarité, and Francistes. The latter even marched through the streets as “Blue Shirts” reminiscent of the Nazi Brown Shirts in Germany and the Fascist Black Shirts in Italy.

On the night of February 6, 1934, matters came to head in France when Fascist protesters demonstrated against Council of Ministers headquarters in a fashion that turned into a mob riot. Although the immediate threat of fascist coup was suppressed, French liberals saw the demonstration as just the beginning of a concerted effort to achieve another overthrow of bourgeois parliamentary government – especially the perpetually weak multi-party coalition governments in France. At this point, Moscow came to recognize the value bourgeois democratic governments under parliamentary regimes to its national security against the supreme ideological threat of diametrically opposed West European fascist governments.

The New Comintern Policy of a Popular Front in France: In April 1934, Maurice Thorez, the leader of the French Communist Party was called to Moscow, and upon his return to Paris in May 1934, he immediately held a meeting of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party to completely reverse the French Communist policy of class against class. Instead, under Thorez the French Communist Party called for a “united front” with the French Socialist Party to defeat the threat of a Fascist takeover as the chief enemy of all defenders of French democracy. And by French democracy, Thorez specified the institutions of bourgeois parliamentary democracy of the Third Republic. The Socialist Party, under Leon Blum, was at first suspicious of this about-face on the part of the French Communist Party regarding its support for the institutions bourgeois parliamentary democracy of the Third Republic. This was because the Socialist Party well remembered it was the French Communist Party’s rejection of bourgeois democracy in 1920, that guaranteed the democratic rotation of political majorities in power as opposed

88 to the cadre political rule of the Communist Party as self-identified democratic class rule, that led to the Communist-Socialist split in the first place.

Nevertheless, faced with the imminent prospect of a Fascist take-over, the Socialist Party agreed to political collaboration with Communist Party in a formal contract on July 27, 1934, that included the mutual second-ballot withdrawal on the second ballot in favor of the highest placed on the first ballot to gain additional parliamentary seats for both parties. The agreement was later joined by the French Radical Party on July 14, 1935, to transform a “united front from above” of Marxist socialist parties into a “popular front” to also include bourgeois capitalist parties in the crusade to stop the spread of Fascism. The Seventh Comintern Congress (July 25-August 25, 1935) then formally proclaimed the strategy of a popular front to be an obligatory policy for all world Communist parties, under its new Moscow sponsored leader Georgii Dimitrov of Bulgaria.

The popular front strategy carried the day in the May 1936 French parliamentary elections in which the alliance of the Communist, Socialist, and Radical Republican Parties elected a parliamentary majority. Socialist Party leader, Leon Blum, as the head of the largest vote-gaining party of the popular front alliance, then assumed the post of Prime Minister of a popular front government on July 5, 1936. The Communist Party, still holding to the Soviet orthodoxy of the cadre political rule of the Communist Party as self-identified democratic class rule, did not accept any official government cabinet posts. Nevertheless, it promised to faithfully support the Blum government with Communist deputy voting solidarity in Parliament.

Even though the popular front government of Leon Blum succeeded in stopping the immediate fascist to the bourgeois democratic parliamentary institutions of the Third Republic, it failed to hold on to political power on the long-term. On the one hand, it was faced with an economic crisis from a series of general strikes; and, on the other hand, it found itself hamstrung to deal with an accompanying Fascist threat in neighboring Spain. In early 1938, Blum resigned in favor of a capitalist government of the Radical Party under Edouard Daladier as prime minister. The New Comintern Policy of a Popular Front in Spain: In 1931, a revolution overthrew the monarchy in Spain and a republican government of the center-left came to power. The republican regime supported by “Loyalists” of center-left political persuasion immediately came to be challenged by an authoritarian quasi-Fascist “Phalange” of right-wing political persuasion. The Phalange, headquartered in Spanish Morocco, was led by General Francisco Franco, and was poised to march on Madrid the Spanish capital in a counterrevolutionary overthrow of the parliamentary republican regime. In February 1936, a popular front government was elected in Spain composed of political parties of the center-left to defend the regime of parliamentary democracy against Franco’s military forces. The Spanish Communist Party of some one million members, as the largest Communist Party in Western Europe, spearheaded the Spanish popular front movement, and actually joined the Spanish popular front government under Socialist Party leader Francisco Largo Cabellero. Moscow threw its full support behind the anti-fascist popular front government in Spain. Fascist rule of the Phalange to succeed in Spain would mean that the republican popular front government in France would be surrounded by Nazi and Fascist governments in Germany, Italy, and Spain. Moscow instructed the Spanish Communist Party not to advance any socialist initiatives that might alienate the republican solidarity with bourgeois capitalist political elements of the center-left. This especially included a campaign against Spanish Trotskyists similar to that occurring in the Soviet Union, insofar as, under the international influence of Leon Trotsky, Spanish Trotskyists called for an immediate transformation of the Spanish popular front into a Trotskyite socialist revolution. Additionally, Moscow provided both economic and military assistance to the Spanish republican popular front government. Soviet military assistance included advisers led by General Vladimir Ovseenko and a Comintern directive to support the recruitment of “international brigades” from other countries to supplement the Spanish republican popular front forces, e.g., the American Abraham Lincoln Brigade in which Ernest Hemingway served and the subject of perhaps his most famous novel For Whom the Bells Toll. The Loyalist republican government made a heroic defense of Madrid in October 1936. But by mid-1937 the tide of the Spanish civil war began to turn to the side of Franco’s Phalange military forces; and by February 1939, Franco was able to occupy Barcelona as the last stronghold of Loyalist forces. Franco’s authoritarian rule, although somewhat moderated after the Second World War, lasted until his death in 1974.

89 The defeat of the Loyalist forces was owed to two related considerations. Franco’s forces received an enormous amount of military aid from Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Mussolini dispatched two Italian military divisions in support of Franco’s ground troops, and Hitler added the air support of two German Condor squadrons. By way of contrast, the Spanish Loyalist government, outside of its military assistance from the Soviet Union, received no government support from the Western democracies. No doubt, that at the outset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the British government still hoped to keep Mussolini’s Italy from committing to any direct military alliance with Hitler’s Germany. Mussolini, in 1934, opposed any German annexation of Austria; and still hoping to keep Mussolini from committing to any direct military alliance with Hitler’s Germany, Great Britain and France in 1935 in a Hoare-Laval agreement secretly pledged to refrain from any military action against Mussolini’s occupation of Ethiopia. Therefore, despite the strident call of the French Communist Party for military intervention in the Spanish Civil War, Blum, in the face of British passivity, also refrained from military action. The passivity of the Western powers had a sobering effect on Soviet policy. Concerned over the reluctance of the western powers to take military action, and recognizing the increasing doom of the Republican popular front government, Moscow herself gradually withdrew all economic and military support for the Loyalist regime. And long-term it left a festering Soviet suspicion that western bourgeois democratic regimes, being gendarmes of capitalist rule, could never be trusted to stand up a rival Fascist capitalist-imperialist challenge. The Reestablishment of a Popular Front in China: By 1932, the Chinese Communist Party, under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung, had established a bastion of “Rural Soviets” in the hinterland of Kiangsi Province in southeastern China just above Kwantung Province. Under Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese Communist Party had come to stress the role of the revolutionary consciousness of the poor peasantry as the majoritarian class force most ordained to sustain Communist political cadre rule in a rural agrarian state like China. Even more so than in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, the overwhelming mass of the Chinese population constituted a poor peasantry subject to economic exploitation by a Chinese landlord class. Maoist revolutionary strategy therefore called for carrying out land reform by forces of a “Chinese Red Army,” recruited from the poor peasantry under the military leadership of Chu Teh. Members of the landlord class were declared to be “enemies of the people” as capitalist allies of a financial oligarchy in the cities which acted as the anchor of the political rule of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government.

Long-term Maoist strategy called for the continued expansion of the territorial rule of Rural Soviets and the continued recruitment of an ever larger peasant Chinese Red Army from a supportive poor peasantry. Eventually, a Chinese Red Army would then surround the cities as the sites of China Kai-shek’s Nationalist capitalist forces and force their capitulation in a nation-wide Communist victory. In two works entitled On Guerrilla War and On Protracted War, Mao Tse-tung succinctly characterized this long-term political-economic strategy as a four-stage process of revolutionary development as follows: (i) the enemy advances, we withdraw; (ii) the enemy attacks, we retreat; (iii) the enemy encamps, we harass; (iv) enemy withdraws, we advance.

Chiang Kai-shek himself reacted to the Maoist revolutionary strategy in a series of “Red bandit extermination campaigns” from 1930 throughout most of 1933. Only in late 1933 did Chiang Kai-shek change his Red suppression strategy. As instructed by German military advisers, Chiang resorted to a quarantine of Mao’s forces in Kiangsi Province, where, without any further expansion, Mao’s forces would simply exhaust their economic and military resources and wither and die. And it was just such a situation that forced Mao’s Red Army forces of 80,000 men to break out of Kiangsi Provence in the fall of 1934, and begin a fourteen-mouth trek to establish new headquarters in the Yenan caves of Shensi Province way to the northwest and only 300 miles from the Soviet controlled border state of Outer Mongolia. Continuously hounded by Chiang’s own forces, and forced into a circuitous march, Mao’s Red Army reached the Yenan caves in Shensi Province with only 20,000 remaining forces. Yet the heralded “long march” of Chinese Communist historical lore allowed the Maoist forces to establish a secure base of viable Rural Soviets in the Yenan caves for renewed expansion not only in Shensi Province but also through Inner Mongolia and into Manchuria.

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By the time that Mao’s forces reached Yenan in Shensi Province in early 1936 Soviet foreign policy imperatives had radically changed from 1928 in the popular front movement described above. Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931-32 was seen as the action of another form of fascist-militarist rule of Imperial Japan. Moreover, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria portended an immediate territorial threat to the Soviet Maritime Province overlapping Manchuria to its Far Eastern border with Korea. Japan had temporarily occupied the Maritime Province from 1919 to 1922 during the Russian Civil War. Hence, the Soviet popular front strategy was extended to the Far East in 1936.

Popular Chinese resentment against Japanese aggression had fostered a “National Salvation Movement” to mobilize an alliance of all political forces in China to drive the Japanese from the Chinese Mainland. Moscow wished to capitalize on the Chinese National Salvation Movement to achieve the same end of driving the Japanese from Manchuria. Mao’s Communist forces in Yenan were therefore instructed to seek a Kuomintang-type political alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces, which had come to be recognized as the official government of China by the Western powers in 1928. But Chiang Kai-shek resisted, seeing the Maoist Communist forces militarily ensconced in their Rural Soviets in Yenan as a greater threat to his political rule than the Japanese in Manchuria.

However, the Soviet endorsement of a popular front in the National Salvation Movement against the Japanese occupation of Manchuria found a willing ear in Chang Hsueh-liang, the son of the deceased Manchurian warlord Chang Tso-lin. Chang Hsueh-liang, still controlling a powerful warlord military force, had been forced to move his political headquarters to Xian in Shensi Province where Mao’s forces were also located in Yenan. While Chiang Kai-shek called upon Chang Hsueh-liang to do battle with Mao’s forces, Chang Hsueh-liang sought collaboration with Mao’s forces to drive the Japanese out of Manchuria so that he could return to his old military stronghold. Chiang Kai-shek therefore flew to Xian on December 7, 1936, to deal with Chang Hsueh-liang’s insubordination to his orders to carry on Chiang’s campaign against the Maoist Communist forces.

Chang Hsueh-liang responded by holding Chiang Kai-shek in “protective custody” from 12-25 December 1936. Chiang was released only when he agreed to reconsider political-military collaboration with the Maoist Communists against the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Eventually, Chiang agreed not only to political-military coloration of his Nationalist government with the Maoist Communists, but to supply the Maoist forces with military assistance to turn its guerrilla campaign against the Japanese. The Maoist forces were formally placed under the military command of Chiang Kai-shek’s National government as an Eighth Route Army, and the two sides were to participate in a new coalition government whose governing structure would be established by constituent assembly of both parties. In effect, Communist-Nationalist political collaboration looked to be reminiscent of the original Kuomintang political collaboration of 1926.

The Unfolding of Communist-Nationalist Political-Military Collaboration in China: The convening of the constituent assembly was preempted, however, by the “Lukouchiao Incident” of 7 July, 1937, when a clash of Chinese National forces against the Japanese Kwantung Army at the Marco Polo bridge near Beijing set off an all-out Sino-Japanese military conflict that launched the Second World War in the Far East. From 1937 to 1940 the Japanese engaged in a brutal political-military campaign to seize control of the rest of costal China from Manchuria to Kwantung. For its own security the Nationalist government of Chiang was forced to move its headquarters from Nanking to Chungking some 700 miles to the southwest on the Yangtze River.

From 1937 to 1941, Nationalist forces at Chungking and the Communist forces in Yenan conducted a common military campaign against the Japanese. But by early 1941 political-military coloration collaboration between the two forces broke down. Chinese Communist forces, while conducting guerrilla warfare against the Japanese also continued to establish Rural Soviets of their own political rule. And when, an extension of Rural Soviets established by a new Communist Fourth Army in its areas of occupation reached the Yangtze Valley in the province of Szechwan where the Nationalist headquarters at Chungking was located, open conflict again broke out between the two forces in which Chiang Kai-shek concentrated his military forces more against the Maoist Communists than the Japanese for the remainder of the Second World War.

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The two sides therefore remained at odds for the remainder of the Second World War. Mao’s guerrilla forces concentrated on expanding their power from Shensi Province into Japanese held Manchuria, and Chiang Kai-shek concentrated on building up his Nationalist forces in Chungking for a post-war showdown with the Maoist Communist forces. An American effort under General George C. Marshall to negotiate a postwar collaborative political settlement proved unavailing; and Mao’s forces eventually overran all of China in 1949 to establish the present Communist Chinese People’s Republic. The Soviet Union, looking toward its national security not only recognized the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek already in 1937, but in 1937 provided it with $300 million in military assistance after the outbreak of its war with Japan. It even agreed to recognize the National government of Chiang Kai-shek as the legitimate postwar government of China at the Yalta Conference in 1945 in return for a guarantee of its concessions grained prior to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 (see below).

The Soviet Foreign Policy and the Nazi-Fascist Threat in Europe (1934-1940)

A Rapprochement of Soviet-American Relations: Throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s under the Republican administrations of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, the United States shunned all diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, refusing even to recognize the Soviet government. The Soviet state was seen as being antithetical to the most fundamental American values of political democracy and free enterprise capitalism; and the Comintern was seen as the Soviet center of the American Communist Party calling for the violent overthrow of the American government as capitalist and imperialist. Finally, Shell Oil and International Harvester demanded compensation for economic holdings in Russia nationalized by the Soviet government. The two companies were not prepared to accept the same terms of economic write-offs that Germany and the other governments of Western Europe had accepted in the Rapallo agreement for the mutual cancellation of debt claims. But the situation had changed by 1933. First, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 threatened American foreign policy interests in Asia much like that of the Soviet Union in the Far East. Most notably, the United States was concerned about her continued presence in the Philippines. Already in 1927, the then Japanese Prime Minister Baron Tanaka proclaimed the “Tanaka Memorial” as a Japanese “Monroe Doctrine,” which held that all East Asia was subject to the same Japanese pre-eminent Japanese political influence as that exercised by the United States in Latin America. Following its expansion into Manchuria, Imperial Japan identified the establishment of its puppet state of Manchukuo as portending Japanese political hegemony in a greater “Japanese East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,” in which Japanese imperial power rested on further expansion in a ring of Southeast Asian territories extending from China through Indonesia, to secure the necessary raw materials of iron ore, coal, rubber and petroleum to sustain its rapid rate of industrial-military growth since the Meiji restoration of 1868. And in the midst of such a Japanese East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere stood the American Philippines.

Insofar as Japan presented a similar challenge to Soviet and American foreign policy interests in Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia respectively; and insofar as Germany also presented a similar challenge to Soviet and American foreign policy interest in East Central Europe and Western Europe respectively, the Democratic administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, more pragmatic than its predecessors in responding to American national security interests, recognized the Soviet government as the formal government of the Soviet Union on November 13, 1933. The recognition included the establishment of mutual embassies and the exchange of foreign ambassadors. Aleksander Troyanovskii was the first Soviet ambassador to the United States and William Bullitt was the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. Bullitt had already once served as an unofficial American liaison to the early Soviet government to try to encourage its continued participation in the First World War on the side of the Allied Powers. The Franco-Soviet Pact of 1935: By 1935, Hitler had publicly announced that Germany would no longer be bound by the unilateral obligation of military disarmament imposed upon her by the Versailles Peace Treaty. And faced with a mutual revisionist threat from Germany, France and the Soviet Union signed a mutual defense pact on May 2, 1935. The military agreement between the two countries declared that if either country were the object of an “unprovoked attack on the part of a European state” the other country would immediately “consult” on measures of mutual defense. The pact was reminiscent of a similar mutual defense pact between France and Russia in 1892, but not quite as clear-cut in the direct obligation of mutual defense.

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France was fearful that a rearmed Germany under Hitler would seek to reclaim Alsace-Lorraine ceded back to France by the Versailles Peace Treaty. The Soviet Union was fearful that a rearmed Germany would seek to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia as a forward staging area to advance against the Soviet Ukraine. The Sudetenland comprised the western borderland of the Czechoslovak state carved out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the Treaty of Versailles. The Sudetenland included some 2,000 square miles of territory that rimmed the borders of Czechoslovakia, around Poland, Germany, and Austria. The Sudetenland contained a population of 3,625,000 of the total 15 million population of Czechoslovakia, with 2,800,000 of the Sudetenland population being ethnic Germans. France had already signed a mutual defense pact with Czechoslovakia as part of a “Little Entente” in Eastern Europe in the 1920s, and the Soviet Union sought to strengthen France’s commitment to Soviet security In Eastern Europe by signing an additional Soviet-Czechoslovak mutual defense pact on May 16, 1935, whereby the Soviet Union pledged to come to the defense of Czechoslovakia in the event of German aggression, but only if France honored her own mutual defense pact with Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Call for Global Collective Security: The League of Nations had been established in 1919 under the paramount inspiration of the American President Woodrow Wilson. It was designed to transform the military power of all nations into an international police force to prevent any form of military aggression, and as such to abolish international war itself as an instrument of national foreign policy. Although noble in purpose, the League of Nations as a new form of global collective security was hamstrung from the outset. On the one hand, it left the obligation of providing both the military forces and territorial deployment of the military forces to the voluntary commitment of individual members. Hence, already in 1923, Canada had a resolution passed to affirm that all members had the right to base their voluntary commitment of providing military forces and territorial deployment of League military forces on their own independent national security interests. And, on the other hand, the United States, although the chief sponsor in drawing up the League of Nations Covenant under Woodrow Wilson, ultimately itself refused to join. The Senate argued that in vesting the use of American military power to the League Council the League Covenant divested the American Congress of the power to declare war. The upshot was that the League was powerless to act against to act against “aggression” so defined as “violating the territorial and political status quo.” When Japan overran all of Manchuria in 1931, it only received a verbal reproof that it had overreacted; and when Italy militarily overran Ethiopia in 1935-36, it was only subject to formal economic sanctions; German rearmament and reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1935 and 1936 drew no response at all. Eventually, Japan, Italy, and Germany all withdrew from the League.

From time of its founding and until 1934, the Soviet government also refused to join the League of Nations, arguing that it was only a consortium of the winning Allied Powers of the First World War to protect their newly acquired imperialist holdings as the war victors. Most notably, this included new British and the French holdings in Africa and the Middle East; new Italian holdings in the Tyrol and Trieste, and a new Japanese holding in Shantung, at the expense of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey.

But the new threat of Germany and Japan in the 1930s prompted an about face in the Soviet attitude toward the League of Nations. On September 18, 1934, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations as what it now considered to be an international popular front against German Nazi, Italian Fascist, and Japanese Imperial expansionist aggression. Under Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov – an urbane diplomat who spoke fluent English – the Soviet Union indeed attempted to transform the League into a genuine instrument of collective security calling for League economic and military sanctions against Japan in China, Italy in Ethiopia, and the prospect of German action against Czechoslovakia and Poland. Litvinov famously coined the phrase: “Security is indivisible.” The message that this famous phrase was intended to communicate was that from even a national security standpoint, outside of the consideration of international law, if collective security is to be effective it must operate as a universal force otherwise no nation could be assured that there would be a sufficient military force to protect its individual security.

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Austria and Czechoslovakia Added to the German Reich

The Austrian Anschluss and Czechoslovak Incorporation: On March 13, 1938, German troops marched into Austria after Hitler announced that an Anschluss (merger) had been established to form a greater German Reich. Recognizing the danger not only to the Sudetenland and but the whole of Czechoslovakia, Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov announced on March 15, 1938, that it would honor its commitment to Czechoslovak national security as set forth in the Soviet-Czechoslovak defense agreement of 1935. Litvinov then, on March 17, 1938, called upon all members of the League of Nations to commit themselves to a similar League guarantee of Czechoslovak sovereignty. However, as the year of 1938 progressed, it became clear that the French under its new Prime Minister Edouard Daladier was willing to follow the lead of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in reaching a deal with Hitler to turn over the Sudetenland sector of Czechoslovakia to Germany.

Still, as late as September 21, 1938, the Soviet ambassador to Prague promised Eduard Benes the President of Czechoslovak that the Soviet Union alone would provide military assistance against Germany if only the League of Nations would prevail upon Poland and Romania to allow the forward disposition of Soviet troops in their countries’ territory. But Poland and Romania adamantly objected to the deployment of Soviet military forces in their countries’ territories. Thus, on September 30, 1938, Daladier and Chamberlain signed the famous Munich Agreement turning over the Sudetenland to Germany as the famous historical policy of “appeasement.” The New Strategic Threat to Soviet Security: Without the Sudetenland as the natural terrain and well-fortified frontier of defense, Hitler was able to easily establish German occupation over the rest of Czechoslovakia. On March 15, 1939, Germany declared that it was establishing a “protectorate” over a rump Slovakian state to safeguard it against “Bohemian nationalism” from a remaining similar rump Czech state, which Germany also proceeded to militarily occupy. German occupied territory now extended to within 200 miles of the Soviet Ukraine. Poland itself which refused forward staging of German troops on its territory to stop the German annexation of Czechoslovakia, soon learned in early 1939 that it was the next target of German expansion, when Hitler demanded the Germany recovery of the Danzig Corridor, a strip of 23,000 square miles ceded to Poland by the Versailles Peace Treaty along the northern Vistula River that gave Poland access to the Baltic Sea and separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The Soviet government could not understand why the West did not stand up to Hitler over Czechoslovakia if it was really interested in stopping Nazi German aggression, especially when it could confront Hitler with the combined weight of France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, and with the same type of two-front war as in World War I. Was the West more interested in playing off Nazi Germany against the Communist Soviet Union than in providing for its own security against Nazi Germany expansionism? In any case, after the Munich Agreement the Soviet Union began to reconsider its national security options, with such options based entirely on practical realpolitik rather than any ideological considerations of stopping Fascism. A hint of where this might lead was already conveyed by the deputy Soviet minister for foreign affairs, Vladimir Potemkin, when, in reference to the Munich Agreement, he told the French ambassador in Moscow: “My poor friend, what have you done? For us, I see no other way out than a fourth partition of Poland.”

Soviet Foreign Policy toward Poland and Romania in 1939-1940 The Soviet Eighteen Party Congress: The Soviet Eighteenth Party Congress which met from 10-21 March 1939 set the theme of realpolitik for Soviet foreign policy negotiations with all interested parties. The most notable aspect of the new realpolitik of Soviet foreign policy was an open-ended approach that trusted no one while being willing to come to terms with anyone serving Soviet foreign policy interests. Stalin put this policy succinctly and trenchantly when he declared that the Soviet Union must be “cautious and not allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them.” The implication could not have been more clear: western democracies were after all imperialist capitalist countries like all others, and the moral value of their commitment to self-defense was not necessarily more elevated than that of Fascist revisionists like that Nazi Germany as a victim of the Versailles Peace Treaty. A high ranking Soviet diplomat,

94 Ivan Maisky, iterated the same message at the Soviet Eighteenth Party Congress when he declared that western democracies could not expect the Soviet Union ”to draw the fangs of fascist imperialism.” Finally, to underscore its new approach to realpolitik as opposed to a global commitment to collective security to enforce international law Maxim Litvinov was replaced as foreign minister by Viacheslav Molotov on May 3, 1939. Unlike Litvinov, Molotov was not of Jewish extraction nor identified a League of Nations commitment to collective security. Assuming that Molotov’s appointment was a signal for a potential change in the Soviet outlook toward Hitler’s Germany, the German foreign office immediately sounded out Soviet officials on May 20, 1939, as to whether better relations between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany could be established. Moscow responded by declaring that any real change in Soviet-Nazi German relations would have to be based on a “proper political bases” between the two countries. The latter was a code term for German endorsement of the Soviet Union’s own revisionist aims in Eastern Europe. Soviet Negotiations with Great Britain and France: The complete subjugation of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, finally awakened Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier to the reality that Hitler’s Nazi ideology called for German domination of all of Europe. Consequently, on March 31, 1939, prime minister Neville Chamberlain announced to the British Parliament that Great Britain and France would now formally guarantee the security of Poland and Romania, including Polish control of the Danzig Corridor. But the Nazi threat of a “march to the east” (drang nach osten) against Poland was only heightened by the “Pact of Steel” signed between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy on May 23, 1939, which committed to the two parties to direct mutual military action against a foreign adversary (an agreement which Italy subsequently backed down on when Hitler attacked Poland on September 1, 1939).

The success of the British and French guarantee to Poland and Romania necessarily placed the Soviet Union in a favorable negotiating position because the Soviet Union not only represented the possibility of a second front against Germany geopolitically situated on the Polish border from the east. As such, Great Britain and France immediately sounded out the Soviet government to join a tripartite guarantee of the security of Polish and Romanian territory. On April 15, 1939, while Maxim Litvinov was still Soviet foreign minister, the Soviet Union responded that any such tripartite guarantee of the security of Polish and Romanian territories must extend coverage from the “Baltic to the Black Sea” to include Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as the Soviet Union could also be subject to a German attack through the Baltic States. Talks on an extended guarantee to include the Baltic states continued through May and June, and it was only in July that Great Britain and France finally agreed to extend coverage to the Baltic states.

But by this point a new sticking point came up when the Soviet government demanded that Soviet troops be allowed to take up forward military positions on Polish territory, just as they had wished to do in Czechoslovakia the previous year. And at first the Polish government adamantly refused, fearing the Soviet government would seek to recover the territory it had lost to Poland by the Treaty of Riga of March 18, 1921. Under heavy British and French pressure, only by August 21, 1939, did the Polish government provisionally agree to the Soviet demand. But this final condition for a final tripartite Soviet alliance with Great Britain and France resembling the Triple Entente of 1906, was reached too late in the face of parallel negotiations that were also taking place between Soviet and German officials. The Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: In July 1939, Soviet negotiations with Nazi Germany moved in a more distinctly positive direction regarding trade, but it was only on August 12, 1939 that Nazi German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop took a direct political hand in Soviet-Nazi German negotiations to upstage any further Soviet talks to establish a Baltic to Black Sea wall against German expansion to the east. Von Ribbentrop made the startling proposal to Georgii Astrakhov the Chargé d’Affaires of the Soviet Embassy in Berlin that instead of fighting over Poland both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany would be better served by a new bilateral division of Poland. For Nazi Germany quick Soviet agreement was urgent as Hitler had already set August 26th as his original dateline for the German invasion of Poland which actually took place on September 1, 1939. And when, on August 12, 1939, the Soviet foreign office affirmed serious interest in the Nazi German proposal, von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow on August 23rd to finalize a Soviet-Nazi agreement on the fate of Poland. The original Soviet-Nazi agreement was signed

95 on the morning of August 24th but dated on August 23, 1939, and was subject to subsequent revision on September 27, 1939.

Under the Soviet-Nazi German political terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact the two parties committed to a ten-year non-aggression agreement, that included the provision that neither party would join any combination of powers aligned against the other. This presumably guaranteed the Soviet Union from military action by Germany combined with Japan and Italy; and in turn guaranteed Germany from military action by the Soviet Union combined with Great Britain and France. And within this framework, a secret clause also guaranteed that the Soviet Union would give Hitler a free hand in his planned attack on western Poland; and that Germany would give the Soviet Union a free hand in eastern Poland to allow her to occupy not only all the pre-World War I Tsarist territory lost to Poland by the Treaty of Riga, but also the historically coveted territory of Galicia that the Tsarist government sought to annex for her Allied participation in World War I.

For the Soviet Union this included an expanse of territory in western White Russia from the headwaters of the Niemen River to headwaters of the Narew River past Grodno (an area of some 25,000 square miles); and an expanse of territory in the western Ukraine from the headwaters of the Southern Bug River to the northerly flow of the San River that included Galicia (an area of 90,000 square miles). Stalin shrewdly waited until September 17, 1939 to commit military troops to the Soviet occupation zones, some two and a half weeks after Hitler’s offensive of September 1, 1939, to represent the Soviet military occupation as a preemptive measure to protect the White Russian and Ukrainian populations in its assigned zones from being overrun by German forces. And here it should be noted that Soviet forces in 1940 executed some 20,000 Polish military officers in the Soviet zones of occupation, the most notable episode being the “Katyn massacre.”

Additionally, the secret clause allowed the Soviet Union a free hand to reoccupy Bessarabia, a territory of 13,067 square miles lying between the Dniester and Prut Rivers along the southwestern Ukraine. Bessarabia, which had been occupied by Tsarist Russia in the early nineteenth century had been ceded to Romania as an Entente ally after World War I. Bessarabia was then combined with a strip of the Ukraine to form the separate Soviet Republic of Moldavia in 1940.

Finally, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as originally written on August 23, 1939, gave the Soviet Union a free hand in Estonia, and Latvia; was revised on September 27, 1939, to also five the Soviet Union a free hand in Lithuania in exchange for some 8,000 square miles of territory the Soviet Union had originally been awarded in Poland. The three Baltic states were then occupied by Soviet military forces, and under contrived referendums forced to join the Soviet Union as the three additional Soviet Republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1940. The three Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania respectively comprised 17,642 square miles, 24,256 square miles, and 25,212 square miles of territory. In its ensemble under the revised Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement of September 27, 1939, the Soviet Union acquired some 195,000 square miles of territory and a population of some 40 million people.

Soviet Foreign Policy toward Finland in 1939-1940

Soviet Geopolitical Demands: Beginning in 1938, the Soviet government informed the Finnish government that Soviet geopolitical security interests demanded strategic border adjustments. The Soviet government was concerned about the close political relations between the Finnish government headed by General Gustav von Mannerheim and Germany and certain geopolitical considerations of her Baltic Sea and North Sea security. The greatest concern for Soviet Russia was the Gulf of Finland where the Isthmus of Karelia separated the Gulf of Finland from Lake Ladoga in a 125-mile long and 50-mile wide stretch of land from Finland to the Leningrad. Finland’s most forward military staging area in the Isthmus of Karelia, the so-called “Mannerheim Line,” placed Finnish artillery within range of Leningrad. But, likewise, Soviet military concern addressed naval access to the Baltic Sea from the Gulf of Finland and naval access to Norwegian Sea from the Barents Sea. As to the Mannerheim Line, the Soviet government demanded that Finnish fortifications be move back some twenty-four miles in the Isthmus of Karelia out of artillery range from Leningrad.

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And as to the Gulf of Finland the Soviet government demanded a leasehold on the port of Hango at the outlet of the Gulf of Finland and the cession of four islands in the Gulf of Finland; and a border adjustment in the far north that included the district of Petsamo some sixty-five miles north from Murmansk for secure access to the Barents Sea. In their ensemble the Soviet demands were not unreasonable in terms of the geopolitical requirements of Soviet security, but the Finnish government remained recalcitrant, perhaps expecting that the League of Nations to come to its military assistance. The Russo-Finnish War: Assured of non-German intervention, and recognizing that Great Britain and France were engaged in a declaration of war against Germany on September 3, 1939, following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the Soviet Union resolved to take by military force what it could not gain by diplomatic pressure. On November 30, 1939, using the pretext of Finnish instigated border hostilities, the Soviet Union launched an all-out military assault against Finland. The assault eventually included 1,000,000 Soviet troops and 3,000 aircraft that participated in the bombing of Helsinki. Surprisingly, Finnish forces put up a strikingly stubborn resistance against the initial spearhead of the Soviet offensive from the shores of Lake Ladoga. In this, the Finns were assisted by some six feet of snow which undermined the advance of Soviet armored forces, and made slashing tactics by the Finnish ski forces amazingly effective as the major military strategy of Marshal Mannerheim.

The League of Nations condemned the Soviet Union of direct aggression, and expelled the Soviet Union from the League on December 14, 1939. Ironically, therefore, the Soviet Union, as the greatest defender of the League from 1934 through 1938, was the only member to be expelled before the complete demise of the League itself in 1940.

The world applauded the heroic Finnish resistance, and under the League attempted to recruit a 50,000-man volunteer force similar to the international brigades recruited by the Comintern in the Spanish Civil War. But the international situation and overwhelming Soviet military power were decidedly against the Finns. Although the British and French did render some armament assistance to the Finns, they were too heavily engaged against Hitler to offer any further assistance; and the tide of the war soon turned decidedly against the Finns as no additional international assistance was forthcoming.

On February 1, 1940, Soviet military strategy shifted the spearhead of its offensive from the Lake Ladoga region to the Isthmus of Karelia in a frontal attack on the Mannerheim Line. In two weeks, Soviet armor smashed through the Mannerheim Line and threatened the whole southeastern coast of Finland. Thus, in early March the Finnish government had no choice but to sue for peace terms. But the Soviet victory came at a high military-political cost. The Finnish campaign had cost the Soviet military 48,745 lives and 158,863 wounded. Worse still, it questioned the competence of the entire high-ranking Soviet military officer corps as a legacy of the military purge of 30,000 officers in 1937-38.

For some, most notably Adolph Hitler, the performance of the Soviet Red Army in the Russo-Finnish War raised questions about its very overall political morale, as Hitler was later to say of the Soviet government: “I have only to kick down the door, and the whole rotten structure will collapse.” But the Soviet government also took cognizance of its military performance in the Russo-Finnish War and set about military reform in not only increasing military budget expenditures but also in revamping its military leadership. Klimet Voroshilov, Stalin’s favorite as a Soviet marshal going back to the Tsaritsyn defense in the Russian Civil War lost much of his military influence in favor of a the younger and more competent generals, Georgii Zhukov and Simion Timoshenko. Zhukov in particular had distinguished himself as the military commander of the Red Banner Army of the Far East in hostilities against Japan (see below).

The Peace Terms of the Russo-Finnish War: On March 12, 1940, the Finns agreed to peace terms that were considerably more onerous than the pre-war Soviet demands. In addition to being forced to cede to the Soviet Union all of the Isthmus of Karelia and a naval base at Hango and the four islands in the Gulf of Finland along with the district of Petsamo In the Rybachi Peninsula on the Barents Sea, the Finnish government was also forced to give up a stretch of territory north from the Isthmus of Karelia along the western shore of Lake Ladoga, and another strip of land further to the north along the Soviet-Finnish frontier in the district of Kandalaksha. In their ensemble the territories ceded to the Soviet Union included 16,000 square miles and a population of 420,000.

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At the outset, the Soviet Union had hoped to establish Soviet control over all of Finland through the Finnish Communist leader Otto Kuusinen. Kuusinen was a leading figure in the Comintern and the Finnish Communist Party held a great deal of political support in the Finnish trade Unions. At one point, Kuusinen was actually established as the leader of rival Communist government in the border town of Terijoki; but the Finnish masses rallied behind the anti-Communist leadership of Mannerheim. Hence, the newly acquired Finnish territories at first were constituted as a separate Soviet Republic of Karelia, but later simply incorporated into the Soviet Russian Republic.

Soviet Foreign Policy toward Japan in 1939-1940

The Political Context of Soviet-Japanese Relations: Following the “Lukouchiao Incident” of July 7, 1937, and in line with the Tanaka memorial, Japanese military forces in the Far East occupied the whole of eastern China from Beijing to Canton from 1937 to 1940. Japanese expansion included the notorious “rape of Nanking” in July 1937 in which Japanese military forces brutally killed an estimated 200,000 Chinese civilians. Eventually, the Japan ese imposed its rule over all of eastern China under the puppet government of Wang Ching-wei in December 1940. From that point on, the Japanese moved westward along the Yangtze River valley to try to advance against the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek with its wartime capital Chungking in Szechuan Province. Soviet military assistance to the National forces and the popular front collaboration with the Communist forces in Yenan could only manage to allow Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government to maintain its political hold of western China. What remained to be determined was where Japanese political-military expansion would next turn in East Asia. Here Japanese strategy was divided between two factions. A “strike north” faction advocated expansion into the Soviet Far East, beginning with a renewed advance on the Soviet Maritime Province and oil-rich Northern Sakhalin Island across the Tartar Strait (Southern Sakhalin Island had already been ceded to Japan by the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War). A “strike south” faction instead advocated expansion into Southeast Asia through Indochina, Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia to secure control of the richest prize, the oil-rich Dutch-held Indonesia. A strike north campaign would emphasize the role of land forces, whereas a strike south campaign would emphasize the role of naval forces. And it was in this context that Japan sought to test the strength of the Soviet land forces in the Far East.

The Soviet land forces in the Far East had been built up in the 1930s in anticipation of military conflict with Japan. Labeled the “Red Banner Army of the Far East” the Soviet land forces in the Maritime Province facing the Japanese were constituted as an elite military contingent under General Zhukov capable of carrying on successful combat even in the Siberian winter. Soviet-Japanese Military Confrontation in the Far East: In June 1937, Japanese military forces occupied two islands in the Amur River along the Soviet-Manchurian border over which both governments claimed sovereignty. After inconclusive fighting, the Soviet forces withdrew to avoid an all-out military confrontation. But such was not the case in July 1938, when Japanese and Soviet forces clashed for control of the heights of Changkufeng Hill near Lake Khasan at the strategic junction of the Korean, Manchurian, and Soviet Siberian Maritime borders. In a pitched battle that included some 50,000 troops on both sides along with artillery, tanks, and planes, the Soviet forces, commanded by General Georgii Zhukov scored a commanding victory and retained control of the strategic area. This was followed by another decisive Soviet military victory over Japanese forces at Lake Buir on the Mongolian-Manchuria frontier in July-August 1939, in which the Japanese government admitted to 18,000 casualties and Soviet technical military superiority. And, again, Japan accepted a territorial settlement claimed by the Soviet Union.

Hence, by August 1939, Japan had resigned itself to the territorial and political status quo with the Soviet Union in Northeast Asia. At the beginning of the year, a Japanese military alliance with Nazi-Germany might have seemed in order for a two-front war on the Soviet Union. But Soviet military successes against the Japanese Kwantung Army in the Far East, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which prohibited any German collaboration with a Japanese attack forced Japan to opt for a “strike south” campaign of imperial expansion.

98 The Japanese Tripartite Pact of 1940 and Japanese Neutrality Pact of 1941: By the summer of 1940, Japan was looking to establish a military alliance system to secure her expansionist ambitions in Southeast Asia against the United States. The United States not only held a political-military stronghold against Japan in her control of the Philippines against Japanese expansion from the Malayan Peninsula to Indonesia; but was also the only Pacific naval power equal to Japan. As such, Imperial Japan joined Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in signing a Tripartite Pact of Mutual Assistance on September 27, 1940. The Tripartite Pact committed each of the signatory partners to mutual military assistance if any one of the signatory partners were the “object of a military attack” by “any country not currently engaged in the war in Europe or Asia.” The target by all three parties was to keep the United States out of the war in Europe, in the case of Nazi-Germany and Fascist Italy, and out of the war in Asia, in the case of Japan. Here the emphasis was on Japanese expansion in China, Indochina, and Indonesia. Then, to further safeguard her political-military expansion in China in the Far East, Japan signed a Mutual Neutrality Pact with the Soviet Union on April 13, 1941, which was to be valid for ten years unless unilaterally abrogated by one of the parties after five years. The Pact called for the signatory parties to remain neutral if the other was to become the “object of hostilities” by “one or several third parties.” For Japan, already committed to a “strike south” campaign, the Pact was to ensure that she would not be confronted with a Soviet challenge to her political dominance in Manchuria and Korea; for the Soviet Union, by that recognizing a serious military threat from Nazi Germany, the Pact was to provide reassurance against a reversal of Japanese policy to a “strike north” campaign in consort with German aggression from the West, confronting the Soviet Union with a two-front war. Molotov’s Trip to Berlin and “Operation Barbarossa”: Stalin was aware of Hitler’s testament in Mein Kampf and that for Hitler the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact could only be a temporary stratagem to relieve Nazi Germany of a two-front war until he could finish with France and Great Britain in Western Europe. Still, he envisioned a long and exhausting war in Western Europe which would drain the resources of all the warring parties. In this, Stalin was shocked by the defeat of France in a six-week period from 10 May to 17 June 1940. And following this, Stalin was greatly disturbed by the adherence to the German-Italian Axis Alliance of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria in East Central Europe as quasi-Fascist powers in an area Stalin understood to be within the Soviet sphere of political influence. Finally, the Italian advance in Albania and Greece also threatened Soviet naval power in the Black Sea, especially with Axis pressure on Turkey to also get in step with the broadened Axis Alliance.

The Soviet Union did take a certain preemptive action on its own in forcing Romania to also cede Northern Bukovina, a stretch of 4,000 square miles of territory also bordering on the southwestern Ukraine. The latter, incorporated into the new Soviet Moldavian Republic, was not included in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and was source of irritation to Hitler’s Germany to have to prevail upon an Axis partner to concede such territory to the Soviet Union. It was in this context of an increasingly charged atmosphere that Stalin sent Viacheslav Molotov to Berlin on November 12, 1940, to meet with German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to “clarify” the status of Soviet-Nazi German relations. Molotov immediately made it clear that the Soviet government considered Axis dominance Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and paramount influence in the southern Balkans was unacceptable to Soviet security. Ribbentrop tried to mollify Molotov by suggesting that the Soviet Union itself join the Tripartite Pact; and as compensation for Axis dominance in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria and the southern Balkans, the Soviet Union was be given a free hand in establishing its political control over Iran and the Persian Gulf against the British Empire providing it with secure access to the Indian Ocean. Ribbentrop went on to add that Soviet dominance in the Persian Gulf was assured by the fact that Great Britain was all but “finished” as the only remaining combatant to Nazi Germany.

But Molotov was not buying and sarcastically replied as to the bomb shelter as the venue of their conversation: “If Great Britain is all but completely defeated, why are we in his shelter, and whose bombers are those flying above us.” The Molotov visit to Berlin made it clear that conversations for any solid understanding for future Soviet-Nazi German collaboration had come to an impasse. And, in fact, Hitler was already committed to an early military campaign against the Soviet Union for German lebensraum and the destruction of Soviet Bolshevism in Russia. Already in July of 1940 Hitler had told his generals to begin drawing up military plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union. And on December 18, 1940, despite the unfinished campaign against Great Britain, Hitler instructed

99 his generals that the invasion of the Soviet Union was by then an immediate consideration of detailed plans for “Operation Barbarossa” as the code name for the most massive offensive in military history to destroy the Soviet state. Hitler set May 15, 1941 as the invasion date (eventually set back to June 22).

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Questions for Reflection

(1) In Mein Kampf, written in 1925, Hitler called for the destruction of the Soviet on the basis of what ideological consideration that clashed with National Socialism, and what geopolitical consideration demanded by “breathing space” (lebensraum) of the German state? What did the Axis Alliance of October 1936 signed between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy stipulate? Against who was the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936-37 aimed that was signed by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan? What was the military-political outcome of the “Mukden Incident” in Manchuria on September 18, 1931?

(2) What did the Soviet Union did Soviet Comintern policy call for at the Seventh Comintern Congress in 1935, as a

complete reversal from the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928, in the establishment of “popular fronts” to prevent Fascist government takeovers in France and Spain? What was the history of the popular front in France and what was the history of the popular front in Spain?

(3) How did Mao Tse-tung establish Communist political power through land reform in “rural Soviets” in Kiangsi

Province for 1927 to 1934? What type of military-political strategy did Mao adopt against Chiang Kai-shek’s attempted Communist suppression campaigns, as set forth in Mao’s works On Guerilla Warfare and On Protracted War? What took place in the “long march” of Mao’s Communist forces in 1934-35? The Chinese Communists at Yenan and the political warlord Chang Hsueh-liang in Xian collaborated to force Chiang Kai-shek to do what regarding Japanese expansion in China?

(4) What did the Franco-Soviet Pact of 1935 call for regarding their mutual territorial security from Nazi German

military expansionism? What did the Soviet-Czechoslovak Pact of 1935 call for regarding a Soviet guarantee of Czechoslovak territorial security against Nazi German military expansionism? What new attitude did the Soviet Union take toward the League of Nations from 1934 to 1938 regarding the role of international “collective security” to stop Fascist military expansion? What did the western governments of Great Britain and France accept in the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938, regarding Hitler’s demands on Czechoslovakia? What suspicion did the Soviet government draw regarding the Western powers from the Munich Agreement, and what new outlook did it take on its foreign policy beginning in 1939?

(5) Before it would agree to pact with Great Britain and France in 1939 against German aggression, the Soviet Union

demanded a guarantee to what other countries besides Poland and Romania to guarantee the national security of all countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea? Instead of joining a British and French guarantee against German aggression, what did the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939 (as amended on September 27, 1939), call for as regards Soviet political relations with Nazi Germany and Soviet territorial gains? What was the overall performance of the Soviet military in the Russo-Finnish War from November 1939 to March 1940? What territories were the Finns forced to cede to the Soviet Union in the treaty of March 12, 1940, that ended the Russo-Finnish War?

(6) What was the military outcome of two pitched engagements between the Soviet Red Banner Army of the Far

East and the Japanese Kwantung Army in 1939? What was the political outcome in Japanese wartime strategy after the two pitched engagements in deciding on a “strike south” expansionist campaign? What country did Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan hope to isolate in signing the Tripartite Pact of Mutual Assistance of September 27, 1940? Japan wished to establish reassurance from an attack by what country in signing its Mutual Neutrality Pact of April 13, 1941? Soviet concern over the broadening of the German-Italian Axis Alliance in what area countries led to a breakdown of the second Molotov-Ribbentrop talks on 12-13 November 1940? What, then, did Hitler decide in adopting the plan for “Operation Barbarossa?