In justification of the crucifixion of Czechoslovakia at Munich it was said that Russia could not be trusted and that her assistance would not be worth much in any case. On these points there could be honest difference of opinion, but not about the diplomatic record. Certainly the Czech Government did not doubt Russia’s sincerity. At a session of the Harris Institute at the University of Chicago in August 1939 I asked President Benes whether Russia would have supported him had he decided to fight in September 1938. He replied, without an instant’s hesitation: “There was never any doubt in my mind that Russia would aid us by all the ways open to her, but I did not dare to fight with Russian aid alone, because I knew that the British and French Governments would make out of my country another Spain.”

Benes had had every reason for that judgment. The extreme pressure put upon him had left no doubt that if he still fought for his liberty the British and French Governments would make every effort within their power to draw another blanket of Non-Intervention over the tragedy and hold the ring while Hitler worked his will on the offending Czechs. A deep revulsion in their own peoples might have ousted Chamberlain and Bonnet, insisting that their policy be reversed, but Benes could not depend on that. The forces in France and Britain which were determined to work with the fascist powers were too strong to be easily unhorsed. It later required sledge-hammer blows from Hitler’s armies to unseat them.

Did the Munichards Plan a Nazi-Soviet War? There remains the question whether the appeasement governments deliberately planned to turn Hitler toward the East and into a war with Russia.

There was no question that the Nazis had done their best to convince the world that they were out to smash Bolshevism and conquer the Soviet Union. Hitler’s speech saying that if he had the Urals all Germans would be swimming in plenty was only an outstanding example of this propaganda. Nor was there any reluctance among the elites in the Western world to believe him. The great landowners, aristocrats, industrialists, bankers, high churchmen, army leaders—magnates of every kind in Western Europe, together with many middle-class elements—had never lost their fear that their own workers and peasants might demand a social revolution, perhaps one spearheaded and organized by communists. Their support of fascism as a force, albeit a gangster one, which would defeat communism and at the same time leave the vested interests largely in control had been instinctive and sincere. There can be little doubt that many powerful people in Britain and France worked to strengthen and build up the Axis powers with a view to an attack by them upon the Soviet Union. But if this motive was not decisive the inability of the ruling elements to envisage an alliance with Red Russia in a war against the fascist states was. Especially in France that would mean a Popular Front war which would menace the power and privileges of the great interests which controlled the nation’s life.

If London and Paris had not consciously sought to speed Hitler’s march to the Urals, they had exerted themselves mightily to place within his grasp the necessary power for an attack upon the Soviet Union. Until the Czech bastion was swept away he could not effectively take over the Balkans, which he required to give him the necessary food and raw materials for a really great war machine, in addition to putting him on the borders of the Soviet Union. After Munich the British and French had lost all power to prevent Nazi Germany from becoming a colossus capable of attacking the Soviet Union or of turning upon them. To say that this certain and inevitable result of the long and persistent appeasement of Nazi Germany never occurred to the British and French Governments is to vastly underrate their astuteness and perspicacity. It is hardly possible that they were so imbued with the rightness of Wilsonian principles that they naively and innocently sought, solely and singleheartedly, to secure “self-determination” for abused Germans in Czechoslovakia. However blind and stupid the men of Munich may have been, they were not that simple.

In France conservatism began early to “waver between class interest and national security.” Daladier was afraid that a successful war would give power to the Left and he feared communism more than Hitler’s embrace. After Munich the Clericals and Rightists in France changed their cry to “Rather Hitler than Stalin” and proclaimed that the German rampart against communism must not be battered down. In London the feverish desire to deflect Hitler was apparent and there was only one direction in which he could be turned. Chamberlain’s advisers hoped that Hitler could be deflected into collision with Russia. They thought Germany would be weakened in the process of defeating Russia. When the German Minister of Economics toured the Balkans soon after Munich, and announced plans for their economic conquest, Chamberlain assured the Commons that Germany must have “a dominating position” in that region. And when Hitler torpedoed his Munich vows and invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1938, “every newspaper correspondent, every business house, every embassy and legation in Europe” knew that he was going East.²

From the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of 1935 on, Russia had had ample evidence that London and Paris meant to turn Hitler in their direction. Whatever doubts about this intention may have existed or may still exist in Western minds, the Russians could not fail to read the evidence. That they persevered in attempted collaboration with the democracies can only be ascribed to their realization of the unbridgeable antithesis between fascism and communism and to their knowledge that the lust of the Nazis for empire could not really be satisfied without the Ukraine and the Caucasus.

Negotiations for an Alliance With Russia

During the same period that Litvinov had been striving for collective security Hitler had been plunging ahead, achieving at least one great objective each year, nearly always in March. First it was conscription and the recovery of the Saar, then the remilitarization of the Rhineland, followed by the seizure of Austria and the break-up of Czechoslovakia. Puffed up with the wine of easy conquests, it was not to be expected that he would be idle in 1939. On March 15 German troops rolled into Prague, annexing the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Bonnet denied that the Anglo-French guarantee of Czechoslovakia had ever been put into effect and the London Times agreed. Chamberlain said: do not let us “be deflected from our course.”

Carpathian Alarm Bell. The next day German consent to the Hungarian annexation of Carpatho-Ukraine was announced. This decision put an entirely different face on matters for the Munich men. Carpatho-Ukraine was the extreme tip of Czechoslovakia, which in Hitler’s hands was a pistol pointed straight at the Ukraine. Even the inhabitants of the province were Ukrainian, making a jumping-off point ideal from the ideological standpoint. Yet Hitler now gave it to Hungary. He was not going on to tangle with Russia. At last an alarm bell rang in London and Paris. Maybe Hitler was going to clean up the West first! As Schuman observes, anyone who had read Mein Kampf would have known that France was marked for annihilation before and not after the conquest of Russia,³ but Chamberlain only now began to look into Mein Kampf

Pact with Russia? The next day, March 17, under strong pressure from Lord Halifax, Chamberlain responded in his Birmingham speech to the new light on Nazi strategy which had suddenly been revealed to him by announcing a change of attitude toward Nazi aggrandizement. He did it peevishly and under the lash of deep public indignation. He made it clear that he still thought Hitler had been right before Munich and was surprised and irked because the Führer had let him down.⁴ Nevertheless he changed the line and, with many pauses and hesitations, fits and starts and backslidings, he maintained thereafter an attitude of further resistance to Nazi aggression, especially resistance by other powers.

On March 17 the British Government suddenly remembered the existence of the Soviet Union and inquired what its attitude would be toward the Hitler threat in Eastern Europe. Moscow replied promptly and proposed an immediate conference between Britain, France, the U.S.S.R., Poland, Rumania and Turkey to consider how to resist German aggression. This was exactly and obviously what was urgently needed. Nothing less than a drawing together of all the threatened states could be of any avail. Rumania was under intense pressure to turn over her economy to Germany and the quickest action was needed.

However, the Chamberlain clique could not make the shift. Knowing that they wanted to solve the Nazi menace on the plains of Russia, they ascribed to Russia the very same design of which they were guilty, as devious men so often do. They had a “deep seated conviction,” shared also by the French Rightists, that Russia wished to destroy the capitalist system in Europe by provoking a war from which she would remain aloof.⁵ The entire diplomatic record of the past five years belied this self-justifying suspicion. It showed that Russia was desperately anxious to avoid war, but also that on every occasion, without exception, she had sought to avoid war for herself by combining with others to prevent aggression or nip it in the bud. It was Russia which had incessantly pleaded that “peace is indivisible,” warning that if war came all would be engulfed in it.

All this had meant nothing to conservative men bent on making terms with fascism and preserving it. Now, therefore, Chamberlain hesitated a week until Rumania capitulated and on March 18 notified Russia that her conference proposal was “premature.” This was the same rebuff given to Russia when she had proposed a conference a year earlier, at the time of Hitler’s conquest of Austria. Again there was no hurry, but this time Chamberlain did propose a substitute plan whereby Britain, France, Russia and Poland would consult if any further acts of aggression were believed to be imminent, but even this proposal was abortive, since it was at once learned, says Chamberlain’s biographer, that “Poland would refuse contact with the Soviet, which alone was enough to prevent us from taking up the Russian proposal for a six-power conference.” Chamberlain did not blame the Polish Government. He confided to his diary, on March 26: “I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia,”⁶

Polish Impasse. Poland’s comfortable blocking of any liaison with Russia revealed the impossibility of stopping Hitler, at this late date, without a gigantic world war. Poland was now the prisoner of her conquests. Obsessed by delusions of grandeur, she had conquered from Russia some ten millions of White Russians and Ukrainians whom her great landlords did not dare to trust in contact with Russian troops, even if they were fighting for Poland’s very life. Poland had also aggrandized herself at the expense of Germany, Lithuania and Czechoslovakia, acting like an eager and vindictive vulture when Czechoslovakia was being dismembered. The cause and result of this attitude toward her neighbors was that the splendid Polish people were “ruled by an incompetent and purblind oligarchy who preferred government by junta rather than by parliament.”⁷ This oligarchy of landlords and colonels also believed itself to be a Great Power. Impressed by its conquests, it adopted the impossible policy of balancing both of its huge neighbors against each other. Colonel Beck’s slogan, “Not a millimeter nearer to Berlin than to Moscow,” would have been valid under a strong League of Nations, but it meant certain destruction in the midst of an anarchy of aggression on the loose. In this situation Poland might survive by close alliance with one of her great neighbors. Being unable to choose between her hatreds doomed her to sure destruction and in all probability to another partition.

It was the defense of this illiberal, vainglorious and impotent regime which Chamberlain chose as the casus foederis of World War II. His heart had been of flint when the virile democratic and military strength of Czechoslovakia was at stake. The hearts of the appeasers bled for the German minority in Czechoslovakia, the freest minority in Europe, but they were oblivious to the much larger and much worse ruled minorities in Poland.

Guarantees to Poland and Rumania. Poland had been on the hot spot since January 5, 1939, when Hitler had summoned Colonel Beck to Berlin to discuss an alliance against Soviet Russia. Beck temporized and incurred Hitler’s wrath. On March 21 Hitler’s demands on the Corridor and Danzig were presented. The next day Memel was seized from Lithuania. Poland mobilized and London heard from many sources that an immediate German attack might at any moment overwhelm Poland. As usual Hitler was in a hurry, and this time another Munich could not be arranged. Every basis upon which public opinion had been sold on the Munich illusion was swept away.⁸ At the same time it suddenly became apparent to the Munich men that the pursuit of their policy would enable Hitler to absorb the resources of all Central and Eastern Europe, not for use against Russia but against themselves, and without a fight. On March 31, accordingly, Chamberlain threw out a British guarantee of Polish independence. “His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.” Here were no weasel words such as had always vitiated his mild threats to do something possibly about Czech independence. For twenty years, from Lloyd George on, Britain had been cool toward Poland. Poland was farther away than Czechoslovakia, and presumably good Englishmen knew less about her quarrels, but this did not deter Chamberlain from giving a firm commitment to go to war if Germany attacked her.

This lightning change of front was not, of course, motivated by any sudden love for Polish liberty. It was born of an abruptly acquired desire to have somebody absorb some of Hitler’s lethal fury. Poland was a pale substitute in fighting power for the powerful Czechoslovak fortress which had been so resolutely and callously thrown away, but any sort of ally was now better than none. Mussolini replied by seizing Albania on April 8, and on the 13th Chamberlain announced a guarantee of the independence of Greece and Rumania. Rumania was included only because of the strong insistence of France.⁹

These death-bed guarantees were of course utterly worthless. Britain had no power whatever to save Rumania or Poland from German assault. Only the Soviet Union could do that, and serious consideration of an alliance with the much feared Soviets was not begun until April 15, after the Rumanian and Polish guarantees had been tossed out.

Alliance Rejected. On that date the British Government asked Russia to give a unilateral guarantee to Poland and Rumania. What good this would do, since Poland would not accept Russian assistance, was a mystery, but if that obstacle could be overcome London was willing for Russia to do the fighting. In reply to this transparent maneuver, Russia promptly proposed, on April 17, a binding pact of mutual assistance between Britain, France and Russia, to be implemented by a military agreement, which would guarantee all of the border states from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.

This was a starkly realistic proposal. Nothing less offered any hope of stopping Germany without war, or of winning it if Hitler persisted. To offer anything less was to confirm Russia’s well-founded suspicions that the West would be glad to hold the ring, as in the destruction of the Spanish Republic, while Hitler worked his will on Russia. Since this was what the British and French regimes really wanted they recoiled in consternation, especially the British, when the Russian proposal arrived. It was quickly learned that none of the threatened border states in East Europe wanted to be guaranteed by Russia. With relief, London replied to Russia on May 9, 1939, repeating its proposal that Russia give a unilateral guarantee to Poland and Rumania and adding the astounding proviso that the guarantee should go into effect only on the decision of the British Government.¹⁰

It is difficult to imagine how effrontery could go further. Russia was invited to receive the full impact of Hitler’s giant war machine without the slightest suggestion of any willingness to aid in her defense and she was invited to move against Hitler on orders from London. This solution of the Nazi menace was proposed, also, after Hitler had made a speech on April 28 in which he tore up both the Anglo-German Naval Treaty and his Non-Aggression Pact with Poland, thus giving plain notice that Poland was next on his list. He also made no attack on either Russia or communism, an omission which might have rung an alarm bell in London. Gone were his scorching diatribes against Bolshevism. There was not a single insult to Moscow in Hitler’s long harangue.

Hitler’s speech might have sent Chamberlain or Lord Halifax flying to Moscow, especially when Litvinov, long time advocate of support for collective security and cooperation with the West was retired as Soviet Foreign Minister five days later, May 3. On May 7, also, French Foreign Minister Bonnet received a report from his Ambassador Coulondre in Berlin saying that Hitler would come to an understanding with Russia.¹¹ But none of these startling events produced action in London.

No Entanglement with Russia. By comparison with his past record Chamberlain was becoming magnanimous. In issuing the guarantee to Poland he said he would seek the maximum amount of cooperation with other states, “undeterred by any prejudice.” And in an April debate he avowed that “when I say ‘our independence’ I do not mean only this country’s.” However, his new-found concern for the independence of small states took an abortive turn. When Colonel Beck came to London to discuss the alliance in April Chamberlain reported comfortably that Beck was “very anxious not to be tied up with Russia.” Chamberlain agreed with him, writing: “I confess I very much agree with him, for I regard Russia as a very unreliable friend . . . with an enormous irritative power on others.” Thus Poland was to be defended against Germany by the ego of the Polish colonels and by the British Navy in the Atlantic, not by the powerful Red Army fighting with the Polish forces.

Chamberlain’s eye ranged over the globe to find reasons for avoiding an alliance with Russia. Catholic French Canada might not like it. It might cause division in the Balkans, and what if a Russian alliance drove Spain “over” to the Axis? Yet the absurdity of a guarantee to Poland and Rumania without an alliance with Russia compelled a negotiation. Deeply alarmed cries came from both sides of the House of Commons and from all quarters of the country. A Gallup poll showed that 92 per cent of the British people favored an alliance with Russia. Everybody could see that a tight alliance with Russia was imperatively demanded, except the group of men who were determined not to see. After he had been bombarded in the House of Commons on May 19 about a Russian alliance Chamberlain said wearily: “I cannot help feeling that there is a sort of veil, a sort of wall, between the two Governments, which it is extremely difficult to penetrate.”¹²

There was a veil, one held firmly in place in London. Gafencu, who visited Halifax and Bonnet in late April 1939, says that Bonnet was now strongly of the opinion that only a firm alliance with Russia could save the peace. “He wanted it at all costs.” Gafencu was “struck by the clearness of his decision,” and sure that it had the full approval of the other French leaders. The Soviet proposals were also clear and to the point, but London advanced “a wealth of reservations,” proceeding “one step forward, three steps backward.” When France brought forward a plain proposal for a new triple alliance, on April 29, Halifax found it much too clear and was disposed “to leave little initiative to the French Government.” The conservatives in the British Cabinet wanted to believe with Colonel Beck that an Anglo-French-Polish alliance would be sufficient. They feared that agreement with Russia would mean territorial acquisition by her in East Europe.¹³

On May 19 Lloyd George, Eden and Churchill again pressed upon the Government the life-and-death nature of the need for an immediate arrangement with Russia of the most far-reaching terms. Churchill begged the Government “to get some of these brutal truths into their heads. Without an effective Eastern Front, there can be no satisfactory defence of our interests in the West, and without Russia there can be no effective Eastern Front!”¹⁴ Yet it was not until May 27 that London consented to discuss Russia’s proposals, and then London sought to bar the Baltic States from the discussions lest Russia have territorial ambitions there. Chamberlain also had no enthusiasm for a flight to Moscow to arrange the terms. He firmly resisted all suggestions that he go. He had flown eagerly to Germany to wrestle with what he himself called the “wild beast” of Berchtesgaden. Then he had said he was saving the peace, but now he had no stomach for a similar heroic effort in Moscow to save the peace. Things were not so urgent now. Eden offered to go, but “he would not consider letting him go.”¹⁵ Lord Halifax refused an invitation to go to Moscow and instead they sent William Strang, a lesser official, from the Foreign Office. This was a triple insult to the Soviet Union because Strang was of low diplomatic rank, he had defended a group of British engineers in an espionage case in Soviet Russia, and he had been a member of Chamberlain’s entourage at Munich.

Baltic States Sovereignty Sacred. Strang arrived in mid-June, but with no power to settle the deadlock over what to do about the Baltic States. These three little countries, Russian until 1920, were an open invasion highway from Germany to Petrograd. They were ruled by semi-fascist dictatorships which were much more afraid of Soviet Russia than of Fascist Germany. This was signalized by their signature of non-aggression pacts with Germany, on March 22 and June 7, 1939, whereby all three—Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia—pledged themselves to neutrality in any conflict between the Reich and third powers.¹⁶

In any military showdown these militarily helpless Lilliputians would be sure to side with Germany, but this was not the half of it, from the Soviet standpoint. Axis fifth columns had undermined Spain, flooded Austria with armies of enemies before the open kill and supplied all the sound and fury and excuse for the destruction of Czechoslovakia. All during 1939 this process was being repeated at Poland’s expense. Danzig and the Corridor were being taken over by heavy booted “tourists.” All of these incontrovertible facts were as well known in London and Paris as in Moscow. The German effort to undermine the Ukraine in the same way was notorious. The Baltic States were, moreover, still largely dominated by German ruling classes. Nothing could be more certain than the Nazi conquest of these strategic lands by the surreptitious methods used so triumphantly to date.

Nevertheless, the British Government found great difficulty in making with Russia a joint guarantee of the Baltic States. These governments did not want it and the men of Munich were most reluctant to guarantee their neutrality against their wishes. The sovereignty of the Baltic dictators now became a precious thing to them. Were they not independent states, small and helpless? How could the democracies coerce them by imposing guarantees which they feared? When the Spanish Republic was being done to death no sign of sympathy for the liberty of the Spanish people had come from Downing Street. On the contrary, London had been wholly tenacious in helping the Italo-German conquest of Spain, while denying Spain the right to get arms for its defense. No finger had been lifted to save Austria and the Munichmen had resorted to extreme coercion to batter down the sovereignty of Czechoslovakia, breaking up the finest democracy produced by the First World War and leaving it utterly helpless in Hitler’s hands. No soft thoughts about the rights of small nations had deterred them through this long and dismal period, but now they suddenly found themselves apprehensive about the fate of the fascist oligarchies in the Baltic States and Poland.

In his book, Last Days of Europe, Grigore Gafencu, former Rumanian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Ambassador to Russia, has an account of the Franco-British-Russian negotiations which quotes official documents directly, though they are not identified. As Foreign Minister, Gafencu toured all of the chief European chancelleries, beginning in the last half of April 1939.

According to his account, when the Soviet note of June 2 raised the Baltic States question both London and Paris drew back, but on July 6 they gave way fully, agreeing that these states should be guaranteed, though they had all objected. Simultaneously, however, Molotov had proposed a new formula which would enable Russia to take action against indirect aggression in the Baltic States, bringing the alliance into operation if war with Germany resulted.

In the same note Molotov also said that a military convention should be signed before the political alliance. Both of these points caused deep irritation in London, where patience was “almost exhausted.” Bonnet insisted that the negotiations must not fail, since public opinion in all countries now attached the greatest importance to them, and on July 24 the British gave way.¹⁷

Continued Offers to Berlin. While compelled by the urgency of agonized public opinion to go through the motions of negotiating an alliance with Russia, they could not bring themselves to cease making offers to Berlin. On March 16, the day after the fall of Prague, the British Federation of Industries concluded with its Nazi counterpart a series of cartel agreements. In May the British permitted the Bank for International Settlements to send $25,000,000 of Czech gold from London to Berlin. While they haggled with Poland over the terms of a small $40,000,000 armament loan, Chamberlain’s economic advisers, Robert Hudson and Sir Horace Wilson, conferred in London with Dr. Helmuth Wohlthat, Hitler’s economic adviser, concerning a possible British loan of $5,000,000,000 to the Reich. In Berlin Sir Nevile Henderson was still offering British friendship.¹⁸

In these circumstances it was as inevitable as anything could be that Hitler should plunge ahead toward the mutilation and conquest of Poland. He had no convincing evidence that the Munich men had really changed their minds, especially when their newspapers continually urged more appeasements. The cumulative effects of years of propitiatory surrender to his rages could not be overcome by anything except the most resolute measures. His entire life experience since January 1933 taught him that his powerful friends in Britain and France would not permit armed opposition to him, and that another Munich at Poland’s expense would be the result. Chamberlain told his friend Mussolini “plainly” that if Hitler tried to get Danzig “by force” it would mean starting the European war. To which Mussolini naturally replied, “Let the Poles agree that Danzig goes to the Reich, and I will do my best to get a peaceful, agreed solution.”¹⁹

Chamberlain Complacent. All during the Munich crisis, Chamberlain gave the impression of a man fully convinced that Hitler would blow up the world if he did not get what he wanted in Czechoslovakia. Now that the invaluable Czech bastion was gone, and the West wall guarded Germany’s western frontiers, Chamberlain thought that Hitler could be talked out of his next triumph and that his generals would not let him take “the fatal plunge.”²⁰

There was one way, and only one, by which Germany could be deterred from taking the fatal plunge. That was the signature of an air-tight alliance between the Western Powers and Russia, with no loopholes in it, but on July 30 his biographer records that Chamberlain regarded a breakdown of the Anglo-Russian negotiations “with equanimity, as highly probable.”²¹

The appalling prospect that the Anglo-French guarantee of Poland would quickly become a pitiful scrap of paper, in the absence of a firm Anglo-Russian alliance, did not disturb Chamberlain. He was not alarmed when Zhdanov wrote an editorial in Pravda, on June 29, pointing out that the Anglo-Soviet negotiations had been going on for 75 days, during which the Soviet Government took 11 days to return its answers while the British took 59. Zhdanov concluded that “the British and French Governments are not out for a real agreement acceptable to the U.S.S.R., but only for talks about an agreement.”²²

Final Procrastination. This explicit warning did not increase the tempo in London. It was not until July 31 that Chamberlain finally announced the naming of a military mission to Moscow, to arrange the concrete terms of the proposed alliance. Molotov had named his top military men to negotiate, but instead of Lord Gort and General Gamelin the British-French delegation was headed by an obscure British Admiral, Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, and by a French General of comparable obscurity. Nor did this mission fly to Moscow as fast as planes could take it, to concert measures with desperate speed against the pitiable crucifixion of Poland which was boiling up on the horizon. While the sands were running out for Poland by the minute, the Allied mission took a slow Baltic boat, on August 5, and did not reach Moscow until August 11. Then it transpired, once again, that these men had no power to conclude an agreement.

The Soviet Chief-of-Staff, Marshal Voroshilov, outlined a plan to block German pincer movements through Northern Poland and Lemburg in the South. The Allies conferred with Poland and, after four months of negotiations, with German troops piling up on her borders, Poland replied that she did not need Soviet aid.

According to Gafencu, Paris put the strongest pressure on Colonel Beck, but he returned a firm “No.” He believed the U.S.S.R. to be too weak militarily to be of much help, but if she were strong she would never evacuate the region occupied. He would not “admit that, in any form whatever, the use of our territory by foreign troops should be discussed.”

On August 21 Premier Daladier ordered General Doumenc in Moscow to disregard Beck and sign the military convention, but it was too late. On August 24, speaking to the military delegations, Voroshilov placed the full blame on Poland, but Beck was not worried. He asserted that “materially speaking, nothing much would be changed” by the Nazi-Soviet treaty signed the day before.²³

In these days, also, with the entire Nazi machine going into high gear for the Polish kill—screaming propaganda, all the old business of atrocities by the Poles, Danzig filled with German troopers, mobilization gaining momentum—Chamberlain went off, on August 16, for “a holiday to the Far Highlands.”²⁴

German-Soviet Pact. Three days later a far reaching German-Soviet trade agreement was signed in Berlin. On August 23, a non-aggression pact between the same powers was signed in Moscow.

When the German-Soviet Pacts were announced the Western leaders feigned shock and surprise. Actually the French Ambassador to Germany, M. Coulondre, had reported from Berlin as early as May 7 that Germany was planning a deal with Moscow for the partition of Poland. He repeated this warning in the clearest form on May 22, and all during the summer.²⁵ The Allied chiefs knew well that their failure to make an alliance with Russia would mean the destruction of Poland. There was no other conceivable hope of preventing Poland’s liquidation, but London did not choose to bring pressure to bear on Poland or the Baltic states to prevent their own destruction. The great dread of war which had driven Chamberlain to Munich no longer scourged him.

Polish Doom Sealed in London. After August 23, there was but one hope of preventing the smashing of Poland. That was to fly to Warsaw and bring the extremest pressure to bear upon the Polish Colonels to grant “self-determination” to Hitler in Danzig and the Corridor, accept the partition of their country and save it from the terrible rain of death and devastation which could not otherwise be prevented. All the arguments that had been used upon the Czechs now applied triple-strength to the Poles.

Instead, British promises to Poland, never put into binding form, were hastily written into a formal Treaty of Mutual Assistance between Britain and Poland and signed in London on August 25. Never were names put to a more hollow instrument. Britain and France had not the slightest power to save the life of a single Pole, or even to fire a shot that would mean anything to Poland. If this treaty had any meaning at all it meant that finally the Allies would enlist the might of the United States to wear down Germany and restore some semblance of a ruined Poland, but at the moment this was a dim prospect.

Why then had the Munich men refused all through the Spring and Summer to accept the only terms for an alliance with Russia which could mean anything to Russia? It was, says Schuman, because “all preferred the destruction of Poland to the Soviet defence of Poland. All hoped that the sequence would be a German-Soviet war over the spoils.” Is this a too stern judgment? It fits Ambassador Henderson, who told Hitler, on August 23, that he preferred a German-Soviet agreement to an Anglo-Soviet agreement.²⁶

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Poland was sacrificed as deliberately as Czechoslovakia was. Poland meant two things to the Munich men: (1) an occasion for reversing their disastrous policy after its futility was evident to them; (2) another diversion of German conquest-mania toward the East which would gain them a little additional time, if it did not lead to a German-Soviet clash. Chamberlain explained repeatedly that “Poland was the occasion but not the fundamental cause, which was the intolerableness of life under recurrent threats of fire and sword.”²⁷

Poland Destroyed in a Day. Poland’s fate was settled on the first day of the German blitz. East Prussia hung over Warsaw and the heart of Poland like a giant vulture, spitting out planes and mechanized columns in swift profusion while the same thing happened from Germany proper and from Czechoslovakia. A million German troops swept over Poland’s borders in a giant semicircle. At 11:00 a.m. 5000 German bombers appeared simultaneously over 400 Polish towns. An hour later every line of communication in Poland was broken, including 1000 bridges, and half the population of Poland was fleeing in all directions on the disrupted roads. The details were macabre in the extreme. Nothing was too small to draw machine-gun fire from the air. A single person working in his field or a domestic animal was sufficient to attract the attentions of the Luftwaffe. On the roads, filled with fleeing humanity, German planes had a field day. In the towns even the boy scouts were collected by scores and machine-gunned on the steps of the churches. By nightfall the government of the fatuous Polish colonels had ceased to exist, as the German columns rolled across Poland, reaching the Curzon Line in fifteen days. There they met Russian troops who reclaimed Eastern Poland as swiftly.

This unfortunate episode over, Chamberlain settled down for a comfortable war. Until December he doubted that Hitler would dare to attack the Maginot Line. He did not believe in an armored blitz through the Low Countries. He thought Hitler would shrink before “a breach of neutrality so flagrant and unscrupulous.” He doubted too that Hitler would attempt a great air blitz on Britain. Hitler was stymied. Chamberlain waited calmly for “the collapse of the German home front.”²⁸

Green Light to Hitler. In the Western world the Nazi-Soviet Pact caused widespread indignation. Englishmen thought it outrageous that it should be concluded while their military mission was still in Moscow. The Soviets were accused of executing the greatest double-cross in history. People everywhere said that this proved how treacherous they were and how wise the Allies had been in being slow to trust them. Anti-Communists all over the world charged that this treaty was the cause of the Second World War. Others, a little more discriminating, said that it had touched off the war, made it certain. The pact, it was said, gave Hitler the green light. In this form the charge was to be repeated perpetually for many years, especially when Soviet-American relations became acute after the Second World War.

Actually, the Nazi determination to settle accounts with Poland had for months been as plain as anything could be. This time, too, only the most heroic measures could prevent them from taking what they wanted in an orgy of violence and blood-letting. They had been frustrated at Munich, prevented from trying out their new war machine. Now they were determined to see for themselves just how much destruction it could cause. When the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, talked with Hitler and Ribbentrop on August 11–13, he wrote in his diary: “The decision to fight is implacable. . . . I am certain that even were the Germans given much more than they ask, they would attack just the same because they are possessed by the demon of destruction. . . . There is nothing that can be done. Hitler has decided to strike and strike he will.” He added that Il Duce “believes the democracies will still give in.”²⁹ The decision to obliterate Poland was therefore fixed before the pact with Russia was signed. Without it the Nazi Panzer divisions would have rolled up to the borders of the Soviet Union, occupying the White Russian and Ukrainian half of Poland to which the Soviet Union had a far better right.

This fact alone should dispose of the contention that if the Soviet Union could not come to terms with Britain and France it should have at least stood neutral like the American Congress. Moscow, it is said, did not need to make a deal with Hitler and give him the green light, but in reality the Soviet Government did not have this choice. By standing aloof it would have lost not only Eastern Poland but the Baltic states as well. By rejecting Hitler’s promises, and the threats that always went with them, the Soviets would have placed themselves in the daily and imminent danger of fighting the German-Russian war which they believed the West had tried to bring about.

By making the truce with Hitler the Soviets gained four things. (1) They got everything in the Baltic states which the Allies had refused them, and more, plus the ability to ship home to Germany 100,000 Baltic Germans, as well as 300,000 other Germans from Poland and other Eastern areas. These huge fifth columns were quickly cleaned out of the Russian sphere, to the deep chagrin of the Nazi supermen. (2) They achieved freedom to correct their boundary with Finland and reclaim Bessarabia from Rumania. (3) Instead of incurring the full power of the Nazi war machine, while the West viewed their plight with satisfaction, they turned Hitler back upon the West. (4) They also acquired nearly two years of precious time in which to prepare for a German onslaught.

Even then the Soviet Union was almost done to death by Nazi Germany, just as all Western Europe was, except Britain whose escape was narrow enough. Of course, in the end both the Soviets and the West suffered from their inability to unite in curbing Hitler while there was time. At last it took the full power of the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States to master Nazidom.

Many Green Lights. Union to curb the Nazis was always the best policy. It was sound when Germany struck at the foundations of European order, and destroyed three treaties, by militarizing the Rhineland; it was sound policy when she moved into Spain, when she raped Austria, when she plunged for Czechoslovakia, and when she lunged for Poland. At each step union against the aggressor was a crying need, and in each case the Soviet Union gave ample evidence of its willingness to unite, but in every instance its cooperation was rejected.

This is a chapter in the recent history of world politics which is wellnigh forgotten in the West. It is, however, not so easily forgotten in the East. The four years of humiliation at Geneva form a long period in Soviet memory. The League of Nations was the creation of the West. It had all of the sound principles and all of the machinery necessary for restraining the Axis aggressors. The coming of Russia to Geneva also gave the League the necessary power to keep the peace, but the democracies resolutely refused to invoke the power of the League in each crisis. Instead they fled farther and farther from Geneva until at last it was an empty shell, capable only of performing one last rite—the expulsion of the Soviet Union.

The First Russo-Finnish War

During September and October 1939 the Soviet Union concluded mutual assistance pacts with the three Baltic States, gaining air and naval bases and full control of the south side of the Gulf of Finland, which leads up to Leningrad. Then on October 5, Moscow moved to secure from Finland military control of the north shore of the Gulf and of the isthmus of Karelia.

This tongue of land, between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga, was the southern frontier between Finland and the Soviet Union. The border was only twenty miles from Leningrad and it was heavily fortified by the famous Mannerheim line, which had been constructed under the guidance of German military men, who also trained the Finnish army. This frontier gravely endangered the defense of Leningrad, in case Germany should take over Finland, or in case the strong anti-Soviet feelings of the Finns should make them voluntary allies of Germany. In our remoteness of time and space from the scene it is easy to depreciate these fears. At the time it seemed intolerably dangerous to Moscow that Finnish guns should be able to shoot into Russia’s second city. The Kremlin was intent on remedying the situation and on securing new military bases, just as the United States was, after the fall of France, and for the same reason—an intense desire to ward off a great military threat.

In Russia’s case the peril was much nearer. It was rampant in all Eastern Europe, thanks to the policy of the Western Powers in building up Germany to the point at which she escaped all control and smashed the public order of Europe completely. It was a totally lawless world in which the Soviets lived in 1939, a world made lawless in spite of their own consistent efforts to prevent it. This basic factor is essential background in judging Russia’s assault on Finland. Up to the time Europe was chaperoned into chaos by the West the Soviets had never indicated any desire to recover any part of the lands surrendered in 1920 during Russia’s weakness, except Bessarabia, and that claim was put away when Russia came to Geneva. While Germany yelped constantly for everybody’s lands Moscow raised no claims. A border like the Leningrad frontier was no risk to them during assured peace, but it could be a grave danger in a state of complete European anarchy. In similar circumstances it is difficult to conclude that any great power would have refrained from making the demands on Finland which the Soviets made on October 14, 1939.

Soviet Demands Rejected. They demanded: (1) the lease of a naval base at Hangoe, across the Gulf of Finland from their bases in Estonia; (2) the cession of five islands in the Gulf, which controlled Leningrad strategically by sea; and (3) 2761 square kilometers of land on the Karelian isthmus, the new border to be demilitarized. In return, twice the amount of land farther north was offered. If this was the full extent of Soviet desires the Finns could wisely have accepted the Russian demands. But, warned by what had happened to the Baltic States, the Finns were braced to resist, and they left Moscow on November 13 without yielding. They had not been pressured or browbeaten but felt that they were asked to surrender their strategic security as unjustly as Czechoslovakia had been. Being human, they did not understand that the battering down of Ethiopia’s formidable strategic security, then Spain’s and Austria’s, followed by the demolition of Czechoslovakia’s strategic security and Poland’s, had made strategic security something which only the very greatest powers could command. They pluckily stood up to the Soviet Government just as if they had been a great power, even when the Soviets unleashed a newspaper campaign of abuse and intimidation against them and manufactured an incident on the Leningrad frontier.

Finland Attacked. Moscow then denounced the Soviet-Finn Non-aggression Treaty and broke diplomatic relations, recognizing as the government of Finland a puppet regime alleged to be on the Finnish border and headed by one Otto Kuusinen, a Finnish Communist who had been in Moscow for twenty years, and still was. This mythical government aroused general laughter in Moscow at the expense of the Soviet Government, for perhaps the first and last time.³⁰ It “ceded” the required strategic points to Russia, getting back more East Karelian territory than had been offered the real Government of Finland.

Then the Soviet Government sent its planes and third-rate reserve troops against Finland, in the beginning of winter, and waited for the Helsinki Government to collapse. Moscow had miscalculated all along the line. It had thought that the Finnish Government would not fight, had been woefully misinformed about its strength at home, and had not prepared for war against the most spirited fighting by a doughty little people. In addition, Russia had duplicated Hitler’s tactics so closely as to shock the rest of the world psychologically and produce a new wave of anti-Soviet feeling.

The U.S.S.R. Expelled from the League. This was not difficult to accomplish, especially in conservative and Catholic circles. On December 3 Finland appealed to the League of Nations, long ago reduced to a state of coma by the resolute neglect of its controlling members. But now a miracle occurred. The League stirred. Argentina supported by other Latin American states urged the expulsion of the U.S.S.R. from the League, and on December 14 the British-French dominated Council expelled the Soviet Union from the League of Nations, on the recommendation of an equally pliant Assembly.

The entire proceeding was of very questionable legality. The Assembly resolution condemned the U.S.S.R. for breaking the Treaty of Non-aggression with Finland, the Pact of Paris and Articles 12 and 15 of the Covenant, stating that “by its act, the U.S.S.R. has placed itself outside of the League of Nations.” This was strange doctrine, since there is nothing in the Covenant which permits a member automatically to read itself out of the League by violating the Covenant. On the contrary, it specifically became subject to sanctions as a continuing member of the League. There was nothing in the Covenant, either, which permitted expulsion for the breaking of treaties other than the Covenant, or for refusing to attend League sessions, as the U.S.S.R. had done in this case.

Still more serious was the violation of Paragraph 4 of Article 16, which governed expulsions. This paragraph stated that “any Member of the League which has violated any covenant of the League may be declared to be no longer a Member of the League by a vote of the Council concurred in by the representatives of all the other Members of the League represented thereon.”

The terms of this article clearly provided two things: (1) that the offending member could not by his vote prevent his own expulsion; and (2) that the expulsion must be concurred in by all the other members of the Council. How were these conditions fulfilled on December 14, 1939? When the vote was taken, fourteen States were members of the Council. Of these, seven members appear to have assented to the resolution of expulsion; viz. France, Great Britain, Bolivia, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, South Africa and Egypt. Several members abstained from voting, including China, Finland, Greece and Yugoslavia.

Before the vote was taken the Chairman of the Council read paragraph 4 of Article 16 (quoted above) and stated that it provides for “a vote” by the members of the League represented on the Council. Then when the vote was taken he announced that the resolution had carried “as abstentions do not count in establishing unanimity.” It is true that abstentions had generally not prevented action in League procedure, but on the most vital matter of expulsion it is difficult to believe that silence was the affirmative concurrence plainly called for by paragraph 4 of Article 16. But, even if this be denied, the resolution of expulsion was vitiated by the absence of two members of the Council, Iran and Peru, whose representatives were not present at the session. Their absence certainly prevented action by “all the other Members of the League represented thereon.”³¹

Revealing Death Rattle. The resolution expelling the U.S.S.R. from the League of Nations was illegal, but this is not the vital aspect of the case. More important was the hypocrisy of Britain and France in presuming to put it through. Japan had been allowed to remain in the League for nearly two years while she conquered Manchuria, not for self-defense but for aggrandizement, and permitted to resign when she saw fit. Italy had been carefully tolerated in the League while she carried out a long and equally brazen conquest, which France and Britain always had the power to stop in the name of the League, and Italy also had remained a member of the League until she had extracted the last possible modicum of advantage from membership. Then she too was permitted to walk out under her own steam. Germany likewise was allowed to resign at will and to break all the laws which governed the peace of Europe by militarizing the Rhineland, while she was still legally a member of the League, but no righteous wrath ever led to any effort to place the brand of Cain on her.

When Spain was assaulted by the pampered aggressors adamant firmness in London prevented throughout a three-year period any breath of condemnation of the conquerors of Spain by the League. Geneva was resolutely held quiet while Spain was conquered and Czechoslovakia destroyed. Small states which had every right to look to the League for protection and salvation were denied the slightest help or even sympathy from Geneva. Away from Geneva was the cry. Downing Street and the Quai d’Orsay developed a deep loathing for the very idea of collective security, especially after Russia espoused it. When Poland’s hour of doom came the League did not utter even a feeble breath of protest. The Second World War which the League was created to prevent was inaugurated amid utter silence in Geneva.

Then when the U.S.S.R. committed an aggression upon Finland which was plainly due to considerations of defense against Germany, the king of all the aggressors, the League of Nations was hastily revived from its deep coma to morally reprimand the U.S.S.R. After years of steady effort to persuade London and Paris to honor their obligations under the Covenant, Russia now found herself thrown out bodily and illegally. Then the League of Nations relapsed into its last long sleep.

This final act of the League was symbolic of the League’s entire history. Throughout its life it had been used by France and Britain when it suited their purposes and suppressed when it did not. But this last act of puppetry played at Geneva was more short-sighted than its authors could have suspected. When all of the immeasurable slaughter and devastation which directly resulted from the nullification of the League of Nations by the United States, Britain and France was over, it would be necessary to organize a new League, of which the Soviet Union would be a key member, if a still greater demolition of Western civilization was to be prevented. When that time came, too, the last act of the League of Nations would be the first memory of the same men in the Kremlin who had felt its sting.

Plunge Toward War with Russia. Throughout the history of the League of Nations the small states, especially those in Europe, had been the most devoted members, expressing the conscience of mankind far better than the representatives of the Great Powers did. Now that the League was dead they were still to prevent the British and French Governments from committing a crowning and irrevocable act of folly.

When Russia attacked Finland all the reactionaries in the world saw their chance for an outburst of holy fury against Red Russia. As Feiling put it, the Russian attack on Finland “had reawakened the ugliest prejudices of the French Right, many of whom would have preferred a joint front with Germany against Communism.”³² Most of the powerful ones in France and Britain (and many in the U.S.A.) forgot all about the war with Germany, which they had done their obstinate best to avoid. Here in the Russo-Finnish War was a war they could really put their hearts into. The same hearts which had been filled with stony flint about dying for Czechoslovakia now palpitated with hot eagerness to help the noble little Finns. They were such good democrats, and in the United States they were the only ones who had paid their war debts.

The American Congress was so deeply moved by the Finnish tragedy that it ventured ever so cautiously out of its paper citadels of neutrality and voted $30,000,000 to Finland, but to be used only for “non-military” supplies, beans instead of bullets, as one Congressman said. On the other side of the Atlantic world no such circumspection governed. London and Paris rushed to Finland the real sinews of war. London sent 114 guns, 185,000 shells, 50,000 grenades, 15,700 aerial bombs, and 100,000 great coats. The French Government from its own meager supplies sent 175 planes, 472 guns, 795,000 shells, 5000 machine-guns, 200,000 grenades and 20,000,000 cartridges, weapons which would have served France well a little later if there had been strong hands to direct their use.³³

Nothing was too good for the Finns. Although there was supposed to be a war on between Germany and the Allies, Italian, Spanish, French, British and German volunteers hurried to Finland to fight shoulder to shoulder against the horrid Red, while “Great Britain, France, the Vatican and the Fascist Powers all united in their denunciation of Russia.”³⁴

If this aid did not suffice, the French and British Governments were actually prepared to go to war with Russia. On January 19, 1940, Daladier asked his army and navy heads to make plans for attacking Baku and fighting the U.S.S.R. in the Black Sea. On February 5 the Allied Supreme War Council decided to send troops to Finland. Six divisions of troops were made ready for embarkation in Britain and France had 50,000 troops ready to sail. The two governments were saved from plunging into war with Russia only by the refusal of Norway, Sweden and Turkey to grant transit privileges across their territories. Otherwise the Munichards would have been fighting both Germany and Russia.

Were they who had been so careful not to mix in the quarrels of people in far-away Czechoslovakia, “about which we know nothing,” now to attack Russia for still more distant Finland’s wrongs, without any calculation of the consequences? Did they think they could sit out a war with both of the great land powers of Eurasia? That could hardly have been their calculation for in the middle of April 1940, a full month after the Finnish war had ended, “Gamelin and Weygand were still discussing a possible bombing of Baku, ostensibly to cut off Soviet oil supplies to Germany.”³⁵

Nazi Blitz in the West. During the winter, while the French and British Tories plunged toward war with Russia, all Germany was a roaring furnace of war activity. On April 9 she unleashed overwhelming attacks on neutral Denmark and Norway, without any presentation of demands which they could weigh for a month and reject at their peril, as in Finland’s case. Then on May 10 it was the turn of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Germany struck her small neighbors without the slightest warning, and after all the preparation which stealth and treachery could devise. These hammer blows at their own existence quickly took the minds of Britain’s rulers off the luxury of a war with Russia, but for some days the French Rightists were still capable of dreaming about blows against Russia’s far-away oil centers, during their last five minutes of grace. They would have loved a war with Russia. Their choice had been made years ago when they passionately chose “Hitler rather than Blum,” the mild and timid socialist reformer Blum. Now they were to have Hitler, and on the whole were to prosper under him, as their counterparts did throughout Europe.

Feeling in the United States. In the United States feeling could hardly have been stronger against the Soviets. The American Institute of Public Opinion reported 88 per cent of Americans for Finland and only 1 per cent for Russia. Labor unions sent money and upper-class society went “all out” for Finnish relief. Ex-President Herbert Hoover deserted his non-interventionist position and headed the relief organization which eventually accepted contributions for arms, after another group for that purpose had been formed. Many people exultantly identified the “Communism” of the New Deal with Russia and some Republican leaders charged that if Roosevelt had not recognized Russia she would not have attacked Finland.

The society world found that “after two decades of cumulative bitterness they could hate Russia effectively.”³⁶ Carnegie Hall was filled with people who paid up to $250 for seats, for Finland. Benefits of every kind were held, great balls, bridge and theater parties, concerts and auctions, horse shows, hunt breakfasts were held, in Finland’s behalf.

Meanwhile the press proceeded to win the war for tiny Finland and show up with finality the huge colossus with fist of communist clay. The Finnish censorship was to a large degree responsible for this development, to prove that their cause was not hopeless. American newspaper men, who were never permitted to see a Finnish battlefield until the Finnish dead had been removed, and seldom then, contributed their full share of rumored Finnish triumphs, from Helsinki, Copenhagen and Riga. One even wrote a long, graphic account of some 2500 Russians whom he had seen frozen as they were shot—standing, kneeling, in every position they had been in when killed. Most of his readers never learned that this was a medical impossibility. Nor did they notice that Helsinki was not destroyed from the air on Christmas Day, after a powerful three-day build-up for the event. Pictures were faked and many columns filled with tales of revolt and disaster in Russia. Vast plots against Stalin were detailed. Headlines of great atrocities covered articles which said at the end that “there were no deaths.” Great slaughter of Finnish civilians from the air finally boiled down to a death list of 234. One correspondent made the headlines with a dispatch telling how 100 Finns held off 300,000 Russians. Streamers telling of stunning Finnish victories filled the press until they transformed what had seemed a hopeless cause into an irresistible one. It was a rare Finn who had not killed twenty Russians. Circulation managers could not afford to fall behind, or stop to investigate, the thrilling details of the “war which nobody saw,” until suddenly Finland was defeated and the war was over.

The Finnish collapse was a great shock to editors across the continent. As the war opened, the Scripps-Howard newspapers wrote, on October 9, 1939, that “Russia now leers through smudgy eyelids on spotless Finland.” A little later the same newspaper chain proclaimed that “Hitler now becomes a minor irritant to be eliminated, and that a mass crusade on this savage . . .” would soon develop, with the Prussians in the vanguard beside the British and French. On January 13, 1940, the same newspapers observed that “the greatest Finnish ally is not General Winter but General Dumbness, and the San Francisco Chronicle spoke for nation-wide comment in acclaiming Moscow’s “great experiment” as a bluff and a fallacy.³⁷ Then suddenly it appeared that the Red Army was to be reckoned with, a fact, however, which was soon buried under the great mass of emotion generated through the American press during the Russo-Finnish war.

On their side the Russian efforts at propaganda had been few and transparently false. They could not say that they were seizing strategic territory against a war with Hitler. They had to allege that they were fortifying themselves against the imperialistic British and French. Moscow also neglected to warn the New York Daily Worker that it would suddenly abandon the puppet Kuusinen “government” and the Daily Worker fell flat on its face, as it did when the Soviet-German truce was made.

Soviet-Finn Balance Sheet. The Russo-Finnish war ended on March 12, 1940. Seeing the rising danger of a war against the entire West, Stalin sent to the Far East for some crack divisions, hardened in battles with the Japanese, and quickly smashed the Mannerheim line. Then Kuusinen was retired to the wings and peace made with Helsinki, on slightly stiffer terms than those offered in October, but leaving the Finns the two important ports, Viborg, at the base of the Karelian isthmus, and Petsamo, with its nickel mines, as a window on the Arctic Sea.

The Finnish war cost Russia heavily in prestige both abroad and at home. It was never popular with the Soviet peoples. It was expensive in men and supplies lost. It deceived the world and Hitler into thinking that the Red Army was very weak, for the final efficient performance of the Russian regulars received scant notice in the world’s press after months of ridicule of Soviet ineffectiveness. On the other hand, the humiliations suffered led to a sweeping reorganization and re-training of the Red armies and the territory gained may have been of decisive importance in saving Leningrad during 1941–4, after one of the longest and most heroic defenses of any epoch. This gain has to be set against the chances that the Finnish armies would not have taken part in the siege of Leningrad, without the provocation of the first Russo-Finnish war.

When the second war with Finland was over, in 1945, Moscow took both Viborg and Petsamo, and imposed reparations on Finland, but did not occupy the country, and by all accounts Finland maintains a high degree of ability to govern herself.

By fighting, Finland lost heavily both times. Yet it may be that without fighting she would have suffered the fate of the Baltic States. This is debatable, since Finland had always enjoyed a more independent status under the Tsars, and since the entire Soviet handling of the first clash with Finland was marked more by miscalculation than by malice. Still the ability of the Finns to fight and to win world sympathy won respect in the Soviet Union and may have saved them from incorporation into the Soviet Union.

Baltic States and Bessarabia Absorbed. During the summer of 1940, while Germany was heavily occupied in the West, the Soviets ousted the Baltic Governments and after the customary totalitarian preparations, received in August the usual top-heavy votes for incorporation into the U.S.S.R.

Earlier, the Soviets had presented an ultimatum to Rumania, demanding the return of Bessarabia, and the Axis advised submission. Rumania yielded on June 28, 1940.

This cession completed the long chain of buffer lands which the U.S.S.R. recovered during the Hitler-Stalin truce. Whether they were of decisive importance to Russia in stemming the German rush in 1941 may be disputed abroad, but not in Russia. As events developed the German blitz almost engulfed Moscow and Leningrad. It was touch and go when the crisis came, and we may be sure that the Red leaders were glad that the impetus of the first German wave had been absorbed by the buffer belt acquired in 1939 and 1940.

In 1948 an official Russian publication stated that in the absence of this cushion the Germans would have captured Moscow and Leningrad, compelling Russia to go on the defensive for at least two years and releasing fifty German divisions for an assault on Britain and the Middle East, and thirty Japanese divisions for use against China and the Americans in the Far East.³⁸

It would be difficult to argue that these results would not have followed, if the two greatest Russian cities and Stalingrad had fallen in the late autumn of 1941. Had the Russian defense not held in early December 1941 the war would have cost the United States infinitely more in money, goods, and especially in blood.

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