anxiety.
During that short interval nothing of any consequence happened in Russia, with the
exception of the meeting of the Supreme Soviet at the beginning of April which approved the 1940 budget. Already the effects of the Finnish War could be felt here. As Pravda wrote in its editorial of April 5: "The Supreme Soviet has approved the budget of the USSR for 1940. With great enthusiasm it voted a large increase in our defence
expenditure. Our country must have an even more powerful Red Army and Navy if it is
to discourage the warmongers. The fifty-seven milliard roubles to be spent on
strengthening our defence will help the Red Army and Navy to solve any problems
connected with the security of our State."
The tone of this editorial was remarkably free of the usual bluster, and was perhaps intended to convey that the Red Army would, in the future, give a better account of itself than it had done in the Finnish War.
Before the actual German attack on Denmark and Norway, the Soviet press tended to
echo the German charges of "Anglo-French violations of Norwegian sovereignty". This was, indeed, the phrase used by Pravda on April 9. By the time the paper had been printed, the Germans were already busy occupying the two Scandinavian countries.
During the days that followed, the Russian press continued, on the face of it, to follow the German line. Thus, on April 10, together with the news that German troops had occupied both Copenhagen and Oslo, the Soviet papers published under a three-column heading
the "Memorandum of the German Government" which, they said, had been read over the radio by Goebbels. Two days later, TASS, in a message from Oslo, referred to Quisling as "the new head of the Norwegian Government". However, it did not deny the continued existence of the "other" Norwegian Government.
After that the German and British communiqués, as well as TASS reports from London
were published with a certain air of neutrality and impartiality. In a variety of ways the fact was emphasised that the Soviet Union kept strictly neutral in the Scandinavian war.
For example, on April 12, there was an angry official TASS denial of a New York Times story that most of the German troops that had occupied Narvik had travelled there by way of Leningrad and Murmansk.
Yet there seems little doubt that, in the eyes of the Soviet leaders, the war was spreading much too near home. Although at the time nothing was published about it in the Soviet press, much is made in the Soviet History of the War of the way in which direct Soviet diplomatic intervention saved Sweden from being occupied by the Germans: "After the Nazi invasion of Denmark and Norway, the Soviet Government informed Count
Schulenburg, the German Ambassador in Moscow, that it was definitely interested in the preservation of Swedish neutrality."
[ IVOVSS, vol. I. p. 395.]
According to Soviet diplomatic documents quoted by the History, "both the Swedish Premier and the Swedish Foreign Minister, in addressing (Mme) A. M. Kollontai, the
Soviet Ambassador, warmly thanked the Soviet Union for having restrained Germany
and for having saved Swedish neutrality".
Meanwhile, the Soviet press went on with its rather routine and seemingly "neutral"
coverage of the war in Norway, with occasional surveys stressing the general ineptitude of the Anglo-French operations. The last of these surveys appeared in Pravda on May 9, and concluded that the Germans had as good as won. On the following day the Germans
struck out in the west.
Inside Russia the most important developments during the Norwegian war concerned the reorganisation of the Red Army. On May 8, 1940 an ukase of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet announced the creation of new military titles—Major-General,
Lieutenant-General and Army General, in addition to the already existing title of Marshal of the Soviet Union.
[These replaced the clumsier and less "distinguished" titles, such as "Army Commander of the 1st Rank", the equivalent of "Army General".]
At that time four men held the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union: Voroshilov,
Timoshenko, Shaposhnikov and Kulik.
[Shaposhnikov, a highly professional soldier whom the Soviets had inherited from the Tsarist Army, was to be Chief-of-Staff during a large part of the 1941-5 war; he retired, in the end, owing to ill-health. Kulik, on the other hand, was a political upstart who was to fade out soon after the beginning of the war. He was to be blamed for much of the unpreparedness of the Red Army in 1941, and, in particular, for having failed to equip it with up-to-date machine-guns and other automatic weapons, which at first placed the
Russian infantryman at a terrible disadvantage against the German soldier.]
At the same time Voroshilov was appointed Deputy Premier and Chairman of the
Defence Committee of the USSR; his previous post of Commissar of Defence went to
Timoshenko. Corresponding titles were also created in the Soviet Navy. During the
months that followed, the press was filled with army nominations and promotions,
complete with pictures of all the new generals, which filled four pages of Pravda for days and days. Coinciding with the German invasion of France, this unprecedented publicity given to hundreds of Red Army generals was no doubt calculated to have a reassuring
effect on the public.
Chapter V RUSSIA AND THE FALL OF FRANCE-BALTIC
STATES AND BESSARABIA
During my war years in Russia I put these two questions to a great number of people:
"What did you feel about the Soviet-German Pact?" and "At what point, while the Pact was in force, did you begin to have serious doubts about it? "
The answer to the first question was, almost invariably, something like this: "Everybody thought it nasty and unpleasant to have to pretend to make friends with Hitler; but, as things were in 1939, we had to gain time at any price, and there was no choice. We did not think that Stalin himself particularly liked the idea, but we had tremendous faith in his judgment; if he decided on the non-aggression pact with Hitler, he must have thought that there was no other way." The answer to the second question was invariably along these lines: "We started getting really nervous when we saw that Hitler had managed to smash the French Army within a month, or less. We had had considerable confidence in the
French Army and had also heard a lot about the Maginot Line and—let's face it—we
thought the war in France would last a long time, and that the Germans would be greatly weakened as a result. Selfish?—well, yes, we were, but who isn't? That we were
frightened may be seen from the frantic haste with which, while the Germans were busy finishing off the French, we grabbed the Baltic States, Bessarabia and Northern
Bukovina. And then came those draconian labour laws, the reorganisation of the Red
Army, and all the rest of it. We never expected for a moment that the Germans would
attack and above all invade us the way they did, but we felt that we had to prepare for a very hard fight if Hitler were mad enough to turn our way."
And then there was a supplementary question which I liked to ask. It was this: "Between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union there was the war between
Germany and England— and what did you think of that?" Here the answers became
much more confused but, roughly, they boiled down to this: "We developed a sudden contempt—yes, contempt—for the French. On England our feelings were very divided.
We had been conditioned to be anti-British, what with Chamberlain, Finland and the rest.
But gradually, very gradually we began to admire the English—for standing up to Hitler.
There was a good deal in our papers about the bombing of London, Coventry, and so on.
We also began to feel sorry for the English people, and—began to feel that, sooner or later, we might have to face something similar. Our intellectuals felt particularly strongly about it. The id
ea of a 'just war', a 'people's war' began to cross some people's minds. But then, in May, there was Hess, and we got fearfully suspicious of the English again."
Ever since September 1939, the official Soviet line had been that the war between
Britain, France and Germany was an "imperialist" war; but, since the partition of Poland, the powers guilty of pursuing this "imperialist" war were Britain and France, but not Germany. They, and not Germany, were now the "aggressors". During the Finnish War, Germany had been "neutral", while Britain and France had demonstrated their deep hostility to the Soviet Union by helping Finland with arms and volunteers, and by
expelling Russia from the League of Nations. The German occupation of Denmark and
Norway was at first widely attributed in the Soviet press to Anglo-French "provocation", though soon afterwards the Russian pleading with Germany not to occupy Sweden
showed that they were anxious to limit the damage in Scandinavia.
Soviet relations with Britain and France remained badly strained, and the Soviet press angrily reported the persecution of the French Communists—whom Moscow itself had
put in a hopelessly awkward and difficult position with its "imperialist war" slogans. The French working-class—and the Communists in particular—who in any other
circumstances would have fought Nazi Germany wholeheartedly, were precisely the
people who were being told by the Russians—and, more particularly by Dimitrov and the Comintern— that the war against Nazi Germany was an "imperialist" war and so, in consequence, not a "just" war. A different morale of the French Communists might not have made any great difference at the time of the German break-through into France in May 1940, and the French Army would probably have capitulated in any case; but,
undoubtedly, Moscow helped in some degree to weaken French resistance, even though it was obviously in the Russians' interest to strengthen it and to keep Hitler pinned down in France as long as possible.
It was all very well for communist propaganda later to adopt the fashionable Ehrenburg line that France had been "betrayed" by her bourgeoisie, but the morale of the whole nation was low in May-June 1940, including that of the French working-class. The
Soviet-German Pact and the subsequent Russian and Comintern propaganda about the
"imperialist war" had placed the French Communists—whether leaders or rank-and-file
—in a truly tragic dilemma. Many of them strongly suspected that they—and France—
were being sacrificed by Moscow, to whom the survival of the Soviet Union, with the
help of the Soviet-German Pact, was the Number One priority.
[ This tragic dilemma among the French Communists in the face of the. Soviet-German
Pact and the German invasion of France is examined in detail in the author's France, 1940-1955 (London, 1956), pp. 179-202. This chapter was, significantly, omitted from the Russian translation published in Moscow in 1959.]
Whether or not, as is now claimed by communists, certain French Communist leaders
took a firm anti-German lutte à outrance line in the first week in June, the Soviet leaders were very careful at the time to avoid anything that might have caused Hitler the least offence. Nevertheless, there was a significant change in the tone of the Soviet press as the French tragedy developed. At first it was distinctly malevolent towards France and
Britain. Thus in summing up the results of the first five days of the military operations in the West, Pravda wrote in its editorial of May 16:
During these first five days, the German armies have achieved considerable successes.
They have occupied the greater part of Holland, including Rotterdam. The Netherlands Government has already run off (sbezhalo) to England. It had been a long-standing ambition of the Anglo-French bloc to drag Holland and Belgium into its war against
Germany... After the Germans had forestalled Britain and France in Scandinavia, these two countries moved heaven and earth to get Holland and Belgium into the war... So far, the Anglo-French bloc can boast of only one success: it has thrown two more small
countries into the imperialist war; two more nations have now been condemned to
suffering and hunger.
No one will be deceived by the Anglo-French lamentations over the violations of
international law. As soon as the war had spread to Norway, the British grabbed the
Faroe and Lofoten islands—heaven only knows in virtue of what international law. We
now see how great is the responsibility of the Anglo-French imperialists who, by
rejecting Germany's peace offers, set off the Second Imperialist War in Europe.
There was no mention of the ruthless bombing of Rotterdam, and, on the following day, in a review of the military situation describing German successes, there were again the same phrases about the Netherlands Government having "run off" to London, "leaving the army and the country to their fate". On the same day Pravda published a particularly nauseating anti-British article by David Zaslavsky.
But, during the following week, with the Germans crashing on towards Dunkirk, the tone suddenly changed. The reports became much more factual. Every important Churchill
speech was quoted at some length, as was also Reynaud's famous patrie en danger
speech to the Senate on May 21. Significantly, much space was given to the question of American help to Britain and France. On June 5, Churchill's post-Dunkirk speech—"we shall fight on the beaches ... we shall never surrender"—was published under a three-column heading in Pravda. On the same day the paper announced that Molotov had
"raised no objection" to the British Government's appointment of Sir Stafford Cripps as Ambassador to Moscow.
When the resistance of the French army finally collapsed by the middle of June, and
Pétain asked the Germans for an armistice, the Russians seemed suddenly to become
obsessed with one great fear: which was that Britain might make peace with Germany—
for what would happen then? Most significant in this respect was the military survey in Pravda of June 20 by Major-General P. A. Ivanov: "Not only has the French Army been smashed, but France has now lost all her vital industrial centres. This is France's
débâcle.. . Another of Britain's allies has been put out of action, and now Britain is left face to face with Germany and Italy. Yet both sides have mighty economic resources, and therefore they may continue the war for a very long time yet, and it is much too early to try to foretell the outcome of this war.
[ Emphasis added]
It is highly symptomatic that the activity of the British air-force should have been switched from the battle in France to the bombing of economic targets in Germany." And there followed long and detailed accounts of British air-raids on Germany.
[TASS, London, quoting Reuter.]
There was not the slightest suggestion any more that a peace settlement between
Germany and Britain would be a good thing!
Stupefied by Hitler's overwhelming victory over France, Russia now dropped all further pretence of respect for the sovereignty of the Baltic States. Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia were occupied, draconian new labour legislation imposed on Soviet industry, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina occupied—all this was being done within the last fortnight in
June. Already on June 17, Pravda reported that there was "great rejoicing at Kaunas", as the Red Army entered Lithuania, adding significantly that "its Fascist dictator, Smetona"
had "fled to Germany". During the following days, the Soviet press reported similar
"jubilant demonstrations" from Tallinn and Riga. The governments of the Baltic States were accused of plotting against the Soviet Union and Latvia and Estonia, in particular, of having "grossly violated their mutual assistance pacts with the Soviet Union". This now demanded that "they set up governments which would respect their treaties with the Soviet Union and that they give free access to their territory to Soviet tr
oops, which would guarantee that these treaties would be respected ".
[ Pravda, June 17, 1940.]
It was quick work. On June 18 it was already announced that Mr Paletskis "who had been put in a concentration camp by the [pro-Nazi] Smetona gang in 1939", had become Lithuanian Premier. Similar miraculous changes were to take place in the next few days in Latvia and Estonia. On the very day Pravda published the DNB report from Berlin of
"Hitler's meeting with the French delegation in the Forest of Compiègne" it also described the "jubilant reception given to the Red Army by the Estonian people at Tallinn". Some time later Molotov was to explain the diplomatic background of the Russian invasion of the Baltic States as best he could; but every Russian clearly thought he understood why the Red Army had marched in—while Hitler wasn't looking.
The direct connection between the invasion of the Baltic States on the one hand, and the fall of France on the other, was so embarrassingly obvious that, on June 23, the Soviet Government found it necessary to publish this extraordinary statement—denying that it was "dissatisfied with the German successes in the West":
In connection with the entry of Soviet troops into the Baltic States there are
persistent rumours in the Western press about 100 or 150 Soviet divisions being
concentrated on the German frontier. This is supposed to arise from the
dissatisfaction felt in the Soviet Union over Germany's military successes in the West, and to point to a deterioration of Soviet-German relations.
TASS is authorised to state that this is totally untrue. There are only eighteen to twenty Soviet divisions in the Baltic countries, and they are not concentrated on the German border, but are scattered throughout the Baltic countries.
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