Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

B

2

The Great Purge

The mid- to late 1930s were marked by Stalin’s campaign to eliminate all elements alleged to have reservations about his policies. The process was touched off in December 1934 when a disgruntled party member assassinated Sergey Kirov, a popular and high-ranking party official. Although it remains unknown whether Kirov himself harbored doubts about Stalin’s line, the event served as Stalin’s justification to initiate a vicious purge of the party and of all Soviet institutions.

Stalin had any person he or his assistants distrusted removed from posts of authority; many were jailed, sent to the forced-labor camps of Gulag (Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps), or executed. In a series of three show trials in Moscow between 1936 and 1938, a number of once prominent Soviet leaders, including Grigory Zinovyev, Bukharin, and Rykov, were convicted and executed on concocted charges of conspiring with Germany and Japan to overthrow Stalin’s government. In a closed-door trial in June 1937, the topmost commanders of the army, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, were found guilty of similar charges and shot. Two-thirds of the 1934 Central Committee of the party was executed, as were more than half of the senior officers of the army. Furthermore, the political police, or NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), had license to extend the purges to lower-level officials and rank-and-file citizens. In the darkest years of the terror, from 1937 to 1938, the NKVD under Nikolay Yezhov rounded up several million people; as many as 1 million people were shot, while another 2 million are estimated to have died in the camps. In December 1938 Stalin’s appointment of a new NKVD chief, Lavrenty Beria, signaled the end of the mass terror, although some arrests and executions continued into 1939.

B

3

Foreign Affairs

As Moscow saw it, international events in the 1930s increasingly endangered Soviet security. In East Asia, Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, and friction gradually mounted with Soviet forces stationed in Russia and Mongolia; sporadic clashes developed into serious border warfare in 1938. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933 resulted in an even more menacing threat. Stalin initially instructed Comintern and the German Communist Party to cooperate with Hitler, seeing him as a harmless ally against liberal and democratic socialist parties. Stalin reconsidered as it became clear that the Nazis’ plans for expansion through military force were in earnest. The Soviet Union began to seek alliances with other European powers, especially France and Britain, to counter the threat and in 1934 joined the League of Nations. The Soviet commissar of foreign affairs, Maksim Litvinov, repeatedly urged the members of the league to take concerted action for collective security against the successive aggressions of the several Fascist powers. The USSR also encouraged the formation within individual countries of so-called united-front, or popular-front, governments, in which Communist, socialist, and centrist political groups would collaborate against Fascist movements.

In the summer of 1938 a grave crisis arose when Germany demanded the cession by Czechoslovakia of Sudetenland, a border area with a large German minority. The Soviet Union offered to support the Czechoslovaks and called upon France and the United Kingdom to do the same. The French and British governments instead accepted Hitler’s assurance that Sudetenland was the final territorial acquisition he sought. The result was the Munich Pact of September 1938, providing for the transfer of the disputed land by Germany. In March 1939 the Germans dismembered the rest of Czechoslovakia, occupying its capital, Prague, and creating a satellite state in Slovakia (the eastern part of the country).

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B

4

World War II

Engaged in a border war with Japan in the east and fearing Germany would turn on it in the west, the Soviet government began secret negotiations for an arrangement with Germany, meanwhile continuing talks, begun in April 1939, with France and the United Kingdom for an anti-German entente (understanding). On August 23, 1939, the Soviet government shocked the Western democracies as well as many Communists around the world by signing a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. Beyond improving the Soviet Union’s defensive posture, the agreement gave it an opportunity to carry out territorial expansion, something it had not had the strength to do since 1917. Confidential protocols provided for German and Soviet spheres of influence in Poland and for a free Soviet hand in Estonia and Latvia in the event of military conflict in the area.

That conflict was not long in coming. On September 1 Germany, emboldened by the pact with Moscow, invaded Poland, thereby provoking declarations of war by the United Kingdom and France and launching World War II. Sixteen days later the Red Army crossed the Polish frontier, took possession of eastern Poland, and began the Sovietization of the occupied areas. This would involve their incorporation into Ukraine and Belorussia and the deportation of thousands of Poles to Siberia. On September 29 Germany and the USSR signed another treaty modifying territorial arrangements in Poland and consigning Lithuania to the Soviet sphere. The Soviet Union then imposed agreements on the Baltic States giving it the right to base troops on their soil.

B4

a

The Winter War with Finland

Also during the fall of 1939, Stalin demanded of Finland that it hand over the southeastern section of the Karelian Isthmus as a buffer zone for Leningrad and that it permit the USSR to lease naval bases on the Finnish shore of the Gulf of Finland. Rejection of these proposals led to the undeclared Russo-Finnish War (also known as the Winter War), touched off by the Soviet invasion of Finland on November 30, 1939. The League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union for its aggression. After a valiant but futile resistance, the Finns were overcome by the numerically superior Soviet forces. A treaty signed March 13, 1940, gave the USSR the land it sought and other strategic and economic advantages. The Karelo-Finnish region was promptly added to the galaxy of Soviet republics.

B4

b

Expansion in the Baltic and the Balkans

Soviet expansion continued during 1940. On June 15 and 16 the Soviet Union demanded free passage of troops and the formation of pro-Soviet governments in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Without waiting for acceptance of these demands, the Red Army moved in. Puppet governments were established and all resistance was extinguished. The USSR Supreme Soviet in early August annexed the three Baltic States as union republics.

The Soviet Union simultaneously extended its reach to the Balkans. It demanded that Romania surrender its regions of Bessarabia, which had merged with Romania in December 1918, and northern Bukovina. Romania complied and Soviet troops entered the regions on June 28. The central portion of Bessarabia was joined with a section of southeastern Ukraine to form the union republic of Moldavia, while the other territory acquisitions were merged into Ukraine. Germany concurred, but considered the whole affair an irritant and installed a client government in Bucharest. The Soviet Union, growing more wary of German intentions, renewed diplomatic contacts with Japan. On April 13, 1941, the two countries signed a five-year neutrality pact.