Soviet Propaganda

Of the two partners who signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939, it was the Soviets who were most concerned about its possible impact on public opinion in their country.

Stalin knew what he was talking about. When news of the pact broke in Germany, many in the Nazi leadership blamed Rib­bentrop for betraying party principles by making common cause with the Bolsheviks. While most ordinary Germans eventually overcame the original shock and accepted the pact as a means of avoiding war on two fronts, many Nazi Party members found their deeply held anti-communist beliefs traduced. Some ex­pressed their concerns to Hitler; others resigned from the party in protest.¹²

News of the sudden about-face in Soviet-German relations left the population of the USSR no less bewildered than that of Germany. People did not dare to resign from the Communist Par­ty or voice their dissatisfaction publicly, but the NKVD registered mass disillusionment among the population, which had been fed for years on anti-fascist propaganda. Nikita Khrushchev, then first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, later remembered the embarrassment caused by the pact:

We could not even discuss the treaty at party meetings. For us to have explained our reasons for signing the treaty in straight­forward newspaper language would have been offensive, and besides nobody would believe us.

Molotov admitted the problem caused by the Soviet public’s reception of the pact in his speech to the Supreme Soviet on 31 August. Now the regime was faced with the task of explaining an even more treacherous move—the invasion of a neighboring state that had resisted a fascist attack.¹³

The Soviet use of the nationality issue to justify the inva­sion of Poland began in earnest with a publication in Pravda for 14 September that attracted the attention of Schulenburg and was picked up by the German Press Agency (DNB). It was in fact an editorial entitled “On the Internal Reasons for the Defeat of Poland.” With regard to the fresh German victories on the Polish front, the editorial said: “It is hard to explain such a swift defeat of Poland solely by the superiority of Germany’s military technology and military organization and the absence of effective assistance to Poland on the part of England and France.” This was an implicit reference to an article that had appeared in Pravda only three days earlier.

On è September, in an essay entitled “The German-Polish War: A Survey of Military Operations,” E. Sosnin enumerated four reasons for the collapse of Polish defenses: lack of fortifica­tions on the country’s western borders, German superiority in air power, the Wehrmacht’s superiority in artillery, and lack of support from Poland’s Western allies. Now the Soviet leaders were making an important corrective to Sosnin’s assessment. The editorial stressed the “internal weaknesses and contradictions of the Polish state.” It stated that “Poland is a multiethnic state. In the composition of the population of Poland, Poles make up only 60 percent, while the other 40 percent are made up of national minorities, mainly Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews.

The problem with the Polish state, according to the Pravda editorial, was not simply its multiethnic character but the way in which the Polish ruling circles treated their minorities—the sub­ject broached by Stalin in his conversation with Dimitrov a week earlier. “Western Ukraine and Western Belarus,” wrote Pravda, “regions of predominantly Ukrainian and Belarusian population, are the objects of the most flagrant, shameless exploitation on the part of the Polish landlords. The situation of the Ukrainians and Belarusians is characterized by a regime of ethnic oppression and lack of rights. The ruling circles of Poland, flaunting their supposed love of liberty, have done all they could to turn West­ern Ukraine and Western Belarus into a colony without rights, consigned for plunder to the Polish lords.” The authors of the edi­torial went on to describe in detail the discrimination of the non­Polish nationalities on the legal and administrative levels. Special attention was paid to the sorry state of Ukrainian and Belarusian culture and the Polonization of the minorities. While the editorial allegedly dealt with the reasons for Poland’s defeat, its implicit message was hard to miss: the Ukrainians and Belarusians were suffering under Polish rule and needed Soviet protection.¹⁵

The political significance of the editorial was not lost on for­eign observers, and Schulenburg was not the only one to take note of it. With the benefit of hindsight, Time magazine (25 Septem­ber) linked the Pravda editorial with the panic that Stalin and Molotov must have felt as they watched the German advance into Poland. In an article entitled “Dizziness from Success,” which reminded the reader of Stalin’s piece of 1930 about excesses in the collectivization of agriculture, the Time magazine writer ar­gued that the editorial had been drafted by Stalin himself.

In general terms, the argument used by the Pravda edito­rial was already familiar to observers of the European scene. Czechoslovakia had been dismembered in 1938-39, ostensibly to guarantee the rights and freedoms of minorities. The mistreat­ment of the German minority in Poland had served as a pretext for Hitler’s attack on Poland only two weeks earlier, and Hitler had no qualms about exploiting Ukrainian nationalists either in Carpatho-Ukraine or in Poland to destabilize the situation and achieve his goals. If anything, Stalin was now taking a leaf from Hitler’s book.¹⁶

When Viacheslav Molotov addressed the Soviet people on the radio in the late morning of 17 September, explaining why the country had entered the war, the nationality question was front and center in his argument. The Soviet foreign commissar began by claiming that the Polish state had collapsed, rendering existing treaties between Moscow and Warsaw invalid. The col­lapse of Poland had also created a vacuum on the borders of the USSR, threatening the security of the Soviet state. “The Soviet government,” continued Molotov, “also cannot be expected to take an indifferent attitude to the fate of its blood relatives, Ukrai­nians and Belarusians residing in Poland who previously found themselves in the position of nations without rights and have now been completely abandoned to the vagaries of fate. The Soviet government regards it as a sacred obligation to extend a helping hand to its brethren Ukrainians and brethren Belarusians residing in Poland.”

The importance of this ethnic justification of the invasion was further stressed in a statement later in the speech: “The Soviet government has directed the General Staff of the Red Army to order its troops to cross the border and take the lives and prop­erty of the population of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus under its protection.” The “blood brothers,” it seemed, had to be saved from the Polish government, even though it allegedly did not exist.

While lamenting the fate of national minorities was noth­ing new in European politics of the day, the Pravda editorial of 14 September and Molotov’s speech of 17 September marked a major change in the Soviet use of nationality rhetoric at home and abroad. It was a shift from treating cross-border national minorities as a threat to the security of the Soviet Union to a rhet­oric that allowed the regime to take advantage of those communi­ties not only to advance Soviet interests in the international arena but also to extend Soviet borders at the expense of neighboring states. In a certain way it was a return to the policies of the 1920s, marked by the original optimism of the new communist regime, which had not yet abandoned its dreams of world revolution.

The policies of the 1920s, defined by Terry Martin as the “Piedmont principle,” were designed to “exploit cross-border eth­nic ties to project political influence into neighboring states.” They were first formulated and promoted by the Ukrainian national communists who wanted Soviet Ukraine to serve as a beacon of hope for Ukrainians in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Ukrainians abroad, went the argument, would be attracted to

socialism and the USSR by the flowering of Ukrainian culture and society in Soviet Ukraine. This policy was ended during the Great Famine of 1932-33, which resulted in millions of innocent deaths. The beacon was extinguished. Ukrainian communists were accused of nationalist deviation and instigation of peasant resis­tance to the Soviet regime. The policy of cultural Ukrainization was curtailed and the “Piedmont principle” nullified.¹⁸

The new era became known for a different set of foreign- policy priorities and a different rhetoric that reflected a “besieged fortress” mentality.

Khrushchev blamed the “difficulties that Ukraine underwent in the course of collectivization”—an indirect reference to the Great Famine—on the intrigues of the foreign enemies of the USSR, including Jozef Pilsudski of Poland. Khrushchev’s other references to Poland were intended to illustrate Soviet achieve­ments in education and assert that the Ukrainian toiling masses would never tolerate the rule of the Polish lords. The rhetoric was defensive rather than offensive. The “Piedmont principle” was long gone. The “besieged fortress” mentality remained dominant until the appearance of the Pravda editorial on 14 September and Molotov’s speech three days later.¹⁹

Molotov’s speech was broadcast on Soviet radio at 11:30 a. m. on 17 September, less than seven hours after the two Red Army fronts crossed the Polish-Soviet border and began their offen­sive against dispersed and disoriented Polish troops. Since the broadcast was scheduled to coincide with the lunch break at gov­ernment institutions, factories, and collective farms, hundreds of thousands of industrial and office workers, peasants, and students all over the Soviet Union gathered around radio transmitters to listen to the speech. They then participated in government- sponsored meetings featuring speakers who recapitulated Molo­tov’s statements made a few minutes earlier and called on those present to give their full support to the newest party policy and the war effort. The next day, Pravda published a photo of a meet­ing attended by thousands at the Red Proletarian machine-tool factory in Moscow. It also ran an article on a gathering of profes­sors and students of Moscow State University, reportedly with an attendance of six thousand, who welcomed the address delivered by a professor of party history, Vladimir Iudovsky. The profes­sor characterized the invasion as “a sage act of world-historical significance.”²⁰

In Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, Pravda correspondents regis­tered an especially high level of political activity and rising pop­ular enthusiasm. “Thousands of Kyivans crowded around trans­mitters on streets and squares,” reported Pravda from the capital of a republic directly affected by the invasion and the change in the party’s nationality rhetoric.

With strained attention, they listen everywhere to the speech of Comrade V. M. Molotov. When Comrade Molotov speaks of the Soviet government’s decision to offer assistance to Ukrainian and Belarusian brethren, stormy applause and shouts of “hurrah” resound. Comrade Molotov’s words are lost in cries of “Long live Stalin!” “Long live the Party!” “Long live the Red Army!” Someone intones the proletarian hymn, and its sound carries far along the streets. In those minutes, two hundred draftees at the Stalin quarter recruitment office raised a fervent ovation in honor of the party and government. A meeting sprang up spon­taneously. Someone took a red towel from a table, and in the hands of a draftee it turns into a scarlet banner under which the draftees swear to do their duty with honor to their homeland and to the proletariat of the whole world.²¹

Pravda and other Soviet newspapers were full of reports on public meetings at which workers, peasants, and representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia were encouraged by the regime to express their support for the intervention. Given the official na­ture of these meetings, it is not surprising that the language used by speakers and authors of resolutions was taken directly from Molotov’s speech and other official pronouncements. Emphasis was placed on the national liberation of Ukrainians and Belaru­sians and the social liberation of the entire population of Poland’s eastern provinces. Rhetoric that had characterized the “besieged fortress” mentality was abandoned almost overnight in favor of the language of national (and social) liberation. Not only was the fortress no longer besieged, but its walls were extended west­ward, necessitating a new terminology. The “national liberation” paradigm fit the bill. The Soviet authorities’ claim that they had entered the war on behalf of their Slavic blood brothers, aban­doned by their erstwhile Polish rulers, had limited impact on world opinion at best.

If one judges by Soviet media reports, Stalin and Molotov scored a major public-relations coup. But should one trust report­ing in the Soviet media? The London Times wrote on 18 Septem­ber regarding the events of the previous day in Moscow: “At 8 o’clock the Russian wireless broadcast a summary of the contents of the Note [to the Polish government], which stated that So­viet action was necessary to safeguard her own interests and to protect the White Russian and Ukrainian minorities in Eastern Poland.... It has been noted that the Soviet arguments bear a family resemblance to those invariably adopted by Hitler and as often demolished by the Soviet Press as pretexts for aggression. Accordingly, it was a bewildered Soviet population which listened to M. Molotoff’s broadcast this morning.” G. E.R. Gedye, the New York Times Moscow correspondent, reported on 17 Septem­ber from the Soviet capital: “The Moscow population, recalling the reiterated declarations of leaders headed by Joseph Stalin that they did not desire a foot of anyone else’s territory, went about today asking: ‘What has happened now?’ ‘Are we at war; with whom and why?’ ‘What do we want in Poland?’ ‘What has gone wrong with the neutrality pact signed with the express purpose of keeping us from war?’”²²

In the West, the Red Army’s invasion of Poland was consid­ered a stab in the back of a victim of Nazi aggression. Even pol­iticians such as Winston Churchill in Britain, who gave limited support to the Soviet action, did so on the basis of arguments different from those invoked by Stalin and Molotov. But what was the impact of national-liberation rhetoric at home? Did it work, or did it fail? To answer this question, one has to deal with the difficult task of assessing Soviet public opinion. In the last few decades, popular attitudes toward international politics and, in particular, questions of war and peace have attracted a fair amount of attention from scholars of the Second World War.

Public opinion was an important factor in the formulation of foreign policy by democratic governments and an important con­sideration in the efforts of dictatorial regimes to mobilize public support for warfare. The Soviet Union certainly falls into the latter category, which creates additional problems in the acquisition and assessment of relevant data. It is difficult but not impossible to track major trends in the mood of the population under dic­tatorial regimes, partly because the regimes themselves allocated significant resources to monitoring those trends and changes.²³