On Thursday, 7 September 1939,
as the shell-shocked Major Henryk Sucharski, commander of the Polish garrison of Westerplatte, surrendered the embattled fortress to numerically superior German forces, and Hitler’s mechanized divisions rushed eastward, encircling Eodz, approaching Warsaw, and crossing the Narew River, Joseph Stalin summoned his military commanders to the Kremlin.
On the agenda was Soviet entry into the war, which had already become global. Among its declared participants were Germany, Poland, Britain, France, and South Africa. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed only two weeks earlier with Stalin’s active participation, assigned parts of Poland east of the Narew to the Soviet sphere of influence, but the Soviet leaders were more than cautious about claiming their prospective booty.On 5 September Viacheslav Molotov, chairman of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars and people’s commissar for international relations, had responded evasively to the German appeal of two days earlier to send the Red Army into Poland, saying that the time was not yet ripe. Now, with the Germans advancing, the Poles retreating, and the British and French doing little more than formally declaring war, Stalin wanted his military brass to speed up preparations for hostilities. The partial mobilization of reserves ordered the previous day was already taking effect. Soviet forces would cross the Polish border and seize the USSR’s portion of war booty. But how to justify an act of open aggression against a neighboring state?
Stalin had his answer ready. Immediately after meeting with his commanders, he received in his Kremlin office the leader of the Communist International (Comintern), the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov. Also present were V iacheslav Molotov; the chief party propagandist, Andrei Zhdanov; and the chief Soviet representative in the Comintern, the Ukrainian communist Dmytro Manuilsky.
Stalin told his visitors that the Soviet Union would take advantage of the world conflict to help the capitalist countries exhaust one another. He shared none of the admiration lavished by earlier generations of revolutionaries on Poland, which he characterized as a fascist state that was oppressing fellow Ukrainians and Belarusians. “The annihilation of that state under current conditions would mean one less bourgeois fascist state to contend with!” asserted Stalin. “What harm would result from the rout of Poland if we were to extend the socialist system to new territories and populations?” he asked his visitors, according to Dimitrov’s diary.One part of Stalin’s argument was based on a Bolshevik-style class analysis and the logic of world revolution that had failed to materialize in the 1920s. Another had to do with national minorities—the non-Polish inhabitants of eastern Poland, which had been “allocated” to the USSR by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Indeed, it was the Ukrainian-Belarusian nationality card that would be used most broadly both at home and abroad as catchall justification for Soviet aggression. It would outlive the early days of the conflict, serving as the basis of the Soviet authorities’ claim to their newly acquired territories until the end of the war.1
This essay looks into the development of the ethnic justification of Soviet aggression against Poland on three levels: diplomatic, propagandistic, and popular. It examines how the theme of ethnic minorities developed in Soviet-German negotiations in the weeks leading up to Soviet entry into the war and the signing of the Soviet-German Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September 1939; discusses the use of the nationality card in Soviet domestic propaganda; and, finally, takes a close look at the impact of the nationality theme on Soviet public opinion. There are two questions of broader significance that I seek to engage in this essay. The first deals with the relationship between Soviet foreign and domestic policy, especially with the formulation and articulation of nationality policy.
The second concerns the variety of responses to government policy available to the Soviet public under Stalinism.I shall argue that ι) Stalin’s vacillation on the new Soviet borders and the propaganda effort accompanying the Soviet invasion of Poland demonstrate that the Soviet leader and his advisers were surprised by the German offer of 23 August 1939 to divide Poland into spheres of influence, or occupation, and did not fully formulate their position on the scope of their territorial expansion until a month later, when the military campaign was all but over; 2) The Soviet authorities’ view of the world not only as a community of states but also as a conglomerate of nationalities, as well as their understanding of the principle of national self-determination as possessing broad international legitimacy, had a profound impact on the formulation of Soviet foreign policy and defined the extent of Soviet territorial expansion in September 1939; 3) In the first weeks of the war, changes in Soviet foreign policy led to a change in government rhetoric on the nationality question, also opening the door to subsequent changes in nationality policy; 4) The change of nationality rhetoric helped the regime co-opt a sector of public opinion previously hostile to its policies both at home and abroad and prompted some segments of the Soviet public to formulate their relation to government policy in a way that does not fit the categories of resistance and compliance, which have received considerable attention in the recent literature on the subject.