World War II Behind Closed Doors (7 page)

Hans Frank, recently appointed Nazi ruler of this part of German-occupied Poland, even hosted a luncheon party for the Soviet delegation. In his speech to the German-Soviet border committee, Frank expressed ‘delight’ that one of his first tasks as governor-general was to welcome the Soviets. He added that the ‘committee shared the aim of restoring peaceable day-to-day life to the inhabitants of the [former] Polish territory, on whom the blind Polish government had inflicted incredible misery’.
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The head of the Soviet delegation, Ministry Director Alexandrov, replied, saying that ‘the spirit in which these negotiations had been conducted was one of cooperation for the benefit of the German and Soviet nations, the two greatest peoples in Europe’. This atmosphere of intense bonhomie was further consolidated as Frank offered Alexandrov a cigarette, saying, ‘You and I are both smoking Polish cigarettes to symbolise the fact that we have thrown Poland to the winds’.
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(Frank certainly knew what he was talking about – indeed, he would later be executed for the war crimes he committed in Poland.)

Meantime, in the portion of eastern Poland occupied by the Red Army, the process of Sovietization continued at the national level as the delegates who had been ‘elected’ immediately
requested that the captured territories of eastern Poland be ‘incorporated’ into the Soviet Union. The Supreme Soviet – not surprisingly – agreed to the request, and on 28 November 1939 all the inhabitants of eastern Poland duly became Soviet citizens whether they liked it or not.

And, of course, a crucial part of Soviet control – one that went hand-in-hand with radical administrative change – was terror. Altogether, during this first period of Soviet domination, between September 1939 and June 1941, around 110,000 people were arrested.
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Indeed, as we have already seen in the case of Boguslava Gryniv's father, individual arrests of members of the intelligentsia and others thought a threat to the new regime began from the moment the Red Army arrived. And the inherently unjust treatment of Boguslava Gryniv's father stands as an exemplar for Soviet rule of eastern Poland.

Immediately after his arrest, Boguslava Gryniv's father was sent to the local jail. ‘It was a small cell’, his daughter remembers, ‘and it usually held drunks and petty criminals…. And we already knew that the most important people who had stayed behind in the town were in this prison…. They thought that it was just a temporary misunderstanding. But about three weeks later we came to see them and they were no longer there’. Her father had been taken to a larger prison in Chertkov, where he still seems to have believed that he was the victim of a ‘misunderstanding’. He discovered that ‘all’ he was accused of was membership of the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, an organization that had been legal before the invasion and was not anti-Bolshevik. He did not realize that his crime – in Soviet eyes – was that he was seen as a potentially dangerous member of the previous ‘ruling class’. Such people were hugely vulnerable in the new regime. And one day towards the end of 1939, Boguslava Gryniv's father simply disappeared from the prison. It was to be fifty years before his family finally learnt that he had been murdered by the NKVD in the spring of 1940.

THE FATE OF FINLAND

Whilst there was still no mass public outcry in Britain or the USA in the autumn of 1939 about the Soviet occupation of Poland, what had worked for the Soviets in eastern Poland – pretending that they had only moved into this territory to ‘help’ the local population – was not about to work in another neighbouring country, Finland.

Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership coveted the eastern portion of Finland for two main reasons: the existing border was only 20 miles west of Leningrad and they feared that they might one day be vulnerable to attack via this route, and they also wanted a port on the Baltic Sea. Although the Russians had previously ruled Finland as a Duchy, to the rest of the world their threatening actions now seemed more obviously aggressive than their capture of eastern Poland. In this case there was no pretence that moving into Finland would ‘help’ the locals at all.

In October, when it became clear that Finland was at risk of Soviet attack, British policy was confused. In spite of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the British had been trying to negotiate a trade agreement with the Soviet Union in order to acquire much-needed timber, and there was still a view that Stalin should not be confronted unnecessarily. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, even went so far as to tell the Cabinet on 16 October: ‘It was in our interest that the USSR [the Soviet Union] should increase their strength in the Baltic, thereby limiting the risk of German domination in that area’
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But Soviet aggression also presented obvious dangers in northern Europe – not least that the whole of Scandinavia might then be at risk of Soviet attack. There was also the lingering – and ever tricky – sense of a moral issue at stake here as well. Mr Snow, the British minister in Helsinki in Finland, put it this way in a despatch of 21 October 1939: ‘I assume condonation of so cold blooded a crime [the Soviet occupation of Finland] to be out of the question on the part of protagonists [Britain and France] in the idealist war against aggression and that, in view of earlier Soviet treachery [the
invasion of eastern Poland], a complete breach with the Soviet government would command nation-wide support, while condonation would not only involve our profession in complete discredit in Scandinavia and elsewhere but also at home and in our hearts as well’
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Snow went on to conclude that, in the event of a Soviet invasion of Finland (which he called ‘the iniquitous crime in question’), the choice for the British would be a ‘breach of diplomatic relations with Russia or a declaration of war’.

Snow's despatch is in stark contrast, of course, to the more pragmatic views expressed by his Foreign Office colleagues over the question of the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. And so this is an important document – not because anything came of it (nothing did), but because it demonstrates that the genuine belief that this was an ‘idealist war against aggression’ was not confined at the time to romantics outside the levers of power.

The British chiefs of staff were asked to consider the practical question of war with the Soviet Union in the light of the possible Soviet invasion of Finland. Their report certainly lacked the moral fervour of Snow's despatch, though it acknowledged that ‘At present the sincerity of France and Great Britain is being questioned, and force is being added to German propaganda, particularly in Italy and Spain, because we have not declared war on Russia in spite of the fact that she has already interfered with the liberty of small states in much the same way as Germany’.
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For the chiefs of staff, however, the issue at stake was not one of principle, but of harsh, practical pros and cons: ‘The question thus seems to resolve itself into whether any advantage which might accrue from the support of neutrals, consequent upon a stand by us against Russian aggression, will outweigh the disadvantage which we should incur by the undoubted increase in our military commitments and by the probability that we should weld Germany and Russia more firmly together’. The conclusion was that ‘we and France are at present in no position to undertake additional burdens’, but that 'if the War Cabinet decided Britain should make a stand, it was important to chose the ‘right moment’, when it appeared that the vital iron ore deposits of Sweden were threatened.

With the British government – unlike Mr Snow – still not certain about what their policy should be, the Soviet Union attacked Finland on 30 November 1939. The Soviets planned on the war lasting a mere twelve days, and the general assumption amongst the Western Allies had been that the Red Army – with nearly a three-to-one advantage in troops – would make short work of the Finns. But they didn't.

Mikhail Timoshenko
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was a soldier in the Red Army's 44th Ukrainian Division and recalls how effectively the Finns used guerrilla tactics against the invading Soviets: ‘In small groups, of say ten or fifteen men, the Finns were sneaking up to our bonfires, firing short bursts from their machine guns and then immediately running away again… when we sent out men to follow the tracks that we'd observed in the snow, they didn't return. The Finns lay in wait for them and killed them all in ambush. We realized that it simply wasn't possible to wage war against the Finns… personally I thought there had been some kind of misunderstanding – the decision made no sense to me. Why had they sent our division where there was no enemy, when it was so dreadfully cold? When people were freezing to death?’ Only one in eight of Timoshenko's regiment of four thousand left Finland unharmed.

Meantime, in Britain there was widespread outrage at the actions of the Soviet Union. Unlike the successful Soviet campaign to confuse the West about the true nature of their invasion of eastern Poland, in the case of Finland the moral issues seemed clear. After all, what was the difference between Nazi aggression in Poland and Soviet aggression in Finland? In both instances it was an example of a strong country bullying a smaller one.

Under pressure from public opinion, and still concerned about the possible threat to the rest of Scandinavia, the British government offered some – very limited – help to the Finns in the form of a dozen Blenheim bombers and a potential loan of half a million pounds. But it soon became clear that the Finns would not be able to hold out against the Red Army for any significant length of time. The reason why they were causing the invaders problems in the early months of the war was primarily the weather – and that
would soon change. The British assessment was that once the snows melted in the spring the immense manpower superiority of the Red Army would soon tell. As a result, the chiefs of the general staff were asked once again to consider direct military action in support of the Finns.

Rumours of this reached the British Communist Brian Pearce, who had recently enlisted in the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers – and the news put him, he felt, in an extremely difficult position. He had joined up because he believed that ‘all Communists are supposed to take part in these wars, they must be where the workers are… the Communists always had contempt for pacifism…. The real thing, of course, is always to be where the workers are, you join the army and, of course, circumstances may arise in which your position in the army may serve the cause of the revolution very well. You know, you might even find yourself in a situation where it's up to the Communists to save the fatherland – all sorts of wonderful things could happen once a war begins’.

Pearce confesses that it ‘would have been difficult’ had he been sent as a member of the British army to fight Soviet forces in Finland. ‘I would have had, I suppose, to cross over…. Obviously the Red Army was our army, and in a situation like that one must do everything for the Soviet Union…. Essentially we were people who had transferred our loyalty to another country. We didn't see it, of course, as another country; it was the headquarters of the world revolution. We were the British section of the Communist International – theirs was the Russian section and they happened to be the ones who made the revolution first and they were therefore in the leading position’.

He even admitted that, had he and other British Communists been called upon to instigate acts of violence in Britain in order to further the Communist cause, then ‘I suppose we might have done. It's very difficult to say we wouldn't have done in those days. You know, we were so devoted to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the light of the world, to put it in religious terms. And one could commit many small crimes in order to achieve a greater [goal]… you know, the end justifies the means…’.
Fortunately for Brian Pearce, finally the British government decided not to mount a full-scale operation to help the Finns and so he was never placed in a position where he felt he had to desert.

However, several hundred British volunteers who, unlike Brian Pearce, passionately opposed Soviet aggression, did travel to Finland to fight alongside the Finns against the Red Army. But it was all to no avail since, as predicted, once the snow vanished so did the Finns' military advantage. The war ended in March 1940, and the Finns were forced to make peace terms with the Soviet Union along slightly worse lines than the Kremlin had demanded before the conflict started.

It may have been a small war in a far-off country, but it was nonetheless of significance. It demonstrated to keen-eyed members of the German and British High Command the ineptitude of the Soviet military. The German general staff concluded that ‘The Soviet “mass” is no match for an army with superior leadership’.
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And a British military assessment stated bluntly that, if German forces did choose at some point in the future to break the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and invade the Soviet Union, the Red Army would not be capable of fighting back.
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These were sentiments that Mikhail Timoshenko of the Red Army endorsed: ‘The Germans, naturally enough, came to the conclusion that the Red Army was weak. And in many respects they were right’.

The Finnish war also demonstrated once again the confusion of British policy towards the Soviet Union. The British, as we have seen, sent a small amount of military aid to Finnish forces fighting the Red Army. So were the Soviets an enemy or not? Was Britain fighting – as Mr Snow memorably put it – ‘an idealist war against aggression’, or something much more traditional? Did the war become somehow more moral when British self-interest – in the form of Swedish iron ore deposits – was threatened? It was a confusion that was still not adequately resolved.

THE FIRST POLISH DEPORTATIONS