Harvard Professor Robert C. Tucker, a political scientist and historian in his second Stalin biography, Stalin in Power: The Revolution From Above: 1928-1941, wrote: “On 1 September, secure in the knowledge that Russia would remain uninvolved, Hitler hurled the full force of the Wehrmacht against Poland. True to their obligations, Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II had begun… People abroad were dumbfounded by the Hitler-Stalin accord. British humor rose to the occasion with David Low’s famous cartoon showing the two uniformed pistol-packing dictators, hats in hand and bowing deep, with Hitler saying “The scum of the earth, I believe?” and Stalin replying “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?”
Addressing the Supreme Soviet on 31 August to ask its ratification of the pact, Molotov criticized the Western democracies’ conduct of talks with Moscow, implying that they had instigated Poland’s refusal to accept Soviet military aid. He also implicitly condemned Litvinov (who was in the audience as one of the deputies) for his pro-Western orientation, saying that some had been “obsessed with simple antifascist formulas” and hence inclined to overlook “the danger attending machinations by provocateurs in the so-called democratic countries.” This anti-Litvinov jibe casts further light on the tortures to which Gnedin and others were being subjected. As for friendship with Russia’s new pact partner, Molotov declared:
Yesterday the fascists of Germany were pursuing a hostile foreign policy toward the USSR. Yes, yesterday we were still enemies in the foreign-policy sphere. Today, however, the situation has changed and we have ceased being enemies.
Those words must have inspired the episode in Orwell’s 1984 in which Oceana, which has been in alliance with Eastasia against Eurasia, suddenly switches and becomes Eurasia’s ally against Eastasia…
For his part Stalin was punctilious in seeing to observance of the new line that Russia and Germany were good neighbors. Pravda’s dispatch from Berlin on 3 September reporting that the war had started was headlined simply “Military Actions Between Germany and Poland.” Its review of the “actions” on 1 1 September was headed “The German-Polish War.” Schulenburg cabled to Berlin on 6 September that Soviet press coverage of Germany was utterly transformed and that anti-German literature had disappeared from bookshops. A Moscow dispatch of the same date in The New York Times reported that the anti-Nazi films Professor Mamlock and The Oppenheimer Family had disappeared from Soviet screens, that the Vakhtanov Theater’s production of Alexei Tolstoy’s The Road to Victory, about Germany’s part in the Civil War intervention, had been withdrawn, as had Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. As readers of 1984 will remember, it was a function of Oceana’s Ministry of Truth to alter all historical records so as to show that Oceana never had been Eurasia’s enemy. As the German armies advanced eastward across Poland, many Russians, being in the dark about the secret arrangements for Poland’s partition, grew apprehensive that the Germans would not stop at the Soviet-Polish frontier. Official announcements of the call-up of reserves for army service heightened these fears, and a run on food shops ensued. Meanwhile, in secret exchanges, Hitler pressured Stalin to send his forces into Poland according to their agreement. Stalin, not wanting his own people and the world to realize that he had colluded with Hitler, wanted to delay his forces’ entry as long as he could. But the swiftness of the German advance made lengthy delay impossible and on 17 September Soviet troops marched into Poland. Another indication of Russian popular feeling came in reports reaching the U.S. Embassy in Moscow that workers in factories jumped on machines and cheered when they heard this news because they assumed that the Red Army was going to fight the Germans.”
Moscow had to come up with another reason for the invasion and announced it was acting to protect the Ukrainians and Belarusians who lived in the eastern part of Poland because the Polish state had collapsed and could no longer guarantee the security of its citizens. (See the title image)
On September 22, 1939 the two happy accomplices had a joint parade:
“Ukraine & the United States” e-book has several chapters with little-known facts about Stalin-Hitler cooperation.
