However, Stalin’s plans would soon fall apart. Neville Chamberlain, British foreign minister, would openly defy the trustworthiness of the Soviet Union thus refusing such an alliance. Winston Churchill, soon to take his post, was highly critical of this foreign policy. So far, however, Stalin would believe Britain and Germany were plotting against his country; this thought was reinforced when Chamberlain met Hitler in Munich, in 1938.
By this time Stalin realizes war with Germany had become inevitable. The unexpected and exponential army buildup of the Reich was not something he had kept up with, so he needed to buy time and prepare for war. He believed still the only means to do so was to deal directly with his enemy. He believed Hitler was neither prepared nor foolish enough to attempt a war in two fronts, so persuading the german Führer into a peace treaty might rather make him attempt a war in western Europe- at least for a while.
Hitler, on the other hand, had already scheduled his strike on Poland- the ‘blitzkrieg’- to be set off at the end of august, 1939. He wished for his plans to be safely implemented, and to prevent the risk of a consolidated alliance against him, since the British and French had ongoing negotiations with the Russians (at no hastiness, rather). He would have to pay the soviet price for a while and conquer up to the agreed boundaries in the east; a quick invasion, allowing himself much of the same of what Stalin looked for in the eastern lands (which I will explain later) let him, at no rush, mobilize to the west and put an end to the ‘sitzkrieg’, or ‘phony war’.
Stalin did not follow up in a war plan like Hitler. In the beginning, he limited his policies into signing assistance pacts with the Baltic states which were now to annex to the USSR. As Hitler begins to focus his war efforts in the west, Stalin begins to apply his terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact: establishes a puppet government in Finland, and, closing in to the boundaries, “admits” the Baltic states into the USSR, as well as certain provinces of Rumania and southeastern Europe, creating the Moldovian SSR with the leftover annexed territories. Once comfortable with this established buffer zone, the Iron Man begins to work into his internal policy, while the Nazis begin invading France.
Internal policy objectives-
This second step in the process- almost directly simultaneous to the first one- is the safe arms buildup. Stalin seizes the opportunity to transfer the military industry into central-eastern Russia, along the Eurasian boundaries. Huge industrial cities along the Urals, the Dnieper and the Dnester, such as Magnitogorsk, which had been the legacy of his ‘industrialization at all costs’, became great centres of production. Hundreds of thousands of tanks were developed and transferred to the western, urbanized territories along the civil war and NEP-resulting modern railroad systems. Stalin had no necessary risk to his industry or homeland now, and as he openly built up his army- while Hitler occupied denmark and France- he patiently awaited the inevitable, which still remained unexpected: Hitler’s strike.
The objectives’ results-
As nazis and soviets were completing their compliance with the boundaries set by the Nazi-Soviet pact, Germany plots to betray the agreement at the time when the axis powers’ agreement deteriorated the Moscow-berlin relations. By the end of 1940 Hitler has already set the basis for what would be the trespassing of the agreed boundaries and the soviet grounds, operation codename: ‘Barbarossa’. The plan was to strike from the north, in Poland, and the south, in Yugoslavia and Rumania beginning in May, 1941. Stalin had evidently foreseen this, and his plans were obviously not offensive, but maintained his initial proposals and his totalitarian ideals of human sacrifice.
The results of the buffer zone begin to be noticed. As Hitler’s troops go across Central Europe they are obviously stronger than the resisting armies-commited to this by the assistance pacts signed with Stalin under the pressure of the Russo-German treaty. The germans thus achieve quick victories and quickly advance through a poorly defended land, which Stalin appears to have destined only to exhaust the German army’s performance and resources of war. This buffer zone requires short, guerrilla battles with partisans which become costly to both sides (not the Russians but the eastern Europeans) and, worse, fatally delay the german advance into Russia and the confrontation with the gross of these troops.
Germany enters the Russian mainland in fall and are strong and swift to push the Russian defensive fronts considerably, to the point where they came to about 30 miles from Moscow, the capital city. Despite the victories, the German quality army could not match the well protected and connected quantitative production Russia had settled: they could produce over 10 tanks per german tank, and fighting in their homeland. Meanwhile, hitler’s supply lines suffered greatly throughout the buffer zone and failed to supply the army for the upcoming, fatal winter. Perhaps Stalin had predicted this as a condition into the risk of war, and Hitler had not learnt from Napoleon’s 1812 campaign, led under very similar conditions. In the end, while the reduced German army suffered grave and vital losses, Russian production and all-cost policy still allowed to maintain a supply which provided for a return, through the same buffer zone, into an invasion of a weakened germany by 1945, and the end of the war in Europe.
Conclusions-
Stalin obviously did not have an amicable intention with the signing of this pact with his evident nemesis. The inevitability of war was the trigger to a pact which only a totalitarian dictator such as Stalin would sign; he knew such treaty would imply the sacrifice of millions of people from central-eastern Europe and his own country, but this was the means into a defeat, by exhaustion, of the nazi eastern front. It becomes visible that stalin’s peace time and war time policies begin to combine as he foresees the possible outcome of this pact, this being his NEP and 5YP industrialization, his great human losses and the defensive, rather than offensive strategy to defeat Hitler.
Wether or not he estimated the great aid the winter became to his strategy could be discussed, but he counted with some clear, costly plans which makes one reconsider the seriousness of his phrase: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. Clearly, and willingly, stalin becomes a great political strategists and sets what would be the USSR’s cold war policy of the “Buffer Zone”.