On April 5 the Friendship and Non-Aggression Pact was solemnly signed in Moscow in
the presence of Foreign Minister Simic, Ambassador Gabrilovic and two of his assistants on the Yugoslav side and Molotov, Stalin and Vyshinsky on the Russian side. Less than twenty-four hours later the Germans invaded Yugoslavia and the Luftwaffe dropped
thousands of bombs on defenceless Belgrade. On April 7, Pravda carried on its back page, and in unspectacular type, a TASS message from Berlin saying that Germany had
declared war on Yugoslavia and Greece and that the German Army had started military
operations against these two countries. The massive bombing of Belgrade—Hitler's
revenge for the "unheard-of" affront he had suffered—was played down—even though, as time was to show, Yugoslavia's gallant revolt and tragic resistance providentially delayed the invasion of Russia by a few weeks.
There was no official Russian reaction to the German invasion of Yugoslavia. All the Soviet Foreign Commissariat dared to do in the next few days was to instruct Vyshinsky to inform the Hungarian Ambassador that "the Soviet Union could not approve of
Hungary's attack on Yugoslavia".
On April 11 the Soviet press reported Churchill's speech saying that, for several months past, the Germans had concentrated large armoured and other forces in Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania. But it refrained from any comment and, for the next few weeks, it reported in a routine and "objective" kind of way the Germans' progress in Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete. There were no lamentations over the tragic fate of the Yugoslavs with whom a Friendship Pact had so recently been signed. A showdown with Hitler seemed inevitable; Stalin's and Molotov's one aim now was to put off the evil hour—at any price.
Chapter IX THE LAST WEEKS OF PEACE
In Soviet novels and films produced both during and since the War, the news of the
Invasion of June 22, 1941 is often represented as a complete surprise. "Life was so peaceful and happy, and we were preparing to go on holiday when suddenly, on that
lovely Sunday..." Oddly enough, that is precisely what happened to a great many ordinary Soviet citizens, who had been conditioned for years into thinking that the Red Army was the finest army in the world, and that Etitler would never dare attack Russia. Others, more sophisticated, reacted the way the hero of Simonov's novel, The Living and the Dead did:
"It seemed that everybody had been expecting the war for a long time and yet, at the last moment, it came like a bolt from the blue; it was apparently impossible to prepare oneself in advance for such an enormous misfortune." But the politically minded people in Russia must have known for some time that the danger of war was immense, and there
can be no doubt that the invasion of Yugoslavia must have deeply shaken both Stalin and Molotov.
For some months past, the Kremlin had been receiving specific and grave warnings. As early as February, after his visit to Ankara, Sir Stafford Gripps had told the Soviet Foreign Commissariat that the Germans were preparing to invade the Balkans and that
they were also planning an attack on the Soviet Union "in the near future". About the same time, similar information had been given by Sumner Welles to Konstantin
Oumansky, the Soviet Ambassador in Washington. And then, in April, there was
Churchill's famous message to Stalin.
In the post-war History these warnings are treated somewhat ungraciously—they were
"not disinterested warnings", the suggestion being that the British and Americans were merely trying to drag the Russians into the war and turn them into "England's soldiers".
Instead, the History claims that Soviet Intelligence in Poland, Czechoslovakia and even Germany had kept the government fully informed on what was going on.
Be that as it may, it seems certain that Molotov and Stalin were both fully aware of the danger of a German attack but still hoped that they could put off the evil hour—at least till the autumn, when the Germans would not attack; and then by 1942, Russia would be better prepared for war.
Russia's Friendship Pact with Yugoslavia had not deterred Hitler; it had turned out a lamentable fiasco. True, there had been a number of subtle little "anti-German"
demonstrations before that—a few pinpricks in the press, as we have seen, and a few
other little demonstrations, such as the award of a Stalin Prize in March 1941 to
Eisenstein's ferociously anti-German film, Alexander Nevsky, as well as to some other strongly-nationalist and implicitly "anti-invader" works like Alexei Tolstoy's novel, Peter I, Shaporin's oratorio, The Field of Kulikovo, and Sergeiev-Tsensky's novel on the Siege of Sebastopol. Behind the scenes at the end of March, Manuilsky, Vice-President of the Comintern, had even declared that, in his opinion, "a war with Nazi Germany could now scarcely be avoided". The story got round Moscow. Better still, in March a number of Russian officers of Timoshenko's entourage had invited the British Military Attaché to a party. The conversation had been guarded and non-committal until the atmosphere had
warmed up— no doubt helped by the vodka—and, in the end, some of the officers went
so far as to drink to "the victory over our common enemy".
In the course of the evening they had made no secret of their deep concern about the general situation, especially in the Balkans.
[Having heard about this, I asked Cripps in Moscow in July 1941 whether it was true.
"Yes, that is, roughly, what happened. It was certainly something of a pointer. It was all the more significant since I, as Ambassador, continued to be as good as boycotted by both Stalin and Molotov." The story was also later confirmed to me by Colonel E. R.
Greer, the British Military Attaché, though he was uncertain about the exact date of the incident.]
Officially, no doubt, both Stalin and Molotov had to go on pretending that they were not frightened. After the signing of the Soviet-Yugoslav Pact Gabrilovic, Yugoslav
Ambassador in Moscow (as he later told me himself), asked Stalin: "What will happen if the Germans turn on you?" To which Stalin replied: "All right, let them come!"
On April 13—the day Belgrade fell—the Soviet-Japanese Non-Aggression Pact was
signed. It was a doubtful insurance, but still an insurance that the Russians took in view of the growing German menace. Everybody in Moscow was startled by Stalin's
extraordinary display of cordiality to Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, who had come from Berlin to Moscow to sign the Pact. He took the unprecedented step of seeing Matsuoka off himself at the railway station. He embraced him and said: "We are Asiatics, too, and we've got to stick together! " To have secured Japanese neutrality in these conditions, and the promise by Japan not to attack Russia regardless of any commitments she had signed "with third parties" was, in Stalin's eyes, no mean achievement. As long as Japan stuck to her word, it meant the avoidance of a two-front war, if Germany attacked.
On that station platform Stalin was in an unusually exuberant mood, even shaking the hands of railwaymen and travellers as he walked down the platform arm-in-arm with
Matsuoka.
True, he also threw his arm round the neck of Colonel von Krebs, the German Military Attaché, who had also come to see Matsuoka off, saying "We are going to remain friends, won't we?" But what mattered most to Stalin that day was his pact with Japan. Stalin had no great illusions about the Germans. Significantly, at the end of April, he telephoned Ilya Ehrenburg saying that his anti-Nazi novel, The Fall of Paris, could now be published. (Ehrenburg concluded from this call that, in Stalin's view, war with Germany was now inevitable.)