Molotov on Bessarabia

On 29 March 1940 the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, Vyacheslav Molotov, delivered a report on the government’s foreign policy to the deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. It was the first major speech by a Soviet leader since the end of the war with Finland, and at the same time a survey of the Soviet Union’s relations with all its neighbours and with the great powers. Molotov gave official figures for the losses in the Winter War, praised the agreement with Germany and accused Britain and France of hostility, and towards the end, in a few sentences on relations with the states on the southern border, he reminded Romania that Moscow did not recognise its right to Bessarabia. The Soviet Union, he said, had no non-aggression pact with Romania because there was an “unsettled dispute” between the two states. Three months later that dispute was settled by an ultimatum.

The session of the Supreme Soviet

The Supreme Soviet of the USSR, formally the highest organ of state power, met for short sessions at which the deputies unanimously passed laws prepared in advance and rewarded the leaders’ speeches with applause. The previous, extraordinary session had been held at the end of October 1939. Molotov had then delivered a speech in which he called Poland “this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty”, and the deputies incorporated the eastern lands of Poland occupied by the Red Army into the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs. The sixth session, convened at the end of March 1940, was of a similar character. Its main task was to ratify the gains of the Winter War: on 31 March the deputies passed a law that turned the Karelian Autonomous SSR into the twelfth union republic, the Karelo-Finnish SSR, and incorporated into it most of the land ceded by Finland.

Molotov began with an assessment of the war in Europe. In his view Britain and France had declared war on Germany only on the pretext of fulfilling their obligations to Poland, which he called “shattered”, while in reality they wanted to crush and dismember a dangerous competitor. Germany’s peace proposals of the autumn of 1939, he said, had been rejected. The Soviet Union had declared its neutrality at the beginning of the war and was adhering to it. The “radical change for the better” in relations with Germany, embodied in the pact of August 1939, had, according to Molotov, stood the test “in connection with the events in former Poland”, and had been developed further by the trade agreements of August 1939 and February 1940. Trade with the Reich was growing, and Molotov announced that it would go on growing. He made no secret of the fact that the agreement of 11 February was causing irritation in London and Paris, but retorted that Romania sold Germany a far larger share of its own oil and grain output, and no one demanded that it break off trade.

Molotov described relations with Britain and France as a string of hostile acts: the police search of the Soviet trade mission in Paris; the affair of the ambassador Yakov Surits, whose recall the French had demanded; the detention by British warships in the Far East of two Soviet ships bound for Vladivostok; the seizure of Soviet funds in France. He ridiculed rumours of plans for the Red Army to march “on India”. He also warned that in the Middle East, in Syria, “extensive and suspicious activity” was under way in the formation of Anglo-French armies under the command of General Maxime Weygand, and declared that any attempt to use them against the USSR would meet with a response. He did not yet know everything, but he had sensed the direction correctly: for weeks Allied staffs had been considering bombing the Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus, and the matter had come up again at the meeting of the Supreme War Council in London on 28 March.

The balance sheet of the Winter War

The longest part of the report concerned Finland. Molotov repeated the official version: the war had been necessary to ensure the security of Leningrad, and its cause had been the hostility of Finland’s rulers, egged on by the “imperialists” of Britain and France. He described the fortifications of the Mannerheim Line as a “place d’armes” prepared by foreign powers for an attack on Leningrad, told of atrocities committed by the “White Finns” against wounded Red Army men, and read out lists of weapons sent to the Finns by Britain, France, Sweden, Italy and the United States. He also quoted the speech made in the House of Commons on 19 March by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain about an expeditionary force of 100,000 men ready to leave, and the speech of 11 March by the then French Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier. This proved, according to Molotov, that the Red Army had been fighting not only the Finns but the “combined forces” of several powers.

For the first time, figures were given too. According to the General Staff’s calculations, as cited by Molotov, the Red Army had lost 48,745 killed and died of wounds and 158,863 wounded. The Finns, he said, had lost at least 60,000 killed and more than 250,000 wounded – more than half, as Molotov claimed, of an army numbering “not less than 600,000 men”. Both figures were far from the truth. The Finnish army even at its peak numbered some 300,000–340,000 men, and according to the findings of Finnish historians Finland lost 25,904 killed and missing and 43,557 wounded in the war. Soviet losses, on the other hand, were understated many times over: a team of Russian military historians led by Grigoriy Krivosheev established in the 1990s a figure of 126,875 killed, died and missing and about 265,000 wounded, sick and frostbitten, and more recent research gives higher figures still. Yet the figures of 29 March remained the official truth in the USSR for half a century.

Molotov discussed the terms of the Moscow peace of 12 March: the Karelian Isthmus with Viipuri (Vyborg), the western and northern shores of Lake Ladoga with Kexholm and Sortavala, strips of land around Salla and on the Rybachy and Sredny peninsulas, islands in the Gulf of Finland and a 30-year lease of the Hanko peninsula as a naval base. He argued that the Soviet Union, which could have occupied the whole of Finland, had shown “magnanimity”, had given back Petsamo, which it had taken during the war, and had demanded no reparations. To the puppet “people’s government” of Otto Kuusinen – with which Moscow had concluded a treaty of “friendship” in December and in whose name it had intended to rule Finland – he devoted only a passing remark that it had dissolved itself once peace was concluded. He ended with a warning: the plan for a defensive alliance of Finland, Sweden and Norway that was being discussed in Scandinavia would be contrary to the peace treaty, and Sweden and Norway, should they join it, would be abandoning their neutrality, from which the USSR “would draw the appropriate conclusions”. The alliance plan soon collapsed.

At the end of his survey Molotov mentioned Japan, with which it had not proved possible to fix the border in the area of the fighting at Khalkhin Gol, and he mockingly answered a Japanese member of parliament who had proposed buying the Maritime Province (Primorye) from the USSR: if the Japanese parliament wished to trade in land, it could sell southern Sakhalin. Of the United States he said that relations had neither improved nor deteriorated, unless one counted the “moral embargo” announced by Washington after the attack on Finland.

“An unsettled dispute”

The words about Bessarabia came in the part devoted to the southern neighbours. Molotov first gave assurances that the government saw no reason for any deterioration in relations with Turkey and Iran, to which the USSR was bound by non-aggression pacts. He then said: “Of the southern neighbouring states I have mentioned, Romania is one with which we have no pact of non-aggression. This is due to the existence of an unsettled dispute, the question of Bessarabia, whose seizure by Romania the Soviet Union has never recognised, although it has never raised the question of recovering Bessarabia by military means. Hence there are no grounds for any deterioration in Soviet–Romanian relations.”

He added that the Soviet Union had for a long time had no envoy in Bucharest, his duties being performed by a chargé d’affaires. He explained this by the “ambiguous role” of the Romanian authorities in the case of Fyodor Butenko, the Soviet chargé d’affaires who had disappeared from the legation in Bucharest in February 1938. Moscow had then suggested that the diplomat had been kidnapped, but after a few weeks Butenko turned up in Italy and declared that he had fled because he feared he would be shot in the USSR, at the height of the Great Purge. Molotov repeated that the Soviet government had received “no reliable information” about his disappearance, and declared that such things “ought not to happen in a civilised state”. Romania, he concluded, should understand that they could not be tolerated.

The report appeared the next day in Pravda and throughout the Soviet press. The sentence about Bessarabia was short and seemingly reassuring, but coming from the man who seven months earlier had signed the secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe, and three weeks after the peace imposed on Finland, it sounded different from how it would have sounded had Maxim Litvinov uttered it a few years earlier.

Twenty years of dispute

Bessarabia, the land between the Dniester and the Prut, was the eastern part of the old principality of Moldavia. The Russian Empire took it from Turkey in 1812 under the Treaty of Bucharest. After the Crimean War Russia had to return a southern strip of Bessarabia to Moldavia, but in 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, it recovered it from its ally Romania, which received northern Dobruja in exchange. At the end of 1917, in the chaos of revolution, the Bessarabian Sfatul Țării (Council of the Land) proclaimed the Moldavian Democratic Republic; at the beginning of 1918 Romanian troops entered the country, and on 27 March (9 April by the Gregorian calendar) 1918 the Sfatul Țării voted for union with Romania, on condition that autonomy was preserved and land reform carried out. In December of that year the conditions were dropped. According to the census of 1930, Bessarabia had some 2.9 million inhabitants, more than half of them Romanians (Moldavians), together with Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Bulgarians, Gagauz and Germans.

Soviet Russia never recognised this. The People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, protested as early as April 1918. The Treaty of Paris of 28 October 1920, in which Britain, France, Italy and Japan recognised Bessarabia as part of Romania, never came into force, because Japan did not ratify it. Soviet–Romanian negotiations in Vienna in 1924 foundered on the demand for a plebiscite, and in the autumn of that year, after the Tatarbunary uprising had been crushed by the Romanians, Moscow created on the left bank of the Dniester, within the Ukrainian SSR, the Moldavian Autonomous SSR, conceived as the nucleus of a future Soviet Moldavia. Soviet maps showed Bessarabia as land occupied by Romania.

In the years that followed the dispute died down but did not die out. When it signed the Litvinov Protocol in 1929, Moscow made the reservation that this did not mean renouncing its claims, and in 1932 it was Bessarabia that prevented Romania from concluding the kind of non-aggression pact with the USSR that Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Poland signed at the time. In 1933 the two states adopted the London Convention for the Definition of Aggression, and on 9 June 1934 they established diplomatic relations. In 1936 the Romanian Foreign Minister, Nicolae Titulescu, and Litvinov agreed on a draft mutual assistance pact that might indirectly have confirmed the border on the Dniester, but Titulescu lost his post before it could be signed.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact changed Romania’s position overnight. The third point of the secret protocol of 23 August 1939 stated that the Soviet side “emphasises its interest in Bessarabia”, and the German side declared “its complete political disinterestedness in these areas”. The Romanians did not know the contents of the protocol, but they guessed them. In September 1939 Bucharest declared its neutrality and took in interned Polish soldiers and authorities, and in the autumn, despite German pressure, it did not renounce the Anglo-French guarantee of April 1939. King Carol II and the Foreign Minister, Grigore Gafencu, watched with alarm as the Soviet Union imposed bases on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and then attacked Finland.

How the speech was read

Diplomats in Moscow read the speech in different ways. The American chargé d’affaires, Walter Thurston, wrote to Washington on 30 March that it had been “moderate in tone”, that the USSR wished to avoid being drawn into the European war or any complications, and that the words about Bessarabia could be understood as an assurance that Moscow would not use force, and at the same time as an indication that it would want to discuss the matter through diplomatic channels. The remark about the lack of an envoy in Bucharest suggested that the Soviet Union would soon appoint one in order to open such talks.

In Bucharest a less optimistic interpretation prevailed. The phrase about an “unsettled dispute”, spoken by the head of a government that had only just taken the Karelian Isthmus from Finland, convinced Romanian politicians that the main threat to their country was the Soviet Union. Bucharest looked ever more openly to Germany for support. Berlin, which needed Romanian oil, wanted calm in the Balkans but had no intention of changing its commitments to Moscow of August 1939. On 27 May 1940, the day Belgium capitulated, Romania signed the so-called oil pact with Germany, which linked oil deliveries to deliveries of German arms. Meanwhile, from the middle of April the Red Army began concentrating troops in the Kyiv and Odesa Military Districts, along the Romanian border. Moscow appointed a new envoy to Bucharest, Anatoly Lavrentiev, only on 14 June 1940, the day the Germans entered Paris.

Place in the war

The speech of 29 March was the first public signal that after Poland, the Baltic states and Finland, the turn would come of the last territory that the secret protocol assigned to the Soviet Union. Moscow waited for the right moment, and the defeat of France, the guarantor of Romania’s borders, provided it. In June 1940, while the Wehrmacht was routing the French army, the USSR imposed ultimatums on Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. On 23 June Molotov informed the German ambassador, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, that the settlement of the Bessarabian question could wait no longer and that the USSR was prepared to use force if Romania rejected a peaceful agreement. By way of justification he said that much time had passed since his speech to the Supreme Soviet and Romania had done nothing to resolve the matter. He also demanded Bukovina, which the protocol did not mention. Berlin accepted the claim to Bessarabia but protested over Bukovina, so Moscow limited its demand to the northern part.

On the evening of 26 June 1940 Molotov handed the Romanian envoy in Moscow a note demanding the cession of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina within twenty-four hours. On the border stood the Southern Front, formed for this operation under the command of Georgy Zhukov. Germany and Italy advised Bucharest to give way, and the government of Gheorghe Tătărescu accepted the demands on 28 June. That same day the Red Army crossed the Dniester and within a few days occupied some 50,000 square kilometres with nearly four million inhabitants, as well as the Hertsa region, which belonged neither to Bessarabia nor to Bukovina. On 2 August 1940 the Supreme Soviet formed the Moldavian SSR out of the greater part of Bessarabia and the former autonomous republic, while northern Bukovina and the north and south of Bessarabia were incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR. In the new lands arrests, executions and deportations began, culminating in the deportations of June 1941.

The loss of Bessarabia began the break-up of Greater Romania. On 1 July 1940 Carol II renounced the Anglo-French guarantee; in August the Second Vienna Award gave northern Transylvania to Hungary; and in September Bulgaria regained Southern Dobruja. The King abdicated, power passed to General Ion Antonescu, and in November Romania joined the Tripartite Pact. The recovery of Bessarabia became its main war aim: on 22 June 1941 its army marched with the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union and by the end of July had regained both provinces, and in the months that followed Romanian and German units murdered most of their Jewish inhabitants or deported them to Transnistria. In 1944 the Red Army returned to the Prut, and the peace treaty of 1947 confirmed the 1940 border. The words Molotov spoke on 29 March 1940 thus heralded a change of borders that outlasted the war and whose consequence is today’s map of Moldova and Ukraine.