Soviet terms for joining the Tripartite Pact

On the evening of 25 November 1940 the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, summoned the German ambassador, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, to the Kremlin. In the presence of his deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov, appointed the day before as the USSR’s representative in Berlin, he read out a statement by the Soviet government. The Soviet Union was prepared to accept the draft four-power pact that the Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had presented to it in Berlin two weeks earlier – in practice, to join the Tripartite Pact concluded by Germany, Italy and Japan. It set four conditions, however: the withdrawal of German troops from Finland; a mutual assistance pact with Bulgaria and a base on the Turkish Straits; recognition of the area south of Batumi and Baku in the direction of the Persian Gulf as the focus of Soviet aspirations; and Japan’s renunciation of its concessions in northern Sakhalin. Schulenburg cabled Berlin in the early hours of 26 November. The answer never came.

An invitation from a Berlin air-raid shelter

Many chronologies state under 15 November that the Soviet Union was invited to join the Tripartite Pact and to share in the division of the British Empire’s “estate”. In fact the invitation had been made two days earlier. During Molotov’s visit to Berlin, Adolf Hitler had laid out before him on 12 and 13 November a vision of dividing up the world after Britain’s defeat, and on the evening of 13 November, when an air-raid alarm drove the two foreign ministers after dinner at the Soviet embassy down into Ribbentrop’s shelter, Ribbentrop read Molotov the outline of an agreement. He stressed that this was not yet a formal German proposal, merely “still rather rough ideas” that he had not discussed in such concrete terms with either Italy or Japan. On 14 November Molotov left Berlin without giving an answer. On 15 November the State Secretary at the German Foreign Ministry, Ernst von Weizsäcker, sent a circular to the missions abroad stating that the talks had taken place “in an atmosphere of mutual trust” and had led to agreement on all important questions. No new invitation was issued that day: on 15 November Berlin was merely announcing the success of the talks to the world, while the proposal itself was already in Moscow.

Ribbentrop’s draft had a public part and a secret part. The public four-power agreement, for ten years, began by stating that Germany, Italy and Japan wished to prevent the war from turning into a world conflict, and that the USSR “declares its solidarity with these aims” and would cooperate with them politically. The four states were to respect one another’s “natural spheres of influence”, settle disputes by friendly consultation, join no grouping directed against any of them, and support one another economically. The three pact states recognised the Soviet Union’s current borders, and thus its gains of 1939–1940.

The first secret protocol set out the directions of expansion. Germany, apart from territorial revisions in Europe after the peace, was to look for lands in Central Africa; Italy in North and North-East Africa; Japan in East Asia south of the Japanese islands; and the Soviet Union “south of its territory in the direction of the Indian Ocean”. In conversation Ribbentrop also mentioned Soviet aspirations “in the direction of British India”, but he did not explicitly offer India itself to Moscow. The second secret protocol, between Germany, Italy and the USSR alone, concerned Turkey. The three powers were to “free” it from its existing obligations – above all from the mutual assistance treaty with Britain and France of 19 October 1939 – and replace the Montreux Convention with a new one that would give Soviet warships free passage through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles while closing them to the navies of states outside the Black Sea.

Molotov gave no consent in the shelter. He replied that the Germans were assuming they had already won the war against England, and that the great questions of tomorrow could not be separated from those of today and from the fulfilment of existing agreements. He asked about the fate of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece and Poland, about Swedish neutrality and about the Danish straits leading out of the Baltic. He proposed that further talks be conducted through the ambassadors.

Twelve days of reflection

After Molotov returned to Moscow, the Kremlin neither rejected the German offer nor accepted it in the form in which it had been presented. Joseph Stalin concluded that the Berlin talks had not clarified what mattered to him most: the fate of Finland, Bulgaria and the Straits. Germany was promising the Soviet Union distant Asia while entrenching itself right on its borders. Since October a German military mission had been stationed in Romania, and after the Second Vienna Award Romania had received a guarantee of its borders from Germany and Italy – a guarantee in practice aimed at the USSR. Since September German troops bound for northern Norway had been passing through Finland under a transit agreement. Moscow regarded Finland as its sphere under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and had no intention of accepting that, after the Moscow Peace, Helsinki had found support in Berlin.

The most urgent matter seemed to be Bulgaria, through which ran the land route to the Straits. In mid-November Tsar Boris III had met Hitler secretly but had once again avoided joining the Tripartite Pact, citing possible complications with the Soviet Union. On 19 November Dekanozov assured the Bulgarian minister in Moscow, Ivan Stamenov, that Bulgaria could receive security guarantees not only from Germany but also from the USSR. Sofia replied that it needed no guarantees. Stalin then decided to act directly. On 25 November, the same day Molotov handed his terms to Schulenburg, the Secretary-General of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, Arkady Sobolev, was received in Sofia in turn by the Foreign Minister, Ivan Popov, the Prime Minister, Bogdan Filov, and the Tsar. He proposed a mutual assistance pact: the USSR promised to respect Bulgaria’s independence and its system of government and to support Bulgarian interests in Thrace, and in return wanted military bases at Varna and Burgas. Sobolev also announced that once such a pact was concluded, Moscow would not object to Bulgaria joining the Tripartite Pact and would itself “very probably” join it too. That same day Stalin and Molotov summoned the head of the Comintern, the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, and informed him of the proposal, and the Bulgarian communists launched a campaign of rallies and petitions in favour of an agreement with the USSR. The government in Sofia delivered its refusal to the Soviet minister on 28 November.

Four conditions

The statement read to Schulenburg began by saying that the Soviet government was prepared to accept the draft four-power pact on political cooperation and mutual economic assistance presented by Ribbentrop on 13 November, on the following conditions:

1. German troops would be immediately withdrawn from Finland, which under the 1939 agreement belonged to the Soviet sphere of influence. In return the USSR undertook to ensure peaceful relations with Finland and to protect German economic interests in the country, that is, the export of timber and of nickel from the mines at Petsamo.
2. Within the next few months the USSR’s security in the Straits would be ensured by a mutual assistance pact between the USSR and Bulgaria, which “geographically lies within the security zone of the Black Sea frontiers of the Soviet Union”, and by the long-term lease of a base for Soviet land and naval forces within range of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles.
3. The area south of Batumi and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf would be recognised as the centre of the USSR’s territorial aspirations.
4. Japan would renounce the coal and oil concessions in northern Sakhalin that it had received in 1925, when it withdrew its troops from there.

Instead of two secret protocols, Moscow wanted five. The protocol on spheres of influence was to name, instead of the vague “direction of the Indian Ocean”, a specific area between the Caucasus and the Persian Gulf – in practice Iran and eastern Turkey. The Turkish protocol was to provide for a Soviet base on the Straits and, in return, if Turkey joined the pact, a guarantee of its independence and territory by Germany, Italy and the USSR. If Turkey refused, the three powers were to agree on and carry out “the necessary military and diplomatic measures”. A third, German–Soviet, protocol would deal with Finland; a fourth, Japanese–Soviet, with the renunciation of the Sakhalin concessions “against appropriate compensation”; and a fifth, involving Germany, Italy and the USSR, would recognise the Soviet–Bulgarian pact as a “political necessity” that did not infringe Bulgaria’s system of government, sovereignty or independence. Molotov concluded by asking for the Reich government’s position.

The conditions concerned almost exclusively Europe and the USSR’s immediate neighbourhood. Stalin accepted the German proposal to divide up the world, but wanted Germany first to pay for it where Germany itself was just settling in: in the Balkans and in Finland. Bulgaria, which Hitler regarded as part of his own Balkan hinterland, Moscow was writing into its security zone. Events in Bulgaria showed, moreover, that a “mutual assistance pact” with bases was not a neutral notion for anyone in the region. The Soviet Union had imposed exactly such pacts on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the autumn of 1939, and in the summer of 1940 had incorporated them within its borders.

Berlin’s silence

Hitler did not wait for Moscow’s answer before deciding on his own course. As early as 12 November, the day of Molotov’s arrival, he had signed Directive No. 18, which stated that political talks had begun to clarify Russia’s attitude, but that “irrespective of their outcome” all preparations in the east previously ordered orally were to continue. After the visit he wrote to Benito Mussolini on 20 November that Molotov had shown a growing interest in the Balkans. That same day Hungary joined the Tripartite Pact, followed in the next few days by Romania and Slovakia. Germany was building its own bloc in the Balkans and Central Europe before Moscow had even managed to present its terms.

In the German diplomatic service the Soviet reply had its supporters. Schulenburg and some Foreign Ministry officials, like Ribbentrop himself, hoped for a lasting continental bloc directed against Britain. Karl Schnurre, who was conducting economic negotiations in Moscow, regarded the Soviet concessions on trade, according to his surviving cables, as a surprising proof of goodwill. For Hitler, however, the terms of 25 November merely confirmed what he had concluded after the Berlin talks: Stalin would not be satisfied with Asia and wanted a say in Finland, in the Balkans and on the Straits – precisely where Germany obtained timber, nickel, oil and food. Germany did not reply to the statement. On 5 December Hitler approved the plans for a campaign against the USSR presented to him by the Army General Staff, and on 18 December he signed Directive No. 21, Operation Barbarossa, ordering the Wehrmacht to be prepared to crush Soviet Russia “in a quick campaign” even before the war with England was over. At a conference at the Berghof on 8–9 January 1941 Hitler called Stalin a “cold-blooded blackmailer” who would break any written agreement if need be.

On 17 January 1941 Molotov again summoned Schulenburg and expressed surprise that the Soviet government had still received no reply to its position of 25 November. The ambassador explained that the matters needed to be agreed with Italy and Japan. In the same conversation Molotov warned that the USSR would regard the appearance of any foreign troops in Bulgaria or on the Straits as a violation of its security interests. He never received an answer.

The historians’ debate

For decades the Soviet Union refused to acknowledge the talks on joining the Tripartite Pact. When in 1948 the US State Department published captured German diplomatic documents, including Schulenburg’s cable of 25 November, Moscow responded with the pamphlet Falsifiers of History, according to which the USSR had merely been probing Hitler’s intentions. Soviet documents made available after 1991 showed that the offer had been taken seriously and that Stalin had personally directed the negotiations. Historians differ in their assessment of its meaning. Some, such as Gabriel Gorodetsky, see the terms of 25 November above all as an attempt to secure the USSR on its most threatened flanks – the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Balkans – and as proof that Stalin still preferred to deal with Hitler rather than prepare for a clash. Others stress that Moscow was ready to join a bloc of aggressors and share other nations’ territory with them, from Finland to Iran, and that its demands were so high that it was either deliberately dragging out the talks or overestimating its own position. On one point they agree: the reply of 25 November did not cause Hitler’s decision to go to war, but it convinced him that there would be no agreement with the USSR on his terms.

Place in the war

All four conditions of 25 November became, over the next few years, the subject of war or diplomacy, though not in the way Stalin had envisaged. On 1 March 1941 Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact, and German troops entered its territory to strike at Greece. Moscow confined itself to a protest. On 13 April 1941 Molotov and the Japanese Foreign Minister, Yōsuke Matsuoka, signed a neutrality pact in Moscow, and the Japanese promised to wind up the Sakhalin concessions. They were handed over to the USSR only in 1944. On 22 June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and Finland entered the Continuation War at the Reich’s side. In August 1941 Soviet troops, this time together with British forces, entered Iran – the area Moscow had wanted recognised as its sphere in November 1940.

After the war the demands of 1940 returned in almost the same wording. In 1945–1946 the Soviet Union demanded from Turkey joint control of the Straits and bases on the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, as well as the return of the districts of Kars and Ardahan south of Batumi. It also tried to maintain its influence in Iranian Azerbaijan. The pressure on Turkey and Iran became one of the first disputes of the Cold War and prompted the United States to proclaim the Truman Doctrine in 1947. Bulgaria fell into the Soviet sphere after the Red Army marched in in September 1944. The offer to which Hitler did not deign to reply proved to be an exact map of what the Soviet Union wanted on its southern and western borderlands.