Standing up to racism is the duty of everyone. You know, when I'm being verbally attacked or there is some act of discrimination directed at me and nobody says anything the way how I feel about this is that my experience doesn't matter what happened to me, nobody cares because we're all human means we're all equal. Learn more about the impact of racism in Ireland from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission at age overeasy Dotel.

Everyone, welcome Don Snow's history. We got our sibling podcast, World Wars on today, legendary James Rogers, my wonderful colleague, James Rogers. Prof. James Rogers is on. He this time is talking to Professor Ian Johnson. They're talking about the Nazi Soviet partnership, the Faustine pact, the pact between Hitler and Stalin.

It's a great episode. I hope you enjoy this. You enjoy the world wars. Make sure you don't subscribe to that excellent, excellent podcast. In the meantime, over the years, winding down to your satisfaction, a lot of people listening to Christmas trees here on the podcast, watching Christmas trees on the TV channel. If you want to do the latter, you go to history at DOT TV used a code truc and you will get a month for free to watch over free and then you get 80 percent of your first three months.

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Going to be fun. See you all there. Post vaccines can be great. In the meantime, everybody enjoy this episode of World Wars with Professor Ian Johnson.

Thanks for coming back on to history here. How are you doing today? Good, good. How are you? I'm good. Yeah, nights are getting shorter. It's pretty cold, but Christmas is around the corner, so positives indeed.

We've got a snowy day here in South Bend, Indiana.

That's not far from Chicago. So you get some pretty harsh winters. We do lake effect snow. How many feet does that go? You know, last winter was pretty mild, but we're hoping for a very white Christmas.

Well, I have my fingers crossed for you now. Even when I try and describe you to people, I say that you are the military historians, military historian, because you're writing a fascinating new book on such a core part of military history, that alliance between the Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany prior to the Second World War. You've named your dog after General Patton. And actually we met in one of the most military establishments you can. We were young PhDs giving our first papers ever at Santurce.

Do you remember this?

I do. I do. It was the absolute highlight of my career to date. It's really all been downhill since that great talk and conference that is very kind of you.

But I think it definitely involved too many beers and young men smoking cigarettes when they definitely shouldn't have.

But it led us to here because I think that was actually the first place that I heard about your research on the Molotov Ribbentrop pact. So let's dive straight in. What was this pact?

So the Molotov Ribbentrop pact was an agreement signed between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union at the end of August 1939. And the reason it's so significant in such a monumental moment, particularly in European but really world history, is that the Second World War followed almost immediately afterwards. As a result of the pact, Hitler was dedicated to starting a new general war in Europe. He believed that he could isolate Poland, a state that had refused his overtures for years, a state whose territory he desired and he believed in alliance with the Soviet Union might either help deter British and French intervention, allowing him to take on Poland one on one, or if that were not to prove the case, he would be able to use the Soviet Union as a source of economic depth in an extended war against Britain and France.

Britain and France, of course, had defeated Germany in the First World War, in part thanks to the blockade, the economic blockade of Germany and Hitler believed that the Soviet Union as a partner would prevent that from taking place should there be a new world war in Europe. So that after a very brief deliberations in August 1939 and the signing of the pact shortly after midnight on August 23, 1939, Hitler was ready and willing to start a new general war in Europe.

And he invaded Poland about a week later on September 1st, 1939.

So this was all a part of contingency planning, because if the allies were able to stop supplies coming through to Germany, Russia was the get out clause.

Exactly, and Germany had exhausted many of its raw material stockpiles as part of its rapid rearmament programs between 1933 and 1939. In fact, at the very moment Hitler was planning to go to war with Poland, he was told by his military planners that Germany might only have six months of oil and petroleum products in the event of an extended war and even less rubber, other critical raw materials, manganese, etc., which meant that if there was a long war, Germany was going to lose unless it had partners.

See, that's fascinating.

So we can tell what Germany got out of it and what Hitler when it's going out with it. But what did Stalin get out of this?

Yes, Stalin was playing a double game throughout the entire 1930s. He viewed the world as divided between, of course, capitalist and communist states in the capitalist bloc is divided into between rich and poor states. The rich states were headed by Great Britain, the poor by Germany. And he believed that if these two blocks united against the Soviet Union and its some sort of capitalist crusade, he and the Soviet project were doomed. So one of his key goals was to avoid any sort of unified capitalist encirclement.

So he constantly negotiated with essentially every player in the international system, even as he negotiated with the British and French and signed partnerships with France. He was doing similar back channel negotiations with the Germans for a variety of reasons. In 1939, his British and French option became much weaker. He was concerned that the British and French were trying to turn Germany eastward and launch a crusade against the Soviet Union. And he believed that a partnership with Germany would not only forestall a German invasion, which was so important, but would also give him access to German technology, industrial expertise, military equipment.

He had long been partners with Germany on the military front. From 1922 to 1933, the two states had been close partners working together. He wanted to resume that cooperation. And finally he knew that the British and French would not agree to broad territorial revisions in Eastern Europe. He wanted the Baltic states. He wanted Finland. He wanted parts of Romania. All territories that had belonged to the Tsarist Empire before the Bolshevik Revolution. British and French wouldn't give them that, but Hitler could.

So for Stalin. By August 1939, it was something of a logical conclusion that a partnership with Germany would bear much greater fruit than a partnership with the Western democracies.

So this is a real broad geopolitical great power decision by Stalin here with some great ambitions. Keep Germany on side and keep them from having any sort of alliance with France and Britain. And you almost divide and conquer as you go.

Absolutely. There's a famous quote. Vyacheslav Molotov once explained the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, which, as you might imagine, shock so much of the world, the Nazis and communists working together. He explained to a young communist desperate for explanation. He said with this deal with Germany, he said this In about 1940, we've essentially turned the Western capitalist states and Germany against each other. They will fight a horrific war. They will bleed each other dry. And at some point, the Red Army will victoriously march across devastated Europe.

A decisive battle will be fought along the Rhine, he claimed, and essentially communist control of Europe would be guaranteed. That is what they believed might be at stake. Wow, that's some long term planning going on there, isn't there? And the Soviet Union would emerge victorious out of the rubbles of Europe. So we know what the planning here is then. We know what the ambitions are on both sides.

But who is it who reaches out to who first? Because I've read the work of Jeff Roberts and Caroline Kennedy and a number of books on this, and it seems to be something that's quite hot for debate at the moment.

Yes, there's a great deal of of investment in exactly when and who reaches out first. Often narrative has gone. Stalin essentially had no choice. He was confronted by British and French intransigence. There had been military talks that didn't go anywhere in the summer of 1939. And at last resort, desperate to avoid an invasion by Germany, he reluctantly agreed to the Molotov's control pact and partnership with Germany. My own research suggests that this is really not the case, that that traditional narrative is flawed in a number of ways.

So first of all, of course, there had been this earlier period of cooperation. Germany in the Soviet Union had worked together largely secretly between 1922 and 1933. The Soviet Union was largely responsible for the rearmament of Germany, or at least to a significant degree, it was in the Soviet Union. The Germans had built their first tank designs after the First World War had built an entirely new generation. Aircraft had trained hundreds and hundreds of pilots in various senior officers in key technologies, which they had been banned from developing within Germany.

That partnership faded after Hitler came to power, in part because the Germans did not need secret bases in the USSR to develop new technologies. They felt comfortable doing so at home in Germany, but the relationship was never broken off entirely. In fact, Stalin would reach out to the Germans about some sort of political or economic partnership almost every year between 1933 1939. The Germans, for their part, were less interested in the Soviet partnership. For much of this period, Hitler was bent on essentially rearming Germany, resuming Germany's great power status.

And he hoped to launch a crusade against the Soviet Union in partnership with a number of other smaller states, including Poland, whom he wooed throughout the entire war period.

But that began to unravel in the context of the Munich Conference and the aftermath, Stalin had pursued several different alternatives, as I noted, playing this double game really through Munich at the Munich Conference, the British, the French, the Italians and the Germans had gotten together and essentially given away much of Czechoslovakia as border territories that Souderton region to Hitler. Stalin actually had a treaty with Czechoslovakia guaranteeing its territorial integrity. He hadn't even been invited to the conference. However, the British and French decided not to invite Stalin because in the aftermath of the great purges where Stalin had wiped out all of his senior officers, he'd either executed, arrested or terminated about 10 percent of his officer corps in total, essentially, the British and French thought that the Soviet military was worthless.

All it could do is antagonize anti-communist governments across Eastern Europe. It was even invited to attend this conference after Munich. Is exclusion from this conference is efforts to build some sort of partnership against Germany with the British and French known as collective security, essentially had failed. And so Stalin was adrift. He didn't quite know which direction to take his own grand strategy for Hitler. Munich had been a success, but he actually was somewhat disappointed. He actually wanted a brief victorious war against Czechoslovakia to bolster domestic legitimacy, to help demonstrate Germany had been restored to great power status.

He wasn't satisfied with the peaceful resolution of that border conflict. And so it's in the aftermath of Munich. We actually see the first communications about a new partnership, one that was in some respects moulded on the old one that had been enjoyed from nineteen twenty two to nineteen thirty three. We begin to see that emerge. And this first happens in the context of economics. As I noted, Germany burned through its resource stockpiles as part of the rearmament process.

It was desperate for access to Soviet raw materials, particularly oil. The Soviet Union was a major oil and petroleum producer at this juncture, and in December, members of the German Foreign Office began to reach out to their Soviet counterparts about hosting a major summit to begin to try to hammer out some sort of major economic deal. The Soviets would get military equipment, the Germans would get all this oil and other key raw materials. These talks fell apart.

Hitler still thought he could get Poland to join alongside a number of other states and invade the Soviet Union together. But in March nineteen thirty nine, Hitler invaded the remainder of Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia was disintegrating, in part under pressure from Germany and essentially he occupied it, annexed much of the remainder of the Czech portion of that state. Neville Chamberlain in London was shot, this was a betrayal of the Munich Conference that had occurred only six months earlier. The syndicated Hitler wasn't just about getting Germans into Germany.

He had much grander territorial ambitions. And shortly thereafter, unsure how to check or halt Hitler's ambitions, Chamberlain and his cabinet issued the Polish guarantee, a guarantee of the territorial integrity of Poland, the state seen as Hitler's next most likely target. This took everyone aback. He really didn't consult even many members of his own foreign office in doing so. The problem was, if we look at this Polish guarantee in order to defend Poland, Great Britain would need to send a great deal of material aid for the British army.

The deployable British army was only about two divisions strong at this juncture in the face of a German army of about a hundred divisions. The Poles themselves were probably not strong enough to defeat the Germans by themselves either. Essentially, the British needed Soviet assistance to defend Poland and the Poles and Soviets didn't like each other so much. They'd fought a war only about 20 years earlier. Very bloody, brutal war. They were not on very friendly terms. And so this essentially brought the Soviets into a position of initiative in the international system.

Stalin was not thrilled that the Polish guarantee had been offered again without his consultation. He believed it was a sign that Chamberlain was trying to turn the Germans east again, trying to get this big, nasty war started in Eastern Europe to the British and French could sit back and essentially watch unfold. And Hitler, for his part, was absolutely furious. This essentially convinced the Poles that they didn't need to make any concessions to Germany. They didn't need to negotiate.

It hardened the Polish government against any sort of potential deal to revise Danzig and some of the other territorial issues between the two states. And so he immediately issued orders to begin planning for the invasion of Poland. So it's at this juncture in April 1939 that we see Soviet and German policymakers, Hitler and Stalin in particular, unhappy with the international status quo, an increasingly uncertain about what their next steps might be. At this juncture, they began to negotiate.

The Soviets very tentatively reached out in mid-April to discuss some military sales from Czech factories now under German control. The Germans followed up essentially by opening the possibility of a broad economic negotiations again. And at this juncture in May, both Hitler and Stalin, Stalin in late April and Hitler in early May recalled all of their senior diplomats who worked on each other's countries. So the key ambassadors from across Europe returned to Moscow to advise Stalin and the key ambassadors and diplomatic figures from Moscow to return to Berlin to consult with Hitler.

Stalin's meeting was pretty dramatic. His foreign minister offered to resign after being criticized extensively and berated. And essentially Stalin emerged from the meeting, convinced that Hitler was willing to make a deal and would offer good terms. And at this juncture, he essentially reoriented Soviet foreign policy towards partnership with Germany. He fired his Jewish foreign minister shortly thereafter, brought in Vyacheslav Molotov, his right hand man and ethnic Russian, with orders to purge the Ministry of Jews. That was his first command.

The idea was this would send a signal to Hitler and pave the way for broader cooperation. Hitler had a series of meetings about two weeks after this and May 10th, nineteen thirty nine, he began meeting with his Russian experts and essentially they convinced him, in fact, using some information that wasn't entirely true because they were eager for a partnership with the Soviet Union. They convinced him that Stalin would, in fact, reach a deal with Germany, that it was a deal that could lead to the partition of Poland, all sorts of things that Hitler, in fact, desired.

And from that juncture on, the two states began dancing around each other, dropping messages at various events, communicating through third parties and eventually opening direct communications. And by early July, the Germans had agreed to sell weapons to the Soviets in the Soviets. In exchange, demanded a broad political basis be reached before any sort of economic deal could be established. So the ground was set at this juncture for a partnership between Germany and the Soviet Union. But Stalin believed he had leverage.

The British and French needed him, and so did Hitler. And he knew from spies in the German government that Hitler was likely to attack Poland by the end of August. And so essentially he halted negotiations at this juncture and waited. He brought British and French envoys to Moscow and he essentially tried to get a bidding war going between the two states. Unfortunately for world peace, the British and French sent a very low level delegation. They were sent by slow boat.

It took them a very long time to reach Moscow. They only brought one translator who was not very good, apparently at his job. And as a result, the British and French delegation was essentially able to achieve nothing. And after a few desultory weeks of talks, Stalin sent his negotiators out on a hunting trip and essentially told the British and French that negotiations had been suspended for the time being while their Soviet counterparts went on vacation. Meanwhile, on August 11th, he officially told the Politburo it's time to make a partnership with Germany.

He played for time again to increase the terms and essentially got everything he wanted. He got a very favorable economic deal with the Soviet Union, despite relatively little raw materials and got a normal. Territorial concessions, much of the Baltic states sphere of influence over Finland, parts of Romania, in exchange, essentially, they had to play at neutrality. They had to assist Germany economically, provide some very basic military assistance in the invasion of Poland and occupy the eastern part of that country.

But essentially, they had come to terms by the time Ribbentrop flew to Moscow. So even before Ribbentrop arrival, the basic contours of an agreement already been reached. On August 21st, 1939, Ribbentrop was dispatched to Moscow. This is Hitler's foreign minister with orders to essentially finalize this deal as quickly as possible. The invasion of Poland was less than a week away. He was met by a pretty strange scene. Moscow had been bedecked with swastikas. The only way they were able to find so many flags was to take them from a movie where the Nazis were the bad guys, a movie of them being filmed in Moscow and decorate the streets.

But he was greeted with great ceremony and pomp. He met Stalin in person. They very rapidly finalize the terms and essentially spent the remainder of the evening of August, twenty third into the morning of August 24th, toasting each other and drinking quite a bit. At that juncture, the stage had been set for the invasion of Poland and the beginnings of the Second World War in Europe.

You see, this is a very different story to what you hear in modern day Russia, because compared to what you're saying here, it sounds like Stalin really did go above and beyond to try and kill Hitler. I mean, the idea that not only was he chasing them around to try and get a deal, but you get rid of any Jews that are in your government and then you deck the streets with swastikas.

You're fawning to Hitler at this point. How does this compare with the way in which Putin portrays Russian involvement in the Great Patriotic War in the fight against fascism?

Very interesting question. Putin is very interested in history personally. He's actually written a very substantial article about the moratorium and shot back that appeared in English in a publication essentially aimed at academics. It's surprisingly thoughtful, but wrong fundamentally about essentially all of its claims, which are that the Soviet Union was backed into a corner, had no choice, that this six month long courtship that I've just described, which is quite well documented from both the Soviet and German archives, that that didn't really happen, that essentially an agreement was made at the last minute after the British and French rejected Soviet terms.

In fact, Stalin had told the Politburo he wanted a partnership the very day the British and French delegates arrived in Moscow on August 11th. And he really made up his mind, I would argue, in May, some three months before. But this is very much counter to the narrative that's part of the Russian national history today. And in fact, you can get in all sorts of legal trouble by claiming that the Second World War began in September 1939 with the joint German Soviet invasion of Poland, instead of in June 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Those 20 or so months where the Soviet Union was on the wrong side as part of essentially a partnership with Germany, they want to forget that and they want to remember the heroic elements, admittedly very heroic of the Soviet war effort against Germany from 1941 to 1945. But that's only part of the story.

Standing up to racism is the duty of everyone, you know, when I am being verbally attacked or there is some act of discrimination directed at me and nobody says anything the way how I feel about this is that my experience doesn't matter what happened to me, nobody cares because we're all human means we're all equal. Learn more about the impact of racism in Ireland from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. At age overeasy, Dorothy ACost recommends podcasts to keep you informed.

And as I was coming up in the left, I got a phone call from brilliantly. And in fact it was who could have phoned me to say We have our first case. From the news team at Virgin Media Arland, this is a room six three one Irelands covid crisis line. Reporters, Larry, throughout the series will hear the reports of key decision makers who sat inside the walls of Room six three one at the Department of Health and the voice of the people whose lives were changed by those decisions as a global crisis unfolded in their homes.

EGAS powers the world's best podcast's, including the Irish history podcast, the Two Journeys and the one you're listening to right now. Wow, this makes your book incredibly important in such a revisionist history as well, going back to some of the points you said earlier on, it seems that the Soviet Union and Germany have been cooperating for a long time, but this must have been in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Right.

So what did the British do wrong here? Had they not known about this? It appears that they've made mistake after mistake along the way and almost pushed Hitler and Stalin together.

Indeed, in many ways they did. And there was even some awareness this might happen long before Hitler and Stalin ever sign. There was actually concern that Germany and Soviet Russia might be drawn together by their exclusion from the international community. Their own isolation in the aftermath of the First World War and the Treaty of Rissi actually included provisions trying to prevent the two states from getting together, things like signing Soviet Russia, reparations that they could eventually claim against Germany. The idea was to keep them apart.

But it failed by 1922, in part as a product of their own isolation and their own hostility to the international status quo. As I noted, the Germans and Soviets had begun working together in partnership that would become very extensive by 1933.

British policymakers were pretty well aware of all of this, their own intelligence agents, as well as Polish intelligence, which was outstanding in the entire period. They were kept quite closely apprised of much of Germany's activity. Even within Germany, there were teams of allied and particularly British inspectors stationed across the country responsible for German disarmament after the First World War that essentially failed to do their job despite the best efforts, particularly the French disarmament experts with whom they were where the British were much more sympathetic to some German rearmament than their French counterparts.

In fact, the term appeasement, which we usually associate with the late 30s, was actually coined by someone in Lloyd George's cabinet right at the end of the First World War. Great as the Treaty of Recip was being finalized, essentially to say we understand the Treaty of Versailles might be a little harsh. We hope to gradually allow Germany to revise it to violate some of its provisions as part of a process of reintegrating into the international community. And the result of this vision, this idea that Germany was essentially a democratic state, a friendly state, not really interested in revision, meant that British policymakers did very little to halt German rearmament at all sorts of key moments when there were various scandals, when there were revelations that Germany was producing poison gas in violation of international law in the Soviet Union.

When news broke that there were secret arms factories building artillery shells and aircraft also located in the Soviet Union, when it turned out that Germany had secret shipyards all across Europe building submarines by the late 1920s, the British government knew and essentially did nothing to react. Perhaps most shocking, at the end of nineteen twenty six, there was major revelations actually brought down the German government about the scale of German activities in the USSR. Their own civilian government was not fully apprised.

The British reaction was to withdraw the remaining disarmament teams located in Germany for a variety of reasons. And in the last report of that committee tasked with keeping Germany from pharming was that Germany had never disarmed, had no interest in disarming, and was in fact actively rearming for another world war in nineteen twenty seven. Yet that marked the end of close British attempts to prevent German rearmament from continuing. And then they get even closer through the Molotov Ribbentrop pact. How far did this pact go?

How did it play out? Was there ever any chance that Hitler would have been able to get the Soviet Union onside to be part of the war against Britain and France? Did it go that far?

That was always the great German ambition, was that the Soviet Union would essentially participate is not an equal, perhaps, but a partner in a coalition against Britain and France. This was Hitler's aim. Now, he, of course, at a later date might very willingly have destroyed the Soviet Union. But for the time being, the Soviet Union was not enemy number one. From September 1939 onward, it was Great Britain, the state that refused to surrender to continue the fight against Germany.

Stalin, for his part, was much more interested in economic benefits in turning Germany westward. He was very hopeful of this long war that I mentioned earlier that Great Britain and France and Germany would bleed each other dry and create opportunities for revolution and conquest in central and Western Europe. So his aim was really to maintain a benevolent neutrality towards Germany, to supply Germany just enough oil and fuel and other key raw materials to essentially maintain a balance in the war in the West.

He believed he could open or closed the oil spigots as needed in order to essentially control the pace of the fighting there. The problem for him was that that Germany had developed really outstanding doctrine and technology and in May 1940 rapidly defeated France. This was a really disastrous thing from the position of Moscow. In fact, Stalin told Khrushchev Gordon Khrushchev memoirs. Now he's done it. Hitler is going to wring our necks for sure after the fall of France. So he was clearly aware that his long war thesis was not going to happen.

And this was a very dangerous moment for the Soviet Union. Through this juncture, there had been a number of avenues of cooperation besides economics. So the oil was relatively limited in quantity, really through the spring of 1940. So the Germans needed about 60000 tons of petroleum a month to maintain their oil stocks. And in the motel room and property and its first iteration, they were actually only getting about 84000 tons over two years. So not anywhere near what Hitler needed.

Nonetheless, there would be a series of conferences at the end of September, then in February 1940 and then again in January 1941, to keep expanding the terms of their economic partnership. And by January 1941, the economic exchange was taking place on a gigantic scale. We're talking about five percent of the German national budget equivalent in military exchange between the two states and quantities of petroleum nearly sufficient for German needs. And in addition to that, there was actually some direct military cooperation.

The Soviets allowed the Germans to open a naval base on Soviet soil just outside of Murmansk. The idea was that German submarines could be based here and raid and sink British shipping. Soviet icebreakers actually paved the way for German commerce traders to transit the Arctic Ocean and fight their way into the Pacific, where they sank about a dozen British ships before eventually making it all the way back to Hamburg in nineteen forty one. The rumor is there's some evidence that they flew Soviet flags on part of this trip to disguise themselves at various points as a counter trader.

So there was quite a bit of direct military to military collaboration, but Stalin very carefully tried to prevent this from becoming a full fledged military alliance. He did not want war with the British and French empires. Now, there was an exception to that which I can discuss in a moment when in the fall of 1940, he actually did, in fact, consider it. But up to that juncture, he really was more interested in maintaining neutrality and forcing Germany to fight westward, not eastward.

Tell us about the exception in.

Well, after the fall of Franz, Stalin was unsure what his options were in Germany now had the dominant land army in Europe. It strengthened and demonstrated in the course of the fighting there. Britain had been driven off of the continent. And in the aftermath of the Battle of Britain and the successful defence of the skies over Great Britain, Hitler invited Molotov Stalins right hand man to Berlin in a conference that began on November 12th, 1940. This was super critical.

It's really been forgotten in European history, but this was really a dramatic moment. Essentially, what Hitler wanted was to negotiate a partition of the world between Italy, Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. The whole world, at least Eurasia, would be divided into spheres of influence. And what he offered was an extensive military alliance with the Soviet Union. Basically, if the Soviet Union joined the war against the British Empire, it would receive a great deal of spoils in that war, including much of the Middle East and possibly India.

As part of the terms of participation in exchange, Hitler wanted a free hand in much of Europe, in the Balkans, as well as all of that oil and other raw materials necessary to maintain his war effort against the British Empire. Molotov arrived in Berlin with less pomp and ribbon shopping and arrived in Moscow in part because the Nazis certainly were no fans of communism and they were afraid. The demonstrations, Soviet flags, the Internationale might stir the hearts of some former leftists in the capital.

For instance, when Molotov got off his train, there was a band playing the Internationale Soviet anthem at that juncture, and Ribbentrop top ordered them to play it three times speed so they could get through it really fast just to prevent anyone from singing along who might find it tempting to do so. And Molotov. For his part, was equally cold upon his arrival in Berlin. He'd been told by Stalin, essentially, we need to show we're tough here.

The Germans have a really good negotiating position because they've just defeated France. We have all of these concerns about German behavior. The Germans were beginning to violate portions of the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, secretly supplying weapons to Finland, moving troops into parts of the Balkans. The Soviets were not so keen to see German troops in, so he was told to maintain a tough line against Hitler. And over the course of four days, he met with Hitler. He met with Ribbentrop a great deal.

And essentially they tried to hammer out some sort of deal. Bolotov wanted all of these issues in Europe remedied. Hitler wanted Soviet participation in his global crusade against the British Empire. Neither side really got what they wanted. There's a famous scene where Ribbentrop and Molotov were having drinks at a diplomatic function. During his last day in Berlin, British bombers interrupted the cocktail party bombing nearby buildings and they were forced to dash into the bunker under the embassy to continue their conversations and perhaps fuelled by the liquor or being in the underground confinement, Ribbentrop essentially said.

All right, let's just be clear. We want you in. A military alliance against the British Empire was very explicit, very clear. And Molotov said essentially, this is not necessarily in our interests and the British Empire is a substantial force. And Ribbentrop said, no, no, no, the British are nearly defeated. And Bolotov said, then whose bombs are falling and why are we cowering in this bunker? And essentially, that's where the conversation left and Molotov part of the next day.

So this key conference in Berlin came to nothing. And the reason it's so important is that shortly thereafter, Hitler decided upon Operation Barbarossa. In December, he issued orders to his military to begin making preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Essentially, if he couldn't get Stalin as a sort of secondary partner in his ambitions for global conquest, he was going to take those raw materials he needed so desperately by force, conquer the Soviet Union, destroy his communist adversary and try to exploit the Soviet Union for those raw materials he needed to maintain our chief global hegemony.

But the British wouldn't have known this was going to come to an end any time soon, this pact. So did they ever get close to bombing the Soviet Union?

Because if you've got Soviet icebreakers helping Russian ships to go round the top of the world through the Northern Sea route to go through and bomb ships in the Pacific, then you're going to see the Soviet Union as being a bit of an enemy. So was it ever on the cards to start a war against the Soviet Union?

You know, many times there were debates over this question when the Soviet Union invaded the tiny state of Finland in the fall of 1939, there was talk about sending considerable British forces to assist the United States and Great Britain. It came very close to reclassifying the Soviet as a belligerent for all of the reasons we've already discussed. In addition to this conference where the Soviet Union almost ended the war on Germany side and the Soviets, in fact, did issue a proposal that would have brought them in as a military partner to Nazi Germany.

But the terms were extremely onerous, broad territorial concessions, the partition of Turkey, Bulgaria, Japan had to make territorial revisions and the Germans essentially said no. That was the juncture at which Hitler began plotting for the invasion of the Soviet Union. But the British and French almost attacked the Soviet Union as well. This was a two way street. The critical moment was in the spring of 1940. The phoney war had been ongoing. There hadn't been much action in Western Europe.

And the British and French wrongly at this juncture assumed that the Soviet Union was the main source of oil being used by the German Navy and Air Force in preparing for an extended confrontation in what would turn out to be fighting in the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

Essentially, what they did is drew up plans to attack the main source of oil in the Soviet Union, which were the gigantic oil fields around Grozny, in Baku, in the Caucasus, in southeastern Russia. This area was quite close to British mandates and French colonies in the Middle East. And this plan was actually put into effect, known as Operation Pike. So about 50 British bombers were transferred to the Middle Eastern Command in the spring of 1940. The French began building air bases in northeastern Syria to essentially be used as a staging base to attack the Soviet Union.

And 300000 pounds of incendiary bombs were actually brought into the region to be the key munitions, British intelligence. There were constant reconnaissance flights going over the Caucasus. British intelligence estimated that because these oil fields were not very well defended. Only a handful of incendiaries would cause the entire complex to burst into flames. And because of the enormous production, essentially it would be very difficult to put out. So they believed even a small raid or series of raids might essentially destroy Soviet oil production, the vast majority of it, and thus caused the German war machine to grind to a halt.

So the stakes were really high.

In May 1940, plans began to move ahead to prepare for this attack against the Soviet oil fields. But at that very juncture, Hitler invaded France itself in the face of the collapse of the French Resistance in June 1940. The plan was first postponed and then eventually canceled as air bases in Syria were no longer available.

But had Hitler delayed, had he not attacked France at this juncture, it's very likely that Great Britain and France would have essentially brought the Soviet Union to the war unwillingly as a German partner, very much to Hitler's great satisfaction, no doubt. Imagine being one of the RAAF pilots who is being briefed on that mission. You're going to be starting truly a world war of momentous proportions, aren't you, through that attack? But it doesn't go ahead. And instead, as you say, there is Operation Barbarossa in June 1941.

Does this bring an end to the Molotov Ribbentrop pact? Assume it does. And this is something that Stalin has personally been involved in, been courting for years. Is he surprised? Is he shocked? Is he disgusted by this? Yes.

Stalin became concerned about the possibility of a German attack following the fall of France. All of a sudden, this long two front war possibility, basically new Hitler would not start a two front war. That possibility evaporated, at least in part with the fall of France. He still believe, though, that Nazi Germany would not attack the USSR. Well, Great Britain continued to resist. He was quite confident in that. And what's often forgotten is that in the midst of all of these campaigns by Germany and western and northern Europe, the Soviet Union and Germany were continuously revisiting their economic partnership and the scale of exchange by January nineteen forty one was enormous.

We're talking hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks of all sorts of key raw materials, and in exchange, the Soviet Union was receiving huge amounts of military equipment. We're talking almost all of the Luftwaffe as modern aircraft designs, tank prototypes and entire battle cruiser. The Litzow was transferred to Leningrad shipyards where German crews began to repair it and make it ready for sale as part of the Soviet Navy exchange was happening on a huge scale. And what Stalin thought as indications began to arrive from his excellent intelligence networks that Germany was beginning to transfer troops eastward, that there were depots being set up in occupied Poland near the Soviet border, that the Germans were beginning to overfly the border and take reconnaissance photos.

He interpreted a lot of this as part of the negotiations. Essentially, he concluded that he had a lot of things that Hitler wanted, particularly oil, access to rubber, tungsten, manganese, these critical raw materials, and that Hitler's best card was his military. Then what Hitler had was the ability to frighten the Soviet Union, perhaps into offering better terms as part of this economic exchange. And it seems that that was really his conclusion. And part of the reason for this was that he had read Mein Kampf very closely and Hitler went on at great length that a two front war was the ultimate disaster for Germany.

He believed it. He took that very much at face value. And so he believed that all of these military maneuvers were really about changing the terms of exchange rather than starting a war. Now, that was the case really through April, May, 1941. At that juncture, German behavior was becoming much more aggressive. There had been a coup in Yugoslavia. The Soviets offered a partnership to the new government, set up their Hitler, responded by invading the next day, removing the Prasow leader friendly government there.

There had been battles over some river commissions which sound kind of obscure, but they've led to blows being exchanged between fascist and communist delegates at these various talks over Danube River rights, et cetera. There are all sorts of little fissures appearing in the partnership. And so in the beginning of June, nineteen forty one, actually, on June 1st, Stalin issued partial secret mobilization plans, essentially beginning to expand the Soviet Army much more rapidly in preparation for a possible attack by Germany.

That being said, he told his senior military leaders essentially don't do anything that can provoke the Germans. We don't want to provoke the Germans. He believed that if he provided a little extra economic incentive, he increased the flow of oil and if he provided a little bit more force along the border, moved more Soviet troops along the border, he could deter Hitler at least through the end of the summer, which would mean that Hitler was not be likely to attack Russian winters.

A nasty thing to fight in. He essentially thought he could buy himself another year. Nevertheless, he began to increase Soviet readiness. So the next day there was an increase in preparedness order that was issued by the Kremlin. On June 18th, Red Army was put on high alert and the Soviet Navy in particular. So although he told his field commanders don't do anything to provoke the Germans, there were all these quiet measures behind the scenes being made to prepare the Red Army.

So he was not caught entirely unawares. That seems clear. He was receiving a mountain of intelligence, but the way in which he interpreted it was incorrect. He believed that essentially what was happening was that British intelligence and German intelligence were playing each different games with him. The British were trying to steer him into war with Germany by causing him to provoke Germany and essentially save their own skins. While they believe Germany was trying to get better terms in their own ongoing economic negotiations.

There was strategic surprise when the Germans attack.

Clearly, Stalin was taken by surprise Vyacheslav Molotov when he received the German ambassador who told him that Germany was at war with the US, has already said, what have we done to deserve this? Clearly taken aback by the German attack. But the strategic surprise was only part of the overall problem with the Red Army. And the reason for the Red Army's disastrous performance in the early days of the war was that it was essentially unprepared for. The conflict, for a variety of reasons, the purges had removed so many good officers, four times as many Soviet generals were shot by Stalin between nineteen thirty seven and nineteen forty one is would die during the entire Second World War.

There were very few trained senior officers, even down to junior officers. So many people were reservists essentially being called up and thrown in uniform that the surprise certainly was apparent at the highest levels, but it was much deeper than that. There were deep problems, essentially, that it resulted from the rapid mobilization of the Red Army over the preceding two years. And so the great irony here, of course, is that if the Soviet Union hadn't supported German rearmament through the interwar period and if Stalin hadn't killed off all his own officers, then they wouldn't have been so unprepared and faced with overwhelming force.

And this is what makes your research so fascinating in. And of course, we'll have to get the counterargument from President Putin on the podcast at some point in the future. Ian, thank you so much for taking through that amazing history. Where can people read more about this?

Yes. So my book, Faustian Bargain, The Soviet German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. It's available for preorder and will be available in June of 2021. Fantastic.

And there is a link to preorder that in the bio. Ian, thank you so much. I look forward to getting back on the podcast soon.

Thanks very much. James. Big in the history of our country. Barbara, just a quick message at the end of this podcast, I'm currently sheltering in a small, windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundie. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly, is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast Mateer for you guys in return. A little tiny favor to ask if you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review.

I really appreciate that. But from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. And more people listen to the podcast. We can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.

First of all, my belief in my ideal world will be, you know, where we don't need a law for racism because people just get along because, you know, we are all human. So we don't need a law to tell me that I shouldn't treat you bad because you will look different than me. I should know that because we're all human means we're all equal. Learn more about the impact of racism in Ireland from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission at age overeasy.

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