Stalin, Joseph (1879–1953) provided critical assistance to the Wehrmacht invasion of Norway in April 1940 While the Germans were overrunning northern France and the Low Countries in May and June, Stalin fleshed out the terms of the secret protocol to the Nazi–Soviet Pact by annexing the Baltic States He again advanced the Soviet frontier westward, this time to the Danube, by forcing Rumania to cede the provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina He next exerted pressure for “mutual defense” arrangements and demanded territorial concessions from Bulgaria and Turkey As he moved in Europe he secured his far eastern frontiers by agreeing to a nonaggression pact with Japan His hope in the far east was to turn Japan south against the British and Americans The Comintern was instructed in mid-1941 to demand that Britain end the war by accepting the fact of German victory Given this litany of unprovoked aggression, there is no fair way to characterize Stalin’s pre-1941 policy other than as an aggressive de facto alliance with Hitler to destroy the old order in Europe We also know that Stalin was contemplating fresh deals to be made with the other “revisionist” powers that profoundly despised the Western Allies: Italy and Japan The central problem with Stalin’s diplomacy was that he totally failed to understand that Hitler’s aggressive intentions ultimately included the Soviet Union Stalin was convinced that Germany alone would never attack; hence his interest in dividing Germany from the Western powers and failure to construct a deterrent or defensive alliance with France and Great Britain Instead, he eagerly cooperated in Hitler’s gang rape of the helpless countries that lay between them, while passing over key intelligence supplied by the British Stalin actually hoped for German victory, and helped or stood aside four times as Hitler destroyed potential Soviet allies and expelled the British from Europe: FALL WEISS (1939), FALL GELB (1940), WESERÜBUNG (1940), and MARITA (1941) Stalin was the only non-Axis leader to recognize Hitler’s conquests of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, and Yugoslavia as legal Why did he it? Some debate continues over whether he pursued cynical Realpolitik—unsentimental calculation of hard Soviet interests and power politics—or was driven by ideological hostility to all capitalist powers A third and better explanation may lie in Stalin’s personal blindness to the real nature of German fascism, arising from sheer ignorance of the outside world This much is clear: in Stalin’s mind, the external world was coarsely divided into “two camps,” socialist and capitalist, ineluctably enmeshed in permanent hostility It is most likely that Stalin’s foreign policy machinations prior to 1941 were tactical expedients serving a long-range strategy of final hostility to all states in the West, and that he did not make significant distinctions between the threat posed by Nazi Germany and that supposedly presented by the Western democracies His essential view that Churchill’s traditional anti-Bolshevism was the moral and strategic equal of Hitler’s idea of Lebensraum in the east was a colossal failure of intellect and imagination Tens of millions of Soviet citizens paid for that error with their lives One postwar myth about Stalin’s prewar policy may be put to rest based on known evidence: he did not plan an offensive war against Germany The origin of the charge that he did was a demonstrably false claim, made originally in German propaganda justifying the invasion of June 22, 1941 Nazi propaganda asserted 1029