Russia at war 1941-1945

June. Already on June 17, Pravda reported that there was "great rejoicing at Kaunas", as the Red Army entered Lithuania, adding significantly that "its Fascist dictator, Smetona"

had "fled to Germany". During the following days, the Soviet press reported similar

"jubilant demonstrations" from Tallinn and Riga. The governments of the Baltic States were accused of plotting against the Soviet Union and Latvia and Estonia, in particular, of having "grossly violated their mutual assistance pacts with the Soviet Union". This now demanded that "they set up governments which would respect their treaties with the Soviet Union and that they give free access to their territory to Soviet troops, which would guarantee that these treaties would be respected ".

[ Pravda, June 17, 1940.]

It was quick work. On June 18 it was already announced that Mr Paletskis "who had been put in a concentration camp by the [pro-Nazi] Smetona gang in 1939", had become Lithuanian Premier. Similar miraculous changes were to take place in the next few days in Latvia and Estonia. On the very day Pravda published the DNB report from Berlin of

"Hitler's meeting with the French delegation in the Forest of Compiègne" it also described the "jubilant reception given to the Red Army by the Estonian people at Tallinn". Some time later Molotov was to explain the diplomatic background of the Russian invasion of the Baltic States as best he could; but every Russian clearly thought he understood why the Red Army had marched in—while Hitler wasn't looking.

The direct connection between the invasion of the Baltic States on the one hand, and the fall of France on the other, was so embarrassingly obvious that, on June 23, the Soviet Government found it necessary to publish this extraordinary statement—denying that it was "dissatisfied with the German successes in the West":

In connection with the entry of Soviet troops into the Baltic States there are

persistent rumours in the Western press about 100 or 150 Soviet divisions being

concentrated on the German frontier. This is supposed to arise from the

dissatisfaction felt in the Soviet Union over Germany's military successes in the West, and to point to a deterioration of Soviet-German relations.

TASS is authorised to state that this is totally untrue. There are only eighteen to twenty Soviet divisions in the Baltic countries, and they are not concentrated on the German border, but are scattered throughout the Baltic countries.

No "pressure" on Germany is intended and the military measures taken have only one aim: which is to safeguard the mutual aid between the Soviet Union and these countries.

As for Soviet-German relations, the TASS statement went out of its way to say that the occupation of the Baltic States—or Germany's victory in the West, for that matter—could not in any way affect them, though it was careful not to say whether, or not, the Baltic States had been occupied with German consent. "There is a deliberate attempt" (the TASS statement went on) "to cast a shadow on Soviet-German relations. In all this there is nothing but wishful thinking on the part of certain British, American, Swedish and Japanese gentlemen... They seem to be incapable of grasping the obvious fact that the good-neighbourly relations between the Soviet Union and Germany cannot be disturbed

by rumours and cheap propaganda, since these relations are based not on temporary

motives of an ad hoc {konyunkturnyi) character, but on the fundamental State interests of the USSR and Germany."

So far so good; but six days later it was announced that "the Soviet-Rumanian conflict over Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina" had been "satisfactorily settled". Whereupon the Soviet press proceeded to report the "jubilant" reception given by the population of these two areas to the Red Army.

[According to the Russian post-war History, the Russians had become increasingly worried, especially since May 1940, by Rumania's "growing subservience" to Germany; both Tatarescu and King Carol, who had, for a time, tried to sit on the fence, were now beginning to lean heavily over to the German side. It was on June 26 that the Soviet Government presented what was in effect an ultimatum to the Rumanian Government