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Last week biggest news was the fact that Germany did not invade Great Britain. Involved in this news was the apparently insignificant circumstance that, years ago, a proletarian Russian named Alexander Shkvartsev took the trouble to learn German. Little Alexander Shkvartsev is the new Soviet Ambassador to Germany.
Last winter he and Germany's Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop spent several pleasant evenings together at the cinema in Berlin. Going and coming, they would chat about the new friendly relations that had grown up between their two countries. But for the last month and a half Ambassador Shkvartsev has wished he did not know German so well, since he has had to listen to some Ribbentrop tirades that the Foreign Minister would be too cagey to put into notes.
Late in May Ribbentrop began to berate the Ambassador about Russia's failure to deliver supplies promised in the commercial agreement of last February. As a result of Russia's shortcomings, explained Herr von Ribbentrop, Germany had to buy oil, cotton and foodstuffs in the Balkans, had to pay for them with machinery. Therefore Germany would be unable to fill the Russian orders for machinery. Furthermore, said the Foreign Minister, Russian newspapers were not giving sufficient praise to German achievements in The Netherlands, Belgium and France. And what was Great Britain's Ambassador Sir Richard Stafford Cripps up to in Moscow? Was he trying to play Russia against Germany? Anyway, it was time for Germany and Russia to make a clear division of interests in Eastern Europe. Germany was going to be busy in the West.
When Ambassador Shkvartsev's chief, Premier and Foreign Minister Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, learned of these conversations he was reminded of a historic parallel. At Tilsit Napoleon proposed to Tsar Alexander I that the two rulers share Europe. If Alexander had stuck to his agreement there would have been no Franco-Russian war. Said Viacheslav Mikhailovich to his chief, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin: "Why not meditate on this example?"
Black-browed Joseph Stalin may have meditated that it was the Franco-Russian War that started Napoleon on his downward spiral, beginning with the retreat from Moscow. To Joseph Stalin the Ribbentrop message sounded like the prelude to a typical Hitlerian workup: complaints, proposals, demands, threats, action. Communist Joseph Stalin is mortally afraid of National Socialist Adolf Hitler, but he knows one truth that Europe's other statesmen learned too late: that Hitler respects strength alone. He set out to give a demonstration.
Within six weeks Russia occupied and socialized three Baltic republics, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, took outright from Rumania, Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina. Last week the Red Army was feverishly digging in along the east bank of the Prut while Premier Molotov kept southeast Europe sweating in steam from three valves:
>From Rumania, Russia wants control of bridgeheads on the Prut and at Reni on the Danube and Snake Island in the Danube's mouth, which would give Russia control of Central Europe's main waterway.
>From Rumania, Bulgaria, backed by Russia, wants the southern Dobruja without delay.