The last flicker of Moscow’s attempts would be extinguished with an absurdly lethargic and powerless French-British military mission to Leningrad in August 1939; Stalin now understood that his Plan A was dead and the USSR was on its own. So, to buy time, he accepted Hitler’s offer of a non-aggression pact, grabbed territory to the west and buckled up for the inevitable war. But his timing was wrong and Hitler attacked, as David Glantz has observed, at exactly the worst time for the Soviets.Hard as it may be for many in the West to admit, Stalin’s appreciation of the situation was completely correct and the alliance that could have deterred Hitler never happened.
