In this matter (the expansion of Soviet borders) we admittedly went a bit too far, but something has been brewing in the south. You have to understand that there are limits to everything, otherwise you can choke.

The problem of the Baltic states, western Ukraine, western Belorussia, and Bessarabia we solved with Ribbentrop in 1939. The Germans reluctantly agreed to our annexation of Latvia, Estonia, and Bessarabia. A year later when I was in Berlin, in November 1940, Hitler asked me, “Well, good, you are uniting the Ukrainians, uniting the Belorussians, all right, and the Moldavians, that’s reasonable—but how are you going to explain the Baltic states to the whole world?”

I said to him, “We’ll explain.”

Communists and the people of the Baltic states favored joining the Soviet Union. Their bourgeois leaders came to Moscow for negotiations but refused to sign such an agreement with the USSR. What were we to do? I must tell you confidentially that I pursued a very hard line. I told the Latvian minister of foreign affairs when he came to visit us, “You won’t go home until you sign the agreement to join us.”

A popular minister of war from Estonia came to see us—I’ve forgotten his name. We told him the same thing. We had to go to such extremes. And to my mind, we achieved our aims quite satisfactorily.

This sounds crude in the telling, but in fact everything was done more delicately.

But the first one could have warned the others.

There was no escape for them. A country somehow has to see to its security. When we laid down our demands—you have to act before it’s too late—they vacillated. Of course bourgeois governments could not join a socialist state with alacrity. But the international situation was forcing their decision. They found themselves between two great powers—fascist Germany and Soviet Russia. The situation was complicated. That’s why they wavered, but finally they made up their minds. And we needed the Baltic states…

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-Molotov Remembers, Inside Kremlin Politics, 1993.