At the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union's Krasnaya Armiya (Red Army) em-bodied Stalin's military strength. It had five million troops, more than 300 divisions, a formidable reserve, and included the Voenno-Vozdushnye Sily (VVS), the Air Force. It seemed invincible, and Defense Commissar KlimentVoroshilov even said so to delegates at the 1939 Party Congress. In August 1939, Stalin and Hitler executed a nonaggression pact essentially giving Stalin a free hand in the Baltic States and Bessarabia, the region around modern-day Moldova encompassing parts of Ukraine and Romania.
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