Joseph Stalin controlled the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, with Vyacheslav Molotov as his foreign minister. Their policy was neutrality until August 1939. The Soviet military had conversations in Moscow with a high level military delegation from Britain and France. The Soviets demanded an agreement from Poland to allow Soviet troops to enter that country to defend it against Germany, but Poland refused. Those talks went nowhere. On August 21, Hitler made friendly proposals to Stalin that led to the Molotov–Ribbentrop nonaggression pact on August 23 that stunned the world. The Soviets achieved friendly relations with Germany in order to carve up Key elements of Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the Baltic states. Following the pact, Germany invaded and quickly defeated Poland; then the Soviets invaded and took control of its preassigned areas of eastern Poland. Both invaders systematically decimated the Polish elite. In the 1940 Katyn massacre, the NKVD (Soviet secret police) executed 22,000 Polish military and police officers and civilian intelligentsia.