Stalin wouldn't surrender if the Germans took Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad. He planned to fight until the Soviets won or until he died.
Now that we've had some access to the archives held in East Germany and the Former Soviet Union, it appears that Stalin was
desperately seeking peace in 1941.
Now maybe Stalin was thinking "I'll do what Lenin did, cut my losses, then come back stronger to take back what the Germans have torn from us". But if Hitler wanted B-L v2, he could have gotten it (and Stalin would have counted himself lucky).
Now maybe there's round 2 in a few years as the Western Allies bribe Stalin into coming back into the war. Maybe there's round 2 in a decade or two. Or maybe the Soviet Union just loses Belarus and Ukraine permanently.
So is it true or not that Stalin retreated to his dacha and nobody was allowed to speak to him for quite some time, while the Wehrmacht was advancing?
This is a myth. Stalin was working feverishly with his team to try to stop the Germans by hook or by crook. We know this because we have the paperwork and multiple witnesses.
(Question, where does the myth of Stalin's breakdown come from? Was it Khrushchev?)
He shouldn't have made a treaty with someone who already broke several ones.
The Soviet Union was in a really bad diplomatic position when the British started appeasing Germany. The initiative after the Anglo-German naval agreement was firmly in the hands of Britain and Germany - anyone else in Europe had to tiptoe carefully, knowing that Hitler was a ticking time bomb, but unable to act in a way that would upset Britain. The real fear for the German targets is that if they placed a foot wrong Britain would either not intervene while Germany dismembered them or would be a participant with Germany in stamping them down. (For countries that got on with Britain like France, the former was the dominant fear and the latter fear was almost zero, for the distrusted Soviets, there was a very strong fear that Britain and Germany would gang up on them even while the Battle of Britain was raging.)
And keep in mind that Stalin made repeated attempts to seek an anti-German alliance with Britain and France - for understandable reasons, these were all rebuffed. But always in a way that seemed to hint that maaaaybe cooperation was possible. After years of this, it appears that Stalin decided that the Brits especially were playing rope-a-dope with him. Which considering that at the time Britain was helping Germany expand its fleet, selling Germany arms and helping Germany dismember Czechoslovakia, it was not unreasonable to conclude that the British were trying to keep the Soviets diplomatically isolated until they were ready to jump on the Soviets with their German allies.
(And it's worth noting that while Hitler broke a bunch of treaties in the run up to WW2,
the British were also breaking treaties. Hitler would never have gotten to the point that he did if the British hadn't treated the Versailles treaty as toilet paper.)
So when an opportunity presented itself to split Germany from friendship with Britain, Stalin jumped on it and did his very best to out-bid the British in seducing Hitler, even as he was frantically preparing from the almost-certain-but-hopefully-avoidable Soviet-German clash.
Now, with hindsight we can say that Britain didn't have an actual anti-Soviet masterplan in the 1930s. Rather Britain was busy throwing people under the bus to buy time for her own re-armament because they thought Nazi Germany in the late 30s was stronger than she really was. On the other hand, the British would also have been very happy to see the Nazis wipe out the Soviet Union if they crippled themselves doing so. Stalin was being paranoid, but no more paranoid than the British were being about him and there was some element of real danger there.
In other words, Stalin seems to have taken a calculated risk and lost badly... But he did manage to avoid the worst-case scenario. In the end Britain would be his ally, not his enemy and it was the Nazis, not himself, that ended up diplomatically isolated and ganged up on.
EDIT: And while I am speaking about the Soviet perspective here, don't think that I'm saying that the British were being irrational or evil - the British, just like Stalin, were trying to make the best moves with the limited and often contradictory information they had at the time. They had good reasons to distrust the Soviet Union, just as the Soviet Union had good reasons to distrust them. And in 1938, if you had to choose between Hitler, a man who might be a mass-murdering tyrant, and Stalin, a man who definitely was a mass-murdering tyrant. Well, I can find some measure of forgiveness for the British people of the times who thought that being friends with Hitler was a good idea. And before that, in 1935, who could argue with making reasonable accommodations to Germany when the alternative was thousands of innocent young men dying for a treaty that would be a dead letter in 20 years anyway?
fasquardon