Stalin

CHAPTER 5 A GREAT POWER

They talk about it in Soviet institutions, factory smoking rooms, student dormitories, and commuter trains. The most widespread sentiment is the feeling of national pride. Russia has again become a Great Power whose friendship even such powerful states as France desire. . . . In Soviet institutions the philistine functionaries, silent for years, now speak confidently about national patriotism, about the historical mission of Russia, about the revival of the Franco-Russian alliance.

Émigré Socialist Herald, May 1935 ¹

FRANCE AND BRITAIN, to the west, and the Soviet Union, to the east, had a Hitler problem. All the powers were slowly coming to grips with the Nazi leader, whose turgid masterpiece, Mein Kampf (a crisp title suggested by his publisher), had been reissued after he became chancellor.² The prison-dictated autobiography, first published in 1925–26, had been issued in English translation only in 1933, and in abridged form, cleansed of “offensive” paragraphs; Britain’s foreign office possessed a single copy of an unexpurgated edition (which it misplaced for a time). A French translation had finally appeared only in 1934 (few French politicians read German).³ A Russian translation would be published only in 1935, and only in the Shanghai emigration.⁴ Soviet foreign affairs commissariat personnel, many of whom were Jewish, could read the original German with all the “Drang nach Osten” and “Judeo-Bolshevism” riffs.⁵ Still, people were unsure what to make of the book’s ravings in policy terms. Hitler’s calls for rearmament could be misread as standard German nationalism. His radical anti-Semitism could be misconstrued as in line with remarks by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had blamed the Jews for the Great War.⁶ Even the Führer’s expansionist Lebensraum could be stretched to resemble a defensible, if emotional, reaction to the circumstance that so many German speakers had been left out of Bismarck’s “unified” Germany.

While Hitler exploited a national politics of salvation and an international politics of national self-determination, Stalin was conjuring up a domestic politics of siege and anticapitalist mobilization and an international politics of anti-imperialism. But he did no better than his British and French counterparts in taking the measure of the Nazi regime. Between January and March 1935, the newspaper Red Star published a series of articles about supposed tensions between Hitler and his Nazi entourage, on one side, and the German military on the other. The German army supposedly “sought to reestablish the old relations with Russia,” and German generals “foresee a military clash with France in the first instance.”⁷ Alongside this provocation—or was it a fantasy?—the Soviet war plan for the western theater still identified Poland as the main enemy, anticipating that Romania would join Poland’s side, but assuming that Germany, because it coveted Polish territory, would at least indirectly support Soviet defense by threatening Poland’s rear. Soviet intelligence, however, forwarded a report of intensified rumors of a Franco-German rapprochement, possibly leading to a larger bloc with Poland—supposedly Piłsudski’s dream—and maybe drawing in Finland, Hungary, Romania, even Italy.⁸ In fact, Poland had no intention of sacrificing its precious independence to the victor of a German-Soviet clash, continuing its neutrality toward both of its giant neighbors, along with separate alliances with France and Romania—in short, bilateralism, not multilateralism.⁹ This was a truth the British understood, the French regretted, Hitler relished, and Stalin never accepted.

Finally, during two unusually long sessions with the military men in the Little Corner (February 28, March 8), Stalin acknowledged reality.¹⁰ The regime resolved to be more forceful in standing up to Japan, and admitted that Germany might start a war against the Soviet Union not opportunistically, waiting for Japan to act, but on its own initiative.¹¹ Above all, the PR (Poland-Romania) war plan was displaced by a new GP (Germany-Poland) plan, in which Poland as well as Romania remained enemies, but only as auxiliaries: Nazi Germany eclipsed them.¹² Soviet diplomacy, predicated upon disruption of European solidarity and avoidance of commitments, was even slower to turn. Membership in the League of Nations had brought little, and negotiations for the regional security system known as the Eastern Pact were effectively dead, but time and again the politburo instructed the Soviet envoy Vladimir Potyomkin in Paris, “Do not rush ahead and thereby foster the misconception that we need the [Franco-Soviet bilateral alliance] more than the French. We are not as weak as some suggest.”¹³ By spring 1935, however, Soviet foreign policy more seriously contemplated securing the country against Nazi Germany.¹⁴ Stalin both countenanced and exerted a break on that shift, refusing to abandon pursuit of closer economic, and ultimately political, ties with Berlin. At the same time, he wanted the world to recognize that the country he led was a revived great power.

THE HITLER PROBLEM

British officials feared that an arms race would derail its fragile economic recovery, and that another war would no better solve the German problem than had the Great War. Hitler had invited foreign secretary Sir John Simon as well as Lord Privy Seal Anthony Eden to Berlin. On March 7, 1935, three days before the scheduled visit, London published a policy paper urging a sheepishly modest ₤11 million increase in military spending, citing German rearmament and bellicosity. Hitler developed a “cold,” and the visit was put off (“Those ruling England must get used to dealing with us on an equal footing”).¹⁵ On March 9, Göring assembled foreign military attachés to announce the existence of a German air force, which was prohibited by Versailles. On March 15, the French National Assembly debated a doubling of army service, from one to two years. Using this as a pretext, the next day, in a further flouting of Versailles, Hitler declared reintroduction of conscription for the Reichswehr—renamed the Wehrmacht—tripling its size to 300,000, which was to rise at some unspecified date to 550,000 (pundits predicted 3 million). Pravda prominently reported Nazi Germany’s actions.¹⁶ On March 17, representatives of France, Britain, Italy, and the Soviet Union discussed “protesting” Hitler’s actions at the League, but Britain and France demurred.¹⁷ That same day, Heroes’ Memorial Day in Germany, Hitler celebrated the rebirth of the German army in the State Opera House, and afterward staged a review of the Wehrmacht, effectively a military parade, to jubilant crowds.¹⁸ Belatedly, the Führer now deigned to receive Simon and Eden after all. The pair, rather than cancel in protest, paid the first visit by British high officials to Hitler as chancellor.

Hitler met them in the morning and the afternoon on both March 25 and 26, wearing a brown tunic with a red swastika armband, and launched with a monologue on the menace of Bolshevism and Soviet expansionism, insisting that he merely wanted to improve the welfare of the German people, who had been through a bitter fifteen years. He further declaimed that Germany’s exit from the League of Nations had been approved by 94 percent of the people, and that no one in Germany imagined annexing Austria, given the principles of state sovereignty and noninterference. He raised hopes for a bilateral naval pact by accepting that his fleet be limited to no more than 35 percent the size of Britain’s—three times the size of the Versailles restrictions—provided the Soviet Union did not expand its own military even more than it had. He also boasted that he had already achieved air parity with Britain, a falsehood that, when leaked, would set off a storm in London. “He emphasized his words with jerky, energetic gestures of the right hand, sometimes clenching his fist,” Hitler’s interpreter wrote. “He impressed me as a man who advanced his arguments intelligently and skillfully.”¹⁹

Hitler parried the Britons’ efforts to draw Germany into any multilateral agreement, such as a pact covering Austria or German readmission to the League of Nations. He noted that he “could give the British ministers the assurance that Germany would never declare war on Russia,” but added that Bolshevik doctrine, political aims, and military capabilities meant that “from Russia there was greater probability of war than from other countries. Moreover, the risks for Russia in a possible war were smaller than those for other powers. Russia could with impunity allow the occupation of great tracts of her territory as large as Germany; she could permit bombardment of great regions; she could therefore wage war without risking destruction.” It was a shrewd lament, and revealed Hitler’s deepest preoccupations.

A skeptical Eden voiced doubts that the Soviet Union would initiate a war. Hitler pronounced himself “firmly convinced that one day cooperation and solidarity would be urgently necessary to defend Europe against the Asiatic and Bolshevik menace.” The Führer thanked his guests and voiced hope that they had understood his efforts to raise his country to equal status with other nations. “The British ministers,” according to their record, avowed that they “would take away very pleasant memories of the kindness and hospitality shown them.”²⁰ In the evening, Hitler, in tails, hosted a banquet and concert at the Chancellery. Press accounts made it hard to discern what, if anything, had transpired. But the mere fact of the visit conveyed British readiness to renegotiate already imposed treaty obligations.

Stalin’s spies in London (the Irish John King, a cipher clerk at the foreign office, recruited in mid-February 1935) and in Rome (Francesco Constantini, an Italian employee at the British embassy) each delivered copies of the British foreign office record of the conversation, which ran to 23,000 words. But NKVD intelligence forwarded a severely condensed Russian translation of just 4,000 words, selecting only certain statements, which they removed from context, to form a new single stream. Their editing made it seem that the British had given Hitler carte blanche to annex Austria and schemed to instigate a Nazi-Soviet clash.²¹ “Mister Hitler,” the NKVD version of the British record had the Nazi stating, “would not sign an agreement he could not accept, but if he did take on obligations, he would never violate them.”²²

Being fed what he craved, Stalin’s suspicions were further incited by the fact that Eden, on the way to Berlin, had stopped over in Paris to sound out the French about readmitting Germany into the League and a possible arms limitation agreement. French foreign minister Pierre Laval, Stalin knew, had been noncommittal. “Laval told Eden France could renounce aid from the Little Entente and the USSR only if England signed a military alliance, a Franco-English military alliance,” according to an intelligence report about the conversation from a Soviet agent in the French foreign ministry, on which Stalin wrote, “Important. (Truthful.) My archive.”²³

Laval waved the Soviet card to break through British hesitation, but the British establishment was cool even to the “entente” it had signed with France in 1932, let alone to a real bilateral alliance.²⁴ British secret services, starved of resources, a bit old-fashioned, and uncoordinated, contributed to government ignorance, sometimes willful, of the capabilities, let alone the intentions, of Hitler’s regime.²⁵ Never mind that Hitler’s boasting that Germany would be a “world power” or nothing uncannily echoed British declarations about their own empire: many British officials believed or wanted to believe that German rearmament was, or would be, limited, gradual.²⁶ The fright over Hitler’s assertion of air parity did consolidate moves to some British rearmament.²⁷ But even those Brits who took a dark view of Nazi Germany remained eager to nip the developing arms race in the bud with some sort of accommodation.

STRANGE PEOPLE

Simon did not bother to travel to Moscow, instead returning home to report on Hitler to the cabinet; Eden was transported from the German border in a Soviet-supplied luxury rail coach equipped with a phonograph that played English jazz. From his car window he found Moscow drab, the people poorly dressed. On the day of his arrival, March 28, Litvinov and Soviet envoy to Britain Ivan Maisky received him, along with British ambassador Lord Chilston and Strang of the foreign office, who had been with Eden in Berlin. Eden conveyed that Hitler had harped on the Soviet threat and how Germany was the bulwark of “European civilization” and needed to be permitted to rearm. “We do not have the slightest doubt about German aggression,” Litvinov answered, according to the Soviet notetaker. “German foreign policy is inspired by two main ideas—revanche and domination in Europe.” Litvinov elucidated that the Soviets wanted “mutual assistance” against Germany and possibly Poland, according to the British notetaker. When the British offered congratulations on the Soviet sale of the Chinese Eastern Railway, Litvinov remarked, “In Japan, even in military circles, a tendency to maintain peaceful relations with the USSR is growing rapidly.”²⁸

That evening, Litvinov hosted a banquet in Eden’s honor at the Neo-Gothic Spiridonovka, an expropriated merchant’s mansion, and made a speech in English about the ominous state of the world.²⁹ The next day, the group returned to the German theme, with Eden again stressing that people in Britain were less convinced than those in the USSR of Nazism’s aggressiveness. Litvinov answered: “The original German plan had been to attack France and then to attack in the East. . . . The plan now apparently is to leave France alone, but to attack in the East only.”³⁰ Eden raised the perennial complaint about Comintern propaganda abroad. Litvinov, in the Soviet account, responded, “What in reality is ‘propaganda’? Is what the British press publishes about the USSR propaganda?”³¹ Eden and entourage were taken to view the collections of priceless jewels, silver sent from Queen Elizabeth to Ivan the Terrible, and the wedding dress of Catherine the Great in the Kremlin, which Eden called “Aladdin’s cave glittering with history.” They walked over to Catherine’s former Imperial Senate, where, in Molotov’s office, Eden became the first high Western official to be received by Stalin.

Eden opened with a statement about the integrity of Soviet state borders and said that the same should apply to the British empire, then asked for Stalin’s views on the current situation; Stalin replied by asking for Eden’s. He volunteered that matters were “anxious but not alarming,” and commended the League of Nations, which the world had lacked before the Great War. “I think the situation now is worse than in 1913,” Stalin answered, “because in 1913 there was only one center of military danger—Germany—and now there are two: Germany and Japan.” Contradicting the previous day’s remarks by Litvinov (present now), Stalin stated that “the situation in the Far East is extremely alarming,” and any recent “improvement temporary.”

The main topic was the Hitler problem. “We are not trying to isolate Germany,” Stalin explained. “On the contrary, we want to live with Germany in friendly relations. The Germans are a great and valiant people. We will never forget that. It was impossible to hold that people down for long in the chains of the Versailles Treaty. Sooner or later the German people had to liberate themselves from the Versailles chains.” He added that the Soviet Union would not defend Versailles but stressed that the way Germany overcame its pariah status mattered. He inquired of Eden’s impressions from his Berlin visit and, after a short, evasive answer, stated, “Strange people sit there in Berlin. For example, about a year ago the German government proposed a 200-million mark loan to us. We agreed and began negotiations, and after that the German government suddenly started spreading rumors that Tukhachevsky and Göring were secretly meeting to work out a joint plan to attack France. Is that really a state policy? That is trivial policy.”³² When Stalin asked whether, as Litvinov reported of his own conversations with Eden, Hitler had raved about a Soviet threat, Eden answered affirmatively. Stalin: “Well, you know, at the same time the German government has agreed, in connection with the loan, to sell us products about which it is awkward to talk openly—arms, chemicals, and so on.” Eden claimed to be incredulous. “Completely true,” Stalin replied. “Really, is this a state policy? Is this serious policy? No; trifling, clumsy people sit there in Berlin.”³³

Molotov invited everyone to the long table for tea. Eden, taking in the USSR map on the wall, remarked (according to the Soviet notetaker), “What a wonderful map and such a huge country.” Then Eden “looked at the place on the map occupied by Great Britain and added, ‘England is such a small island.’ Comrade Stalin looked at Great Britain and said, ‘Yes, a small island, but a lot depends on it. If this small island tells Germany, “We will not give you money, raw materials, metal,” peace in Europe would be guaranteed.’ Eden did not reply to this.”³⁴

LEVERAGE

The Red Army’s new GP war plan entailed significant advances, based on covert mobilization, surprise, and preemption. Rigorous internal debate had reaffirmed the value of the offensive and what were known as deep operations—that is, efforts that combined armor, motorized infantry, and close air support to smash through fixed enemy defenses, exploiting gaps to strike deep in the enemy’s rear and cause disarray, so as to preempt regrouping and counterattacking and to radically shorten the length of engagement.³⁵ Covert troop buildups for quick strikes and penetration, to disrupt enemy mobilization, made irrelevant traditional mobilization or declarations of war: attacking armies that had achieved tactical surprise could complete deployments of mobilized reserves on enemy territory. Preemptive seizure of Poland, to deny its use to Germany, now loomed large in the Soviet ability to disrupt the latter’s mobilization and counterattacking strength.³⁶

A shift to recognition of Germany as the enemy surfaced publicly on March 31, 1935, when Pravda published a sensational essay under Tukhachevsky’s byline: “The Military Plans of Today’s Germany.” Stalin had softened the title from the even more provocative “The Military Plans of Hitler.” Still, the article, quoting extensively from Mein Kampf, presenting figures on German rearmament, and spelling out new German war doctrines, exploded like a bomb.³⁷

Tukhachevsky believed mid-1930s Europe to be in a state similar to that on the eve of the Great War, with Poland playing the role of Austria-Hungary, but whereas Germany in that war had made the mistake of attacking France before Russia, this time around it would strike the USSR first, believing it needed to go after the stronger force, then take on a weak France. Stalin twisted this around: Germany’s first strike would be against France and Czechoslovakia, and only after an Anschluss with ethnic German regions would Hitler attack the USSR. Thus, Tukhachevsky’s article, in a new ending the dictator had inserted, stated that behind the “convenient screen” of anti-Soviet fulminations, Germany was really plotting to attack in the west (France and Belgium, for ore and ports) and in the center (the Polish Corridor, Czechoslovakia, Austria). Stalin further inserted that “in order to realize its plans of revanche and conquest, Germany by this summer will have an army of 849,000, that is, 40 percent larger than that of France, and almost as large as that of the USSR. (The USSR has 940,000, considering all types of forces.) And that will be despite the fact that the USSR has 2.5 times the population and ten times the territory.”³⁸ German diplomats indignantly protested to Moscow.³⁹

Eden’s Moscow visit came to a close. Pravda (April 1, 1935) and The Times of London (April 1) published a joint communiqué: “Mr. Eden and MM. Stalin, Molotov, and Litvinov were of the opinion that in the present international situation it was more than ever necessary to pursue the endeavor to promote the building up of a system of collective security in Europe . . . in conformity with the principle of the League of Nations.” Eden’s telegrams to London reported that Stalin showed “a remarkable knowledge and understanding of international affairs,” that Stalin’s “sympathies seemed broader than those of M. Litvinov,” and that “he displayed no emotion whatever except for an occasional chuckle or flash of wit.” The dictator had struck Eden as “a man of strong oriental traits of character with unshakeable assurance and control whose courtesy in no way hid from us an implacable ruthlessness.”⁴⁰ Later, in his memoirs, Eden amplified these impressions: “Stalin’s personality made itself felt without effort or exaggeration. He had natural good manners, perhaps a Georgian inheritance. Though I knew him to be a man without mercy, I respected the quality of his mind and even felt a sympathy which I have never been able entirely to analyze.” Eden concluded, “I have never known a man handle himself better in conference. Seldom raising his voice, a good listener, prone to doodling.”⁴¹

In Berlin on April 9, the Soviet trade representative, Kandelaki, and the Reichsbank president, Hjalmar Schacht, finally concluded the proposed loan agreement, which extended a 200-million-mark credit for five years, at 2 percent interest. Stalin had been right: the Germans, needing to supply the rearming Wehrmacht, had made the concessions. The USSR pledged to place new orders with German industrial firms, as well as to complete within eighteen months current orders for German industrial goods and contracts for German shipping. Soviet payments would take the form of 100 million marks in gold and foreign currency and 100 million marks’ worth of raw materials: naphtha, timber, furs, manganese ores.⁴² So much for Stalin’s warning to Eden not to supply Hitler. Sergei Bessonov, a counselor with a trade profile at the USSR’s Berlin embassy, who wore a Hitler mustache, reported to Moscow that “Schacht reiterated to both me and comrade Kandelaki that his course of rapprochement with the USSR was being carried out with the consent and approval of Hitler.”⁴³ Only now did the French cabinet approve going forward with a treaty with the Soviets; Laval informed Potyomkin and issued a public statement.⁴⁴

STAGING GROUNDS

On Red Square on May 1, 1935, upward of 30,000 tank drivers, artillerymen, cavalry, and infantry marched past the Mausoleum as 800 warplanes flew in a choreographed formation.⁴⁵ The next day, Voroshilov presided over the annual banquet for select participants in the Grand Kremlin Palace.⁴⁶ The palace had been built under Nicholas I and dedicated in 1849 as the residence of the tsars when they visited the old capital. Its construction had folded in parts of nine churches, including Moscow’s oldest extant structure, the Church of the Resurrection of Lazarus (1393), and the Palace of Facets (1491), which had been used by Ivan the Terrible. The 150-foot-high building had two stories, despite appearing to have a third (the upper floor contained two sets of windows). Its main entranceway opened to a stunning sixty-six-step staircase and a gigantic mural by Ilya Repin, “Alexander III Receiving Rural District Elders in the Courtyard of Petrovsky Palace” (1886), which depicted the strapping sovereign in full-dress uniform. The ground floor, facing the front façade, was taken up by the royal apartments (where Voroshilov lived). One floor up were five dazzling halls named for the High Orders of the empire: the St. George, the Vladimir, the Alexander, the Andreyev, and the Catherine. The Soviets had combined the St. Andrew and St. Alexander, creating a larger, plainer space for party congresses. A raised stage was added to the St. George’s Hall, the main venue for banquets, which boasted dazzling white marble, fifty-foot ceilings, eighteen columns bearing allegories of imperial Russian military victories, and hundreds of marble plaques with the names of military heroes.⁴⁷

Inside, no more than one in fifteen parade participants could be accommodated for an experience that would reverberate over a lifetime. Around 800 places could be set at tables in the St. George’s Hall, with spillover accommodated in the adjacent Facets (which could hold around 400) and the rose-marbled St. Vladimir Octagon, linking the two. Seats were preassigned, the most prestigious being those closest to Stalin’s table, known as the Presidium, where Molotov occupied seat number 2 and Voroshilov 3. Each table, holding twenty to thirty people, was piled with caviar, fish, game, fresh vegetables, and fruit, although the food could seem incidental to the finest-flavored vodkas, brandies, wines, and Crimean champagne. One or two NKVD officers in civilian dress sat at each table (identifiable by the glaring circumstance that they did not drink) and listened attentively to the conversations, but enough actresses and other eye candy were distributed about to counteract some of the intimidation. The well-lubricated affairs had been publicly, albeit laconically, reported in Pravda.⁴⁸ The imperial splendor—giant fireplaces and mirrors, chandeliers, antique furniture, parquet floors polished to a brilliant shine—stirred embarrassment in the worker and peasant state.⁴⁹ Stalin exhibited no such qualms.

N.B. (a thinly disguised Nikolai Bukharin) reported in Izvestiya that upon Stalin’s entrance “suddenly the applause, which grew like a snowstorm, covered everything, and became a blizzard, thunder, blustery spontaneous joy and ecstasy.” During the endless toasts, Stalin sipped red wine, a glass of mineral water nearby.⁵⁰ (Voroshilov preferred vodka; after each shot he would cut off a slice of butter from a mound and swallow it.)⁵¹ The dictator customarily delivered a speech in the form of his own toast, and now proposed that glasses be raised to the health of the Red Army rank and file (“Bolsheviks in the party and non-party”). Then, trailed by his entourage, he made the rounds, personally greeting attendees. Suddenly, a few exuberant types lifted him up and carried him about the hall, putting him down at each table for a toast. Ubiquitous NKVD guards in full-dress uniform had proved powerless in the face of the hall’s fervor and Stalin’s desire to soak it up.⁵²

At events like these, after the dictator and his retinue departed, the tables would be removed and functionaries and military officers in uniform approached the actresses and ballerinas to ask them for a dance.⁵³ Before exiting, Stalin might duck into the kitchen to congratulate the chefs, after which they—like his bodyguards, drivers, or film projectionists—would walk through fire for him.⁵⁴ But it was the artists at these events, often non-party members, whom he worked most to bend to his will. Stalin addressed them with the formal vy (“you”), paid attention to their performances amid the din, and invited some to drink at his table, inquiring whether they might have requests of him for themselves or their organizations. Relaxed, convivial, he engaged in freewheeling conversation.⁵⁵

Earlier that same day of May 2, the Soviet envoy to Paris had signed a mutual assistance pact with France—the Soviet Union’s first formal alliance. Pravda hailed it as a triumph.⁵⁶ It had taken nearly eight months of negotiations since the Soviet Union had been voted into the League of Nations. Article 2 stipulated “immediate aid and assistance” if either country became the victim of unprovoked attack and the Council of the League of Nations failed to reach a unanimous decision, but the “immediate” was diluted in an accompanying protocol that, at French insistence, left out any time limit to act while the council deliberated.⁵⁷ The treaty dumbfounded many Soviet Communist party members.⁵⁸ The Soviet press reported that Stalin approved of French imperialism’s military buildup “at the level consonant with its security.”⁵⁹ French domestic audiences were better prepared, thanks to a drawn-out public discussion. France’s ally Poland was angry, even though it shared responsibility for catalyzing the treaty.⁶⁰ In Hitler’s Chancellery, the reaction was incandescent rage. The Führer now obsessed over the “Bolshevization of France” and “Judeo-Bolshevik encirclement” of Germany the way Stalin obsessed over an “anti-Soviet imperialist bloc” and “capitalist encirclement.”

“CADRES DECIDE EVERYTHING”

On May 4, 1935, Voroshilov, with Stalin in attendance, was back presiding in the Grand Kremlin Palace amid a sea of dress uniforms, this time over the annual graduation of military academies. The defense commissar issued “an order” for everyone to fill their glasses, then toasted Stalin at length, stirring the standing hall to frenzy. The orchestra played a flourish. Molotov was next. “You already know, comrades, about our new success in the struggle for peace,” he said. “You already know from newspapers about the agreement on mutual assistance, which the Soviet Union has signed with one of the most visible powers of Europe—France. . . . The signing of the Soviet-French Agreement became possible because of the growth and strengthening of the power of our country and the force of our Red Army under the genius leadership of our party, comrade Stalin. Our enormous growth has become plain to our friends and to those whom it is impossible to call friends.” Molotov, along with Stalin, went up to Voroshilov and exchanged kisses.⁶¹ Stalin sounded his now habitual populism.

“Comrades, now, when our achievements are great in all branches of industry and governance—now it has become typical to speak a lot about leaders, bosses of the upper echelon, to credit the successes to them,” he stated. “This is incorrect.” The Soviet people had triumphed over backwardness, he continued, which had required “great sacrifices, great efforts, . . . and patience, patience.” Some had lacked stamina. “There is a saying, ‘Let bygones be bygones,’ but all the same, a person’s memory retains things.” Stalin rebuked those who, he remembered, had wanted to expend scarce resources on consumer goods and “all kinds of trifles,” instead of “tractors, automobiles, airplanes, tanks. . . . You will recall the declarations, from leaders of the Central Committee, that ‘you are embarking on adventurism’; you heard such speeches, indeed it was not only speeches. . . . Others threatened to kill some of us, they wanted to break apart the leadership. It’s plain as day we are people forged in fire, unbreakable, and did not retreat. (Stormy applause.)”

Stalin opened himself up: “It’s plain as day that, back then, we did not retreat; we are Bolsheviks, people, so to speak, of a special cut. Lenin forged us, and Lenin was a man who did not know and did not acknowledge fear; this man was our teacher, our educator, our father—this was a person who, the more enemies raged and the more opponents inside the party fell into hysterics, the more he gathered force and the more resolutely he went forward. We learned a bit from him, this person. . . . We did not retreat; we went forward to attack and smashed some people. I must admit, I also had a hand in that.”⁶²

He could not let the thought go: the fork in the road, supposedly either a more comfortable life, with small-scale, backward agriculture and no security, or large-scale mechanized farms and a socialist great power. “There were victims—it is true—some of us fell by the wayside, others from a bullet.” The country overcame its “famine of technology,” he said, using a resonant word. “But now we have a new famine: a famine of people. . . . If, earlier, technology decided everything, now people decide everything, because now we have the technology. . . . Cadres are the most valuable capital. Not everyone in our country understands this, unfortunately.” He told a story about his exile days in Turukhansk, how at the time of the spring flood, when a group went out to pilfer some of the giant pine logs being floated down the Yenisei, one man went missing, but no one bothered to look for him. “If a cow had disappeared, they would have gone searching, but a person perished, a trifle. . . . We do not value people. People can always be produced, but a mare, go try. (Stormy applause.)” ⁶³

Stalin, an avid gardener, had already been instructing officials to “cultivate people with care and attention, the way a gardener cultivates a beloved fruit tree,” a skill he had shown since his youth.⁶⁴ As the hall quieted again, he continued: “I drink to you, to the higher cadres of our Red Army, and wish you every success in the organization of the defense of our country, in the practical leadership of this defense, because you will lead it. We, here, will lead the speechifying, but you will lead the practical work. (Stormy applause.)” His toast concluded: “Only those good cadres who are not afraid and do not hide from difficulties, but overcome them. Only in the struggle with difficulties can one grow genuine cadres who are not afraid of difficulties. Then our army will be invincible. (Stormy applause of the entire hall. Everyone stands and addresses comrade Stalin with loud shouts of Hurrah and applause.)”⁶⁵

Stalin edited the above raw transcript with his stenographer on May 5, producing the version published in Pravda the next day, sharpening the key point, a shift in slogans from “Technology decides everything” to “Cadres decide everything.” ⁶⁶ The newspaper version enjoined officials to “show the greatest concern for our functionaries, ‘great’ and ‘small,’ . . . help them when they need support, encourage them when they show their first success, move them forward,” and warned, “We have a whole series of instances of soulless, bureaucratic and outright scandalous attitudes toward workers.”⁶⁷ On May 9, Stalin’s in-laws received permission to pay him a late-night visit at the Near Dacha. The dictator recalled his elder son Yakov’s attempted suicide and groused, “How could Nadya, condemning Yakov’s act, shoot herself. She did a very bad thing, she maimed me for life. Let’s drink to Nadya!” Those gathered got to reminiscing about the recent spontaneous metro ride, “the ecstasy of the crowd, the enthusiasm. Iosif again expressed his thought on the fetishism of the people’s psyche, on the striving to have a tsar,” Maria Svanidze noted. “Iosif was in a down mood; more accurately, he was preoccupied, something was occupying him to the depths, for which he had not yet found the answer.”⁶⁸

REVEALED PREFERENCES

Stalin’s tête-à-tête with Eden had yielded nothing. French foreign minister Laval, who, in signing the nominal alliance with Moscow, still hoped to goad London into a real one, belatedly traveled to Moscow, but conspicuously stopped in Warsaw, where he informed Beck that France’s new alliance was neither anti-German nor even pro-Soviet. In the Soviet capital for three days, beginning May 13, 1935, Laval met with Litvinov, Molotov, and Stalin.⁶⁹ The politburo had just decreed a Red Army expansion to 1.094 million troops by the end of 1936, and before the summer was out, Stalin would accept Voroshilov’s proposal to lower the conscription age by six months each year (dropping it from twenty-one to nineteen by 1939).⁷⁰ Laval was brought to a military airfield for a demonstration. When he appeared at the Bolshoi on May 15, he drew an ovation.⁷¹ But barely a week after the treaty with France had been signed, Litvinov informed the new German ambassador, Werner von der Schulenburg, that a bilateral nonaggression pact was urgently needed and would “lessen the significance of the Franco-Soviet alliance.”⁷²

Maisky, in London, was brought into the loop, and he recorded in his diary that Stalin had asked Laval about his recent trip to Poland and, when Laval proceeded to predict a shift in Warsaw away from pro-German attitudes, had cut him off: “You are friends of the Poles, so try to persuade them that they are playing a dangerous game that will bring disaster on themselves. The Germans will trick them and sell them short. They will involve Poland in some adventure, and when she weakens, they will either seize her or share her with another power.”⁷³

Stalin had something the tsar never had—control over a political party in France’s parliament—and he acceded to Laval’s request to stop the French Communists from opposing France’s military budget and its new two-year service law. French Communists turned on a dime.⁷⁴ Stalin, in return, told Laval that he thought it prudent to prepare for the worst and wanted to add concrete military obligations to their treaty. Reluctantly, Laval agreed to open talks after the Soviets reached an accord with France’s ally Czechoslovakia.⁷⁵ That very day in Prague, May 16, foreign minister Beneš and Soviet envoy Sergei Alexandrovsky signed a mutual assistance pact. Beneš had drafted the text. He, understandably, did not want to dilute France’s obligations and was anxious not to allow the Soviets to invoke the pact on their own and possibly draw Czechoslovakia into a Soviet-Polish conflict. The Soviets, predictably, were keen to have France retain the main burden and themselves avoid being drawn into a possible German-Czechoslovak conflict over Austria. And so, even though the Czechoslovak-Soviet treaty carried the same obligation of mutual assistance in the event of a third-party attack as did the Franco-Soviet pact, a special clause stated that the Soviets were obliged to act only if the French fulfilled their obligations first.⁷⁶

Laval, again, stopped in Poland, where Piłsudski had died of liver cancer on May 12, 1935. “Stalin,” Laval told one Polish confidant, “is wise, cold, detached, and ruthless.” To another he said, “Oh, oh! Very strong. He is a grand figure, but an Asiatic conqueror type, a species of Tamerlane.”⁷⁷ At Piłsudski’s funeral, in Kraków (May 18), Laval assured Göring, who was representing Hitler, of France’s good intentions. Göring, for his part, renewed his wooing of the Poles with tall tales of Soviet air bases about to appear in Czechoslovakia.⁷⁸ In Berlin, at St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, in a sensational gesture, Hitler attended a holy mass, with a symbolic coffin draped in a Polish flag in honor of the deceased Polish president. On May 21, in another long speech to the Reichstag, the Führer held out the prospect of nonaggression pacts with all of Germany’s neighbors except Lithuania (“What else could I wish for other than calm and peace?”). He criticized the Franco-Soviet treaty, while stating in a moderate tone that, in the matter of rearmament, Germany expected to be treated equally by Britain.⁷⁹

Soviet military intelligence, meanwhile, had suffered another self-inflicted disaster by violating tradecraft yet again, recruiting agents among Communists under police surveillance—this time in Denmark, which ran the Soviet agents in Nazi Germany. Danish police had gone looking for a suspected spy on charges of raping a chambermaid (possibly an invented pretext) and netted the current and former station chiefs for Germany, as well as cash, fake passports, and codes. In early May, over several sessions in the Little Corner with Voroshilov, among others, Stalin promoted Semyon Uritsky from deputy head of the tank armor directorate to chief of military intelligence, retaining Artuzov as deputy head. (Artuzov would be replaced on May 21 as concurrent head of NKVD espionage by his deputy, Abram Slutsky.) Stalin told the Jewish Uritsky to recruit operatives and agents among ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Latvians, and Jews, but to avoid Poles, Finns, Estonians, Hungarians, and Austrians. As spies in the field risked their lives to combat fascism, Uritsky went to war to force out Artuzov, seething that he “would be the idiot with the genius deputy.”⁸⁰

CONNECTING THE DOTS

All this while, Stalin was reading interrogation protocols about elaborate terrorist “centers” of cleaning ladies and librarians plotting his assassination. By now, only nine persons hired by Yenukidze remained on the Kremlin staff.⁸¹ On May 12, 1935, Yagoda had sent Stalin proposals for punishment of the 112 people who had been arrested in the Kremlin Affair. Yagoda left blank Lev Kamenev’s sentence; Stalin wrote in ten years for him, and execution instead of ten years for Nina Rozenfeld.⁸² The next day, Yenukidze was named central executive committee plenipotentiary for the resorts group in the North Caucasus, which included elite Kislovodsk, second after Sochi.⁸³ Stalin also dispatched a secret circular to all party organizations announcing a party card verification campaign to “introduce Bolshevik order in our house.”⁸⁴ Over the years, 200,000 duplicate cards had been issued for those reported lost or stolen. Nearly 15,000 party cards in the Donbass and 13,000 in Central Asia were still unaccounted for. (Several months later, the verification campaign would miss its completion deadline, inciting Stalin to irate charges of “family-ness,” or self-protection, by colluding local elites.)⁸⁵

Yezhov had drafted the circular and was overseeing the verification. In parallel, he was demanding stronger oversight of foreigners in the USSR, calling them spies.⁸⁶ He also asked Stalin to read his ambitious theoretical manuscript, “From Factional Activity to Open Counterrevolution (On the Zinovievite Counterrevolutionary Organization).” It set out how the Zinovievites, right deviationists, and Trotskyites were working together for a coup.⁸⁷ Stalin received the draft on May 17 and underlined various passages (“The Zinovievite counterrevolutionary band definitively chooses terror as its weapon in this battle against the party and working class”). Whether he had instigated the work remains unknown; Yezhov had pretensions and had absorbed Stalin’s worldview. “There is no doubt that the Trotskyites were also informed about the terrorist side of the activity conducted by the Zinoviev organization,” Yezhov’s text asserted, concluding that “from testimony . . . we have established that [the Trotskyites] had also embarked on the path of terrorist groups.”⁸⁸

Trotsky had predicted, almost immediately after his expulsion from the territory of the Soviet Union, that “there remains only one thing for Stalin: to try to draw a line of blood between the official party and the opposition. He absolutely must connect the opposition with assassination attempts, and preparations for armed insurrections.”⁸⁹

Stalin had decided to devote a Central Committee plenum (June 5 and 7, 1935)—one of only two during the year that lasted more than a day—to the Kremlin Affair. He assigned the main report not to Yagoda but to Yezhov, who began not with Yenukidze but with Kirov, explaining that the “embittered” Zinovievite-Kamenevite-Trotskyite “group” had been driven “to the most extreme forms of struggle—namely, terror,” and charged the rightists with complicity, citing attempts to link up with the Zinovievites in 1932. Yezhov deemed Yenukidze “a corrupt and self-complacent Communist” who had unwittingly allowed White Guards to infiltrate the citadel of power. Yenukidze, given the floor on the second day, averred that all hiring in the Kremlin “was carried out with the participation of the NKVD,” prompting Yagoda to interject from the floor, “That’s not true.” Yenukidze insisted on the point, denied cohabiting with the arrested women, and seemed incredulous that helping former Menshevik families could be treason. Yagoda charged him with creating “his own parallel ‘GPU’” in the Kremlin and called for his expulsion from the party, going beyond Yezhov’s call for expulsion from the Central Committee.⁹⁰

Stalin had kept strangely silent, but he finally professed himself unable to abandon a good friend with whom he had spent many a holiday, so he suggested that Yenukidze be expelled from the Central Committee and the party but not handed over to the NKVD.⁹¹ Attendees voted unanimously for expulsion from the Central Committee and voted—with some hands raised in objection—for expulsion from the party for “political and personal dissoluteness.” The minutes for internal circulation and Pravda’s public report were falsified to conceal the objections.⁹² Yenukidze became the first Bolshevik who had joined the party before the revolution and who had never joined an opposition afterward to be expelled.⁹³

WISHFUL THINKING