Stalin

———PART III——— THREE-CARD MONTE

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is, that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.

PRIME MINISTER NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, radio broadcast, September 27, 1938, speaking of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia¹

COLONEL JEAN DELMAS, French military attaché in Romania: “Do you not think it is time and possible to arrest Germany’s expansion?”

LIEUTENANT GENERAL GHEORGHE ŞTEFAN IONESCU, Romanian chief of staff: “In my view, it is the last opportunity. If we let it pass, we can no longer contain Germany and, in that case, enormous sacrifices would be required, while today the victory appears certain.” (September 28, 1938)²

HITLER WAS A FORCE OF NATURE because potential counterforces allowed him to be. For years he had been seeking an audience with one of his idols, Benito Mussolini, who had been handed power after a colossal bluff, the March on Rome, in 1922. Finally, in 1934, after the Führer, too, had been handed power—also by traditional conservatives wary of leftist revolution and desperate for an authoritarian mass base—the duce condescended to a meeting. Afterward, Mussolini reassured an Italian Jewish leader, “I know Mr. Hitler. He is an imbecile and a scoundrel; an endless talker.” The duce added, “In the future there will be no remaining trace of Hitler while the Jews will still be a great people. . . . Mr. Hitler is a joke that will last only a few years.”³ On July 25, 1934, advantageously misconstruing a question that had been posed by Mussolini (who had conducted the conversation in his atrocious German), Hitler and his overzealous minions had colluded with Austrian Nazis in a putsch against Mussolini’s friend the Austrian authoritarian leader Engelbert Dollfuss.⁴ Even as his wife and family were guests of Mussolini’s at his seaside villa in Riccione, Italy, the Austrian chancellor—known as the Jockey for his five-foot-two height—was slowly, agonizingly bleeding to death on his office couch in Vienna. An enraged duce mobilized 100,000 troops on the Brenner Pass to support the Austrian armed forces—and Hitler backed down. “If this group of criminals and pederasts should take over Europe,” the duce fumed, “it would mean the end of our civilization.”⁵

Mussolini had demonstrated that Hitler could be deterred. In the meantime, the Italian fascist had switched sides, because of his expansionism in Africa in 1935 and the next year’s outbreak of the Spanish civil war, when the duce and the Führer found common cause supporting Franco.⁶ On November 1, 1936, during a bombastic outburst in Milan, Mussolini had mused that a Rome-Berlin “Axis” had formed, around which all of Europe would be “reorganized.” The British cartoonist David Low called Mussolini “the man who took the lid off.”⁷ Hitler and Mussolini became a corrosive duo, but hardly genuinely committed allies. Following a duce state visit to Berlin in September 1937, according to Albert Speer, Hitler pantomimed him. “His chin thrust forward, his legs spread, and his right hand jammed on his hip, Hitler, who spoke no foreign languages, bellowed Italian or Italian-sounding words like giovinezza, patria, victoria, macaroni, belleza, bel canto, and basta. Everyone around him made sure to laugh, and it was indeed very funny.”⁸ The histrionic duce would be derided as a cardboard Caesar presiding over a regime of gestures, from the Roman salute that replaced the handshake to the leader cult.⁹ But his playacting about an Axis with Germany put a heavier onus on France and Britain. Even in the face of Hitler’s illegal rearmament and public statements about expansionism, however, the Western powers strove to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the Great War.¹⁰

Most contemporary statesmen assumed that great powers acted out of self-interest, that international discord was the norm, that peace was provided for by balance of power, and that the overturning of the balance (or equilibrium) would bring consequences that even anti-status-quo (or revisionist) powers failed to foresee.¹¹ Here was the rub, however: the Versailles order had not been a genuine equilibrium. The treaty had been possible solely because of an anomaly in 1919: the simultaneous collapse of both German and Russian power. One or the other of these big countries was certain to come back strongly. In the event, both rose to be major military powers, and within a single generation. As if that were not enough, the old Habsburg buffer was gone. The revived Polish state and expanded Greater Romania exacerbated the instability with their barbed rivalries with, respectively, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Lack of resolve on the part of the Western powers was in many ways a symptom, not a cause, of the death rattle of Versailles. Stalin, for his part, hardly objected to Versailles revisionism—the Bolsheviks had not even been invited to the peace conference—provided, of course, that any “new order” did not come at Soviet expense.¹² Versailles’s obsolescence offered extraordinarily fertile ground for Hitler’s appetites and, in his wake, for Stalin’s opportunism.

The Führer could mesmerize people. Winston Churchill, the Tory politician, had written in September 1937 that “one may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among nations.”¹³ Churchill would soon experience a drastic change of heart, coming around to the view that Hitler was serious about his martial and racialist aspirations.¹⁴ But many observers, perhaps most, would continue to assume that, like all politicians, the Nazi, too, would eventually “come to see reason.”

Hitler posed a profound danger to Stalin’s personal dictatorship as the Führer not only rearmed his country but raged ever more rabidly against “Judeo-Bolshevism,” transforming Germany from partner of convenience with the USSR during the Weimar years to menace. Stalin was bafflingly slow to come to grips with the centrality of ideology in the Nazi program. On the Soviet despot’s Asian flank, meanwhile, the long-standing threat of an expansionist Japan had only strengthened. The symbolic November 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan, which Italy joined the next year, and the relentless Soviet border clashes with Japan, including the summer 1938 limited war at Lake Khasan, meant that the Soviet Union faced the prospect of a two-front war—and without allies.¹⁵ Mongolia, the world’s only other socialist state, had a total population far smaller than the Red Army. Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Chiang Kai-shek’s China, but a decade of bitterness and distrust was not easily overcome, and China’s ability to continue holding off a Japanese military onslaught, while battling internal Communist subversion, remained uncertain. Could Stalin somehow achieve a military alliance with the Western capitalist democracies, even as he was conducting grisly mass executions at home and engaged in forms of Communist subversion of his potential partners abroad? Czechoslovakia provided the key test.

• • •

CZECHOSLOVAKIA CALLED TO MIND the old Habsburg empire in miniature—Mussolini dubbed it Czecho-Germano-Polono-Magyaro-Rutheno-Romano-Slovakia. Of the new country’s approximately 15 million people, Czechs formed a bare majority, and the main minorities—3.25 million Germans, 3 million Slovaks, 750,000 Hungarians, 100,000 Ruthenians [Ukrainians], 100,000 Poles—chafed at real and perceived discrimination. Politically, the country remained a parliamentary democracy, but in some ways it was too divided, too nationalist, and even too small to sustain the limited stability that old Austria-Hungary had fitfully managed.¹⁶ Hitler preyed upon these vulnerabilities, taking advantage of Czechoslovakia’s democracy to subvert it: spreading lies to discredit its democratic institutions while claiming the protections of laws to defend freedom of expression; covertly funding pro-Nazi political groups while irately denouncing the evidence of its complicity fake, even inciting armed revolt by Czechoslovakia’s German speakers, who were concentrated mostly in the horseshoe-shaped Sudetenland, contiguous with Germany. With regional tensions high, on February 24, 1938, the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Red Army, the Soviet embassy in Prague threw a glittering reception for 350 guests. (The German, Italian, and Polish ambassadors stayed away.) General Ludvík Krejčí, chief of the Czechoslovak general staff, stated in the presence of journalists that if Germany were to attack, “We will fight and we will never fall to our knees.” He added that the Czechoslovak general staff wanted relations with the Soviet general staff to be on a par with those it had with the French. Still, doubts existed in Prague about whether the USSR was really prepared to defend Czechoslovakia.¹⁷

Events moved very rapidly. On March 12, a different Habsburg successor state vanished when the Wehrmacht, unopposed, seized Austria, a country of 7 million predominantly German speakers. It was the first time since the Great War that a German army had crossed a state frontier for purposes of conquest, and, in and of itself, it constituted an event of perhaps greater import than the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which had helped spark the Great War mobilizations in 1914.¹⁸ The Versailles and Saint-Germain treaties of 1919 expressly forbade a forcible annexation of Austria by Germany, but Berlin deemed what it called Anschluss a “reunification” with the German speakers whom Bismarck had left out of his unified Germany. Even Germans not enamored of National Socialism rejoiced. Hitler overcame the stain of his failed 1934 putsch, and this time Mussolini, estranged from Britain and France and judging a deal with Hitler more prudent than paying the cost of opposing him, allied Italy to Germany’s expansionism even as the latter threatened Italy’s own territorial interests.

France, for its part, lacked a government on the day Hitler invaded Austria; the coalition cabinet had just resigned—again. (France would have sixteen governments over the eight years beginning in 1932.) British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s special envoy to Hitler, Edward Wood, First Earl of Halifax, leader of the House of Lords, had conveyed (back on November 19, 1937) that London would not stand in his way over Austria—or the ethnic-German-majority provinces of Czechoslovakia and Danzig—provided such revisions to the Versailles Treaty came through “peaceful evolution.” In the conversation it had been Halifax, not Hitler, who first mentioned these other territories coveted by Nazi Germany.¹⁹ Chamberlain (b. 1869) did publicly warn Germany not to attack Czechoslovakia, but he privately informed Paris that London would not join a military counteraction should Hitler repeat his aggression.²⁰ France wanted it both ways as well: it publicly affirmed its resolve to defend Czechoslovakia while privately wanting British pusillanimity as an excuse not to have to live up to its own treaty obligations.²¹

Rationalizations were to hand. The Versailles peace had been pummeled by pundits as unjust and self-defeating, while state borders in Eastern Europe were widely viewed as arbitrary, including by the East Europeans themselves. What would the powers be shedding blood to defend? All true, but Austria’s disappearance should have and could have been stopped. Germany’s mobilization was so sudden, ordered by the Führer at 7:00 p.m. on March 10, 1938, that it nearly collapsed. “Nothing had been done, nothing at all,” chief of staff General Ludwig Beck fumed of the planning.²² Only the long lists of Austrian Jews had been meticulously prepared. Once across the frontier, the German army had to purchase gasoline at private Austrian petrol stations; lucky for them, it was for sale. The Austrian leader, Kurt von Schuschnigg, had decided not to resist militarily, and yet, even without resistance, and in perfect weather, nearly one in six German tanks broke down before reaching Vienna. Many of the Wehrmacht’s horses, meanwhile, lacked shoes: German farmers, forced to remit horses by quota, had turned over their most decrepit.²³ Fatefully, however, the improvised chaos of the German invasion was not immediately recognized as such. The French did not even have a military attaché on the ground to observe the near disaster.²⁴

What outsiders did see was that much of the Austrian population greeted Hitler’s show of force with euphoria: Nazi banners, Hitler salutes, flowers. By March 13, Austria was already officially a province of Germany, and the Austrian army had sworn an oath to Hitler personally. The Führer issued a decree banning all parties save the National Socialists on what had been Austrian territory. Many Jews were rounded up in Vienna, whose 176,000 citizens of that extraction (10 percent of the urban population) made it the largest Jewish city in the German-speaking world. The Gestapo arrived at Berggasse 19, the offices of Sigmund Freud, who possessed the wherewithal to get himself and some of his possessions out, to London, but others were not so lucky (his four sisters would all be murdered farther east). Much of the Austrian political class was deported to Dachau or an Austrian camp soon opened at the quarries in Mauthausen. Austrian gold and foreign currency reserves, including private holdings, were looted—780 million reichsmarks’ worth, more than Germany’s own.²⁵ On March 14, Hitler entered Vienna as conqueror, staying at the Imperial Hotel, near whose entrance he had shoveled snow many years earlier to earn a few Habsburg crowns.

For two days, Soviet newspapers did not even comment on the Nazi seizure of Austria: Pravda and Izvestiya were consumed with blaring the death sentences for Bukharin and other accused “war provocateurs.”²⁶ When Hitler delivered a rousing speech before a quarter million people on Vienna’s Heroes’ Square on March 15, 1938, in Moscow Bukharin was made to watch as the other defendants from his “trial” were shot, and then he, too, was executed. Stalin took his colored pencils to the transcript of Bukharin’s last statement in court, before it was published in the Soviet press, and crossed out several passages, including: “I accept responsibility even for those crimes about which I did not know or about which I did not have the slightest idea”; “I deny most of all the prosecutor’s charge that I belonged to the group sitting on the court bench with me, because such a group never existed!”²⁷

Czechoslovakia was now surrounded on three sides by German troops, and its western border defenses were gone. Back when Stalin had agreed to mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia, he had pledged to come to the latter’s aid if France did so first.²⁸ On the same day Hitler spoke in Vienna and Bukharin was executed, deputy foreign affairs commissar Potyomkin, who had taken over for the arrested Krestinsky, told the Czechoslovak ambassador that requests for reassurance should be addressed to Paris.²⁹ On March 21, 1938, Sergei Alexandrovsky, the Soviet envoy in Prague, warned his interlocutors that the defense of Czechoslovakia was not in the first instance the Red Army’s responsibility.³⁰ On March 26, Litvinov wrote to Alexandrovsky that “the Hitlerization of Austria has predetermined the fate of Czechoslovakia.” That day he had been in Stalin’s Little Corner, along with Molotov, Voroshilov, and others, for two hours.³¹ By March 27, the despot was compelled to close the Soviet embassy in Vienna “in connection with the elimination of the Austrian state.” Austria’s legation in Moscow was signed over to Hitler. On March 28, Stalin sent Marshal Kulik to Prague. Krejčí was again ingratiating, joining denunciations of Trotsky and asking Kulik point-blank, “Will you help us if the Germans attack?” According to the Soviet notetaker, “Comrade Kulik answered ‘that help will be forthcoming.’”³² But on March 29, Pravda warned that “German aggression against Czechoslovakia will occur only if Germany is sure that the other powers will not intervene on the Czech side. Thus, everything depends on the attitude adopted by France and Britain.”³³

Over in Spain, Franco’s forces reached the Mediterranean, slicing the Republic’s zone in two. At the same time, French intelligence, citing a “top-secret and completely reliable” source, reported on Germany’s war plans against Czechoslovakia.³⁴ On April 21, Stalin met in the Little Corner with Molotov, other minions, Litvinov, and Alexandrovsky, who was instructed to reaffirm that the Soviet Union stood with France and Czechoslovakia—a reminder of France’s obligations.³⁵ Hitler traveled to Italy, his second visit since becoming chancellor, seeking Mussolini’s assent to a Nazi plan to “take out” Czechoslovakia. Despite seven days of pomp, sightseeing, and spectacle recalling the visit of Holy Roman emperor Charles V in 1536, the Führer came away without a binding military pact.³⁶

Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš, who had studied for a law degree in France and had represented the new Czechoslovakia at Versailles, showed resolve, telling the Soviet envoy (May 18, 1938) that he would defend his state’s frontiers and sovereignty “with all the means at his disposal” and urging that this message be conveyed personally to Stalin.³⁷ Between May 19 and 22, under the impression that a German strike was imminent, in a repeat of the Austrian scenario, Beneš called up reservists, 199,000 men, which doubled the force structure, and he repositioned troops to the front lines in the Sudetenland. The British issued a formal protest of Hitler’s presumed war plans and evacuated nonessential staff from their Berlin embassy.³⁸ Whether a German offensive had been imminent remains uncertain; it appears that the Czechoslovaks had been fed disinformation.³⁹ The emergency Czechoslovak mobilization, in eliciting the warning from Britain to Germany, had made it seem as if Hitler had had to abandon his putsch at the last minute under pressure, which provoked his fury. In fact, Hitler had already decided on an attack, and the planning was well under way for a short war against Czechoslovakia, but now those secret plans were given stronger impetus and refined (with a target completion date of October 1).⁴⁰ Even more consequentially, hyper-war-averse Britain had accidentally emerged as the ostensible roadblock to Hitler’s continental Lebensraum and racial aspirations. French hostility—which Hitler took for granted—would be far more threatening if Britain stood shoulder to shoulder with France. The Führer began to contemplate the necessity of a war in the west as prelude to his eventual expansionism in the east.⁴¹

Germany’s heightened spring–summer preparations against Czechoslovakia became known to Stalin, who ordered the Kiev and Belorussian military districts reorganized into a special military command (with a completion deadline of September 1), but to unspecified purpose. The Soviet high command internally noted that the Czechoslovak army and populace were in a fighting mood, and that President Beneš, who had been born to a peasant family, seemed inclined to stand up for his country.⁴² But in Prague, the severe doubts about Moscow, which General Krejčí had expressed back in March, persisted. Would Stalin help defend them?

• • •

ALTHOUGH STALIN HAD SUCCESSFULLY stood up to the Japanese at Lake Khasan in summer 1938, that border war had exposed Soviet military weaknesses, which were aired at a meeting of the Main Military Council on August 31. Stalin had reduced Soviet involvement in the Spanish civil war, but he had ramped up military involvement on behalf of China and remained deeply preoccupied with shoring up defenses in the Soviet Far East while, paradoxically, continuing to massacre his own military personnel there.⁴³ He was also preoccupied with Polish-German collusion. Poland’s leadership had been among the first to recognize the March 1938 German takeover of Austria. A few days after that, Poland itself took advantage, compelling independent Lithuania, in an ultimatum, to recognize Poland’s annexation of Wilno (which the Poles had occupied militarily back in 1920–22). Lithuania had no defenders, west or east, but whereas Poland’s power play did not turn Western opinion definitively against Warsaw, it reconfirmed Stalin’s ingrained suspicions of likely German-Polish revisionist collaboration.⁴⁴ Potyomkin, under a pseudonym, had publicly mocked Polish fantasies of annexing all of Lithuania and predicted a coming German-inspired Polish invasion of the USSR. “Hitler wants to let Poland loose against the Soviet Union,” he wrote, adding that the Führer “only wants [the Poles] to clear the road for Germany. . . . He is preparing Poland’s fourth partition.”⁴⁵

Moscow’s assistance to Prague faced formidable logistical challenges: Soviet territory was not contiguous with Czechoslovakia. Four of the five partially mobilized Soviet army groups were on the border with Poland, the best transit route, but Poland adamantly refused to permit a military crossing. Some contemporaries speculated that the Soviets could still have gone through Poland on a contrived League of Nations authorization.⁴⁶ Romania, also a Soviet enemy, provided a less advantageous but still valuable land route, along with overflight options, but discussions with Bucharest were inconclusive, partly because of Soviet claims to Romania-controlled Bessarabia and partly because of King Carol II’s objections.⁴⁷ Even though Romania did not shut the door entirely to passage, the rail gauge differed, so the Red Army would have needed to change the undermount wheels at the border or obtain substantial European rolling stock from someone.⁴⁸

London, Paris, and Berlin all judged the Red Army incapable of decisive intervention abroad—after all, Stalin had decapitated his own officer corps.⁴⁹ A Soviet spy secretly transmitted to Stalin the brutal internal intelligence assessment of his French ally to the effect that Soviet armed forces “were not capable of conducting an offensive war” and that the USSR had been “weakened by an internal crisis.”⁵⁰ Officials in France and Britain began spreading self-exculpatory rumors that the Soviets would do nothing in defense of Czechoslovakia.⁵¹ Stalin again had Kalinin publicly reaffirm that Moscow would honor its treaty obligations “to the last letter”—that is, take action provided France did so, a position that was announced on public radio loudspeakers throughout the Soviet Union. France had secretly warned the Czechoslovak government in July 1938 that it would not take up arms over the Sudeten issue under any circumstances.⁵² In trying to back off their treaty obligations, the French grasped a convenient pretext: they knew that Germany had broken some British codes and that, therefore, thanks to telegrams out of Prague by the British special envoy Viscount Walter Runciman, Hitler could see how far—very far, indeed—the British would go to avert war.⁵³

The Führer, ratcheting up the pressure, had ordered that the harvest be gathered as quickly as possible (to free up horses for the Wehrmacht), private trucks be requisitioned, border defenses with France be fully manned, and reserves be called up for fall “maneuvers” in East Prussia. But no peacetime market economy had ever managed Germany’s level of military expenditures, and Germany was already the highest-taxed major economy, and approaching insolvency. The German stock market had dropped 13 percent between April and August 1938.⁵⁴ German military circles had begun plotting to remove the reckless Führer in a palace coup before he could embroil Germany in a new world war for which the country and the army were not ready.⁵⁵ Troops of the elite 23rd Infantry Division, stationed in Potsdam, were to occupy Berlin’s ministries, its radio station, and the facilities of the regular police, the Gestapo, and the SS. Hitler’s bodyguard division, the SS-Leibstandarte, who were stationed in Saxony near the border with Czechoslovakia, would be blocked on-site. A final action involved seizure of the Chancellery and of Hitler himself. The plotters were not fully coordinated, but some sort of putsch seemed to be coming to a head right after Hitler’s Nuremberg rally closing speech on September 12, when many expected him to declare war on Czechoslovakia. He did not. Still, one conspirator told his brother on September 14 that “Hitler will be arrested tomorrow.”⁵⁶

Then the news broke: on September 15, Neville Chamberlain boarded an airplane for the second time in his sixty-nine years and, for the first time, would meet with Hitler. The British PM touched down only one day after the Nazi party had concluded its annual weeklong rally in Nuremberg, a ferocious, torchlit spectacle whose images were seen worldwide.

• • •

A MAJORITY OF THE BRITISH establishment believed, or wanted to believe, that an agreement with Germany over Czechoslovakia was possible.⁵⁷ But what kind? The PM proposed awarding Germany the Czechoslovak border territories with majority ethnic German populations in exchange for Hitler’s not resorting to force and a great-power “guarantee” of rump Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity.⁵⁸ A diplomatic deal, even such a stunningly advantageous gift, was precisely what the war-thirsty Hitler feared. He had been startled by Chamberlain’s offer to come to Berlin.⁵⁹ During a fortnight, as the Führer got ever more expansive in his demands, the elderly, unwell Chamberlain would fly to him three times. (“If at first you can’t concede,” went a nasty ditty that made the rounds, “fly, fly again.”)⁶⁰ On the eve of the first encounter, Chamberlain had written to his sister Ida, “Is it not positively horrible to think that the fate of hundreds of millions depends on one man and he is half mad?”⁶¹ Eight days later (September 19), he wrote to her again: “Here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”⁶²

Of course, Stalin had been straining to elicit his own deal with Hitler, who would have none of it. Sorge, the agent of Soviet military intelligence at the German embassy in Japan, was reporting on secret German-Japanese negotiations for a binding military alliance.⁶³ In Moscow, three meetings of the Main Military Council took place on September 19, with Stalin in attendance, and much of the discussion was taken up with shortcomings and planned construction in Soviet Far Eastern military districts.⁶⁴ That same day, Beneš, in receipt of Anglo-French proposals that day for territorial concessions to Germany—which he was inclined to reject—asked Alexandrovsky specifically if the Soviets would support Czechoslovakia should Germany attack and France fulfill its treaty obligations. Potyomkin telegrammed Alexandrovsky that the answer was yes, and that Moscow was transmitting the same answer immediately to Paris, all of which was conveyed to Beneš by telephone on September 20 while he was meeting with the Czechoslovak government.⁶⁵ Beneš, the next day, was aggressively pressured by Britain and France into accepting the “deal.” From September 21 to 23, Stalin undertook a redeployment and partial mobilization in his western borderlands—which held 76 divisions—and had the Red Army troops informed that they would be defending Czechoslovakia.⁶⁶ On September 23, the Führer flat out rejected the British-French “compromise”—the prize of the Sudetenland without having to fight for it. France and Czechoslovakia partially mobilized.⁶⁷ The Soviet envoy in Paris briefed the French on intensified Soviet troop movements.⁶⁸

Chamberlain again took the lead to defuse the bellicosity. “However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account,” the PM stated on the radio on September 27. “If we have to fight, it must be on larger issues than that.”⁶⁹ That same day, the German general staff moved its troops to forward positions on the frontier with Czechoslovakia. The French and British governments reluctantly felt that they would be compelled to fight if the Wehrmacht forcibly seized Czechoslovakia. The Royal Navy was on full alert. Britain’s populace was digging trenches and air-raid shelters and filling sandbags; the authorities were distributing gas masks. The mood was grim.⁷⁰ Hitler, in fact, was hours from ordering an invasion. But on September 28, Mussolini accepted a British entreaty to coordinate a disorganized four-power summit with Chamberlain (Britain), Édouard Daladier (France), and Hitler (Germany), with the duce (Italy) acting as dishonest broker.⁷¹

Hitler chose the site of the Führer Building in the Nazi movement’s capital, Munich. The British and French governments consented to consigning the Czechoslovaks to an adjacent room, apart from the negotiations. The Soviet Union, despite its treaties with France and Czechoslovakia, was not even invited. Chamberlain, along with Daladier, agreed not only that Czechoslovakia would cede the Sudetenland but also that all fortifications and weapons there would be left intact. Hitler acceded to this granting of his original demands rather than unleash the war he had been promising, and the infamous Munich Pact was signed in the small hours on September 30 (it was dated the day before).⁷² Wehrmacht troops marched into western Czechoslovakia with international authorization. Nazi Germany absorbed, gratis, industrial plants, coal and other natural resources, and 11,000 square miles of territory, on which lived 3 million Sudeten Germans and 800,000 Czechs. Non-German Sudeten inhabitants were given fewer than ten days to evacuate, and forced to relinquish everything—homes, household possessions, livestock. The German government was absolved from paying compensation.

Chamberlain allowed himself to imagine that he was “fixing” the Versailles Treaty by removing the supposed cause of German aggression: too many ethnic Germans living outside German borders. Hitler, recounting what he had told Chamberlain, had remarked in a public speech on September 26, 1938, at the Sports Palace in Berlin, that the Sudetenland was “the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe, but it is a claim from which I will not swerve, and which I will satisfy, God willing. . . . And this I guarantee. We don’t want any Czechs at all.” That had been the straw that Chamberlain grasped. To win over Britain’s head of state, George VI, to the deal with the distasteful Hitler, the PM had played up “the prospect of Germany and England as the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against Communism.”⁷³ In fact, Chamberlain prioritized the higher purpose of preserving the British empire. (The self-governing dominions would, in any case, not join a war over Czechoslovakia.)⁷⁴ What Chamberlain and his ilk missed was that Germany was not militarily strong, but, if unopposed now, it would never be so weak again.

Daladier had heard from an adamant French general staff, which wanted more time to build up the military, that the Luftwaffe was too strong for France.⁷⁵ But if he understood how the French brass tended to exaggerate German capabilities, Daladier, a veteran of the Great War, also recognized the antiwar sentiment in French society, which, along with Germany, had borne the heaviest devastation in that conflict. Still, the former history teacher from Provence also understood that France had failed to honor its commitments. “No, I am not proud,” Daladier told colleagues concerning Munich. “I do not know what you think, you others, but I, I will say it again, I am not proud.”⁷⁶

Whatever the worries in Paris and London over their own military unpreparedness, in fall 1938 the Wehrmacht was woefully unready for a major military clash against the combined forces of Czechoslovakia (36 already mobilized divisions), France, and possibly the Soviet Union. True, in Czechoslovakia, half the Sudeten German conscripts had deserted to Germany, and many ethnic Poles had failed to report to the colors, but more than 1 million troops, including reservists, were called to the colors.⁷⁷ Nazi Germany possessed around 70 divisions, but that included a great many rated second class, while some would have to remain home to protect Germany against an attack from the west. If Germany were forced to employ nearly the full weight of its army (and air force) in a war in Czechoslovakia, France might be left with as much as a seven-to-one advantage in Germany’s west, at a time when Germany’s Siegfried Line (or Westwall) was perhaps 5 percent complete (recently poured concrete had not yet set).⁷⁸ Chief of staff Ludwig Beck had been trying to rally the military brass to oppose Hitler’s plans, curb the SS, and “reestablish orderly conditions in the Reich,” because he feared that the French general could take advantage of adventurism in Czechoslovakia and strike a decisive blow from the other side.⁷⁹ To be sure, by August 1938, Beck had resigned, but his replacement, Lieutenant General Franz Halder, was perhaps even more anxious over the Wehrmacht’s inadequacies and the German public’s antiwar mood, and on September 28 he pleaded with military commander in chief General Walther von Brauchitsch to restart the coup against Hitler, to prevent war.⁸⁰ Brauchitsch, however, worried that such an act would divide the army, and in any case he and others were undercut by the announcement of the diplomatic gathering in Munich.

Stalin had a copy of the French intelligence assessment, via a Soviet spy, which indicated both German weaknesses and lack of French resolve stemming from worries about its own weakness.⁸¹ The despot seemed off the hook. Nonetheless, he had had the Red Army augment its military preparedness: on September 28, Voroshilov reported that 246 high-speed bombers and 302 fighter planes were ready to take off within two days; some 330,000 Soviet reservists in the interior were called up. On September 29, chief of staff Shaposhnikov issued an order not to discharge Red Army soldiers and commanders who had completed service.⁸² In the event, none of the mobilized troops or planes would see action. The cynical Germans had long anticipated that the absence of a common frontier with Czechoslovakia would serve as a convenient pretext for Stalin to demur on living up to his commitments and coming to Prague’s rescue.⁸³ Beneš had had his own doubts on that score.⁸⁴ Still, we shall never know whether Stalin would have fulfilled his obligations, because France failed to fulfill its own treaty obligations, the precondition for Soviet action.

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NOTHING IN THE TREATIES of mutual assistance with France and Czechoslovakia precluded unilateral Soviet action. We have no reliable record of Stalin’s deliberations, if any occurred, over this question.⁸⁵ But indirect evidence is available. Back on September 19, 1938, after the French and British indicated that they would not go to war to defend Czechoslovakia, Beneš hoped to reverse Western policy by obtaining a unilateral Soviet commitment: he received the Soviet envoy Alexandrovsky, who encouraged the Czechoslovaks to fight the Germans come what may; in response, Beneš privately said to his secretary, “They naturally play their own game. We cannot trust them completely either. If they get us into it, they will leave us twisting in the air.”⁸⁶ On September 25, Beneš had grilled the Soviet envoy point-blank about the specifics of possible Soviet military action under any circumstances—and Alexandrovsky had sat in stone silence. They met again the next day and the day after, and the Soviet envoy again offered nothing; on the contrary, he reported to Moscow that Beneš appeared to be trying to drag the Soviet Union into a war.⁸⁷ On September 28, the Czechoslovak legation in Moscow inquired directly; Beneš received no commitments. No Soviet official ever initiated or responded to Czechoslovak requests for elementary military coordination.

Stalin made no moves whatsoever toward unilateral military action to defend Czechoslovakia.⁸⁸ He never even issued an explicit warning to Germany. That did not mean, however, that Soviet troop movements constituted a ruse. They were directed, along with multiple diplomatic and public warnings, at Poland. Back on September 23, Potyomkin had roused the Polish chargé d’affaires at the undiplomatic hour of 4:00 a.m. to warn him that the Soviet Union would renounce their bilateral nonaggression pact if Poland attacked Czechoslovakia; that evening, the Polish diplomat responded in the name of his government that the Soviets ought not to get involved in matters that did not concern them.⁸⁹ Izvestiya (September 26) published the Soviet note to Poland, and the next day Polish diplomats stationed in Minsk reported to Warsaw on Soviet military preparations. Poland officially protested Soviet overflights of their common frontier.⁹⁰ The Soviets also asked the French for their views on a Soviet military response to a Polish armed attack on Czechoslovakia.⁹¹

Polish foreign minister Józef Beck wrote to the Polish ambassador in Berlin (September 28), about the Soviet military actions, that “the character of these demonstrations was distinctly political, and the forms at times outright comical. From the military point of view, this so far has no great significance.”⁹² When the Polish ambassador inquired of Nazi foreign minister Ribbentrop how Germany would view a Polish military action against Czechoslovakia, Ribbentrop, according to the German account, responded supportively but also noted that “if the Soviet Union undertakes an offensive against Poland, which I, however, consider excluded, then a completely new situation in the Czechoslovak question would arise for Germany.”⁹³

Did Stalin fantasize about delivering a blow to Poland, in revenge for 1920, and achieving a new partition of that country—seizing Galicia, with its large Ukrainian and Belorussian populations—if the Czechoslovaks decided to fight alone and became embroiled in war against Germany?⁹⁴ The despot certainly inclined toward opportunism, and he had kept his options open. Conversely, he might have just wanted to deter any Polish or combined Polish-German military action against Ukraine. Or perhaps in mobilizing he was angling to ensure that France, not the Soviet Union, would be blamed for any debacle with Czechoslovakia. What we know for certain is that during the biggest foreign policy moment of his regime to date, Stalin went more than 100 hours—from very early on September 28 through late on October 2—without receiving visitors in the Little Corner.⁹⁵ “Have you received any advice, instructions, or comments on the part of comrade Stalin or the comrades in the politburo regarding our work in the current situation?” Dimitrov wrote, in a plaintive request to his Comintern deputies on September 29.⁹⁶ Where was Stalin? He was spending every day at a five-day gathering (September 27–October 1) of propagandists from Leningrad and Moscow to discuss a book, The History of the all-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course.⁹⁷

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NONE OF THE PRIOR EFFORTS to publish a new textbook for Marxist-Leninist ideological training had met Stalin’s expectations. A revised draft of the Short Course party history (not to be confused with the Short Course USSR history) had been presented to him around the time of the Bukharin trial, and he had spent much of summer 1938 in Moscow rewriting it, forgoing his beloved annual Caucasus holiday.⁹⁸ Some pages he rewrote several times. Numerous passages betrayed his preoccupations. A reference to the Greek hero Antaeus, the half giant who had been invincible in battle until he lost physical contact with the earth, indicated his reading of ancient Greek history. (Stalin did not mention that Antaeus had been killing his enemies so as to amass their skulls for a temple dedicated to his father, Poseidon.)⁹⁹ Collectivization received a central place. “The originality of this revolution,” the Short Course stated, “consisted in the circumstance that it was brought about from above, at the initiative of state power, with the direct support from below by the mass of millions of peasants.”¹⁰⁰ Stalin cut much of the material about himself, but he left in Lenin’s return from exile and April 1917 theses as “decisive moments in the history of the party.”¹⁰¹ Yaroslavsky, an author of the draft, lauded Stalin’s deletions as demonstrating the “exceptionally great modesty that adorns a Bolshevik.”¹⁰² Stalin also cut details of the opposition’s deeds—wrecking in industry, treachery in Spain—but highlighted how class enemies with a party card were the most dangerous of all and how “double-dealers” constituted “an unprincipled gang of political careerists who, having long ago lost the confidence of the people, strive to insinuate themselves once more into the people’s confidence by deception, by chameleon-like changes of color, by fraud, by any means, only that they retain the title of political figures.”¹⁰³ He inserted dense philosophical passages about dialectical materialism (“The essence is not in individuals but in ideas, in the theoretical tendency”).¹⁰⁴

Stalin circulated the revised text to his inner circle (only some dared make written suggestions) and then convoked a kind of book club in the Little Corner between September 8 and 18, 1938, to finalize the text, one chapter per day.¹⁰⁵ “I am interested now in the new intelligentsia from the workers, from the peasants,” Stalin said, according to notes Zhdanov took. “Without our own intelligentsia we shall perish. We have to run the country. . . . The state has to be managed through white collar employees.”¹⁰⁶ Pravda began serialization, using centerfolds, publishing the first chapter on September 9, 1938, and another chapter each day thereafter. The stand-alone book then went to press in a first print run of 6 million.¹⁰⁷

At the opening of the propagandists’ gathering, on September 27, Zhdanov delivered the greeting, but Stalin could not refrain from intervening at length already that first day. “If we speak about wrecking, about Trotskyites, then you should know that not all these wrecker Trotskyite-Bukharinites were spies,” Stalin told the agitators, seeming to reverse everything he had previously said. “I would not say that they were spies; they were our people, but then they went astray. Why? They turned out not to be genuine Marxists; they were weak theoretically.” Never mind that the NKVD had fabricated their crimes, tortured them to confess, and executed them whether they confessed or not: if only these middle and lower functionaries had been able to study the Short Course, they would still be alive.¹⁰⁸

Stalin showed impatience, explaining that “religion had a positive significance during the time of Saint Vladimir; there was paganism then, and Christianity was a step forward. Now our geniuses speaking from the vantage point of the twentieth century claim that Vladimir was a scoundrel and the pagans were scoundrels, that religion is vile; that is, they do not want to evaluate events dialectically, such that everything in its time had its place.”¹⁰⁹ He also denounced anti-intellectualism: “What is this savageness? This is not Marxism, not Leninism. This is old-bourgeoisism.” During twenty years, “with God’s help and with your help, we have created our intelligentsia,” but, he complained, “there are people who, if someone left the ranks of the workers and no longer works at the factory, or left the ranks of the peasantry and no longer works in the fields, would consider him an alien. I repeat, this is savagery, this is dangerous savagery. . . . Not a single state without white collar [functionaries], a commanding corps in the economy, in politics, in culture; not a single state could govern the country that way. . . . Our state took over all of industry—almost all—our state took over the significant channels of agriculture. . . . How could we manage without an intelligentsia?”¹¹⁰