Stalin

CHAPTER 10 HAMMER

They arrested my first secretary, then they arrested the second. . . . They arrested my first aide. A Ukrainian, also from the workers. He was not especially literate, but I could rely on him as an honest person. They arrested him, it seems they put a lot of pressure on him, but he did not want to say a thing and threw himself down the elevator shaft at the NKVD. That’s the way it was with all my staff.

VYACHESLAV MOLOTOV (“Hammer”) ¹

THE FORMER AVIATOR NIKOLAI SHPANOV, in his novella The First Blow: A Story About the Future War, published in early 1939 in the thick journal Banner, then as a book in the Library of a Commander series, named Nazi Germany as the country’s principal foe.² The action revolved around Soviet Air Force Day (August 18) in an unspecified future year. People are observing a Soviet pilot’s exploits at an air show when suddenly, over loudspeakers, at precisely 5:00 p.m., they hear that Luftwaffe warplanes have violated the Soviet frontier. Within one minute, Soviet fighters are challenging the Germans in the skies. Only twenty-nine minutes later, the last surviving German plane has fled Soviet airspace. The Red Air Force then mounts a lightning counterattack with 700 state-of-the-art planes into Germany’s industrial rear. As bombers reach an aircraft factory at Nuremberg, German workers break out into “L’Internationale” in solidarity. Already the next morning, Soviet ground troops have smashed across the frontier. Quick victory comes with little loss of Soviet life. Vsevolod Vishnevsky, in a review, deemed the book “valuable, interesting, profoundly germane,” and explained that “it entertainingly speaks about how the Soviet people will fight a just war against aggressors, a war that will be fatal for the enemies of socialism.”³

Outside this dream palace, Stalin faced a harsher, ideology-inflected version of the security dilemma that had bedeviled his tsarist predecessors: a now even more aggressive German power on the European continent and a now even more aggressive, militarist Japan moving onto the Asian mainland—two flanking powers that were now formally allied. In Europe, he could keep trying to secure a deal with anti-Communist France and Britain, in order to try to deter Germany, or keep pursuing a deal somehow with Nazi Germany to try to redirect German ambitions westward. In the Far East, no such deal with the United States or Britain seemed even theoretically possible. Stalin had kept Litvinov in place, despite Yezhov’s predations against the foreign affairs commissariat (which Beria would continue).⁴ “We sometimes prefer to be isolated rather than to go along with the bad actions of others,” Litvinov had written to Maisky in London, “and that is why isolation does not frighten us.”⁵ But such a retreat into “fortress Russia”—a temptation also indulged by the party’s chief ideologue, Zhdanov—afforded Stalin little comfort: the British and the Nazis could join in a deal against the Soviet Union, turning Soviet “isolation” deadly. Had that not been the significance of Munich?⁶

German and Italian planes, following General Franco’s directives, had sunk 10 British-registered merchant ships and seriously damaged 37 more that were en route to Spanish Republic ports, but even after outrage had erupted in the House of Commons, Neville Chamberlain had merely told his Tory cabinet that if Franco “must bomb the Spanish [Republic] government ports he must use discretion and that otherwise he might arouse a feeling in this country which would force the government to take action.”⁷ Franco had sent a letter to Chamberlain thanking him for his “friendship” and underscoring how both leaders stood for “world peace.” In Stalin’s mind, Spain had starkly illuminated not only the limits of Soviet relations with the West, but also the expansiveness of British-French accommodation with “fascism” (Germany, Italy, and a Francoist Spain). Conversely, the limited but bloody purges inside the Spanish Republic further reinforced doubts among the Western powers about security cooperation with Stalin.

Unlike Litvinov—no less a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist—Stalin refused to distinguish between the imperialists, as either “pacific” (democratic) or “aggressor” (fascist). He divided the world into just two camps, and for him, as for Lenin, all diplomacy amounted to two-faced intercourse with enemies.⁸ This stance facilitated a flexible readiness to contemplate either of two diametric opposites: the expedient of “collective security” with the “democratic” capitalists, in Litvinov’s parlance, or détente with the “fascists.” Post-Munich, Stalin would renew the Soviet efforts at negotiations with Britain and France against Germany. Simultaneously, he would ramp up his so far failed stratagems to reach rapprochement with Hitler’s Germany, despite the venom about “Judeo-Bolshevism” out of Berlin.⁹ But the image of a wily Stalin brilliantly keeping his options open, to extract maximum advantage, is belied by the fact that neither Hitler nor Chamberlain proved at all forthcoming. Europe’s collective security dilemma, drawing in Japan, had deep structural foundations.

PERSONALITIES, REGIMES

In London, far too many British officials labored under the delusion that “moderates,” such as Göring, existed in the Nazi hierarchy and could act as restraining influences on Hitler.¹⁰ Some British officials held the view, largely originating with Nevile Henderson, the ambassador to Berlin, that Hitler was like Jekyll and Hyde: normally cautious and reasonable, but given to flying off the handle if provoked or humiliated. Others speculated that, like all dictators, he engaged in “foreign adventurism” to quiet domestic dissatisfaction.¹¹ Still others subscribed to the view that his seemingly impetuous actions were driven by economic crisis, a view picked up from disaffected Germans.¹² In Moscow, too, next to nothing of Hitler’s personality or the operation of his regime was well understood, beyond his uncanny success and Western indulgence of it.¹³ Walter Krivitsky, a Soviet intelligence officer (born Samuel “Shmelka” Ginsberg in Austro-Hungarian Galicia), had defected to the West and, in 1938, in the most authoritative Russian émigré newspaper and then in The Saturday Evening Post, predicted an imminent deal between Stalin and Hitler. Krivitsky had divulged secret Soviet flirtations, aiming “to convince German leaders of the genuineness of Stalin’s own intentions, of his readiness to commit himself quite far in bringing about a rapprochement.”¹⁴ But Krivitsky failed to acknowledge how all of Stalin’s backdoor and front-door intermediaries with Nazi Germany had made no headway.

Hitler’s early circumstances had been nowhere near as humble as Stalin’s. (Hitler’s father, a senior customs official in the Habsburg empire, earned roughly the same salary as a school principal, and then enjoyed a handsome pension.)¹⁵ But Hitler, too, had not completed his basic education, let alone attended university. No less a striver than Stalin, he had assembled an extensive private library, but he delighted in melodramas, the occult, German translations of Shakespeare, Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great, Henry Ford’s four-volume The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.¹⁶ (Albert Speer would dub Hitler a “genius of dilettantism.”) The Führer showed little interest in foreign languages or travel beyond Germany. His passions were architecture, painting, cinema, classical music, boxing, roadside picnics, and high-speed motoring in his Mercedes-Benz, sitting up front next to his chauffeur. (Hitler could not drive.) He railed against those who put on what he perceived as intellectual airs, feared committing a faux pas among more refined people, basked in the least signs of others’ approval, and did not hide his megalomania. “I believe,” he had written, echoing Napoleon, “my life is the greatest novel in world history.”

Some contemporaries attributed Hitler’s interminably long monologues, with quivering lips, to an effort to conceal his inadequacies, rather than a proclivity to get carried away, for he could also restrain himself and come across as an amiable conversationalist. He felt most at ease at reunions of the Munich “street brawlers” from the years of Nazism’s rise, but he saw them only once a year. He confided fully in no one. (“Just as I never got close to him, I never observed anyone else doing so, either,” Joachim von Ribbentrop would recall.) Hitler enjoyed unguarded relations only with the Wagner clan in Bayreuth and the family of his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, through whom Hitler had met Eva Braun (when she was then seventeen, he forty). She eventually became his de facto wife and, although blond and blue-eyed, was secretly checked for Jewish ancestry on Hitler’s orders. (She proved to be “Aryan.”)¹⁷ Hitler ate no meat, smoked no cigarettes, and rarely consumed alcohol, but he enjoyed cakes and lumping sugar into his tea (he suffered from dental problems). He exercised in order to hold his right arm upward for long stretches and, despising perspiration, took multiple baths each day. He had insomnia, eczema on his legs and feet (making it uncomfortable to wear boots), and gastric pains. A bout of stomach cramps would set him ranting about death from cancer. His mother had died at age forty-seven, and he told confidants he was fated to die young as well. (In May 1938, following the Anschluss, he dictated a private will.)¹⁸ He ingested pills, prescribed by his quack doctor, but suspected that kitchen staff aimed to assassinate him (the pots were guarded). He carried a pistol, even as he was surrounded by commandos. He was given to uncontrolled farting.

Hitler can look like a crude and banal figure who inexplicably took over a highly industrialized, culturally advanced, politically sophisticated country, but he had proved to be an astute student of German mass sentiment. He attracted followers partly with his consummate acting skills. He cultivated an image of simplicity and humility, did not carry a wallet, and favored military uniforms, while forgoing any medals other than his Iron Cross First Class and Golden Party Emblem. He possessed a phenomenal memory. He also evinced a talent for mimicking people and situations. “In order to depict the barrage of the first day at the Battle of the Somme more vividly,” Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl would recall, “he used a large repertoire of the firing, descent, and impact noises made by French, English, and German howitzers and mortars, the general impression of which he would vividly augment by imitating the hammering tack-tack of the machine guns.”¹⁹

The Führer had commissioned an imposing new chancellor’s complex in Berlin, dismissing the existing one as “fit for a soap company.” The monumental edifice, with 400 rooms, readied in less than a year, was fronted by square columns and seventeen-foot-high double doors, which were flanked by gilded bronze and stone eagles clutching swastikas in their talons. The building’s 480-foot-long upper-floor Marble Gallery, which led to a grand hall for receptions, was twice the length of the Versailles Hall of Mirrors. “On the long walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Hitler boasted to his architect, Albert Speer, “they’ll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!” Hitler, meanwhile, lived in the old “soap” building, using its modest study as his main working office. But off the new Chancellery’s Marble Gallery stood the Führer’s vast “study,” for the audiences he granted, with portraits of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Wisdom above the four doors. Hitler’s lengthy afternoon meals at the Chancellery (beginning at 2:00 or 3:00) involved up to fifty people; they merely had to telephone the adjutant to say they’d be coming—without being summoned. These were not Germany’s military brass or industrialists, but the inner court of Reichsleiters and Gauleiters and old party comrades, often from Munich. Evening suppers were more intimate still, comprising six to eight persons—Hitler’s doctor, photographer, pilot, radioman, private secretary (Martin Bormann)—where, according to Speer, “usually Hitler would tell stories about his life.”²⁰

Frequently, though, Hitler was absent from Berlin, seeking refuge at his Bavarian alpine retreat, the Berghof, where he relished holding forth on race and global conquest in table talks. Like Stalin, Hitler fretted about being alone. (“Hitler needs to have people around him,” Goebbels had observed early on. “Otherwise he broods too much.”)²¹ But unlike Stalin, the Führer was unwilling or incapable of submitting to routine. Nazi Germany was a scrum of divergent interests—party, army, bureaucratic fiefdoms, private industry—with a proliferation of ad hoc agencies and plenipotentiaries.²² Hitler refused to chair committees or agencies, and often went lengthy periods without summoning officials.²³ After February 5, 1938, the infrequent cabinet meetings had ceased altogether. Hitler’s diligence went into preparing the texts for his speeches, which he rewrote with fountain pen after dictating a first draft, and into military affairs. But he awoke late and appeared at work well after noon, glancing through clippings assembled by the Reich press chief, then repairing to “breakfast” and avoiding his own officials. (“I asked myself often: when did he really work?” recalled Speer.)²⁴ His desk was empty, and he almost never worked at it. (“For him, desks were mere pieces of decoration,” the head of the Hitler Youth recalled.) Reports went unread. “He disliked reading files,” recalled Fritz Wiedemann, who in the 1930s served as Hitler’s adjutant. “I got decisions out of him, even on very important matters, without his ever asking me for the relevant papers. He took the view that many things sorted themselves out if they were left alone.”²⁵

Stalin’s regime, too, was beset by improvisation, but the despot devoured documents and, even when away from Moscow down south, used the telephone, telegraph, and field couriers assiduously.²⁶ One comes away flabbergasted not by learning what went on without Stalin’s involvement, but by the quantity of information he managed to command and the number of spheres in which he intervened. He had terminated the increasingly infrequent formal meetings of the politburo, but he was as obsessively hands-on as Hitler was sometimes disengaged. Stalin read and affixed written directives; Hitler conducted state affairs mostly by talking, and his interlocutors—sometimes an oddly assembled bunch—would piece together decisions from the ramblings or try to get him to confirm them later. For all that, no small degree of coordination took place through the Chancellery and the Führer conferences. He hesitated to intervene in bureaucratic struggles to avoid being caught up in unpopular decisions and festering resentments.²⁷ On the issues of greatest importance to Hitler, from foreign affairs to the Jewish question, he encouraged the involvement of multiple agencies. He would sometimes set the players against one another, in “a carefully balanced system of mutual enmity,” as Speer would note. Oscillating between freneticism and lethargy, Hitler tended to postpone the most difficult decisions, biting his fingernails while others waited and waited. “Sometimes,” one secretary recalled, “he would stop and stare silently at Lenbach’s portrait of Bismarck, lost in thought and collecting himself before he started to wander around again.”²⁸

Stalin sometimes took the wives of his top officials hostage and arrested and executed their aides; Hitler allowed pre-1933 comrades—Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, a few others—to build power centers within the state.²⁹ Hitler showed awareness of the need to indulge the preferences of elites and powerful bodies. Supposedly, his style of rule incited minions to forge ahead with initiatives in the hope of anticipating his wishes and earning favor, in what has been called “working toward the Führer,” but that was possible only in certain spheres, and when Hitler became cognizant of underlings’ efforts to take such initiatives, he often intervened to stop them.³⁰ Stalin’s micromanagement and flashes of anger largely precluded proactive risk taking in the first place. Local officials almost always awaited explicit instructions, which, however, often turned out to be impossible to fulfill, so they began a process not of “working toward the vozhd,” but cat and mouse (circumventions, prevarications, concealment), which drove Stalin’s desire to clamp down further. The Soviet political machine often suffered paralysis not from Hitler-style ostensible aloofness but from extreme centralization and dependency on a single person who just could not do everything. In the end, whether at the Little Corner or the Near or Sochi dacha, the Chancellery or the Berghof mountain hideaway, everything revolved around the Person. Every functionary’s dream was to serve as Hitler’s or Stalin’s personal representative—the authority for a designated sphere of activity.

BERIA’S TAKEOVER

Yezhov could have schemed to flee abroad, dealing a blow to the Soviet state and paying Stalin back for mistreatment, but instead he retreated to his dacha. On November 19, 1938, the “politburo” summoned the NKVD commissar to the Little Corner, where, from 11:10 p.m. until 4:20 a.m., they discussed a denunciation of him that Beria had orchestrated from a provincial NKVD boss (Viktor Zhuravlyov).³¹ Yezhov wrote a letter to Stalin, which he likely ended up not sending, saying that “the past two years of tense, highly strung work have acutely strained my whole nervous system.”³² He was accused of having permitted foreign spies to capture Soviet espionage. On November 23, Yezhov was again in Stalin’s office, where he had logged nearly 900 hours over the previous two years, but these three and a half would be his last: Stalin edited Yezhov’s resignation.³³ On November 25, the despot sent a telegram to all regional party secretaries referring to Zhuravlyov’s denunciation of NKVD errors and noting that “the Central Committee had granted Yezhov’s request to resign.”³⁴ Pravda printed a delayed announcement, on its back page (December 8). Executing the NKVD chief could throw into doubt the mass arrests and executions. For now, Stalin retained Yezhov as a Central Committee secretary, chairman of the party Control Commission, and water transport commissar.

Beria, even as deputy NKVD chief, had arrested 332 NKVD leadership personnel between September and December 1938, including 140 in the central apparatus and 18 of the NKVD commissars in Union and autonomous republics. NKVD operatives still on the job became disoriented.³⁵ So did military men. “Now, if you notice or unmask an enemy, there’s no one to inform about it, because the higher the boss, the more likely he’s an enemy of the people,” one Red Army political worker complained. “You have to ask: Who can you believe, and to whom do you report?” Another asked who the enemy was: the person who got arrested or the person who did the arresting?³⁶ At the same time, hopeful letters poured in as people logically assumed that their cases—which had been falsified—would be overturned. At the defense commissariat alone, nearly 2,000 such letters were being received every day.

As NKVD chief, Beria insinuated himself deeply into the regime. Initially, he had brought just a handful of his gang to Moscow, including Vsevolod Merkulov, a graduate of St. Petersburg University and the son of an aristocrat tsarist officer, and son-in-law of a tsarist general (who had served as war minister in the Provisional Government). Merkulov was the only ethnic Russian among Beria’s Caucasus subordinates, and Beria named him first deputy in Moscow. Another was Bogdan Kobulov (b. 1904), a Tbilisi Armenian who had been expelled from the Communist Youth League and arrested for rape in 1921, but became an informant for, and then an operative in, the secret police; Kobulov became deputy chief of the investigation department. But when annihilation of Yezhovites opened up expansive vistas for Beria’s people, he summoned many others from the Caucasus: Lavrenti Janjava, known as Tsanava (b. 1900), who had been expelled from the party in 1922 for abducting a bride (he was reinstated the next year) and became NKVD chief in Belorussia; Goglidze (b. 1901), who would be given the Leningrad NKVD; Solomon Milstein (b. 1898), descended from a wealthy trading family of Vilnius Jews (most of whom had fled abroad after the revolution), who began as deputy head of investigation but would get the new NKVD rail transport department; and Vladimir Dekanozov (b. 1898), who would get a series of high posts.³⁷

Georgians in the NKVD in Moscow would jump from 3.13 percent (January 1938)—already nearly double their weight in the overall population—to 7.84 percent (July 1939).³⁸ Georgians aside, Beria’s NKVD saw a dramatic reduction in minorities, especially Jews, and promotion of ethnic Russians.³⁹ Regime officials who had once looked to Yezhov as someone who would clean up the antiparty actions and mistakes of his predecessor viewed Beria as someone who would do the same. Releases of some people arrested under Yezhov reinforced such illusions. Stalin got credit for correcting his mistaken trust in Yezhov, and for a new, vigorous, loyal top official.⁴⁰ Beria’s power came to exist on a completely different plane from Yezhov’s or Yagoda’s. Stalin, however, made sure to have non-Beriaites inserted into key positions (Sergei Kruglov, who had been on Malenkov’s list of possible NKVD first deputy chiefs, got the critical post of head of NKVD personnel).⁴¹ Stalin also directed Beria to turn in the documents regarding his role in the Musavat; Beria had Merkulov collect and deliver them.⁴²

BUCK-PASSING

Stalin had shattered his own remarkable spy network: of the 450 secret police officials stationed abroad, at least 275 had been arrested by his regime.⁴³ In January 1939, the despot was informed that “the USSR NKVD does not have a single spy coordinator [rezident] abroad and not one proven agent. The work of the NKVD foreign department practically is destroyed and in essence needs to be organized from scratch.”⁴⁴ Similarly, the acting chief of the key western department of the separate agency for military intelligence reported that “the Red Army is essentially without an intelligence arm. The agent networks, which are the basis of intelligence, have almost all been liquidated.”⁴⁵ In truth, recruited foreign agents and underground informants were still out there, but, with a few key exceptions, such as the German embassies in Warsaw and Tokyo, they lacked handlers to receive information. Beria would work to reconstitute espionage.

Even with good espionage, Hitler remained difficult to gauge: how far would he actually go? How far could he really go? He had started from tremendous relative weakness. Germany had lost a war, it lacked an army, navy, air force, or financial prowess, and Hitler’s actions were necessarily full of zigs and zags, opportunistic, hard to read. He decried unfair treatment of his country, made “concessions,” talked ceaselessly of nonaggression pacts and peace. His vision was vague enough to allow people to see it as just an overheated version of long-standing German nationalism.⁴⁶ Indeed, the Nazis’ ultimate goals—eradicating a supposed global Jewish conspiracy; complete German racial dominance of Europe—seemed so improbable that even some minions in the know could scarcely believe Hitler actually meant them in full.⁴⁷ The Munich-born Konrad Heiden had published, in exile, the first serous biography of Hitler, in two volumes in 1936–37, arguing that Germany’s raw materials and food base would be insufficient for taking on the European continent, especially because any new conflict, like the previous one, would be long. Heiden also predicted that Hitler’s rearmament would provoke counter-rearmament and alliances against Germany.⁴⁸ But by early 1939, no such blocking coalition had formed.

For Stalin, rapprochement with the Western imperialists had always been a dangerous game full of illusions: the capitalists could never be trusted because they could never permanently accept the existence of Soviet power. Like Lenin, he held in contempt any promises the imperialists might make. Just as Poland’s Piłsudski had once used the Soviet Union’s courtship to obtain a nonaggression declaration with the supposedly anti-Polish Nazi regime, the British would play the same game, using negotiations with Stalin to obtain a deal with Hitler. If Britain and Germany had joined forces before 1914, they could have destroyed Russia as a world power.⁴⁹ Preventing just such a mésalliance between London and Berlin had become Stalin’s fixation. He had received a continuous flow of intelligence about the relentless British efforts to cozy up to Germany and divert it in the direction of the USSR almost from the moment of Hitler’s accession to power.⁵⁰ British officials harbored the exact suspicion in reverse, perceiving Stalin’s interest in negotiations with them as a ploy to win his own deal with Hitler while “stealthily and cunningly pulling all the strings behind the scenes to get us involved in war with Germany,” as Chamberlain had privately remarked to one of his sisters), when the real quarrel, to British thinking, was between Nazism and Communism.⁵¹

Many members of the British establishment detested the Bolsheviks as incubators of colonial revolutionaries who threatened the British empire, and they viewed Russia as semibarbarous, run by people of the wrong sort. In the early 1930s, Reader Bullard, British consul general in the Soviet Union, described Litvinov—who had been born Meir Henoch Mojszewicz Wallach-Finkelstein, in 1876, to a well-off banking family in Białystok—as a “Warsaw Jew” and “shameless liar.”⁵² Beyond well-grounded suspicions of Russia and ingrained anti-Communism flavored by anti-Semitism, an alliance with the Soviet Union effectively constituted an admission that war could not be avoided.⁵³ Most ordinary Brits, in what was a democracy, were of a mind that the Great War slaughterhouse had claimed nearly 1 million subjects for naught. The war had increased the national debt tenfold in four years.⁵⁴ Most British conservatives—not just those in the Tory government—to a degree shared Chamberlain’s preferred policy of negotiation with Hitler as a way of exerting influence over him.⁵⁵ A majority of the opposition Labour party remained pacifist throughout Nazi aggrandizement, opposing rearmament.⁵⁶ “Lose or win,” one influential British journalist had observed, catching the general view, “a world war would be for England the end of everything.”⁵⁷

Britain felt overextended already, defending a global empire. The Scramble for Africa had never fully subsided, while in India, Palestine, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere, insurgencies drained resources and men. The Depression and misguided fiscal and monetary tightening had undercut confidence as well: real output in 1938 was no better than it had been in 1918 (annual GDP growth averaged 0.5 percent). Various worst-case scenarios in British intelligence reports—which for a long time had been underplaying Nazi Germany’s capabilities but now grossly overestimated them—enhanced the appeal of negotiation. So did underestimation of the Red Army. On top of everything, Eastern Europe and even the continent as a whole were just not a British priority, notwithstanding the Versailles Treaty.⁵⁸ Chamberlain was, by conviction, fiscally conservative. He abjured investing in a continental expeditionary force, which to his mind would only embolden France to take risks against Germany and bankrupt the British treasury.⁵⁹ Still, he was investing in the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy. If all else failed and Hitler tried to overrun Western Europe—which seemed unlikely, given the existence of the French land army—the British home isles, Chamberlain reasoned, could be defended.⁶⁰

Chamberlain not only convinced himself that he could accede to grievances of Nazi Germany without infringing core British interests, but also the grievances of fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, and, via bilateral agreements, diminish these powers’ incentives for trilateral cooperation as well.⁶¹ His combination of diplomacy (engagement, conciliation) and a measure of deterrence (the threat of a massive bombing campaign)—what was known as appeasement (essentially to make peace)—occupied a venerable place in British policy, dating back to the nineteenth century. It offered a way of settling international quarrels by appealing to the other side’s reasonableness and forging compromises, rather than opting for costly war.⁶² Why stumble down the path of turning the latest equivalent of a Balkan squabble into a world war? A repeat threatened equally bloody futility, at a minimum, and potentially far worse: Communist subversion of the continent in the ruins.⁶³

Germany’s other great-power antagonist, France, was also the only other large democracy left in Europe. Its geopolitical position was unenviable. France had triumphed in the Great War, but the conflict had been fought to immense devastation on its soil, and, in the aftermath, it lacked the wherewithal to hold down a rising Germany. The United States had tipped the balance in the war and could have provided the security guarantees that would have allowed France, in the 1920s, to make the kinds of concessions to Germany that Britain advocated and stability required, but the Americans had had no desire to do so.⁶⁴ Instead, French postwar security had come to rest on three shakier pillars: a military occupation of Germany’s Rhineland, military superiority over a disarmed Germany, and alliances with the newly independent small states on the eastern side of Germany. The first two had vanished. As for the third, Eastern Europe roiled with homegrown animosities and irredentism that undermined reliable security partnerships. France’s alliance system with Poland and Czechoslovakia had hollowed out even before Hitler had put it to the test.⁶⁵ And so, behind the defenses of the Maginot Line (named for a defense minister who had launched its construction), France was thrown back onto its familiar options: alliance with the British or alliance with the Russians. Before the Munich Pact, the Tory government had exhibited ruthless caution toward entanglement with France, and after Munich it took only baby steps, initiating staff talks with France.⁶⁶

Munich had almost pushed Stalin in the opposite direction: he contemplated denouncing the Franco-Soviet pact before reaffirming it.⁶⁷ But Stalin’s on-and-off efforts to convert the 1935 Franco-Soviet mutual assistance treaty into a real military alliance against German power—following in the footsteps of Nicholas II—had produced only desultory military talks.⁶⁸ Britain staunchly opposed a Franco-Soviet military convention, and Paris would not break from London, even after the Munich debacle, and even after the French ambassador’s warnings out of Moscow that the Soviet Union was not a colossus with feet of clay and could cozy up to Berlin.⁶⁹ The French general staff continued to dismiss the Red Army’s value in a European war and to underscore the USSR’s lack of common borders with Germany and the fact that Poland and Romania remained disinclined to grant transit routes.⁷⁰ Stalin’s executions of three of his five marshals amid public accusations that they and others had given away battle plans and other secrets to the Nazis cast new doubt on the Red Army as a possible partner.⁷¹ But even before the full denouement of the grisly executions, the French had backed away from the military talks.⁷² For Prime Minister Daladier—the man who had granted Trotsky asylum in France back in 1933—another pan-European war would mean the “utter destruction of European civilization,” opening a vacuum for “Cossack and Mongol hordes.”⁷³

So that was it: Germany foaming at the mouth with anti-Communism and anti-Slav racism, and now armed to the teeth; Britain cautious and aloof in the face of another continental war; and France even more exposed than Britain, yet deferring to London, and wary of its nominal ally, the USSR. Stalin was devastating his own country with mass murders and bald-faced mendacities, but the despot faced a genuine security impasse: German aggression and buck-passing by great powers—himself included.

MUSIC AND TORTURE

Secret police, in their smartest dress uniforms, lined the walls of the cavernous main hall and all the entrances of the Grand Kremlin Palace for the 1939 New Year’s banquet. Soviet officials did not bring their wives unless the latter, too, held official positions, such as Molotov’s Zhemchuzhina (fishing industry commissar). But much of the beau monde was intermarried: the actor Ivan Moskvin attended with his wife, Alla Tarasova, a star of the same theater; the filmmaker Alexandrov with his wife, the singer-starlet Lyubov Orlova; the dancer Igor Moiseyev with his common-law wife, the Bolshoi prima ballerina Nina Podgoretskaya. But Stalin himself could come off as the movie star: the mischievous grin, the lifted head, the pauses, nods, glances. During the toasts, when he called out Soviet triumphs and heroes, people clinked glasses, tapped knives and forks, and shouted his name. By the time the USSR State Jazz Band entered the anteroom of the Andreyev Hall, it was after 2:00 a.m. A Chekist, as the police liked to be called, summoned them to the stage following the Alexandrov Red Army Ensemble—240 singers and dancers—and Moiseyev’s State Folk Dance Ensemble.

“We walked into the dimly lit, deserted Andreyev Hall, which is used by the Supreme Soviet for its meetings,” recalled Juri Jelagin. “The hall was lined with rows of armchairs like a theater auditorium, or perhaps more like a university auditorium, because each chair was equipped with a small writing desk and a radio headset.” They reached a door, behind which was a stage. “The bright lights blinded us. We were in the ornate, white [St. George’s] Hall of the Kremlin. . . . The large tables were crowded with people, and a regular feast was in progress.” In front of the stage, at a distance from the other tables, was the Presidium table, the seats facing the hall, backs to the performers. When the jazz musicians appeared on the stage, Stalin and his entourage turned and applauded. “Stalin was wearing a khaki tunic without any ribbons or decorations. He smiled at us and nodded encouragement. In front of him stood a half-empty glass of brandy.” The jazzmen, with their female vocalist, Nina Donskaya, performed “Jewish Rhapsody,” by Svyatoslav Knushevitsky, perhaps Moscow’s top cellist. (He was married to Natalya Spiller, the Bolshoi soprano much admired by Stalin.) For whatever reason, according to Jelagin, Stalin paid no attention to Donskaya. “He turned away and began to eat.”

The mass murderer was able to differentiate, within his conventional tastes, a sublime performance from a merely good one. He loved opera, and selections were invariably included from the prerevolutionary repertoire (Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Tchaikovsky) and the better-known Western classics (Carmen, Faust, and Aida). But his greatest passion was for Russian, Ukrainian, and Georgian folk songs.⁷⁴ After the jazz band had concluded its six approved numbers—among them Tchaikovsky’s “Sentimental Waltz” and Stalin’s sentimental favorite, “Suliko”—the Presidium table, according to Jelagin, “applauded long and vigorously.” Only now, after exiting and storing their instruments, were the musicians invited to dine—in a separate hall for performers, one floor below, loaded with “caviar, hams, salads, fish, fresh vegetables [in winter], decanters of vodka, red and white wine, and fine Armenian brandy. There were about four hundred of us, but the tables could seat at least a thousand.” Here, the Chekist servers wore their police uniforms. The musicians were addressed by the latest chairman of the committee on artistic affairs, Alexei Nazarov (b. 1905), who toasted Stalin as well as some of the most famous performers, such as the singer Ivan Kozlovsky.⁷⁵

Kozlovsky (b. 1900), the virtuoso soloist at the Bolshoi (since 1926), would receive the Order of Lenin in 1939. (The next year, Stalin would make him a USSR People’s Artist.) He possessed a transparent, even voice, with a beautiful and gentle timbre in the upper register, which was not particularly powerful yet filled the largest spaces. He hailed from a Ukrainian village and had a brother who had emigrated at the end of the civil war and ended up in the United States, which alone would have been enough to doom the tenor. Zealous Chekists went to Kozlovsky’s native village to dig up dirt, but when Poskryobyshev handed Stalin thick files of compromising material, the despot was said to have observed, “Fine, we’ll imprison comrade Kozlovsky—and who’ll sing, you?”⁷⁶ Apocryphal or not, the despot was known to keep track of the schedule for the Bolshoi and to terminate meetings in the Little Corner to catch an aria sung by Kozlovsky, Maxim Mikhailov (a bass), or Mark Reizen (also a bass), the lyrical tenor Sergei Lemeshev, the lyrical sopranos Spiller and Yelena Kruglikova, or the mezzo-soprano Vera Davydova.⁷⁷ At the New Year’s gala, Kozlovsky, who acquired the reputation of being an unbearable person, sang “La Donna è Mobile,” from Rigoletto, at Stalin’s request.⁷⁸

Two days later, Stalin informed USSR procurator general Vyshinsky that he wanted a public trial of those arrested in the NKVD.⁷⁹ “The enemies of the people who penetrated the organs of the NKVD,” the commission on the secret police internally reported to Stalin—as if the secret police rampage had somehow occurred without his directives—“consciously distorted the punitive policy of Soviet power, conducting a mass of baseless arrests of people guilty of nothing, and at the same time protecting the activities of enemies of the people. . . . They urged that prisoners offer testimony about their supposed espionage activity for foreign intelligence, explaining that such invented testimony was necessary for the party and the government in order to discredit foreign states.” The despot circulated the report to the inner circle: they needed to know how to interpret the terror, as the result of the infiltration of “spies in literally every [NKVD] department.”⁸⁰ But for whatever reason, a public trial of the NKVD never took place. “I am very busy with work,” Stalin wrote (January 6, 1939) to Afinogenov, the reprieved writer, who had sent a copy of his latest play to read. “I beg forgiveness.”⁸¹

Beria issued a secret directive calling for NKVD branches to cease recruiting informants for surveillance of party and factory bosses, and to destroy, in their presence, the files compiled against them.⁸² Provincial party bosses were even invited to scrutinize the dossiers of all NKVD personnel in their domains.⁸³ But Stalin had some second thoughts. “The Central Committee has learned,” he wrote in a telegram to all locales (January 10, 1939), “that the secretaries of provinces and territories, checking on the work of the local NKVD, have charged them with using physical means of interrogation against those arrested as if it were a crime.” He informed them that the “physical methods” had been approved by “the Central Committee” and agreed to by “the Communist parties of all the republics” (whose leaders had almost all been shot as foreign agents and wreckers). “It is known that all bourgeois intelligence services apply physical coercion with regard to representatives of the socialist proletariat, and in the ugliest forms,” he stressed. “One might ask why the socialist intelligence service must be more humane with regard to inveterate agents of the bourgeoisie.”⁸⁴

COMPLICATING FACTORS

Stalin exacerbated but did not invent the hostility of his Eastern European neighbors. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland preferred neutrality but, if forced to choose, would opt for Berlin over Moscow.⁸⁵ Romania was openly pro-German. Poland, a nasty regime sandwiched directly between two nastier ones, sought a middle way. Some members of Polish ruling circles latched on to the idea of throwing in their lot with Hitler to deflect him farther eastward, even at the high cost of territorial concessions, and a few high-placed Poles fantasized about a joint Polish-Nazi attack on the USSR, an aggression in which they imagined Poland could wrest Ukraine from the Soviets, a delusion that Nazi officials cynically encouraged.⁸⁶ But Polish foreign minister Beck, who spoke good German, had met several times with Hitler, trying to reach an accommodation without sacrificing Poland’s independence. In early 1939, Hitler summoned him to Berlin for one last effort to bully Poland into joining the Anti-Comintern Pact, which would have required that Poland allow the Wehrmacht to march across its territory and “return” to Germany the Free City of Danzig and the surrounding Polish Corridor (a chunk of territory that had belonged to Frederick the Great’s East Prussia but, thanks to the Versailles Treaty, now belonged to Poland and lay between German East Prussia and the rest of Germany). Poland would have become economically dependent on (nonexistent) Nazi goodwill.⁸⁷

Soviet intelligence, thanks to its penetration of the German embassy in Poland, reported (February 10, 1939) that Hitler had allegedly told Beck there was no need to seize Ukraine, for “the Soviet Union in two to three years would perish of its own internal contradictions and clear the path for Germany and Poland to reach a friendly resolution of the Ukrainian question.” The Soviet report further observed that Hitler had bent over backward to ingratiate himself, which German diplomatic personnel in Poland interpreted as merely tactical, and that “Beck, it seems, had been left unsatisfied by the conversation and as before thinks the fundamental aim of German expansion remains the East, and in this connection Hitler does not plan on making any concessions to Poland.”⁸⁸

Nonetheless, Soviet military intelligence reported to Moscow that the German ambassador in Warsaw, Hans-Adolf von Moltke, had boasted to a German journalist on February 13 that “the situation is utterly clear. We know that in the event of a German-Soviet conflict, Poland would take our side.”⁸⁹ The Western powers, too, suspected illiberal Poland of being pro-German and territorially revisionist. But Beck had refused to make any firm commitments regarding Hitler’s entreaties. He knew Western support for Poland was fragile—as did everyone, after Munich—and he feared a Western diktat over Danzig and the Corridor. But he nonetheless pinned Poland’s security hopes on Britain and France. The alternative, a security alliance with the Soviet Union, was anathema. The Soviets returned the enmity, and had lacked even an ambassador in Warsaw since November 1937 (through June 1939).

Poland’s best security guarantee was probably a full-scale war by Japan against the Soviet Union, and Polish military intelligence worked extremely closely with its Japanese counterpart, essentially conducting an extended tutorial on their common adversary. Japanese Manchukuo forces continued to engage Soviet and Mongolian troops in border clashes. The Soviet spy Sorge (codenamed “Ramsay”) relayed to Moscow (January 23, 1939) an analysis of infighting among three factions in Japan. One demanded a ramping up of the all-out war with China; a second, the Kwantung Army, demanded a peace settlement with China to shift to all-out war with the Soviet Union; a third, in a variant on the second, urged winding down operations in central and south China and holding on to only northern China and Manchuria, to use as a base of operations for attacking the USSR. Sorge included the prime and war ministers in the third group and added that the only way for Japan to corral domestic radicalism was to turn the radicals’ attention toward the USSR.⁹⁰

Adding to the pressure on Moscow, anti-Soviet émigrés in Harbin, China, were using radio to debunk Soviet propaganda in broadcasts into eastern Soviet territories. Radio stations from German territory were also transmitting in Russian to the westernmost parts of the Soviet Union, whose equipment was not powerful enough to jam these foreign signals.⁹¹