Stalin

Through it all, Hitler remained Stalin’s most complicating factor. “One thing I should like to say on this day which may be memorable for others as well as for us Germans: In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it,” Hitler raved, deep into a speech on January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of his becoming chancellor. “Above all the Jewish people only laughed at my prophecies. I believe that such gales of laughter now stick in the throats of Jewry in Germany. ” He continued: “Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”⁹² This revealing resentment-cum-threat was partly a belated response to Roosevelt and U.S. criticisms of the anti-Jewish pogrom Kristallnacht, as well as to bogged-down negotiations over restrictions for Jewish immigrants from Germany and Austria, and an equation of the United States with “the headquarters of world Jewry.”⁹³ The Reichstag erupted in acclamation.

Hitler had achieved more than anyone—perhaps even he himself—had imagined, and he wielded his increasing power and confidence to raise the stakes. On February 13, 1939, he placed a laurel on the grave of Otto von Bismarck, and the next day he presided over the launching of the Bismarck, Germany’s grandest new battleship. “As Führer of the German people and Chancellor of the Reich,” he told the assembled crowd, “I can give this ship no finer name.”⁹⁴ Of course, Bismarck, unifier of Germany, had proceeded from a sense of limits and a need for balance, not unlimited expansion, and had refrained from swallowing the Habsburg empire, while Hitler had already annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. At the same time, the prohibitive costs of Hitler’s ongoing rearmament and military actions, as well as anxiety over raw material supply, were mounting. The national debt had tripled since his takeover.⁹⁵ Hitler ordered a reduction in the Wehrmacht budget for the first quarter of 1939. But the army, knowing the Führer, ignored the limit. Hitler did not make strategic decisions on the basis of economic considerations.⁹⁶ Still, more affordable supplies of raw materials for the war machine had to be found.⁹⁷ Germany had submitted to Moscow a request for formal trade talks, and Mikoyan handed the German ambassador two new shopping lists for industrial goods in February 1939.⁹⁸ The USSR and the Capitalist Encirclement, a book published that same month, asserted that the “ruling class” in Britain and France desired not an alliance with the USSR against “fascism,” but a war between the Soviet Union and Germany.⁹⁹

PURSUING REWARDS

Soviet prisons now held an estimated 350,000 inmates, while Gulag labor camps and colonies held 1.665 million. But the recorded proportion of prisoners who did not work in the period 1937–39 ranged from 16.6 percent to 27.1 percent. The camp complexes had accumulated ill, invalid, and idle “laborers.”¹⁰⁰ The slave labor productivity exception had always been the gold-mining trust in the Kolyma River region of the far northeast. Stalin sent a telegram (January 24, 1939) praising Karp Pavlov, Dalstroi’s head: “Let us reward all, starting with Pavlov, without embarrassment or false modesty.” A two-decade veteran of the secret police, with service from Crimea to Krasnoyarsk, Pavlov had arrived two years before to replace the long-serving head of Dalstroi, who was executed as the head of a counterrevolutionary spy-diversionist Trotskyist organization.¹⁰¹ On February 2, 1939, Pavlov received the Order of Lenin. That winter, thousands of gold diggers would again perish.

New influxes would double the Dalstroi population to 160,000 by the end of the year. (Soon Pavlov would be promoted to chief of mining and metallurgy for the entire Gulag.)¹⁰² Dalstroi had acquired enough performers to form a local symphony and a musical comedy troupe, both of which entertained the bosses in the local “capital” of Magadan, a jumble of log cabins and transit prisons known as the Athens of Okhotsk.¹⁰³ Magadan could claim a higher concentration not just of musicians and actors, but of doctors, scholars, poets, novelists, photographers, and painters, than any urban center east of the Urals, and many to the west, but the terror had killed off the trust’s technical specialists and lowered productivity.¹⁰⁴ Magadan officials begged to see Union-wide arrest lists so they could scour them for geologists, hydrologists, and other desperately needed “wreckers” and “Trotskyites.”

Beria’s NKVD discovered a self-styled “fascist organization” in Moscow, whose handful of members had evidently fashioned a flag, put up seventy posters on the eve of Red Army Day (February 23), drew some graffiti, and wrote poems. They seem to have discussed Nazism, anti-Semitism, and Russian nationalism. At least one turned informant, leading to four arrests. Three of the members turned out to have been nineteen when they joined the group; the organizer was seventeen. The NKVD produced five volumes on the case.¹⁰⁵

ABSENT FATHER

Stalin received a troubling report in February 1939 from his son Vasily’s military aviation school. Now almost eighteen, he had become a candidate member of the party, but not long before, Stalin had written to one of Vasily’s teachers at his previous school that he was “a spoiled youth of middling capabilities, a wild beast (like the Scythians), not always truthful, loves to blackmail weak ‘bosses,’ not infrequently impudent, with a weak—more accurately—unorganized will. . . . He was spoiled by sundry ‘godfathers’ and ‘godmothers,’ who reinforced the circumstance that he is ‘Stalin’s son.’”¹⁰⁶ With Vasily’s transfer to the military school in Crimea, Beria had reported to Stalin that the school’s bosses had met him with pomp at the train station. Stalin had ordered that Vasily be moved to a regular barracks.¹⁰⁷ The latest report, cleverly worded, was framed in praise: “Politically literate. Dedicated to the cause of the party of Lenin-Stalin and our motherland. Actively interested and well versed in questions of the international and domestic situation.” But it also noted that Vasily was given to cramming, occasionally reported unshaven for duty, and “reacts badly to snafus in flight.”¹⁰⁸ His friends found him generous—and a target. “Despite a nondescript appearance (small stature, scrawny, redheaded, chalky),” one acquaintance recalled of him that “all kinds of sycophants and especially girls clung to him like flies to honey.”¹⁰⁹

Stalin continued to shower tenderness on his daughter, Svetlana—when he saw her. Now thirteen and without her brother or longtime housekeeper, Karolina Til, she continued to live in the Kremlin apartment, where her father appeared only for late-evening “lunches.” The dining room “had a large, carved sideboard with my mother’s cups on it and a table with the latest newspapers and magazines,” she recalled. “Above it was a large portrait of my mother, a blown-up print of one of the photographs taken at our house.” After the meal, Stalin would go back upstairs to the office or head out to the Near Dacha for the night. Svetlana spent summers partly at the old Zubalovo dacha, partly either in Sochi or Mukhalatka, Crimea. “Sometimes after school was out in the summer, he’d take me to Kuntsevo for three days or so,” she would recall of the Near Dacha. “He enjoyed having me around. But it didn’t work out, because it was impossible for anybody to fit in with his way of life. He’d have his first meal at two or three in the afternoon and lunch at eight in the evening. Then he’d sit up late at the table. . . . It was too much for me.” They did go for walks in the Kuntsevo woods, and, thanks to her nurse’s lessons, Svetlana would ace her father’s oral quizzes on the names of flowers, grasses, and singing birds. But soon he would have to return to his paperwork. “At that point he didn’t need me anymore,” Svetlana continued. “I’d get restless and bored and long to leave as quickly as possible for Zubalovo, where I could take one of my friends with me and there were so many things I enjoyed. Meantime, my father thought it was being with him that bored me, and that hurt his feelings.” Svetlana’s nanny would advise her to ask forgiveness, and he would talk to her again. “I heard him mutter angrily, ‘She went away! Imagine leaving her old father like that! Says she’s bored!’ But he was kissing me and had already forgiven me, for without me he had been lonelier than ever.”¹¹⁰

18TH PARTY CONGRESS

Great powers, when menaced by a rising or aggressive power, usually build up their militaries and seek strategic alliances, but leadership in the international arena has always been costly, and each power had drawn the lesson from the Great War experience that defense trumped offense, such that any new war could not be won easily. The benefits of getting someone else to do the fighting appeared to be very high, while the risks of that other side succumbing quickly appeared to be low.¹¹¹ And so, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union were each keen to afford the others the “honor” of standing up to Germany. Stalin worried about a linkup of the others behind his back (“a united imperialist front against the USSR”). His energetic feelers for political rapprochement with Germany and, less energetically, for a binding military dimension to his mutual assistance pact with France had failed to make headway. Facing two blind alleys—Paris/London and Berlin—he opened the 18th Party Congress on March 10, in the combined Andreyev-Alexander hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace.

Stalin had not been compelled to convoke a congress. This was the first since the January 1934 “Congress of Victors,” and thus the first to take place in the wake of his terror (a “congress of survivors,” as it were). Back when admission to the party had been closed, in January 1933, membership had stood at 2.2 million, and although it had been reopened in November 1936, the ranks were still thinner by 700,000.¹¹² The congress was attended by 1,569 delegates with voting rights and another 466 without, who had been “elected” (without alternatives) in primary party organizations. Once in Moscow, as per custom, they sat with their province or republic delegations for formal photographs with Stalin and others in his inner circle. Their local newspapers, in turn, featured their presence at the congress. Factories and collective farms had sent greetings to Stalin and affirmations of the congress agenda. All this was captured in newsreels.¹¹³ Identification of congress delegates by social origin (worker, peasant, white collar) ceased—the class question having supposedly been resolved—but markers for occupation, age, and education remained. Only 63 voting delegates worked in agriculture, 230 in industry, and 110 in transport. Military and NKVD made up the second-largest group, at 283 (18 percent), while the largest comprised apparatchiks—those for whom their sole occupation was party work—with 659 voting delegates (42 percent). Another 162 (10 percent) served as functionaries in trade unions and soviets. Nearly half the delegates were thirty-five years of age or under; four fifths were no older than forty. Just under half (46 percent) had not graduated from high school.¹¹⁴

Krupskaya missed the congress, having died in agony on February 27, 1939, one day after her seventieth birthday. She had been suffering from acute appendicitis, peritonitis, thrombosis, and arteriosclerosis and appears to have had an abdominal embolism, though the precise cause of death remains uncertain.¹¹⁵ She was the only former avowed member of an opposition group in the party (in her case, from fall 1925 to fall 1926) to die naturally.¹¹⁶ Olga Ulyanova (b. 1922), the daughter of Lenin’s brother Dmitry, who lived in the Kremlin Cavalry Building, recalled that upon coming home from school, she would look up across the way to the apartment of her aunts, Krupskaya and Ulyanova, in the nearby Imperial Senate. If a light was on in the second window, it meant Krupskaya was in; if in the fifth, then Maria; if in the fourth, they were in the dining room. “I came home in the evening and looked at the window of their apartment,” Olga recalled of late February 1939. “The windows were dark. They had no light, and no longer ever would.”¹¹⁷

Krupskaya’s hand in helping create a Lenin Testament had failed to slow Stalin’s succession. He was among those who carried the urn of her ashes for burial in the Kremlin Wall on March 1. He allowed the newspapers to be filled with eulogies for a few days, but the highest-level official called upon to publish an obituary was the chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet.¹¹⁸ Trotsky, in exile, rendered his own. “In addition to being Lenin’s wife—which, by the way, was not accidental—Krupskaya was an outstanding personality in her devotion to the cause, her energy and her purity of character,” he wrote (March 4). “Lenin’s illness and death—and this again was not accidental—coincided with the breaking point of the revolution and the beginning of Thermidor. Krupskaya became confused. . . . She made an attempt to oppose the Stalinist clique, and in 1926 she found herself for a brief interval in the ranks of the opposition. Frightened by the prospect of split, she broke away.” As a member of the Central Committee, Krupskaya had approved the expulsions and death sentences of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin.¹¹⁹ With her death, Stalin had a chocolate factory named after her. Orders went out to the Soviet press: “Do not print another word about Krupskaya.”¹²⁰ For the proposed ribbon on the official wreath, Stalin altered the text (with his red pencil) from “closest friend of Lenin” to “closest helpmate of Lenin.”¹²¹ Stalin was Lenin’s “closest friend.”

THE TERROR’S PROMOTIONS

At the party congress, Stalin received public credit for the mass arrests. “Comrade Stalin has directed the work of purging enemies who have wormed their way into the party,” Matvei Shkiryatov, deputy head of the party Control Commission, noted in an understatement. “Comrade Stalin taught us how to fight wreckers in a new way; he taught us how to get rid of these hostile elements quickly and decisively.” One female party member told a story of how she had mailed to Stalin a denunciation of “the gang” in the Communist Youth League leadership and how he moved to eradicate them, “although he was very busy.”¹²²

The full scope of the bloodletting was not revealed, but it was secretly recorded: 15,485 of the 32,899 positions in 1939 on the Central Committee nomenklatura—the highest officials—had been appointed in the years 1937–38, a turnover of nearly half.¹²³ Of the 10,902 party secretaries of counties, cities, and districts, 6,909 had been appointed in 1937–38. Of the 333 regional party bosses, 293 had assumed their posts since the 17th Congress, most since 1937–38; only six heads of regional machines were older than forty-six; 91 percent were between twenty-six and forty years of age. Forty-four of the 71 Central Committee members were new (by contrast, at the 17th Congress in 1934, 10 of the 71 had been new). The same picture obtained throughout industry: on the railways, 2,245 of 2,968 senior posts as of November 1938 had been at their positions just one year. In the NKVD, the average age of the upper ranks fell between 1937 and 1939, from around forty-three to thirty-five. Fully 85 percent of Red Army officers were under thirty-five years of age.¹²⁴ These people, inexperienced and young, were by and large graduates of technical education.¹²⁵ A mass of graduates (even greater numbers would now follow) helped make possible extermination of their predecessors.

Pravda deemed these new cadres “healthy young representatives of a healthy young people,” one of Stalin’s core tenets. They were manifestly one of his reasons for summoning the congress: to demonstrate that the purged party was alive and well. Alexei Kosygin (b. 1904), who had graduated from the Leningrad Textile Institute just four years earlier, would become commissar of textile production. Vyacheslav Malyshev (b. 1902), who had finished technical school in 1937, would become commissar of heavy machine building. The dashing Leonid Brezhnev (b. 1906), who had graduated from a metallurgical technicum in 1935, was promoted to party boss of his home region, Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine). The village-born Mikhail Suslov (b. 1902), who had joined the party in 1921 and taken a few training courses, had been sent in 1936 to Rostov province, where, in October 1937, after the arrest of the entire provincial leadership, he was named third and then second secretary. In February 1939, after the arrest of everyone in neighboring Orjonikidze (Stavropol) province, Suslov had been named first secretary there. “Understand it is only thanks to Stalin that we have all risen so high,” he would later explain. “Everything we have is thanks to Stalin.”¹²⁶

No less striking was the expansionism. The number of officially designated “leading personnel” hit 1.6 million in 1939, a leap from 600,000 in 1928. Overall, there were now 7.5 million administrative personnel, as compared with 1.45 million in 1928.¹²⁷ These white-collar employees and their offspring had come to dominate the spaces in higher education.¹²⁸ They were also well fed: between 1937 and 1939, when overall employment rose 10 percent, the Soviet salary fund jumped 41 percent, largely because the salary fund for administrative positions rose 66.5 percent. Especially pronounced increases were observed in supply, procurement, and, inevitably, departments introduced to control costs.¹²⁹ Despotism, too, cannot function without functionaries.¹³⁰ The terror that murdered officials en masse accentuated the ascendancy of the functionary class.

When Stalin made his way to the rostrum to deliver the main political report, the 2,000-odd attendees stood in an ovation. Making eye contact with the many delegations, the despot motioned for silence, but the applause only intensified. People desisted only when he rang the cowbell. Under a spotlight, Stalin received a new model rifle, a gift from the “proletarians of Tula” (Russia’s ancient armaments center), and he aimed it at the hall. Speaking softly, slowly, as usual, he conceded that there had been “more mistakes than might have been expected” in the cleansing of the ranks. But he pronounced the terror “unavoidable” and “beneficial.” “Our party is now smaller in membership, but, on the other side, its quality is better,” he told the beneficiaries.¹³¹

Stalin praised his creation. “As a result of the colossal cultural work conducted by the party and the Government, a burgeoning new Soviet intelligentsia was born and took shape, an intelligentsia that emerged from the ranks of the working class, peasantry, Soviet white-collar, the sweat and blood of our people, an intelligentsia that does not know the yoke of exploitation and despises exploiters and stands ready to serve the peoples of the USSR with belief and truth,” he rhapsodized, underscoring that these “young healthy people” would be genuinely Marxist cadres. “There is scarcely any necessity to dwell on the serious importance of party propaganda, of the Marxist-Leninist rearing of our laboring employees,” he told the delegates, adding, in the wake of the Short Course, that without a developed Marxist-Leninist consciousness, functionaries “will degenerate into pragmatist-pedants.”¹³²

NEW INNER CIRCLE

Stalin removed Petrovsky from candidate member of the politburo, but, uniquely, did not have him arrested.¹³³ He promoted Zhdanov and Khrushchev to full (voting) membership of the politburo, where they joined Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Andreyev, Kalinin, and the despot. Malenkov, in charge of personnel for years, finally became a member of the Central Committee, but, among party apparatchiks, Zhdanov alone enjoyed inner-circle status. In his speech to the congress on party affairs, he noted that masked enemies had infiltrated the ranks, slandered, and expelled honest Communists en masse, and singled out the new “Soviet” intelligentsia as the regime’s political base.¹³⁴ Zhdanov traveled often from Leningrad to take part in the ad hoc sessions in the Little Corner. He had become a personal favorite of the despot, as much as if not more than “Mykita” (the Ukrainianized version of Khrushchev’s name that Stalin used for his Ukraine party boss). “Only Zhdanov received from Stalin the same kind of treatment that Kirov enjoyed,” Molotov would recall. “After Kirov, Stalin liked Zhdanov best.”¹³⁵

The party would continue to serve as the regime’s indispensable ideological, personnel, and disciplinary instrument and charismatic symbol, but the state (government, military, secret police) gained more and more operational power, thanks to Molotov (government), the consigliere and longest-serving full politburo member after Stalin, Voroshilov (military), and Beria (secret police), nemesis of both Voroshilov and Molotov. Beria was elevated to one of two candidate member positions in the politburo, along with Shvernik, head of the trade unions (since 1930).¹³⁶ Stalin was uncommonly solicitous toward Beria, ordering, for example, that his household be given better accommodations after inspecting their first Moscow flat, with its shared kitchen. Beria ended up not at the Kremlin but in a two-story detached mansion, the former residence of General Alexei Kuropatkin, war minister during the Russo-Japanese War fiasco, at Little Nikitskaya Street, 28.¹³⁷ The Beria household also obtained use of a wooden dacha in the pine forest near Arkhangelskoe, but, the story goes, Stalin saw it, judged it a hovel, and moved them into the arrested Postyshev’s newer, palatial country estate.¹³⁸ “Beria’s dacha was sumptuous, immense,” recalled Svetlana, who played there with Sergo Beria (fifteen months her senior). Beria’s deputy Merkulov would later testify that “in Moscow, practically every evening, comrade Stalin summoned Beria” to the Near Dacha.¹³⁹

SOCIALIST REALISM

Nearly 19 million peasant households belonged to collective farms. Investment in mechanization and infrastructure had increased from 1.5 billion rubles in the first Five-Year Plan to 6.3 billion in the second (the third, which had commenced in 1938, would see another 5 billion). But output of tractors and combines, after having risen exponentially, was declining as the number of tanks, made at the same factories, soared.¹⁴⁰ Official harvest figures for 1937 (120.2 million tons), 1938 (94.9 million), and 1939 (105.4 million) were exaggerated. Even these numbers signified output per head below the 1913 level.¹⁴¹ Still, the state procured 36 million tons of the 1939 harvest (as compared with 10.8 million in 1928). The regime had reacted with assistance, rather than secret police barricades, to the regions that had suffered a major drought in 1936 and a lesser one in 1938, avoiding even a partial repeat of the famine of 1931–33.¹⁴² The continued underperformance of the livestock and dairy sectors, still not recovered from dekulakization-denomadization, was publicly acknowledged.

In his congress report, Andreyev, now the Central Committee secretary responsible for agriculture, called for a reduction in the size of the farmers’ household plots, which he claimed had been allowed to become their main occupation. To an extent, he was correct, although, according to official statistics, 77 percent of household plots conformed to size limits imposed by the February 1935 statute, 12 percent were below, and only 10 percent above.¹⁴³

Molotov gave the congress report on industry and the third Five-Year Plan. The heavy industry commissariat had been further divided in early 1939 into many smaller ones, reducing the power of their commissars.¹⁴⁴ Industry remained a wreck as a result of Stalin’s massacres. “If last year and today the majority of industries has not fulfilled their plan, the cause of this is our weak cadres, who were promoted to leading work during the past year,” one brave official wrote to the despot in March 1939, adding that “the atmosphere of lack of confidence and oversuspiciousness . . . blunts the initiative and energy of the personnel, and has an extremely harmful effect on all the work.”¹⁴⁵ Molotov, however, regaled the delegates with fantastic projections of annual growth in the third Five-Year Plan, of between 13.5 and 15.2 percent. Production of locomotives was supposed to reach 225 percent of the 1937 figure, coal 206 percent, electric power 200 percent. Nearly simultaneous with Molotov’s congress speech, Krokodil—the Soviet satirical journal, printed a caricature of the Third Reich. “What are you doing to propagandize the Four-Year Plan?” Göring asks Goebbels. Answer: “Prohibit the population from laughing.”¹⁴⁶

During the Soviet party congress, Industry of Socialism, a monumental art exhibition, was mounted near the Park of Culture metro station. Artists working in photography, industrial design, and even graphic and poster art had been excluded in favor of oil painters. Originally slated to open on the revolution’s twentieth anniversary, it had been mounted in an earlier form by November 1937 in a hard-to-reach hall on the Frunze Embankment, but it had not been open to the public—many of the figures depicted in the paintings had been (or were soon to be) arrested. Artists, too, were arrested, and even some of those not arrested had failed to produce their contracted works. (Soviet paints were known to be of miserable quality, and funds for purchasing foreign paints and canvases were unavailable, a fact that the artists wrote denunciations about.) Most of the works on exhibit in 1939 depicted railroads, canals, coal pits, and gold mines, as well as a Tajik weather station, Arctic exploration, and the good life of workers who enjoyed rewards like motorcycles for their labor exploits. Visitors encountered a gigantic mosaic of precious stones and metals that traced the infrastructure and natural resources of the USSR, Stalin’s epic canvas. Newsreels gave a narrated tour of the works.¹⁴⁷ First prize went to Boris Yoganson’s disconsolate In an Old Urals Factory (1937), which showed a muscular worker staring down the fat-cat owner. More innovative was Yuri Pimenov’s New Moscow (1937), which depicted a new boulevard and a prosperous Soviet way of life, symbolized by automobiles and stylish attire, in a decidedly modern look reminiscent of a Cézanne. The painting’s central figure was a woman in an open-top car—and in the driver’s seat.¹⁴⁸

HITLER INTRUDES

Stalin, in his congress report, had boasted that “it is necessary to recognize that the most important achievement in the sphere of public-political life during the reporting period . . . is the complete democratization of the country’s public life.”¹⁴⁹ He mispronounced the name of the commissariat of agriculture—calling it the Narkomzyom, accenting the last syllable, instead of Narkomzyem—and every speaker who followed copied his mistake.¹⁵⁰ Occasionally raising his right index finger for emphasis, he pointed out that the country had to have “at its disposal a well-trained army, well-organized penal organs, and a strong intelligence service.” He also underscored the system’s political fastness. “In the event of a war, the rear and the front, in view of their homogeneity and internal unity, will be stronger than in any other country, which foreign lovers of military confrontation would do well to keep in mind,” he observed, lauding himself for collectivization. “Some people in the Western press are claiming that the purge of spies, murderers, and wreckers from Soviet institutions—the likes of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Rosenholz, Bukharin, and other scum—has ‘shaken’ the Soviet system and brought disintegration,” the despot added. “Such cheap gossip merits only our contempt.”¹⁵¹

Foreign affairs took up about one quarter of Stalin’s speech, and on this score he had thoroughly reworked the text from the draft supplied by aides. He noted that the League of Nations had proved useless but argued that, given the dangerous times, it “should not be ignored.” He stressed the fact of a “new imperialist war,” now in its second year, and named Germany, Italy, and Japan as aggressors, but warned that efforts at collective security were “in disarray” because “the “non-aggressor states,” Britain and France, were playing a dangerous game. They were stronger than the fascist powers but shrank from meeting the threat, refusing to intervene in Spain, China, or Czechoslovakia “to save their own skins.” Remarking on the hysteria in the Western press over supposed German designs on Soviet Ukraine, Stalin warned countries “accustomed to having others pull chestnuts out of the fire for them”—a reference to Britain and France—that they would not succeed in pushing the Soviet Union into war. “We stand for peace and strengthening of businesslike ties with all countries,” he noted, but only “as long as these countries maintain similar relations with the Soviet Union and do not try to damage our country’s interests.”¹⁵²

When Stalin finished—congratulating the victorious working class, the victorious collective farm peasantry, the Soviet intelligentsia—the entire Andreyev-Alexandrov hall stood in thunderous applause. Editorials in Izvestiya, the government newspaper, did not elaborate Stalin’s statement that “collective security” was effectively dead or his hints that Moscow might even turn to Nazi Germany, as if that were an option.¹⁵³ Goebbels’s propaganda ministry had instructed the German press (March 13, 1939) that “you can comment on the congress of Communists in Moscow as a still greater strengthening of the Stalin-Kaganovich clique.” (Kaganovich was Jewish.)¹⁵⁴

The German ambassador, Schulenburg, was the son of a Prussian officer, tall, elegant, pious, an aristocrat of long pedigree, with a balding pate, white mustache, and impeccable manners. The childless, genial count had developed exceptionally good relations with the Soviets, as with his own staff.¹⁵⁵ He had also developed a rivalry with his predecessor in Moscow, Dirksen, now in London. They engaged in a parallel competition to normalize Soviet-German and Anglo-German relations, respectively.¹⁵⁶ Still, Schulenburg doubted that Stalin’s speech signaled a policy shift, although he did note the absence of the customary denunciations of the fascist states.¹⁵⁷ Hitler’s foreign minister showed the Führer a German translation of Stalin’s speech, but the Nazi leader remained skeptical, and, in any case, he was preoccupied: right in the middle of Stalin’s party congress, on March 15, 1939, the Wehrmacht seized the rest of truncated Czechoslovakia, making a mockery of the Munich Pact and Hitler’s pretense of merely wanting to incorporate ethnic Germans. Among the prizes were the Czechoslovak army’s advanced mechanized divisions and the famous Škoda Works, in the city of Plzeň (Pilsen), one of Europe’s premier military factories. “Give me a kiss, girls!” Hitler told his secretaries. “This is the greatest day of my life. I shall enter history as the greatest German of them all.”¹⁵⁸ The Führer annexed the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia) as a Third Reich “protectorate”; Slovakia became nominally independent, under a Nazi puppet. Czechoslovakia’s eastern Subcarpathian Rusyn (Ruthene) province became an independent state—for thirty hours, until March 16, when Hungarian troops invaded and annexed the southern part; Polish troops seized the northern part and established a common border with Hungary.¹⁵⁹

Hitler had intruded on Stalin’s affirmation of Soviet unity and might. The despot had Litvinov convey to Schulenburg that “the Soviet government cannot recognize the inclusion of the Czech lands in the German empire, or that of Slovakia in any form.”¹⁶⁰ An aide to the Soviet military attaché in Berlin reported, rightly, that Hitler had already achieved a windfall: advanced Czech weapons plants, advanced Czech mechanized divisions, storehouses of grain. Less positively for Germany, the attaché noted that the Nazis had absorbed a large non-German population that could create risks in Germany’s rear if the Führer pushed still farther out. On that latter score, the Soviet military aide was unequivocal: Germany was gearing up for further expansion. The question was: in which direction, “east or west?”¹⁶¹

FIXATION

Trotsky had been writing about the creation of a Fourth International since at least 1933, but the founding congress had only taken place on September 3, 1938, and was attended by fewer than two dozen delegates, at a private home outside Paris. In October 1938, he had fantasized, in a speech in Mexico he recorded on a gramophone, that “in the course of the next ten years, the program of the Fourth International will become the program of millions, and these revolutionary millions will be able to take heaven and earth by storm.”¹⁶² However absurd his “movement,” Trotsky’s pen was another matter. Commenting the day after Stalin’s political report to the 18th Party Congress, Trotsky scandalously surmised, like Krivitsky before him, that “Stalin is preparing to play with Hitler.”¹⁶³ Around the time of the party congress, Stalin ordered renewed efforts to assassinate Trotsky.¹⁶⁴

That Trotsky was still alive was almost inexplicable. He had been sentenced to execution in absentia at the first Moscow public trial (August 1936), but the attempts to have him killed probably dated to 1929 in Turkey. He had been hunted all the while he had been in Paris (1933–35) and after his relocation to Norway. The most recent effort, in 1938, led by veterans of the Spanish civil war dispatched to the United States and then Mexico, had petered out after their NKVD espionage overseers in Moscow (Sergei Spigelglas) and New York (Pyotr Guttsait) were arrested as supposed foreign spies.¹⁶⁵ A new plan would expressly forbid everyone previously involved in such efforts to take part, and would be put together by Pavel Sudoplatov (b. 1907) and Naum “Leonid” Eitingon (b. 1899), until recently the NKVD station chief in Republic Spain.¹⁶⁶

Sudoplatov was a celebrated assassin, having liquidated Yevhen Konovalets, the leader of the fascistic émigré Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Sudoplatov hailed from Ukraine and spoke the language. The NKVD had penetrated the OUN and even ran its branches, but Konovalets, who had been born in Habsburg Galicia and studied in Lemberg (now Lwów), was viewed as a possible figurehead who could be used by foreign powers and had working ties to intelligence officers from Nazi Germany, as well as fascist Italy, Lithuania, and Poland.¹⁶⁷ On May 23, 1938, Sudoplatov had managed to blow Konovalets up in a Rotterdam restaurant with a box of chocolates that concealed a time bomb, escaping undetected. It was bravura wet work. In November 1938, after yet another NKVD foreign intelligence chief was arrested, the thirty-one-year-old Sudoplatov had briefly shot up to acting chief. But when Beria took over the NKVD, he installed as foreign intelligence chief his Caucasus crony Vladimir Dekanozov, whose principal experience was in food processing and supply, including self-supply.

Sudoplatov was moved back down to section director. Someone in Beria’s entourage, perhaps Dekanozov, placed Sudoplatov under investigation for ties to “enemies” (i.e., the now-arrested NKVD bosses under whom Sudoplatov had worked). The assassin spent months fearing he was about to be liquidated. Damaging rumors were being spread about him, and he was not being shown documents or allowed to carry out assignments, even those Beria had expressly directed he be given. It appears that Beria contrived to firm up Sudoplatov’s position using Kremlinology: he invited him to a soccer match between Spartacus (the trade union team) and Dynamo (the NKVD team) and had him sit in the government loge; Malenkov was there, along with the full canopy of Beria cronies. “I didn’t utter a word,” Sudoplatov explained, “but my mere presence in that elevated place signaled Kruglov, Serov, Tsanava, and others to stop spreading rumors about evidence against me in the archives.”¹⁶⁸

In March 1939, as Sudoplatov tells the story, Beria took him to the Little Corner to see Stalin and proposed that Sudoplatov be named deputy chief of NKVD foreign intelligence, in order to oversee global anti-Trotskyite operations. In this telling, as Stalin lit his pipe with a match and got up and paced, the assassin took note of “the simplicity of Stalin’s reactions. It was hard to imagine that such a man could deceive you, his reactions were so natural, without the slightest sense of him posing.” Stalin was indeed an actor, especially in the Little Corner. “There are no important political figures in the Trotskyite movement except Trotsky himself,” he was said to have advised. “If Trotsky is finished, the threat will be eliminated.” Obviously, the Nazis would never resort to using a Jew even as a figurehead. Nonetheless, Stalin supposedly added, “Without the elimination of Trotsky, as the Spanish experience shows, when the imperialists attack the Soviet Union, we cannot rely on our allies in the international Communist movement.”¹⁶⁹

According to Sudoplatov, he and Beria debated innumerable scenarios for what Stalin had called the “action.” The chosen plan derived from events in civil war Spain, where, after murdering Konovalets, Sudoplatov had taken refuge and met up with Eitingon (the two knew each other from five years earlier, when they were “illegals,” operating without diplomatic cover, in Soviet foreign intelligence). The Spanish- and English-speaking Eitingon had in his circle the twenty-year-old Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born revolutionary who carried out sabotage missions behind Franco’s lines. Back in Moscow, Eitingon did not know that he had been denounced as a British spy by arrested officials, but, thanks to his acquaintance with Sudoplatov, he was chosen to lead the latest field unit, with Mercader as its centerpiece, to penetrate the Blue House, in Coyoacán, Mexico, where Trotsky lived.¹⁷⁰

A “GUARANTEE” FOR POLAND

Alliances are often about imposing brakes, not empowerment. The Anglo-French “entente” was unwritten, which caused tremendous anxiety in France, but this was essentially a way for Britain to restrain its partner without committing itself formally to continental war. French alliances with Poland and Czechoslovakia had been meant the same way (a means to limit the smaller countries’ behavior while not fully committing France), but that arrangement had suited neither Poland nor Czechoslovakia. The Franco-Soviet-Czechoslovak alliance had afforded no such intra-alliance control and fooled no one, paving the way for the collective failure to prevent Germany’s forbidden annexation of Austria and the dismemberment of the third partner, Czechoslovakia.¹⁷¹ Germany’s military had consumed 17 percent of national production in 1938, about the same as in the USSR but double the level in Britain or France; in 1939, the German percentage would rise to 20 percent. Militarily, Britain and France were still holding to a mostly defensive posture, leaving all the initiative in the hands of the aggressor.¹⁷²

Even into 1939, Hitler’s references to the injustices of Versailles and to his desire merely to “unite” all ethnic Germans had still been eliciting sympathy in Britain.¹⁷³ But his seizure of all the Czech lands, on March 15, 1939, and recognition of an independent Slovakia blew up British domestic politics. Rumors flew that Germany was preparing similar conquests of Romania, Hungary, and Ukraine.¹⁷⁴ A Soviet military intelligence assessment (March 17) concluded that “the seizure of Czechoslovakia is the first act, the threshold to further, larger happenings,” and that even if, as some experts claimed, Germany’s next moves would be westward, it would still need raw materials for its military from the east.¹⁷⁵ That same day, British ambassador Sir William Seeds asked Litvinov what the Soviet position would be in the event of a Nazi invasion of Romania. That same evening, after consulting Stalin, the foreign affairs commissar proposed a multipower diplomatic conference involving Britain, the USSR, Romania, Poland, and others. On March 18, a Saturday, the British cabinet met. “The Prime Minister said that until a week ago we had proceeded on the assumption that we should be able to continue with our policy of getting onto better terms with the Dictator Powers, and that although those powers had aims, those aims were limited,” the minutes recorded, indicating a possible policy shift. But Chamberlain, who celebrated his seventieth birthday that day, insisted that they continue seeking to negotiate, although he did become far more willing to warn Hitler against future aggression.¹⁷⁶

German war preparations became blatant. On March 20, Ribbentrop issued an ultimatum to Lithuania to transfer the Baltic Sea deepwater port of Memel (Klaipeda), which had been awarded to independent Lithuania at Versailles, or risk military occupation. Lithuania capitulated, and the leaders of the 40,000 ethnic Germans in that country stepped up their agitation for subordination of Lithuanian foreign policy to Germany. This magnified the Kremlin’s high anxiety that the Baltic states would become staging grounds for an attack on the Soviet Union.¹⁷⁷ On March 21, Ribbentrop informed the Polish ambassador, Jan Lipski, that Poland’s territorial desires vis-à-vis now nominally independent Slovakia might be satisfied if Poland handed Germany Danzig and allowed a German-controlled special transit route through Poland to and from East Prussia. Lipski was noncommittal. So as not to drive Poland into Britain’s arms, Hitler informed his brass that no seizure of Danzig would be carried out and ordered Nazi ruffians in Danzig to desist from provocations for now. Germany would instead wear Poland down. On March 23, King Carol II, from whom no territory was sought, agreed to closely align Romania’s economy with Germany’s, creating joint-stock companies for Romanian oil, manganese, copper, and bauxite, as well as grain, corn, fodder, and pigs, to be exchanged for German armaments, machines, and investments in Romanian transport and communications. A secret protocol obliged Bucharest to expand oil production.¹⁷⁸

An alarmed Moscow sought details. Soviet tensions with Romania had only intensified, but in 1939 the NKVD would arrest a mere fifty-nine Romanian “spies,” as compared with 7,810 in 1937–38.¹⁷⁹ (Total NKVD arrests in 1939 would amount to 63,889, not only the fewest in the decade but a mere half of the next lowest year.) These statistics—compiled by the Soviet regime—give the lie to avowals that the terror constituted a campaign to root out a potential fifth column. More broadly, as Stalin also knew, the vast majority of former kulaks, national minorities, and recidivist criminals remained at large, meaning that the supposed potential fifth column of the wronged and resentful was still there, when the prospect of war surpassed that of the previous two years.

Back and forth the diplomatic volleys went. On March 25, 1939, the Polish government formally rejected Germany’s demands. Hitler secretly began to contemplate attacking Poland, to reestablish the pre-1914 frontiers in East Prussia and evict the ethnic Polish population.¹⁸⁰ On March 28, Litvinov delivered official notes to Estonia and Latvia, warning that the Soviet Union would view any state agreement—made voluntarily or under duress—that diminished the Baltic states’ independence or led to the political and economic hegemony of a third state over their territory and infrastructure as unacceptable, “with all the ensuing consequences.”¹⁸¹