Stalin

Then came the sensation: on March 31, Chamberlain, who had not stood up for democratic Czechoslovakia, announced a unilateral “guarantee” of Poland’s independence in the House of Commons. His act was hardly sentimental: Poland was a dictatorship, albeit one without a dictator (since Piłsudski’s death, in 1935). But British intelligence warned Chamberlain—wrongly, as it turned out—of an imminent coup in Danzig to turn the city over to Hitler. (Vernon Kell, head of MI5, also passed on a report that Hitler had mocked the Tory PM as an “asshole.”)¹⁸² Chamberlain had noted that the French government knew of the guarantee in advance and supported it, but the way he had made it public—in response to a parliamentary question about what the government would do in the event of a German attack on Poland—gave it the appearance of an improvisation.¹⁸³ Maisky reported to Moscow that David Lloyd George, the former PM, had been told by Chamberlain on March 31, when asked why he had given a guarantee to Poland, that, “according to the information at his disposal, neither the German general staff nor Hitler would ever risk war if they knew that they would have to fight simultaneously on two fronts—the West and the East.”¹⁸⁴ That said, the British offered no specific military commitments to Poland (or, over time, to any country in Eastern Europe).¹⁸⁵

Trotsky, who had been allowed to visit London in March 1939, bitingly observed that “Chamberlain would give away all the democracies of the world (there are not many left) for one tenth of India.” Beyond personal foibles, Trotsky noted that “the fear of Great Britain and France before Hitler and Mussolini explains itself by the fact that the world position of these two colony-holding countries . . . no longer corresponds with their specific economic weight. The war can bring nothing to them, but can take a great deal from them.”¹⁸⁶

Even the appeasement-inclined governments in the British empire’s dominions denounced Hitler’s action. Britain’s lively press had a field day with Chamberlain—the beak nose, the shiny top hat, the impeccably tailored overcoat, the umbrella. The prime minister had made a career in municipal politics in his native Birmingham, following an up-and-down business career, and had only become a member of Parliament at age forty-nine, rising to minister of health (twice) and chancellor of the exchequer (twice). He had become PM, in late May 1937, only when Baldwin had decided to resign (the Tories still commanded a majority in the House of Commons). Then sixty-eight, Chamberlain was the second-oldest person to become PM, and he was widely perceived as a caretaker until the next election. He saw himself as a reformer of domestic affairs, but he got entangled in trying to resolve international issues in order to pursue his domestic goals.¹⁸⁷

Chamberlain’s guarantee of Poland’s independence, not its borders, presupposed further territorial revision, provided this was not achieved by force. The PM appears to have imagined that the British guarantee would strengthen Poland’s hand in “negotiations” with Nazi Germany over Danzig and the Corridor. Chamberlain’s idea was that London would be able to exert control in any possible Anglo-Polish alliance.¹⁸⁸ He warned Warsaw not to do anything rash to precipitate German military action—which, however, showed that, despite his assurances to the contrary at a cabinet meeting, the guarantee had, to an extent, placed the question of war or peace with Germany in the hands of a third country.¹⁸⁹ The dominant player in Poland’s ruling triumvirate, Foreign Minister Beck, was not fully trusted in London (or in Paris), and his idea of what was “reasonable” in negotiations with Germany differed from Chamberlain’s.

Chamberlain’s announcement of a British guarantee for Poland, which was soon publicly joined by France, happened to occur the same day (April 1, 1939) that Madrid, the last Republic holdout in Spain, fell to Franco’s forces.¹⁹⁰ Britain and France had already recognized his regime on February 27. On March 26, the caudillo had declared Spain’s adherence to the Anti-Comintern Pact. Although he had forged a politically and militarily unified Nationalist cause, a successful Popular Front on the right, he had still required thirty-two months, some 100,000 combined Italian and German troops, immense quantities of foreign weaponry, disorganization and mini civil war in the Republic camp, the timidity of France, and the active collusion of Britain to triumph. Altogether, probably half a million perished on both sides combined, including civilians, but after his victory, Franco would put to death more people than had all the kings of Spain combined; he offered no amnesty, instead forcing still more Spaniards into labor battalions or exile (Stalin refused to take them in). The victorious Nationalists in the locales, too, exacted vengeance, mostly on the Republic’s former rank-and-file officialdom (top leaders escaped).¹⁹¹ Franco was a criminal. The putsch he helped launch and the methods he used to prosecute the ensuing civil war constituted massive crimes against humanity. But his illegal action had galvanized the very leftist threat he had wanted to preempt. Stalin had chosen to hold back the Spanish Communist party, for the time being, but because of the inexorable ascendancy of the Communists in just about any extreme situation in which they are present in force, a Franco victory had become the lesser evil (as the fullness of Spain’s history would demonstrate). History rarely delivers moral clarities.

The British government and establishment were more or less pleased. But Britain’s reputation had suffered, France had been weakened, and Italy had become alienated from France and Britain, which had opened the path to Germany’s Anschluss with Austria. While the Spanish experience had further encouraged Chamberlain in his hopes that Britain could avoid war regardless of what happened on the continent, it had further convinced Hitler that Britain and France were afraid. Stalin had drawn the same conclusion.

Two weeks after Chamberlain’s gesture toward Poland, he issued, under French pressure, a similar guarantee for Romania, also a dictatorship. But the PM resisted calls in Britain for a “grand alliance” against Hitler, meaning one that involved the Soviet Union. He argued that such a bloc too closely resembled the old alliances that catastrophically had spawned the Great War.¹⁹² His domestic critics, numerous and vociferous, were neither consistent nor unified—not even just the conservatives—over a viable alternative policy.¹⁹³ In May 1939, the Bank of England would transfer to Nazi Germany gold valued at ₤6 million, held in London accounts by the erstwhile Czechoslovak National Bank.¹⁹⁴ Inside Whitehall, appeasement was far from dead, even after the debacle of Czechoslovakia: when the British cabinet discussed the guarantee for Poland, its members agreed that it would be operative only if the Poles did not demonstrate “provocative or stupid obstinacy” regarding Danzig and the Corridor.¹⁹⁵ The guarantee further required that the Poles themselves mobilize to fight the Germans, an action that London kept warning the Poles not to take. For all that, however, the guarantee had been publicly proclaimed. The nightmare Chamberlain had strenuously tried to avoid was now upon him: a possible second Europe-wide war.

Stalin was well informed about the brouhaha that had erupted in Britain over Hitler’s seizure of all of Czechoslovakia. The despot also likely knew that the British cabinet had discussed the possibility of asking the Soviet Union to join a coalition against Hitler but that the Poles were refusing to countenance such a move. With the guarantee, Chamberlain had effectively chosen Poland over the Soviet Union.¹⁹⁶ But to make his guarantee credible, he needed a military commitment to the defense of Poland from the Soviet Union.¹⁹⁷ Suddenly, unintentionally, Chamberlain, who left day-to-day management of Soviet affairs largely to his foreign secretaries, had placed Stalin and the USSR at the center of European power politics.¹⁹⁸ Some British foreign policy officials ignorantly predicted that Stalin would now “stand aloof,” failing to grasp the despot’s fear of a Western-German alliance behind his back.¹⁹⁹ At the same time, Chamberlain’s guarantee to Poland had given Hitler a powerful incentive to seek some sort of deal with the USSR, to secure his rear. London’s turn to Poland, in other words, unintentionally heightened the British need to talk to Stalin—lest Hitler do so.²⁰⁰

A BELATED DEMISE

Beria’s extreme urgency notwithstanding, the operation to murder Trotsky took time, and success was hardly assured. In the meantime, the NKVD commissar had ways of ingratiating himself: in the wee hours of April 6, 1939, Mikhail Frinovsky, Yezhov’s former first deputy of the NKVD, was arrested, just after he had requested to be relieved as naval commissar, “in view of my ignorance of sea matters.”²⁰¹ The regime sailed on. Friendship of Peoples, the first issue of an annual almanac, was issued in a print run of 10,000, for translations of the belles lettres of the Union republics into Russian. “The Soviet people sing,” the editor’s note observed. “Their songs speak of the joy of labor and victories, the successes of socialist construction. They do not know borders and are heard round the world. They talk of the miraculous flowering of the great constellation of eleven Union republics, each of which has become a bright, shining pearl. . . . The Soviet people have something to sing.”²⁰²

Stalin’s reading now extended to biographies of Ivan the Terrible and foreign affairs, including Yevgeny Tarle’s Talleyrand (1939), published in the series Lives of Remarkable People.²⁰³ In April 1939, not long after the Nazi occupation of rump Czechoslovakia, Stalin read an intercepted ciphered communication from the Japanese representative in Buenos Aires to Tokyo: “Taking into account that in a European war some 75 submarines of Germany would temporarily seek to paralyze England, what would happen if such powers as Japan, Germany, Italy, and Spain united?” Stalin underlined every word in this fantasy and wrote on it a quick count of the combined divisions (250) such an alliance would yield.²⁰⁴

On April 7, Lenin in 1918, Mikhail Romm’s sequel to his Lenin in October (1937), premiered to acclaim in Moscow.²⁰⁵ The film would be shown at Cannes and nominated for the Palme d’Or. The celebrated Shchukin again played Lenin, with what was regarded as even greater fidelity to his life.²⁰⁶ Gelovani again successfully played Stalin, who despite the title was the central man of action, sent in 1918 to obtain grain in Tsaritsyn, where he shows himself to be a great military commander who feeds the two capitals in the north and saves the Soviet republic. Stalin had dictated changes to the original cut. Originally entitled Assassination, for the near-fatal attempt on Lenin’s life that year, the film opens with Lenin asking Gorky, “What should we do with our enemies?” Gorky worries about “excessive severity,” but Lenin retorts, “Severity nowadays is an essential condition of battle. Such severity will be understood.”²⁰⁷

Many people who had been arrested under Yezhov were being released as victims of “enemies” who had infiltrated the NKVD. Also on April 7, the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky noted in his diary that “Yezhov’s portrait in the Lomonosov Institute was taken down.” He added: “They say [it has happened] everywhere. This is a person who destroyed thousands, if not tens of thousands, of innocents.”²⁰⁸ The interrogator-torturers, who before had followed orders from Frinovsky, had set to beating out of him testimony against Yezhov, including how the latter had ordered that suspects be beaten to provide false testimony. Within a week Beria would send Stalin a forty-three-page confession written by Frinovsky; Stalin made notes on it.²⁰⁹ On April 10, Yezhov himself finally was arrested, evidently in Malenkov’s office on Old Square, where Yezhov had been summoned as a precaution, perhaps so that he would not commit suicide. Stalin was eating supper in his Kremlin apartment, below the Little Corner, with Khrushchev, among others, when Beria’s call about the apprehension came through. Yezhov’s arrest went unmentioned in the Soviet press.²¹⁰ “Despite all the major shortcomings and failures in my work,” Yezhov would boast, in a letter to Stalin, “I must say that, with the daily guidance of the Central Committee, the NKVD really trounced the enemy.”²¹¹ Beria wanted Yezhov to confess to failing to cleanse the bodyguards of the enemy Karl Pauker’s people, thereby putting Stalin at risk, a convenient pretext for Beria to try to stuff the Kremlin guards, now led by Vlasik, with his own people, but Stalin mostly thwarted this power grab.²¹²

Beria personally oversaw Yezhov’s interrogation at night at Sukhanovka, the most feared prison in the system, where Beria kept an office.²¹³ Almost no light ever penetrated the darkness of the five-by-seven-foot cells, some of which were located far underground. Prisoners were often not permitted to sleep or sit, but instead forced to stand all night. In the worst and tiniest cells, it was, in any case, impossible to stand, and freezing water was run through constantly. Executions took place in the site’s former cathedral, where a crematorium had been set up. The Yagodaites and many thousands of others had been buried at Yagoda’s former dacha complex, near the Kommunarka state farm, but the Yezhovites would meet their deaths at Sukhanovka cathedral, as well as at the nearby Butovo killing field. Altogether, more than 100 of the highest-ranking Yezhovites were massacred—all of his deputies, almost all department heads in the center, almost all NKVD heads in Union republics and provinces.²¹⁴

Sukhanovka lay not far from Yezhov’s luxurious dacha at Meshcherino (which now went to the Comintern chief Dimitrov). A search of the dacha, Yezhov’s Lubyanka office, and his Kremlin apartment turned up juicy finds: an arsenal of guns, 115 books written by counterrevolutionaries and anti-Soviet émigrés—the kind of literature Stalin collected in abundance. “Behind the books in various places,” the investigator noted, “were discovered three half-bottles (full) of wheat vodka, one half-bottle of vodka, half emptied, and two empty half-bottles of vodka.” In the desk the NKVD investigator found four bullet casings, marked ZINOVIEV, KAMENEV, and SMIRNOV (two). Perhaps the greatest discovery was that in Yezhov’s apartment—and not in his Lubyanka safe—he had kept a cache of documents from the tsarist-era Tiflis gendarmerie on “Koba.” Whispers of a “file on Stalin” circulated throughout the upper ranks of the regime.²¹⁵ The nature of this file in Yezhov’s possession remains unknown. For Beria, it was unclear which was more dangerous: to turn the material over to Stalin, and thus indicate that he had seen it, or to not turn it over.²¹⁶ Stalin supposedly flashed the material Yezhov had gathered on him at a politburo meeting, as if Yezhov had been acting on his own in the terror’s excesses.²¹⁷

Beria also obtained twenty pages of testimony from Yezhov that compromised his former party deputy Malenkov, which Beria evidently passed on to Stalin, but the despot chose not to allow Malenkov’s destruction.²¹⁸ Still, Beria delivered still more pleasing news: on April 13, 1939, Merkulov, his first deputy, finally managed to produce testimony with the signature of the stout Yefim Yevdokimov. Beria had personally gone to arrest him at his apartment on Grand Kisel Lane, 5, off Great Lubyanka, but Yevdokimov had held out for seven months, through broken legs and unceasing torture, which had continued in the prison hospital.²¹⁹ When confronted by former colleagues, he shouted them down for confessing to fabricated crimes; investigators were compelled to cease such confrontations, for Yevdokimov sometimes convinced others to retract their statements. When the NKVD put one former colleague in his cell to cajole him into confessing, Yevdokimov cursed him as a lowlife and the supposed plot inside the NKVD as “fabrication.” Another coaxer-informant reported that “during my stay together with Yevdokimov . . . he said that all he wanted was a bomb to blow up the investigative unit of the NKVD and fly with it up in the air, and that an apparatus that so cripples and destroys innocent people can only be called fascist.”²²⁰

But after the arrests of Frinovsky and Yezhov, Yevdokimov evidently agreed to incriminate himself, along with them. Beria was on a roll: on April 16, his minions managed to track down former Ukrainian NKVD chief Alexander Uspensky, who, after having staged his own suicide, had evaded an all-Union manhunt for five months (in Arkhangelsk, Moscow, Kaluga, Kazan, Sverdlovsk). He was apprehended outside the luggage area of the train station at Miass, in the Urals.²²¹ The interrogation of Yezhov, meanwhile, would result in twenty fat volumes. He was charged with heading a “counterrevolutionary organization”—while heading the NKVD.

Stalin’s former NKVD chief confessed to working for a veritable world gazetteer of enemy intelligence services: Germany, Britain, France, Japan, Poland. (Yezhov had in fact liquidated the Polish Communist party, on Stalin’s orders.) On April 24, 1939, Yezhov “testified” about his “pederasty,” meaning homosexual relations. As recorded in the protocols, he recounted that his first such experience dated to age fifteen or sixteen, when, along with other male youths, he was a tailor’s apprentice. Yezhov named various Soviet officials, from the army and elsewhere, with whom he claimed to have cohabitated for months; many of his male partners were married but, conveniently, for service reasons, happened to be without their wives. Among the latter category, Yezhov named Filipp Goloshchokin, at the time party secretary in Kazakhstan. More recently, Yezhov had been on a long, alcohol-soaked debauch with Vladimir Konstantinov, one of his longtime lovers (along with Ivan Dementyev). Yezhov characterized his homosexual liaisons as “mutually active.”²²² How much of this Beria embellished cannot be known. History does not record the prudish Stalin’s reaction.

TRIPLE ALLIANCE PROPOSAL

Back on April 3, 1939, Poland’s Beck had arrived in London, seeking recourse. That same day, Hitler ordered plans developed for a military attack on Poland that could begin no later than the early fall. On April 11, the Wehrmacht issued clarifying instructions that a war against Poland was to be avoided, if possible, but preparations would go forward.²²³ On April 14, the British and French governments—separately—approached the Soviets. Foreign secretary Halifax asked Maisky whether the Soviet Union would make a public declaration to the effect that it would support countries that were “victims of aggression” if they resisted such an act, by providing aid “if desired . . . and in such a manner as would be found most convenient.”²²⁴ It was a small move in the direction of the Soviets by the British government.

Also on April 14, 1939, TASS sent a secret internal report, which reached Stalin, containing a Russian translation of an article in the New York World-Telegram by its editor, Roy Howard, who had achieved renown by attaining the interview with Stalin some years back. Howard’s latest article, dispatched from Paris—beyond Soviet censors—called the Soviet Union a false “shop-window country” with ubiquitous surveillance, propaganda that covered over everything with lies, thousands of internally deported or executed political prisoners, and, as a result, a military and industry in disarray. Howard wrote that Communism had failed to find an alternative to capitalism’s stimulation, and that the standard of living remained below that of Italy. He called the Soviet system—in passages underlined by Stalin—“oriental military despotism, the iron hand, and mercilessness” and concluded, in a paragraph crossed out by Stalin, that “at the present time, despite the gigantic army and air force, in the opinion of foreign military observers, including French and British officials, the USSR has lost hope as a factor in the pending combination of forces against fascism.”²²⁵

The Soviets, in this context, upped the British ante; Litvinov (April 15) sent Stalin and Molotov a draft proposal for a formal alliance with Britain and France. Stalin edited the text, transforming it into a specific eight-point plan for an unequivocal anti-Nazi Triple Alliance.²²⁶ Litvinov was received in the Little Corner on April 16, and the next day he conveyed the final text to the British, summoning Seeds from the theater in the middle of a play; the day after that, Litvinov passed it to the French. Scholars who continue to deny that Stalin ever wanted a military alliance with the West have to explain why he offered one, in written form. British officials, internally, judged the Soviet proposal “extremely inconvenient” and hurriedly worked to douse French interest in it; the French contemplated an independent policy vis-à-vis Moscow, but only briefly.²²⁷

Also on April 17, the newly appointed Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Aleksei Merekalov, called on Ernst von Weizsäcker, state secretary at the German foreign ministry, to complain about violations of Soviet trade contracts with the Škoda Works since the Germans had taken it over. Merekalov, a former deputy commissar for trade (who spoke no German), observed that fulfillment of the contracts would indicate whether the German government was willing to “cultivate and expand economic relations with Russia.” Weizsäcker shot back that, given reports of a possible British-French-Soviet military alliance, the atmosphere for delivering war matériel to Russia was not favorable. This prompted Merekalov to inquire about current events in Europe and Soviet-German relations. Weizsäcker, sticking to his brief, stated that Germany desired “mutually satisfactory commercial relations with Russia,” to which Merekalov replied, “Russian policy has always moved in a straight line.” The envoy further pointed out that ideological differences had scarcely affected Soviet-Italian relations and did not have to “prove a stumbling block” with Berlin, especially since the USSR had refrained from exploiting the tensions between Germany and the West. Merekalov concluded that normalizing bilateral relations was possible, the refrain of Soviet trade and diplomatic officials going on six years.²²⁸

Škoda was selling the Soviets antiaircraft guns, howitzers, and naval weapons, in exchange for iron and manganese ores, nickel, tungsten, copper, tin, and foodstuffs. Stalin viewed fulfillment of the orders as important in themselves, and as a revealing test of German intentions, which remained unclear. Hitler, during a long, rambling audience granted to Grigore Gafencu, the Romanian foreign minister, in the Chancellery (April 19, 1939), raved about the British, Danzig, and being forced into war. “In the end, victor or vanquished, we shall all be buried in the same ruins,” he was said to have told Gafencu. “And the only one who will profit is that man in Moscow.”²²⁹

Romania, like Poland, expressed concerns to London that any formal security treaty involving the USSR would provoke Hitler’s wrath against them. Viscount Halifax, according to the well-informed Maisky, told Polish ambassador Raczyński that “the Soviet proposal, though serious, went further than the British government was prepared to go.” Indeed, already on April 19, according to notes of a meeting of the British government’s foreign policy committee taken by Sir Alexander Cadogan (who had replaced Robert Vansittart as the top foreign office bureaucrat), London had decided to reject the Soviet proposal without directly conveying as much. British officials reasoned that the Soviet military was in no position to extend support beyond its borders, and that friends of Britain would erupt in fury at an alliance with the bloody Communist menace. Cadogan, however, did note the risk, albeit “remote,” that an outright British rejection of the Soviet proposal might provoke a Soviet-German agreement. He also deemed the Soviet proposal politically awkward. “We have taken the attitude that the Soviets preach us sermons on ‘collective security’ but make no practical proposals,” Cadogan observed. “They have now made such, and they will rail at us for turning them down. And the Left in this country may be counted on to make the most of this.”²³⁰

The British stalled any formal response, cloaking rejection in the form of “comments” (as a German official in London noted).²³¹ Litvinov had written to Merekalov in early April 1939, regarding Britain and France, that “later, our help will be sought, which will cost them more dearly, and they will have to recompense us.”²³² But on April 19 and 21, Stalin convoked angry meetings in the Little Corner, having had the envoys to Britain (Maisky), Germany (Merekalov), and France (Surits) recalled. (Potyomkin, evidently protecting Surits, had him send a subordinate.)²³³ Especially at the second session, on April 21, “collective security” was eviscerated.²³⁴ “The atmosphere was strained to an extreme,” recalled Maisky. “Although outwardly Stalin appeared calm, puffing on his pipe, it was evident he was extremely ill-disposed toward Litvinov.” After almost six years, “collective security” had gotten nowhere. Litvinov evidently had written a resignation letter, though he did not submit it. “Molotov became vicious,” Maisky added, “attacking Litvinov unremittingly, accusing him of every mortal sin.”²³⁵ Merekalov had been summoned to the April 21 meeting only for the last of the four hours. Fresh from meeting in Berlin with Weizsäcker, he insisted that Soviet-German rapprochement was possible; after all, Hitler needed Soviet neutrality. The British had still not replied to the Soviet offer of a Triple Alliance, but on April 26 they informed Berlin that they would not accept Moscow’s proposal.²³⁶ Stalin decided to bring in the Hammer.

SEIZING FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Ten years younger than the despot, Molotov was the second-most-senior member of the inner circle. He could play violin and took tango lessons (with Voroshilov), though he stammered and was infamous for being mulish. But he had never belonged to a party opposition or the Mensheviks, let alone fought for the Whites or worked in bourgeois counterintelligence (like Beria) and, almost uniquely, was completely untainted. There had been, essentially, just that March 1936 botched Le Temps interview, after which Molotov’s name disappeared from the targets of “enemy” assassination attempts for a time.²³⁷ (Trotsky closely followed the absence, then reappearance, of Molotov’s name, speculating on its significance; Molotov followed Trotsky’s Kremlinological writings.)²³⁸ All during the terror, when Stalin had sent Molotov “materials” on someone and asked what should be done, he had invariably leapt at the cue: “Arrest.” Molotov sometimes crossed out “exile” and wrote “shoot.” When Stalin murdered Molotov’s aides, he acquiesced, and was not known to have tried to protect anyone except his wife.²³⁹ One subordinate recalled that “Molotov was often agitated, and lost his temper over nothing.”²⁴⁰ That was especially the case after Stalin had read him the riot act. At the 18th Party Congress, Stalin had publicly humiliated his number two, approving the draft of Molotov’s report beforehand but then, after he had delivered it, convening the politburo to criticize it, which Molotov then had to acknowledge to the ongoing congress.²⁴¹ Still, the indispensable Molotov proved unfailingly reliable, and possessed phenomenal grit.

Molotov had been present every single time Litvinov was summoned to the Little Corner between 1935 and 1939, with a mere two exceptions.²⁴² The chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars did not hide his antipathy for the foreign affairs commissar. Zhdanov, whom Stalin had made head of the Supreme Soviet commission for foreign affairs, a platform for spewing additional venom about dens of foreign spies, was perhaps even more rabid in his dislike. A Russian nationalist whose virulently anticapitalist, anti-imperialist speeches appeared frequently in the press, Zhdanov came to be seen as the public antipode to the cosmopolitan, multilingual Litvinov. He publicly condemned the mutual assistance pact with France—the linchpin of Litvinov’s foreign policy.²⁴³ Still, Zhdanov worked in Leningrad, and Molotov was by far the most frequent presence in Stalin’s Little Corner—logging three times the total hours of the next closest visitors (Voroshilov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Beria, Mikoyan). In fact, Molotov not only met Stalin alone often but was present at three quarters of all recorded gatherings in the Little Corner. Few others in that regime, if any, could have borne the weight of such proximity to Stalin.

Stalin had long been directing foreign policy himself from his Little Corner, relying upon the NKVD, military intelligence, the Comintern, special envoys, and Molotov as head of government and member of the politburo commission on foreign policy.²⁴⁴ The despot summoned foreign affairs commissariat staff and ambassadors from abroad without Litvinov being present, and he had ignored Litvinov’s warnings about intervening in Spain and much else. Litvinov must have feared for his own life.²⁴⁵ Two terror waves had pulverized his commissariat, the first in spring 1937, the second in spring 1938 (which targeted those who had worked with him yet remained at large).²⁴⁶ Foreigners looked to Litvinov’s fortunes as a key to unlocking the enigma of Soviet foreign policy.²⁴⁷ During the 1939 May Day parade, Stalin allowed him to appear atop the Lenin Mausoleum for all to see.²⁴⁸ The next day, Maisky, in London, ruminating on the Soviet proposal for a grand alliance with Britain and France, concluded that “acceptance by the British Government can scarcely be doubted.”²⁴⁹ But that very night, Beria and Dekanozov, along with Molotov and Malenkov, arrived at the foreign affairs commissariat, in the form of a “Central committee commission,” to interrogate the staff. Litvinov was forced to observe the humiliation.²⁵⁰ On May 3, Litvinov received the British ambassador calmly, and Seeds, belatedly, answered the Soviet alliance proposal by reporting that Whitehall had still not come to a decision—after a fortnight.²⁵¹ That same evening, in Stalin’s Little Corner, yet another flaying of collective security took place. As Litvinov sat there impassively, Molotov lost his composure, shouting as Litvinov departed, “You think we are all fools.”²⁵²

During the Little Corner gathering, Beria had slipped out at 5:05 p.m., ten minutes before Litvinov was admitted. NKVD troops proceeded to surround the foreign affairs commissariat building on Blacksmith Bridge, diagonally across from the back side of Lubyanka. At 11:00 that night, Kremlin staff dispatched a coded message to Soviet ambassadors—which, unusually, was signed by Stalin himself—noting Litvinov’s “disloyal attitude to the Council of People’s Commissars” and the acceptance of his “request” to be relieved of his duties.²⁵³ On the morning of May 4, at the foreign affairs commissariat, Molotov announced that he was taking over. In Litvinov’s old office, he had to sort through his state papers, which lay in a disorganized pile, many unread, some smeared in butter from sandwiches—the kind of disarray the fastidious Molotov found especially distasteful.

Litvinov’s 1939 dismissal marked Stalin’s full emancipation from the foreign policy “specialists.”²⁵⁴ Unlike many Bolsheviks of his vintage, such as Litvinov, Molotov had never been part of the foreign emigration in Europe.²⁵⁵ Also unlike Litvinov, Molotov enjoyed direct access to Soviet intelligence agencies, which he would employ alongside regular channels of diplomacy.²⁵⁶ Among the cast of top minions, Molotov, further, was uniquely self-assured. “I would say,” Khrushchev later recalled, “that he was the only person in the politburo who opposed Stalin on this or that question for the second time.”²⁵⁷ Georgy Zhukov, the military commander, later recalled that “at times it reached the point where Stalin raised his voice and even lost all self-control, and Molotov, smiling, rose from behind the table and held firm to his point of view.” Zhukov added that Molotov “exerted a serious influence on Stalin, especially in foreign policy questions, in which Stalin at that time, before the war, considered him [Molotov] as competent.”²⁵⁸

A ROUTED, TRANSFORMED COMMISSARIAT

Litvinov was put under investigation for high treason, partly based upon “testimony” from Yezhov, delivered to Stalin on April 27, to the effect that, while on holiday at Merano, Italy, Litvinov, while dancing a foxtrot, had told Yezhov that “our statesmen have absolutely no culture at all.” Litvinov lost his Moscow apartment but kept his state dacha outside the city, which Beria had surrounded with NKVD troops. The story goes that Litvinov, finding his government phone disconnected, used a city line to call Beria, who “joked” that the goons were stationed there for his “protection.”²⁵⁹ Litvinov’s house arrest reverberated throughout the foreign affairs commissariat as his closest associates still at large were arrested and tortured to build a “case” against their boss. “Beria and Kobulov put me on a chair and sat on either side and punched me in the head, playing ‘swings,’” recalled Yevgeny Gnedin, the press officer of the foreign affairs commissariat. “They beat me horribly, with the full force of their arms, demanding I give testimony against Litvinov.”²⁶⁰ One foreign affairs commissariat insider who might not have been displeased at Litvinov’s removal was Vasily Korzhenko. When he heard of Molotov’s appointment as commissar, he anticipated a promotion; after all, Korzhenko had been helping direct carnage from the inside. But the Korzhenko family driver had been arrested as a Polish spy; his replacement, too, was arrested as a trumped-up spy.²⁶¹ The loyal hatchet man himself, rather than being given the expected promotion, was asked for his keys, and, back out in the corridor, NKVD operatives arrested him. He disappeared, now a victim as well as perpetrator.

Soviet diplomacy’s image abroad was being devastated by the widely discussed disappearances. As in the case of the NKVD, however, a planned separate trial of foreign commissariat personnel would never take place.²⁶² The wet work of mopping up the remaining Litvinovites fell to the Beriaite Dekanozov, who had only recently been named head of NKVD foreign espionage but now became first deputy commissar of foreign affairs. Dekanozov’s place was taken by Pavel Fitin (b. 1907), the son of Russian peasants in Siberia, who had attended a village middle school, then graduated as an agricultural engineer from the Tirmiryazev Academy, in Moscow, and became an editor at the state agricultural publisher. In March 1938, the party had him mobilized to the NKVD Central School, in Moscow, but not the newly opened NKVD School of Special Designation for training spies, outside the capital in the woods (he lacked knowledge of a foreign language). Nonethless, by August 1938 he was an intern in the NKVD’s espionage directorate, in the department for Trotskyites and rightists abroad. In January 1939, Fitin was named deputy head of Soviet civilian espionage, and on May 13, 1939, he would be promoted to the top position (while holding the rank of major).²⁶³ Sudoplatov would be advanced to deputy chief under Fitin and given a grand office at Lubyanka HQ, on the seventh floor—the old office of Abram Slutsky, the former NKVD foreign intelligence chief who had been killed with poison by his own agency.²⁶⁴

Not everyone in foreign affairs was arrested. Alexandra Kollontai, a former member of the old Workers’ Opposition and one of the world’s first female ambassadors, survived. Why remains mysterious, though she did constantly seek out Stalin’s guidance, allowing him to explain geopolitics to her, flattering his self-conception as the Lenin of our day, while also sucking up to Voroshilov, playing on his infamous sentimentality.²⁶⁵ Equally remarkable, the Litvinovite Maisky, a former Menshevik who during the civil war had been a member of the anti-Bolshevik government in Samara, was not recalled. A few diplomatic personnel, when summoned home, escaped. Raskolnikov, Soviet envoy to Bulgaria, had received a telegram from Litvinov ordering him to Moscow in connection with an unspecified new appointment, but he dragged out his departure from Sofia and, en route to the Soviet Union, managed to switch trains and abscond to Paris. (In summer 1939, Raskolnikov would be convicted in absentia.) How often Litvinov had tried to protect people, versus how often he became complicit in their destruction, remains unclear.²⁶⁶ He had written to Stalin that he was worried about nine ambassadorial vacancies (including Warsaw, Bucharest, Tokyo, and Washington), with more vacancies looming, and he underscored that “in some of these capitals there has not been an ambassador for a year.”²⁶⁷ NKVD station chiefs had been assigned to the ambassadorial positions in China and Mongolia—and they asked Lubyanka headquarters if they could inform the foreign affairs commissariat of their diplomatic activities.

A number of those now arrested in foreign affairs were Jewish. Their deliberate removal in 1937–39 did not signify a special anti-Semitism, any more than their original mass promotion into the foreign affairs commissariat, or into the Cheka, had signaled a special Judeophilia.²⁶⁸ The removal of Jews was aimed at altering the image of the regime and making way for promotion of the young, the humble, and the Slavic, as in the NKVD. Typical of the new men was twenty-four-year-old Vladimir Pavlov, an ethnic Russian who had graduated in spring 1939 from the Moscow Energy Institute and, already a candidate member of the party, found himself a top aide to Molotov. Pavlov soon became one of Stalin’s interpreters.²⁶⁹ Another example was Andrei Gromyko (b. 1909), a working-class militant from Belarus who had been trained as a Marxist economist and suddenly entered diplomatic service in spring 1939 as the new head of the foreign affairs commissariat’s American department. (He had “virtually no knowledge of foreign affairs,” American diplomats in Moscow surmised after a luncheon.)²⁷⁰ Molotov would recall that Litvinov “was an intelligent man, an outstanding personality, but one did not trust him.” By contrast, Molotov viewed Gromyko as “still young and inexperienced, but loyal.”²⁷¹

When Hitler had asserted control over his foreign ministry, which he had called an “intellectual garbage dump,” by appointing the Nazi parvenu Ribbentrop to replace the old-line aristocrat Baron Konstantin von Neurath, the takeover was said to resemble a fight of the jackboots against the striped trousers.²⁷² The Soviet foreign affairs commissariat was rocked not just by the brawling over political orientation—Britain/France versus Germany—but by class and cultural antagonisms. Litvinov had once been a young firebrand, the man Lenin had called upon to fence the money that Kamo and Stalin had heisted from the mail coach on Yerevan Square in 1907. But Victor Serge, in France, characterized the dismissed sixty-three-year-old Litvinov as “a large diplomat with a lined face resembling a very wealthy diamond merchant from Antwerp or a City banker related to the Rothschilds.”²⁷³ No love was lost between the Litvinov caste of “bourgeois” Soviet diplomats of Western three-piece suits and clubby gestures—the very features that made him acceptable in the Western world—and the latest young appointees, who often came from the workbench or the plow, such as Pavlov and Gromyko. But Pavlov aside, the newly promoted were often monolingual (as Litvinov had complained to Stalin) and out of their depth.²⁷⁴ A former textile plant manager would soon be appointed Soviet envoy to Berlin.

A POLISH HINGE?

On April 20, 1939, when Hitler celebrated his fiftieth birthday, he playfully wrote to Ribbentrop, “Please invite a series of foreign guests, among them as many cowardly civilians and democrats as possible,” adding that he wanted these foreigners to see “a parade of the most modern of armies.”²⁷⁵ Some 20,000 guests were accommodated in the grandstand alone. Celebrations were also held in other German cities, and the Free City of Danzig. The birthday festivities had actually begun the day before, when Hitler rode at the head of a fifty-white-limousine cavalcade along Speer’s newly constructed East-West Axis, the central boulevard of what was to be the transformed capital, decorated with Nazi banners and lit by torches. For the military parade, the Führer stood on the reviewing stand, flanked by generals, admirals, field marshals, and bodyguards. Arm extended in Nazi salute, he took in the largest display in Nazi Germany to date of goose-stepping columns—nearly 50,000 uniformed troops—along with tanks, artillery, antiaircraft guns, and Messerschmitt fighters and Heinkel bombers roaring overhead. According to one foreign eyewitness, Hitler “never took his eyes from the immense army on the march.”²⁷⁶

All surrounding streets and other approaches had been sealed, of course, but the British military attaché in Berlin, Colonel Noel Mason-MacFarlane, had an apartment overlooking the reviewing stand. “Easy rifle shot,” he had said to a colleague in the run-up to the Munich Pact. “I could pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking, and what’s more I’m thinking of doing it. . . . There’d be all hell to pay, of course, and I’d be finished in every sense of the word. Still . . . with that lunatic out of the way . . .”²⁷⁷ His superiors at the war office would have none of it. Again in March 1939, at the time of the invasion of rump Czechoslovakia, Mason-MacFarlane had urged headquarters in London to take energetic action, warning of catastrophe if Hitler was not “unexpectedly wafted to Valhalla.” Now, during preparations for Hitler’s birthday, he had been able to observe the swastika banners and other decorations going up. Assassination by a high-velocity rifle from his apartment remained feasible: his drawing-room window was no more than 100 yards from the reviewing stand. The noise of the crowds, not to mention the blare of the military band, could drown out any shots and allow an assassin a decent chance to escape. Again, however, the war office demurred.²⁷⁸

Following the parade, safely inside the Chancellery hall where Bismarck had presided over the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Hitler’s inner circle presented him with bronze casts, Meissen porcelains, oil paintings (including a Titian), tapestries, antique weapons, rare coins, and kitschy Nazi memorabilia.²⁷⁹ “The Führer is fêted as no other mortal has ever been,” gushed Goebbels, the instigator of the grandiosity. A collector’s luxury anniversary edition of Mein Kampf was published in both dark blue and red cases with stamped gold sword. Hitler, as state propaganda noted, had arisen from the lower ranks, and for his birthday, low-income Germans received 15 reichsmarks, plus 5 more for each dependent, as a onetime gift. Whatever the daily life hardships, Germans could be proud again. “A great man,” one seventeen-year-old girl observed, speaking for millions, “a genius, a person sent to us from heaven.”²⁸⁰

On April 28, 1939—two days after the British government had informed Berlin that it would not accept Soviet proposals for an alliance—the Führer denounced his nonaggression declaration with Poland as well as the Anglo-German naval accord, blaming the two countries, in a blistering two-hour speech at one of the fewer than a dozen Reichstag sessions since he had claimed power.