Stalin

Hitler was furious over another letter from U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt pleading for assurances from the Nazi leader that he would not commit aggression against a long list of specified countries, promising him access to raw materials in return. The message had been disclosed to the New York Times before reaching Hitler, and he had summoned the 855 Reichstag deputies to the Kroll Opera House. “For the past six and a half years, I have lived day and night for the single task of awakening the powers of my people in the face of our desertion by the rest of the world,” he gloated, in front of an immense Nazi eagle. “I have conquered chaos in Germany, reestablished order, immensely increased production in all branches of our national economy, produced, by strenuous efforts, substitutes for numerous materials which we lack, prepared the way for new inventions, . . . caused magnificent roads to be built and canals to be dug, created gigantic new factories.” He congratulated himself for overcoming Versailles and reunifying Germany as well: “I have likewise endeavored to rid them of that treaty, page by page, which in its 448 articles contains the vilest oppression which has ever been inflicted on men and nations. I have brought back to the Reich the provinces stolen from us in 1919. . . . I have reunited the territories that have been German throughout a thousand years of history—and, Mr. Roosevelt, I have endeavored to attain all this without bloodshed and without bringing to my people, and so to others, the misery of war.”²⁸¹

Hitler’s speech drew hearty applause and laughs, including when he implied that he would refrain from attacking the many countries that remained under the British colonial yoke or had already been invaded by the United States over the course of its existence. His twisted thinking—calling dictatorship “order” and the Weimar Constitution “chaos”—did not vitiate the fact that Germany’s vast pool of 6 million unemployed had been returned to the dignity of work, with an economic boom absent inflation (or strikes, which were outlawed), and that Germany had incorporated Austria, the Sudetenland, the Saarland, and Memel. A once great but prostrate country had in Nazi fashion become great again, in a single generation; a lifelong nonentity had become the world’s central figure.²⁸²

Denunciation of the nonaggression declaration seemed to indicate a likely intention to attack Poland, for which Hitler might want to secure Soviet neutrality. His speech had conspicuously omitted the usual denunciations of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” which Western observers duly noted. German press attacks against the USSR ceased, as the Soviets duly noted.²⁸³ On May 3, 1939, General Karl Bodenschatz, Göring’s adjutant, warned the French military attaché in Berlin that “something is up in the East.” He repeated his warning to the Polish military attaché. (The next day was Litvinov’s dismissal.) Four days later, Bodenschatz informed the French ambassador in Berlin, Robert Coulondre, that Hitler wanted an agreement with the Soviet Union.²⁸⁴

VISIONS OF A DEAL

On the evening of May 5, the delayed Kremlin banquet for May Day parade participants took place in the St. George’s Hall, and among the artists summoned for the first time was Igor Ilinsky, the stage and film actor (of Volga-Volga fame), who read from Chekhov’s comic writing. “Everyone ate, drank, conversed,” Ilinsky complained, “and, it seemed, no one was listening to me.”²⁸⁵ Earlier that day, Merekalov had been recalled from Berlin, which left the embassy to Georgy Astakhov, the chargé d’affaires (rumored to be an NKVD intelligence operative). That same day, Karl Schnurre, head of the East European and Baltic section of the commercial policy department in the German foreign ministry, informed Astakhov, in a response to Merekalov’s inquiry regarding the Škoda Works, that its new German director would fulfill Soviet orders.²⁸⁶ Astakhov, according to the German notetaker, “was visibly gratified at the declaration and stressed the fact that for the Soviet Government the material side of the question was not of as great importance as the question of principle.” Astakhov then asked whether negotiations might be resumed. When Schnurre was noncommittal, Astakhov stressed the significance of Molotov’s replacement of Litvinov.²⁸⁷ Astakhov reported to Moscow in detail on the reaction in Germany to Litvinov’s dismissal, but he did not have access to Hitler.²⁸⁸

While Stalin’s embassy in Berlin also sought to drive home the significance of the personnel change, Germany’s embassy in Moscow buzzed with the implications of the dismissal of Litvinov (known on Nazi radio as “Litvinov-Finkelstein”). Each side’s functionaries reported that the other side looked eager for rapprochement.²⁸⁹ The timing was propitious: German economic planners were warning that Germany’s war machine might fall critically short of oil, rubber, and manganese, all of which Stalin could supply.²⁹⁰ But was Hitler interested? Internally, Göring had broached the idea of approaching Moscow, if only to frighten Warsaw into concessions.²⁹¹ Stalin had long suspected that Hitler might be simulating talks with Moscow in order to frighten London into cutting a deal with Berlin.

Britain’s stance vis-à-vis the Soviet Union offered no greater clarity, given the nonanswer to Moscow’s alliance proposal that Seeds had delivered to Litvinov (the day before the latter’s ouster was announced in the press). Litvinov vanished from public view. He was said to be playing bridge, reading poetry, taking walks at his state dacha, and learning to type. But Stalin did not authorize an arrest.²⁹² No sentimentality was involved. Litvinov’s destruction would have delivered an unequivocal signal abroad. Had the despot wanted to consign Britain and France to hell for good—and he did seem to want just that—he would be doing so with no security alternative at hand.²⁹³ Most worrisome, if he abandoned Britain and France definitively, they might cut a nightmare deal with Hitler behind his back.

A German-Japanese anti-Soviet coalition remained a possibility as well. Japan posed a significant threat to the Western powers’ colonies, and Germany sought to convert the Anti-Comintern Pact into a real military alliance with Japan in order to raise the cost of any British and French declaration of war against Germany on behalf of Poland. Sorge reported from Tokyo (May 5, 1939) that the Japanese side was divided: its navy sought to include as mutual enemies the United States and Britain, not just the Soviet Union, while Japan’s army dreamed about a joint war with Nazi Germany against the USSR.²⁹⁴ Germany was also hoping to sign binding military obligations with its Italian partner in the Axis. In Milan on May 6–7, Ribbentrop met Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and the foreign minister, to iron out final details for a bilateral “Pact of Steel” (Mussolini had wanted to call it the Pact of Blood). Japan had been given no advance notice, but Ribbentrop informed a skeptical Ciano that Germany wanted to include Japan.²⁹⁵ For Stalin, getting some sort of deal with Hitler also promised to drive a crucial wedge between Tokyo and Berlin, and possibly with Italy, too.

NEGOTIATIONS, OF A SORT

On May 8, Molotov received British ambassador Seeds, a lifelong Russophile, as well as French ambassador Paul-Émile Naggiar, in his Kremlin office and assured them that the Soviet offer of an alliance conveyed by Litvinov still stood and that “collective security” negotiations would continue. The government chairman/foreign affairs commissar also bluntly accused the Western governments of wanting to talk “ad infinitum” and insisted that any political agreement had to be coupled with a formal military alliance. Seeds requested a public declaration of support for Britain and France in their guarantees to Poland and Romania, in a form agreeable to them, but said nothing of British and French military aid if the Soviet Union were attacked. “As you see,” Molotov wrote in a telegram to Surits (Paris) and Maisky (London), “the English and French are demanding of us unilateral and gratuitous assistance with no intention of rendering us equivalent assistance.” Maisky responded that a “relapse to the Munich policy” of capitulation to Hitler was evident in London. On May 11, as Molotov again received Seeds and Naggiar, Halifax told the Soviet ambassador in London that no three-way “guarantees” could be offered to the three Baltic states against an aggression, a central Soviet demand to remove these potential attack platforms.²⁹⁶

On May 10 at the Berghof, Hitler, with Ribbentrop in tow, received Gustav Hilger, from the Moscow embassy staff (resident in Moscow since June 1920), and Schnurre, the Soviet trade expert in the German foreign ministry, posing many questions and listening. “Will Stalin be prepared under well-known circumstances to come to an agreement with Germany?” Hitler asked, according to Schnurre.²⁹⁷ Within a week, on the initiative of General Keitel, Hitler would also meet with his German military attaché to Moscow, General Ernst Köstring, who, like Hilger, had been born in Russia (1876) and knew the language, and who, no softy on Bolshevism, confirmed the positive interpretations of German-Soviet relations that Hilger and German ambassador Schulenburg had presented.²⁹⁸ Perhaps Hitler relished an approach to Moscow as a way to upset and apply pressure against Poland and Britain, but he loathed the idea of sacrificing any war production to Stalin, which was what a deal with Moscow would have to entail. Ribbentrop was assiduously seeking Japan’s signature to the military Pact of Steel, offering to allow the Japanese to publicly portray the expansive agreement as if it were directed only at the USSR.²⁹⁹

Poland’s tensions with Germany had even pushed the Warsaw leadership into wary discussions with the USSR. Also on May 10, deputy foreign affairs commissar Potyomkin met in Warsaw with Beck, at the latter’s request. Haughty and deceitful as he might be, Beck had turned out not to be the Nazi stooge that Soviet stooges had portrayed him to be. “Peace is a thing precious and desirable,” he had declared in a speech in the Polish parliament on May 5, carried live on radio, explaining his rejection of Hitler’s demands. “Our generation, bloodied in wars, certainly deserves peace. But peace, like almost all things of this world, has its price, a high but a measurable one. We in Poland do not know the concept of peace at any price. There is only one thing in the lives of men, nations, and states that is without price—honor.” An eyewitness recalled, in relation to the otherwise deeply unpopular foreign minister, “I saw women throwing flowers into Beck’s car as he was returning from parliament”—testimony, perhaps, to the limits of Poland’s room to have cut a deal.³⁰⁰ Now, five days later, when Potyomkin hinted that Moscow would support Poland against Germany if the Poles so desired, Beck, in a rambling discourse on the “correlation of forces” in Europe and the lack of Anglo-French resolve, was said to have conceded that “Poland could not stand up to Germany without Soviet support.”³⁰¹

But the Poles backtracked immediately. On May 11, Molotov received the Polish ambassador, Wacław Grzybowski, who “clarified” his government’s official response: Poland could not accept even a guarantee of its borders by Moscow, let alone a possible alliance treaty.³⁰² The next day, Poland signed a mutual assistance pact with France that, within a mere week, would produce written pledges of mutual military aid in the event of war.

Molotov demanded nothing less from Britain and France. On May 14, he responded to the British by reiterating the Soviet insistence on reciprocal security obligations, and on including trilateral guarantees for the territorial integrity of the Baltic states, too. But Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia did not seek “guarantees” of their sovereignty, least of all from the Soviet Union, which they feared as much as or more than Nazi Germany, and Britain did not want to force them. At the same time, it remained highly uncertain whether Britain or France could persuade Poland and Romania to add the USSR to the British and French guarantees of their sovereignty or even grant unequivocal transit rights to the Red Army.³⁰³ In this context, a secret Soviet memorandum of May 15, “English Diplomacy’s Dark Maneuver in August 1914,” recounted how London had promised Berlin it would stand aside, and even secure France’s neutrality, if Germany attacked Russia but not France. Molotov underlined several passages, as if the British were engaged in the same maneuver now.³⁰⁴

ULTIMATUM

Stalin’s regime remained an exceedingly awkward potential partner for the Western powers. Mikhail Bulgakov, who had once again requested permission to leave the country and once again been refused, organized a private reading of his secret manuscript, The Master and Margarita, to his close circle of friends. “When he finally finished reading that night, he said: ‘Well, tomorrow I am taking the novel to the publisher!’ and everyone was silent. . . . Everyone sat paralyzed,” Yelena Bulgakova wrote in her diary (May 14, 1939). “Everything scared them.”³⁰⁵ On May 15, in the middle of the night, Isaac Babel was arrested at his dacha in Peredelkino. His most recent short story collection had been published in fall 1936; now the NKVD confiscated some two dozen folders and notebooks of his unpublished manuscripts, translations, and other materials. Babel suffered from his association with Yezhov, who, under interrogation, had named him as a spy. According to the interrogation protocols, Babel implicated Eisenstein (“The organizers of the Soviet film industry were preventing gifted individuals from revealing their talents to the full”), Solomon Mikhoels (“constantly dissatisfied that the Soviet repertoire gave him no chance to demonstrate his talents”), and Ehrenburg (“In Ehrenburg’s view, the continued wave of arrests forced all Soviet citizens to break off any relations with foreigners”).³⁰⁶ Babel would also sign a bloodstained protocol confessing to membership in a Trotskyite espionage organization on behalf of France, linked to Malraux.³⁰⁷

Babel’s association with the Cheka had extended beyond bedding Yezhov’s wife, Yevgeniya Gladun, the hostess of a literary salon, whom Babel called a “featherhead,” an allusion to Chekhov.³⁰⁸ “He told us how he spent all his time meeting militiamen and drinking with them,” Nadezhda Mandelstam would recall. “The word ‘militia’ was of course a euphemism. . . . M. asked him why he was so drawn to ‘militiamen’; was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers?” Babel replied that he just wanted to have a sniff.³⁰⁹ Now he was in Lubyanka’s inner courtyard, for good.

Stalin made some moves to indicate that terror against his own people would not govern all decision making.³¹⁰ That spring of 1939, after two years of short-lived acting directors, he had finally named a new chief of Soviet military intelligence: air force commander Ivan Proskurov, a decorated veteran of the Spanish civil war and the son of a railroad worker. Proskurov’s first deputy held the lowly rank of major, as did almost all the heads of the departments and subdepartments, and he himself was a mere thirty-two years old. They had to find and reengage the many foreign agents, who remained willing to risk their lives to serve the cause against fascism.³¹¹ NKVD foreign espionage, too, was working to reestablish its networks, straining every nerve to ascertain the intentions of Britain as well as France. Donald Maclean (code-named “Homer”), one of Moscow’s Cambridge Five spies, had been promoted to the British foreign office; another Soviet spy in the foreign office, John Herbert King, a walk-in, delivered cipher books to the NKVD. Yet another Soviet spy worked inside the French general staff, and another in the Czechoslovak foreign ministry.³¹² All these high-placed clandestine sources provided information that reinforced Stalin’s preexisting doubts about the intentions of the Western powers ever to align with the Soviets, or stand up to Hitler.

They also detailed Hitler’s plans. On May 17, 1939, Proskurov sent Stalin a six-page memorandum, “The Future Plans of Aggression by Fascist Germany,” comprising clandestine notes from a briefing fifteen days earlier at the German embassy in Warsaw by Dr. Peter Kleist, the key person for Eastern Europe in Ribbentrop’s foreign ministry. “Hitler,” Kleist was said to have remarked, based on a conversation between the Führer and Ribbentrop, “has decided to bring Poland to her knees.” According to Kleist’s account, as reported by a Soviet agent in the Warsaw embassy, German destruction of Poland’s army was expected to take a mere eight to fourteen days. Furthermore, any conflict between Germany and Poland was expected to be localized; Britain and France, notwithstanding their public “guarantees” of Poland’s territorial integrity, were expected to do essentially nothing if Poland’s demise proceeded rapidly. “The whole project arouses in Germany only one fear: the possible reaction of the Soviet Union,” Kleist was said to have stated. “In the event of a conflict, we hope, no matter the circumstances, to attain the USSR’s neutrality.” Poland might yet prove Stalin’s opportunity: the despot wrote on his copy of the secret report, “Talk to Proskurov. Who is the ‘source.’”³¹³

Proskurov was summoned to the Little Corner on May 19, along with Molotov and the Soviet military attaché to Poland. Stalin evidently heard firsthand of Hitler’s intention to instigate a pretext for an attack on Poland in the coming summer, then pivot westward against France and Britain, after which it would be the turn of the Soviet Union.³¹⁴ So it looked as though a war in the west would come first? The last major war had lasted four years. In such a scenario, Stalin perhaps could wait to see who emerged the likely winner, and reap the gains without the costs—provided, of course, that Britain did not manage to strike another deal with Hitler.

Also on May 19, Beria had executed a confidential task: Radek had his head fatally smashed on the floor of the Verkhne-Uralsk prison, where he was serving a ten-year term. Rumors were loosed that Radek had been killed in a fight with a fellow inmate. In fact, the murder was instigated by a specially dispatched NKVD team—so much for the promise Stalin had made to not execute Radek, in exchange for testimony that Radek had duly delivered against Trotsky and Trotskyites.³¹⁵ (Sokolnikov, another defendant in the January 1937 Trotskyite trial who had been spared death in exchange for his testimony, would also be murdered in prison, in Tobolsk on May 21.) The ironies, as ever, were rich: Radek had once been one of Stalin’s top advisers on German affairs.

Molotov, too, executed his own confidential task at this time. Stalin, having tried to force the issue with an offer of alliance to Britain and France, now sought to force the issue with Hitler: on May 20, the reliably blunt Molotov summoned Schulenburg and informed him that “economic negotiations with Germany have recently been started more than once but have not led to anything. . . . We have the impression that instead of economic negotiations, the German government is conducting some kind of game.” Schulenburg tried to counter Molotov’s charges, but the Hammer then struck an even bigger blow: resumption of talks for an economic agreement would now require “a political basis.” It was a Soviet invitation, delivered as an ultimatum.³¹⁶

STALEMATE

Soviet economic relations with Britain and France remained dogged by the bitterness over tsarist and Provisional Government debts, but even if the debt issues had somehow been resolved, neither Britain nor France promised nearly as much economically to the Soviets as did Germany.³¹⁷ Some sort of a political deal with Nazi Germany also presented the best chance to avoid and perhaps profit from what Stalin saw as the inevitable intracapitalist war.³¹⁸ At the same time, however, an iron-clad British-French-Soviet military alliance encircling Germany did hold appeal: it could, at a minimum, prevent an aggression by either of France’s formal allies, Poland and Romania.³¹⁹ More than that, it could potentially deter Hitler. And even if it failed to prevent him from attacking, a Western alliance, because of geography, promised to shift any fighting from Soviet onto Polish, Romanian, and French soil.

But progress in the formal talks Molotov had opened with the two Western powers in May 1939—a dozen sessions would be held altogether—was halting. Even British officials not adamantly averse to exploring a security deal with the Soviets were hard pressed to overcome the severe practical obstacles. On May 21, Halifax told Maisky again that the Baltic states outright refused a tripartite security guarantee and that the British government “cannot impose guarantees on others by force.” The foreign secretary added that “many in Britain think that a tripartite pact may push Hitler to unleash a war straight away, and therefore, rather than preventing war, the pact would hasten it.” Maisky countered by evoking “Al Capone as a model,” in the sense that “only force will make (Hitler or Mussolini) doff their cap!”³²⁰

France’s ambassador to Berlin, Coulondre, sounded a more alarming note than his British counterparts, warning Paris on May 22 that Ribbentrop was apoplectic over Polish minister Beck’s rejection of Hitler’s “generous” offer and had come around to favoring a rapprochement with Moscow as “indispensable and inevitable.” Among Germany’s objectives, Coulondre listed “the possibility of persuading Russia to play the same role in the dismemberment of Poland that the latter country had played with regard to Czechoslovakia. The ultimate object appeared to be to make use of the material resources and manpower of the USSR as a means to destroy the British empire.” He noted that “it is possible that up to the present the Führer has resisted these appeals or at any rate hesitated to commit himself to such a policy, for ideological reasons. But, even admitting that such is his present attitude, there is nothing to indicate that he will not change his mind.” Coulondre advised that “at this moment, when the Anglo-Franco-Russian negotiations seem to have entered upon a decisive phase, we should . . . bear in mind that the Reich would do its best to take advantage, to the detriment of France and Great Britain, of any failure . . . in the conversations now taking place with Moscow.”³²¹

Also on May 22, 1939, Stalin addressed a Central Committee plenum on its second day, reiterating his conviction that if it had not been for forced collectivization, “there would be no new major industry, no army and culture,” and complaining, apropos of his own concession of small household plots seven years earlier, that “the peasant on his own plot will always scheme to enlarge his interests.” He added, “If we are going to lag behind events this way in future instead of leading, then . . . we shall obtain the result of collective farms falling apart and hamlets and new individual farms being formed.” A decree followed (May 27) that circumscribed household plots, to combat the “bazaar-ification of collective farm lands,” the only document of the plenum made public.³²² Here was an empire of enslavement and political murder, founded on hostility toward private initiative and markets. That same day, the British and the French nominally acceded to Soviet demands and submitted a draft for reciprocal guarantees of security, but their response still excluded the Baltic states. Still more fundamentally, in the event of an attack on the USSR, the French and the British were promising only consultations—and through the League of Nations, to boot—not immediate military action. Molotov would angrily reject their proposal as betraying a lack of seriousness.³²³

• • •

ON MAY 22 IN BERLIN, Italy and Germany formally signed their Pact of Steel, which contained an open declaration of cooperation and binding consultation, and a secret protocol of military and economic union, directed against Britain and France.³²⁴ Japan declined to sign but continued negotiating with Germany. To Molotov’s blunt maneuver with Schulenburg, Germany offered no immediate response. Some German officials indulged a guarded optimism. “It seems that there still remains fairly wide scope for action in Russo-German relations,” observed Weizsäcker, the number two in the foreign ministry, in a memorandum (May 25, 1939). He added, “It should be our aim to prevent Anglo-Franco-Russian relations from assuming a still more binding character.”³²⁵ But Schulenburg warned that Soviet-German negotiations could be a mere pretext to assist Moscow in the negotiations with London and Paris. Ribbentrop, unsure of Hitler’s thinking, accentuated this caution.³²⁶ For once, though, the Führer seemed ahead of his foreign minister. Secretly, on May 23, Hitler had gathered a small coterie of military men in the Chancellery to convey his resolve for war against Poland, as a step in a looming showdown with Britain. He stressed the imperative to meet the economic challenges of military requirements but indicated that German-Soviet economic relations would be possible only if political relations improved, an unacknowledged reference to Molotov’s ultimatum/invitation. Hitler hinted that Moscow would accede to Poland’s annihilation.³²⁷

In parallel, Hitler wanted to use Japan against the Western powers. The Japanese were insisting on firm mutual obligations for a war against the Soviet Union and only loose ones for a war against Britain and France, exactly the opposite of what the Germans sought.³²⁸ Ribbentrop had tried to force the issue by telling Lieutenant General Hiroshi Ōshima, now the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, that if he could not bring about a German-Japanese alliance, Germany would have to conclude a nonaggression pact with the USSR. Ōshima spoke fluent German and had been accorded private audiences with Hitler; he fantasized with Russian émigrés about Stalin’s assassination. But the diplomatically inexperienced ultranationalist, a staunch advocate for a German-Japanese military pact, would later claim he had not relayed Ribbentrop’s threat to Tokyo.³²⁹ Be that as it may, the Tokyo establishment was divided over whether to take up the German proposal.³³⁰ On May 27, Weizsäcker wrote to Schulenburg that “one link in the whole chain, namely a gradual conciliation between Moscow and Tokyo, was said by the Japanese to be extremely problematical. Rome was also somewhat hesitant, so that eventually the disadvantages of the far-reaching step envisaged were regarded as decisive.” He added, “With the approval of the Führer, an approach is nonetheless now to be made to the Russians, though a very much modified one.”³³¹

Ribbentrop, exasperated, wrote to the German ambassador in Tokyo, Eugen Ott (May 28, 1939), that “we can no longer understand what is actually happening in Tokyo and why the Japanese government, at this advanced stage of the negotiations, are still continuing to avoid making their decision clear.” The next day, German foreign ministry officials somehow discerned that the USSR inclined toward signing an accord with Britain.³³² Soviet military intelligence spies, meanwhile, delivered copies of Ribbentrop’s internal summary of a conversation with the Polish ambassador in Berlin, supplemented by reports of conversations of the German military attaché in Poland, who expected the Poles to capitulate rather than fight. Stalin’s agents supplied him with reports leaked by the British foreign office to the German ambassador in London regarding Soviet negotiations with Britain and France. These leaks contained accurate information and reconfirmed for Stalin where British preferences lay: Berlin, not Moscow.³³³

Round and round the carousel went. German-Japanese, Western-Soviet, Western-German, and German-Italian negotiations all proceeded simultaneously. German officials, far more than British ones, had come to understand the importance of the Japanese question for the Soviet Union, and the difficulty of reconciling Tokyo and Moscow. But nothing was certain, except more intrigue. If diplomacy is the art of managing competing state interests by recognizing other states’ vital interests and keeping communication open, then finding one another’s bottom line, the principals here could barely comprehend how the other states’ systems worked, let alone their aims. Hitler now seemed at loggerheads with Britain, nearing a war over Poland, but his propaganda portrayed history since 1789 as one long march toward “Judeo-Bolshevism,” nihilism, and anarchy, which Nazism alone could halt.³³⁴ Hitler claimed a self-assigned burden to fight on behalf of “civilization” against Jews and other purveyors of international-revolutionary inequity—such as Stalin. Could the Führer really be stopped or even deflected?