Stalin

The Soviets, on August 12, 1939, agreed to the German foreign ministry’s proposal for political talks, requesting, however, that they take place in Moscow. Hitler contemplated dispatching his personal lawyer and minister without portfolio Hans Frank (who had previously gone to Rome to finalize the Axis accord), but on August 14 he opted to send Ribbentrop, a move that Schulenburg formally proposed to Molotov the next day.⁹⁹ That night, at around 8:00 p.m., with Drax in Moscow, Molotov received Schulenburg, who read out a statement received that morning from Ribbentrop. “Germany has no aggressive intentions against the USSR,” Schulenburg stated. “The Reich government is of the opinion that there is no question between the Baltic and the Black Sea which cannot be settled to the complete satisfaction of both countries. Among these are such questions as: the Baltic Sea, the Baltic area, Poland, Southeast questions, etc.” The ambassador proposed a lightning visit by Ribbentrop to Moscow to “set forth the Führer’s views to M. Stalin.” Molotov inquired about a possible bilateral nonaggression pact and German mediation of Soviet-Japanese relations, but said that “such a trip required adequate preparation.”¹⁰⁰ To increase the pressure on Berlin, the day before (and again two days after), Stalin had the German embassy in London informed that the Anglo-Soviet talks were proceeding smoothly and that the Poles would open staff talks with the Soviets.¹⁰¹

On August 16, Rudolf Herrnstadt, a Soviet spy handler in Warsaw, reported to military intelligence HQ in Moscow that the embassy spy Scheliha had revealed that the German invasion of Poland would commence very soon.¹⁰² On August 17, Molotov again received Schulenburg and reported a favorable reaction on the part of “the Soviet government,” but insisted first on the signing of an economic agreement, after which the Soviets wanted to see a written proposal for a nonaggression pact, and only then, about a week after the conclusion of an economic agreement, could Ribbentrop’s visit take place. The Nazi foreign minister, once apprised, on August 18–19 sent Schulenburg a brief two-article text of a nonaggression pact of twenty-five years’ duration, with details to be ironed out in person, promising a special protocol on the Baltic area. “You must keep in mind the decisive fact that an early outbreak of open German-Polish conflict is probable,” Ribbentrop instructed Schulenburg, “and that we therefore have the greatest interest in having my visit to Moscow take place immediately.”¹⁰³

With Pravda (August 19) accusing the British and the French of preparing a “new Munich” with Germany, Stalin received an intelligence report to the effect that Hitler was determined to tackle the Polish question come what may, and that he thought Moscow would “conduct negotiations with us, as she has no interest whatever in a conflict with Germany, nor was she anxious to be defeated for the sake of England and France.” Such information dovetailed with the intercepts of Schulenburg’s telegrams to Berlin.¹⁰⁴ On the evening of August 19, Schulenburg reported to Berlin that he had been received twice that day by Molotov—at 2:00 p.m., for one hour, and again at 5:00 p.m.—and that the Soviet government had presented him with a Soviet text for a nonaggression pact consisting of five articles and a postscript, to last five years, and had agreed to receive the Nazi foreign minister in Moscow on August 26 or 27.¹⁰⁵ That was the proposed date for Germany’s invasion of Poland. A German-Soviet economic agreement had been finalized in Berlin around noon on August 19, but at 4:00 p.m. local time, Soviet negotiators had informed their German counterparts that they could not sign it.

Finally, the Soviets in Berlin consented to sign the economic agreement at 2:00 a.m. on August 20, dating it the previous day. It stipulated that the Reich would export “industrial goods” totaling about 60 million reichsmarks of “current business” (trade covered by earlier clearing agreements) and 180 million reichsmarks of “new business.” The Soviets would export the same in raw materials and repay old credits. The Reich, in turn, would finance 200 million reichsmarks’ worth of the new Soviet orders. Schnurre, the lead German negotiator, noted that “the framework now set up represents a minimum,” and predicted that bilateral trade could leap to nearly 1 billion reichsmarks. The German government agreed to guarantee the loan nearly fully, at a publicly stated interest rate of 5 percent, but with a secret protocol refund of 0.5 percent, reducing the actual interest while allowing a seven-year term of payback, and not requiring an itemized list of goods. The Germans had wanted to grant a larger Soviet credit, 500 million reichsmarks or more, at a higher interest rate, with lower German government loan guarantees, shorter terms of payback (five years maximum), and a specific list of goods to contain Soviet appetites.¹⁰⁶

Later that afternoon of August 20, 1939, Hitler dispatched a personal telegram to Stalin via the German embassy in Moscow. “The conclusion of a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union means to me the establishment of a long-range Germany policy,” Hitler wrote. “I accept the draft pact that your foreign minister, Herr Molotov, delivered, but consider it urgently necessary to clarify questions connected with it as soon as possible.” He referred to “intolerable” tension between Germany and Poland and, noting that Ribbentrop would have full powers to sign a state accord, asked that he be received on August 22, or August 23 latest. Also on August 20, nine days after his arrival in Moscow, Drax finally produced written credentials allowing him to negotiate on behalf of the British government, but Voroshilov adjourned the negotiations indefinitely. Stalin, who was micromanaging the process, sent Voroshilov duck hunting.¹⁰⁷

Pravda, on the morning of August 21, carried the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet economic agreement, calling it “a serious step in the cause of improving not only economic, but also political relations between the USSR and Germany.” Stalin effectively would supply the Germans with grain harvested by his enslaved collective farmers and oil and strategic raw materials extracted partly by his Gulag inmates, for the right to engage in a shopping spree through one of the world’s most modern economies for machines and models of modern weaponry.¹⁰⁸ That day at 3:00 p.m., Schulenburg was able to hand Hitler’s telegram for Stalin to Molotov.¹⁰⁹ Stalin underlined in blue pencil Hitler’s phrase regarding Poland (“A crisis may break out any day”), as well as the Führer’s urgent appeal (“I would be pleased to receive your immediate reply”).¹¹⁰ Stalin had Molotov summon Schulenburg back already at 5:00 p.m. Moscow time to reveal that Ribbentrop would be welcome on the 23rd. “The people of our countries,” Stalin wrote in his response to Hitler, “need peaceful relations.”¹¹¹

Stalin’s response, transmitted via the German embassy, arrived in Berlin at 8:30 p.m. local time on August 21. At the Berghof, champagne was ordered. Hitler, a teetotaler, did not imbibe, but he drummed both fists on the wall.¹¹² Just before midnight, the Nazi regime released the sensational news of its foreign minister’s upcoming Moscow visit. In Paris, the government pondered pressing the Poles into “compromise” with Hitler, to buy time. In London, the assembled cabinet sought to appear nonchalant, but MPs were asking about the apparent failure of British intelligence to anticipate such a shocking turn of events.¹¹³ Burgess informed Gorsky of a telegram from Ambassador Henderson, also on August 21: “All measures have been taken for Hermann Göring to arrive under secret cover in London on Wednesday 23rd. This will amount to a historic event and we are just waiting for confirmation of this from the German side.”¹¹⁴

At the Berghof, very early on the morning of Saturday, August 22, the Führer addressed his top brass. He had summoned them to discuss his plans for Poland even before the news had come from Moscow, with instructions to arrive in civilian attire so as not to give anything away. “It was clear to me that a conflict with Poland had to come sooner or later,” he began, according to notes taken by Wilhelm Canaris, the head of military intelligence. “I had already made this decision in the spring, but I thought that I would first turn against the West in a few years, and only after that against the East.” But the Polish situation had become “intolerable.” His only fear, he said, was “that at the last minute some Schweinhund will make a proposal for mediation.” He concluded with an injunction about the absolute necessity of taking advantage of his never-to-be-repeated spell over the German people. “Essentially,” Hitler said, leaning on a grand piano, “all depends on me, on my existence, because of my political talents.” He adjourned them for lunch. To allay worries over his precipitating a new world war, he decided to address them a second time, giving some operational details and asserting that England had no real military. Not a single top general voiced objections. Toward the end of his peroration, Hitler briefly broke off, suddenly recognized Ribbentrop from among those assembled, and, melodramatically, sent his foreign minister with a Nazi salute right from the Berghof to fly to Stalin.¹¹⁵

That same Saturday, August 22, following the emergency cabinet meeting, Henderson set out to hand-deliver Chamberlain’s latest telegram to Hitler. Received at the Berghof on August 23 at 1:00 p.m., he stated that any German-Soviet pact would not alter Britain’s obligations to Poland, but hinted again that Britain could trade Poland away, and suggested again that the very next day, Field Marshal Göring should fly to Britain surreptitiously to meet Chamberlain at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, to hammer out an Anglo-German accord. Ever the ingrate, Hitler berated Henderson, shouting that London’s “blank check” guarantee to Poland had ruled out negotiations. Henderson departed, then was called back, but Hitler, although calmer, blamed Britain for being “determined to destroy and exterminate Germany.” The Führer evidently felt that his theatrics, on top of any pact with Stalin, would induce the British and, in their train, the French to back down from their pledges to Poland. After Henderson departed a second time, Hitler slapped his thigh in self-congratulation at his performance. “Chamberlain won’t survive this discussion,” he said. “His cabinet will fall this evening.”¹¹⁶

Chamberlain had done more for the Nazi leader than any other foreign politician, and the British PM appeared ready to do even more, in order to avoid war over Poland—but the game was up. In the extended diplomatic three-card monte, after all the dealing and double-dealing, Stalin, not Chamberlain, had turned up the “Hitler” card.

Even as Henderson was en route to the Berghof, Nikita Khrushchev arrived at the Near Dacha, having flown in from Kiev, where he was party boss. Few Moscow party officials, let alone “provincials,” enjoyed such access to the despot’s residence. Stalin let on that Ribbentrop was flying in to Moscow the next day, then looked at his protégé and smiled. Assuming that Stalin’s twisted sense of humor was at work yet again, Khrushchev played along, asking if Ribbentrop was going to defect. Stalin replied that he had gotten a telegram from Hitler.¹¹⁷

WINDFALL

The British press phoned Ivan Maisky at home to ask if it was true that Nazi foreign minister Ribbentrop was flying to Moscow; the Soviet ambassador, out of the loop, went with his wife, Agniya, to see Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.¹¹⁸ Göring’s proposed secret mission to London was canceled.¹¹⁹ Ribbentrop, flying on Hitler’s personal Condor, landed for a night stopover at Königsberg (August 22) and resumed his flight the next morning. His retinue was large, nearly forty persons, requiring two Focke-Wulf Condors. Genuine drama awaited on the German-Soviet frontier, at Velikie Luki. Markings on aircraft, unless they flew at very low altitudes, were generally not discernible. Stalin, ever hyperconspiratorial, had evidently not informed the Soviet border guard of his diplomatic conspiracy and, as a result, he almost destroyed his foreign policy coup. Soviet antiaircraft units fired on the Führer’s personal Condor, swastika on the tail, with Ribbentrop aboard. They missed.¹²⁰

The Nazi foreign minister reached Moscow with alacrity at around 1:00 p.m. on August 23, landing at Moscow’s main civilian airfield (near the Dynamo Stadium), a site that had been used for the coronation of Nicholas II, when a stampede over souvenir mugs had resulted in more than 1,000 deaths.¹²¹ There to greet Ribbentrop was deputy foreign affairs commissar Potyomkin, a name historically synonymous with false fronts and Russian deception. Escorted by Stalin’s personal bodyguard, General Vlasik, Ribbentrop rode in one of Stalin’s personal bulletproof ZIS limousines, outfitted with a Nazi flag. This was his first trip to Moscow and, in the words of German military attaché Köstring, the Nazi foreign minister was “nervous and agitated.”¹²² Their first destination was the freshly painted neoclassical former Austrian legation, now belonging to Nazi Germany, in the heart of old Moscow. After a short repast, Ribbentrop, accompanied by Schulenburg and Hilger, passed through the gates of the Kremlin, less than three hours after landing. They were greeted by the indispensable, physically unseemly Poskryobyshev, in colonel’s uniform, who escorted them upstairs to Molotov’s suite. In a surprise for the Germans, Stalin was present, too.¹²³

Schulenburg, by now in Moscow almost five years, had never even spoken to Stalin.¹²⁴ Schulenburg had previously served in Tehran, and his Moscow residence on Clean (Chisty) Lane “presented a lavish display of marvelous Isfahan carpets covering the walls, old weapons, shields with intricate inlaid designs, sabers, and swords,” a Soviet foreign affairs functionary observed, adding that “Persian miniatures hung all over the place, many of them erotic, which was quite shocking in those days.”¹²⁵ In Molotov’s office, Stalin’s medium height, military-style tunic, and baggy khaki trousers contrasted vividly with the tall Ribbentrop, in his European-cut suit.¹²⁶ A few aides and interpreters were present (neither Stalin nor Molotov could understand German).¹²⁷ Shaposhnikov, the elderly Soviet chief of staff, was the only military figure whom Stalin had included in both the diversionary action (the final talks with Drax) and the main battlefield (Ribbentrop). (Shaposhnikov shook in Stalin’s presence, not because he had difficulty composing himself but because he suffered from Parkinson’s disease.)¹²⁸ Ribbentrop brought a document signed by Hitler that accorded him “full power” to sign a state treaty.¹²⁹ The Nazi foreign minister’s great worry—besides contracting diarrhea from Soviet unsanitariness—was that he would be confronted by the fait accompli of an Anglo-French-Soviet military accord. Ribbentrop further worried that the wily Bolsheviks would drag out negotiations with him.

At the Berghof, having dismissed Henderson, Hitler nervously paced the terrace and sought omens over the majestic Salzburg mountains: the sky was said to go from turquoise to violet to fire red.¹³⁰ For weeks, Stalin had known that a German attack on Poland was imminent, from his intelligence sources, his Berlin chargé d’affaires, Astakhov, and even Schulenburg. Hitler’s recklessness afforded the despot enormous leverage, and he used it. Ribbentrop had sent a formal proposal on spheres of influence on the eve of the French-British military’s arrival in Moscow, but Stalin substituted his own text, which Hitler accepted.¹³¹ The two parties agreed—in the event of an unspecified conflict in Poland—to a mutual demarcation line across the country, right through Warsaw. Germany declared its “disinterest” in Romania’s Bessarabia. Stalin’s sphere of influence also included Finland, Estonia, and Latvia; Hitler was to get Lithuania. But now Stalin wanted Lithuania’s ice-free ports, Liepaja (Libau) and Ventspils (Windau). The talks adjourned so that Ribbentrop could rush to the embassy, where, at 8:05 p.m. Moscow time, he sent a telegram to Hitler, via the German foreign ministry, describing a Soviet request for Libau and Windau as “the decisive point for the final result.” The response came back with Hitler’s assent, and with such rapidity that it shocked his embassy staff.¹³² The Nazi foreign minister had even been authorized, if necessary, to grant a Soviet interest in the Turkish Straits, but Stalin had not thought to make the request.¹³³

By 10:00 p.m. Ribbentrop was back at the Kremlin with Hitler’s latest concession, on Lithuania. In the one alteration to Stalin’s draft that the Führer had been able to introduce, the Pact came into effect immediately upon signing, not ratification. The spheres of influence were written up in a secret protocol: territorially, the Germans got only what they would fight for.

The two sides discussed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which Ribbentrop avowed was not directed against the USSR. He volunteered to bring Berlin’s good graces to bear for improved Soviet-Japanese relations. Stalin replied that there were limits to Soviet patience in the face of Tokyo’s provocations; that the Soviets were ready to go to war if necessary; and that any German approach to Tokyo should not be made to seem a Soviet initiative. On Italy, Stalin inquired whether it might have aspirations beyond small, thinly populated Albania—perhaps for Greek territory. Ribbentrop answered that Albania was not insignificant, and that Mussolini was a strongman who could not be intimidated and welcomed improved German-Soviet relations.¹³⁴ During a break, as the final texts were written up in German and Russian, Stalin, Molotov, and Ribbentrop confirmed their solidarity by trashing the British.¹³⁵

Stalin mentioned that the British foreign office official John Simon, in confidential talks with Germany, had discussed a division of Europe into spheres of influence and had placed Soviet territory into the Nazi sphere. Ribbentrop was taken aback: these conversations were known to only a very narrow circle in Berlin. It was evident that Stalin had spies high up in the German foreign ministry, a problem to be addressed once back home.¹³⁶ For now, shared Anglophobia, undergirded by a shared antiliberalism, like a shared Griff nach der Weltmacht (at British expense), made for a heady cocktail. To the husband of the heiress to the Henkell champagne fortune, Stalin had lifted a glass of Soviet champagne, stating, “I know how much the German people love their Führer, and that is why I have the pleasure of drinking to his health!”¹³⁷ Still, when a giddy Ribbentrop tried to insert an effusive section into the text about German-Soviet friendship, Stalin refused. “Do you not think we should take a little more account of public opinion in both our countries?” he asked Ribbentrop. “For many years now, we have been pouring buckets of shit over each other’s head.”

Signatures were affixed at around 2:00 a.m. on August 24, a mere thirteen hours after Ribbentrop had landed.¹³⁸ He phoned Hitler from Molotov’s office with the news. “Convey my congratulations to Herr Stalin, the Führer of the Soviet people,” Hitler responded.¹³⁹ Stalin did not request the receiver, and Hitler did not ask to speak directly to him. Stalin toasted Hitler (“To the health of the Führer”).¹⁴⁰ Molotov toasted Stalin. “The atmosphere, which had been pleasant, became warmly convivial,” according to a German official present. “The ruler of Russia filled his guests’ glasses himself, offered them cigarettes and even to light them.”¹⁴¹

Photographers had been let in to record the moment for history. Hitler had sent his personal photographer so that the Führer could study Stalin’s surroundings as well as his physiognomy, for Hitler was anxious to ascertain whether Stalin’s earlobes were “ingrown and Jewish, or separate and Aryan”?¹⁴²

Lenin had condemned treaties with secret protocols and spheres of influence as “agreements between robbers behind people’s backs.” Not a mention of the Pact negotiations, even obliquely, was recorded in politburo minutes.¹⁴³ The basic text was published in Pravda (August 24, 1939), with stunning photos of Stalin and Molotov alongside the Nazi foreign minister, but without the secret protocol, of course.¹⁴⁴ The Hitler-Stalin Pact lacked a clause of invalidation in the event that one of the signatories attacked a third country. Litvinov had been trumpeting the inclusion of such a provision in Soviet bilateral nonaggression pacts as evidence of moral superiority, thundering that its absence in capitalist nonaggression pacts “means that a state which has secured by such a pact of nonaggression its rear or flank obtains the facility of attacking with impunity third states.”¹⁴⁵ On the German side, the fourteen members of the embassy in Moscow signed an oath never to reveal the secret protocol’s contents. Hans “Johnnie” Herwarth, the second secretary of the German embassy, on August 24, 1939, divulged to American ambassador Charles Bohlen the full contents of the Secret Additional Protocol signed earlier that morning.¹⁴⁶ On the Soviet side, only Stalin, Molotov, and Shaposhnikov, as well as the twenty-four-year-old interpreter, Pavlov, knew. Molotov, when asked publicly, replied that the imperialists used secret protocols all the time—an evasion that was accurate but placed the Soviets in dubious company from their own point of view.¹⁴⁷

Hitler had secured his eastern flank for his attack on Poland, preempted a possible broad anti-German coalition, and obtained insurance against the anticipated Western blockade. And then there was the sheer shock value. “That will hit like a bombshell,” he remarked to those in the Berghof—for once, an understatement.¹⁴⁸

Immediately after the signing, Molotov had repaired with Stalin back to the Little Corner between 2:15 and 3:35 a.m.¹⁴⁹ From there, in the wee hours of August 24, the two headed out to the Near Dacha. Voroshilov and the other cronies had returned there with their ducks from the military’s exclusive Zavidovo Hunting Preserve, seventy miles outside Moscow. Stalin dropped word that he had signed the Pact with the Nazis, which would allow the Soviets to determine the fate of the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Finland and to obtain a chunk of Poland, a strategic Soviet sphere of influence and a buffer to protect the socialist homeland. Unlike what had been proposed with the Western powers, moreover, the Pact imposed no obligations on the Soviet Union to fight a war; it was not a military alliance. The treaty also drove a wedge between Germany and Japan: not only had Hitler failed to complete the negotiations with Tokyo to convert the Anti-Comintern Pact into an anti-Soviet military alliance, but he had violated the Anti-Comintern Pact’s provision that its signatories would conclude no political agreements with the Soviet Union without first consulting one another. Stalin (as Zhukov later recalled) “was sure that he had twisted Hitler around his finger.”¹⁵⁰

CRUSHING MILITARY DISPLAY

On the Mongolia-Manchukuo border, denouement approached. Grigory Stern, at district headquarters in Chita, Siberia, had drawn up a plan for an offensive involving a double envelopment, encircling the Japanese while pinning them frontally. Zhukov, who would execute the plan on Mongolia’s desert steppes, in a salient forty-five miles wide and twelve miles deep, had prepared meticulously. Logistics were nightmarish in the USSR’s expansive, underpopulated, physically challenging Asian territory, extending into Mongolia, remote from Soviet industrial centers, but 4,000 trucks had bridged the 400-mile gap from the nearest railhead to support what would be the Soviets’ first massive battlefield application of tanks and aircraft. Japan’s full-scale invasion of China had altered the strategic calculus to Soviet advantage, a fact that the Kwantung Army, which was not fighting in China, ignored. China absorbed far more of Japan’s strength—28 of the 36 Japanese divisions on the Asian mainland—than Spain had of Nazi Germany’s (which had supported an indigenous insurgency, not fought a war of conquest).¹⁵¹ That was one reason the Tokyo high command had blocked the Kwantung Army’s plan for a massive offensive, approving operations merely for evicting the Soviets from the Halha, a fact that became known to Soviet military intelligence: Hotsumi Ozaki, the leftist functionary in the Japanese cabinet who belonged to Sorge’s spy ring, had learned that Japan’s leaders, consumed with China, were adamant that the conflict with the Soviets not escalate. Whether this further emboldened Stalin cannot be established, but the despot, and the Red Army, were already thinking big.

Cloud cover interfered with aerial reconnaissance, hindering Japanese efforts to enumerate Soviet forces. The Kwantung Army resorted to observation balloons, the first of which a Soviet fighter plane shredded with a machine gun a few hours after it went aloft. Zhukov, in any case, had camouflaged his buildup of a huge strike force. He and his team installed artificial noise machines to induce the Japanese to react to ghosts, thereby inuring them to loud sounds and enabling the Soviets to move equipment (which sounded just like the artificial noise). Zhukov also had weapons and men transferred to frontline jumping-off points only at night. Knowing that the Japanese were tapping telephone lines and intercepting radio traffic, Zhukov had disinformation spread, in easily broken code, about the Soviets’ purely defensive stance and their preparations for possible military operations in the autumn.¹⁵² The Soviets had detailed intelligence on the location and movement of all Japanese troops in Manchukuo.¹⁵³ True, Zhukov, showing Stalin-like suspicion, deemed much of the intelligence forwarded to him speculative. So he organized his own ground combat reconnaissance, as well as fighter plane photography. Finally, learning that the Japanese allowed officers to take leaves on Sundays, Zhukov unleashed the full force of the First Army Group across the Halha on Sunday, August 20, at 5:45 a.m.¹⁵⁴ The Red Army achieved decisive operational surprise.¹⁵⁵

Japanese intelligence continually, egregiously underestimated Soviet capabilities—because of not only Zhukov’s disinformation but also their own prejudices and the reports, a year before, by the defector Lyushkov, whose revelations reinforced the Japanese’s condescending racism. The biggest oversights concerned precisely what Lyushkov had downplayed: the scale and firepower of mechanized corps and long-range artillery. Indeed, although the Japanese had numerical superiority on the borderland—perhaps 75,000 troops to Zhukov’s 57,000—the Soviets had a colossal advantage in armor: almost 600 tanks, more than 500 artillery pieces, 515 fighter planes.¹⁵⁶ Soviet-built heavy tanks came off assembly lines in numbers, and enjoyed clear superiority to the lighter Japanese models. More prosaically, the Soviets ingeniously used simple piano wires to trap Japanese tanks, immobilizing them long enough that they could be finished off—the kind of resourcefulness used when one does not underestimate one’s foe. Mongolia’s open grassland and low sandy hills, moreover, proved highly conducive to mechanized warfare (the opposite of the lesson the Soviets had learned in Spain’s urbanized areas), and Zhukov managed the feat of coordinating combined tank, motorized infantry, artillery, and aircraft warfare. This sophistication of strategy, tactics, and generalship surprised the Japanese, too. No less extraordinary was Soviet transport of thousands of tons of ammunition, food, and fuel over the primitive roads—more than 1,300 truckloads daily from the Transbaikal military district.¹⁵⁷ The Japanese soldiers, without even water, would take to soaking up the night dew with their towels and chewing.¹⁵⁸

Japan’s cult of fighting “spirit,” its piecemeal commitment of forces, pathetic ground support, inferior ordnance, and poor logistics, combined with its no-surrender doctrine, even in the face of superior firepower, to produce catastrophe.¹⁵⁹ Stalin had always gotten lucky in his nemeses—Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev-Bukharin, and now the Kwantung Army. He also got lucky in Zhukov, whom the despot evidently had never even met, but who showed himself a self-assured corps commander whose operational mastery exposed Japan’s unsophistication in mobile warfare. To be sure, failure for Zhukov at the Halha River could have meant death in NKVD cellars.¹⁶⁰ But then again, that was true for every Soviet commander. He proved to be willing to assume great responsibility and risk. He was decisive, unsentimental, even ruthless—like Stalin. On the third day of the heavily armored offensive, when the Japanese managed to dig in on a strategic hill, causing enormous Soviet casualties, Stern suggested to Zhukov that he halt for a few days to gather forces. Zhukov rudely rejected the idea.¹⁶¹

The very next day, August 24, 1939, as Ribbentrop departed Moscow, the Japanese attempted a desperate broad-daylight frontal assault with no prior scouting or artillery or aerial softening up. This was the beginning of a literal suicide wave. Japanese commanding officers would order their soldiers to take their own lives rather than be captured. Just a week in, on August 28, Zhukov telegrammed Voroshilov: “The Japanese-Manchurian troops that violated the border of the Mongolian People’s Republic . . . have been completely surrounded and annihilated.”¹⁶²

The Japanese suffered 18,000 casualties (8,000 killed, 8,800 wounded, 1,200 sick), but the Red Army, in victory, lost even more—9,703 killed and 15,952 wounded, nearly 40 percent of its deployment.¹⁶³ Still, the entire Halha River had been cleared of Japanese by industrialized brute face, applied with no regard to costs. The thirty-nine-year-old Stern, as the senior-ranking commander and a Central Committee member, headed the list of newly named “Heroes of the Soviet Union.” The forty-three-year-old Zhukov, in his hero citation, was recognized as “a brilliant organizer, a person of unbending willpower and boundless courage.”¹⁶⁴ The text could have added a burning desire to clear his name from the scurrilous denunciations during the terror, and win Stalin’s favor.¹⁶⁵

SHOCK WAVES

Zhukov’s thrashing of the ineptly led Kwantung Army delivered a trove of captured Japanese operational documents and codes, and a blow to its reputation.¹⁶⁶ “We were quite shocked by the results,” the influential Asahi Shimbun would concede.¹⁶⁷ The Japanese, as Stalin heard from his ambassador, as well as from the military intelligence spy Sorge, were also shell-shocked by Hitler’s Pact with their enemy.¹⁶⁸ The disgraced government in Tokyo fell. The outgoing prime minister, who had misinformed the emperor, called the German-Soviet deal “intricate and baffling.”¹⁶⁹

But the Soviet Pact also produced shock waves right at home. Some proletarians wept at news of the agreement.¹⁷⁰ Thanks in large measure to the civil war in Spain, antifascism (understood globally), not just anticapitalism, had become a pillar of the Communist idea, Soviet identity, and domestic and global loyalties. Veterans of the Spanish civil war wondered why they had fought and left so many fallen comrades behind if the USSR was only going to go on to sign a pact with Nazism. Ehrenburg, who was still in Paris as a correspondent for Izvestiya, claimed he had lost his appetite—for eight months.¹⁷¹ Tukhachevsky and other top Soviet military men and intelligence agents had been shot for alleged links to the German military, while the vivid caricatures of Boris Yefimov had memorably depicted Trotsky as dancing arm in arm with Hitler. “Destroying the party and decapitating the army” as alleged agents of Hitler, Trotsky wrote, “Stalin is now openly advancing his candidacy for the role . . . of Hitler’s main agent.”¹⁷²

Stalin did not stage a Central Committee plenum to rubber-stamp the Pact or have the press blare the usual mass affirmations at factories and collective farms. The Comintern absorbed yet another moral and psychological blow. “The publication of photographs of Bolsheviks smiling at Nazis and the announcement that Germany and the USSR had signed a pact stupefied us,” wrote Jesús Hernández, who had joined the Spanish Communist party in 1922, at age fifteen, and spent more than five years in prison for it.¹⁷³ A stunned Georgi Dimitrov had sent Stalin, Zhdanov, and Molotov a summary of Western Communist reactions, cherry-picking anything supportive of Moscow’s position, but pleaded for an audience with Stalin to help him with the “exceptional difficulties” in instructing Communist parties globally.¹⁷⁴ Stalin would receive him in the Little Corner on September 7, in the company of Molotov and Zhdanov. “A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries—(poor and rich as regards colonies, raw materials, and so forth)—for the redivision of the world, for the domination of the world!” the despot gloated. “We see nothing wrong in their having a good fight and weakening each other. It would be fine if at the hands of Germany the position of the richest capitalist countries (especially England) were shaken.”¹⁷⁵

Stalin further stated in the Little Corner that “the division of capitalist states into fascist and democratic no longer makes sense.” Such a division had never held much meaning for him even when, in 1935, he had allowed the Comintern to announce a popular front against fascism, which, in the form of Nazi Germany, had become objectively progressive: “Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system.”¹⁷⁶

Soviet propaganda turned on a dime. Nearly half of all expressly antifascist Soviet films (a mere thirteen in total since 1928) had appeared between late 1938 and early 1939, and all of those depicted Germany as the aggressive country—none better than Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein’s first completed film in more than a decade.¹⁷⁷ With a score by Prokofyev and USSR People’s Artist Nikolai Cherkasov in the main role, the patriotic epic portrayed the Teutonic Knights’ thirteenth-century invasion of Great Novgorod, their capture of Pskov (owing to a traitor), and their eventual defeat by Prince Alexander, who rallies the common people in a decisive “Battle on the Ice,” set to stirring music. Nevsky had premiered on December 1, 1938, and in April 1939 the head of the state cinematography committee reported that 23 million people had seen it.¹⁷⁸ “It came out not bad, it seems,” Stalin had written on the screenplay, but after the Pact was signed, he had the film pulled.¹⁷⁹

Many Communists and foreign fellow travelers who had explained away the monstrous terror, often in the name of antifascism, now broke with the cause. “Everybody else in the world, the Social Democrats, the liberals, the conservatives, had their opinions, but we, the Marxist-Leninists, we had a scientific world outlook,” recalled Wolfgang Leonhard, a German Communist studying in Moscow in the second half of the 1930s. “We knew the fundamental answer to the riddle of the past, present, and future, for all nations and for all countries.”¹⁸⁰ But a deal with the Nazis crystallized Leonhard’s gathering doubts: “The mighty workers’ movement in Central Europe was in ruins; Hitler’s tanks dominated Europe; Lenin’s comrades-in-arms during the Russian Revolution had all been shot as spies; the Spanish Republic had been abandoned by the European democracies, its revolutionary movement stabbed in the back by Soviet agents; and finally Stalin had concluded a pact with Hitler.”¹⁸¹ Even many who wanted to remain loyal struggled to do so. “It was actually shameful, and we weren’t able to overcome this feeling of shame for a long time,” said the German Communist Ruth von Mayenburg, who traveled in secret from Moscow to Nazi Germany on life-risking missions. “One had to mobilize one’s Marxist concept of imperialism, of international struggles, of everything, in order to deceive oneself about this matter of conscience.”¹⁸²

Here, again, we see the core of Communism’s extraordinary power: its rootedness in beliefs and personal biographies, which, however, also made for its extreme vulnerability. To be sure, for those loyalists less preoccupied with Communist dogma, the Pact spurred elaborate great-power fantasies. “Perhaps we have preserved the last word,” Vishnevsky, the playwright who headed the military commission of the writers’ union, wrote in his diary after reading the announcement of the Pact in the newspaper. “In the event of war, we’ll enter last. And—it is utterly possible—we shall strike that very Germany.” Three days later, he wrote, “1) We win time; we shall observe the military prowess of countries in reality; 2) we’ll acquire experience, of much greater value than in Spain and China.” He went on to suggest the possibility of using the Pact to smash Japan for good and obtain advantageous proposals from France and Britain, and he concluded that “Germany could not be trusted: it has violated many agreements.” He foresaw an expansion of Soviet interests in the Carpathians and Balkans and on the Black Sea, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. “It is difficult to guess how the game will turn out,” he wrote in his diary. “But one thing is clear: the world will be reshaped. . . . This is a new chapter in the history of the party and the country. The USSR has begun an activist global policy.”¹⁸³

Beria did his part, imposing a ban on the taunting of Gulag prisoners as “fascists.”¹⁸⁴ Molotov, at the USSR Supreme Soviet on August 31, denounced the “shortsighted people in our country” who were “carried away by simplistic antifascist propaganda.” Still, publicly, if obliquely, he acknowledged the confusion and consternation. “People ask, with an air of innocence, how could the Soviet Union consent to improve political relations with a state of the fascist type?” he allowed. Nonetheless, he could not help gloating. “If these gentlemen have such an irresistible desire to go to war,” Molotov said of the British and the French, “well, then, let them go to war by themselves, without the Soviet Union. (Laughter and cheers.)” He added, “We have never had any equally advantageous economic agreement with Great Britain, France, or any other country.”¹⁸⁵ The Supreme Soviet “ratified” the Pact unanimously. German ambassador Schulenburg was right, however, when he reported to Berlin (September 6) that “the distrust expressed toward Germany over many years cannot be eradicated that quickly, despite the effective counter-propaganda [of late] conducted at party and factory meetings.”¹⁸⁶

Among staunch Nazis, the shock and disgust were no less severe than at the Comintern. “A moral loss of respect in the light of our now twenty-year struggle,” despaired Alfred Rosenberg, one of Hitler’s principal tutors in anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism, who blamed Ribbentrop for the betrayal. Hitler assured his photographer, Hoffmann—who relayed word of dismay among the Nazi faithful—that “my party members know and trust me,” but the front garden at the Brown House, the national headquarters of the Nazi party in Munich, was littered with badges and insignia thrown away by the disillusioned.¹⁸⁷ By contrast, Ernst Köstring, the German military attaché in Moscow, paid a call on the external relations department of the general staff to congratulate the Red Army on the Pact. He had not been part of the Kremlin negotiations, but now he asserted that he had proposed a Soviet-German Pact already five years earlier, and that Ribbentrop—who was getting all the credit—had doubted the possibility of success right up “until he met personally with the great figure of comrade Stalin.”¹⁸⁸

STRATEGIC CHOICES

In the West, the Pact exploded with concussive force. “All the isms,” a British foreign office spokesman soon quipped, “are now wasms.” Chamberlain indignantly wrote to his sister Hilda (August 27) of “Russian treachery.”¹⁸⁹ Admiral Drax, too, would attribute the failure of his negotiations to Soviet bad faith, accusing Moscow of seeking talks with Britain and France merely to scare up a better deal with Hitler, a rich accusation from the British side. Still, Drax was partly correct: Stalin had effectively organized an auction for a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. In the event, the British made no offer. Whatever Stalin’s preferences, Hitler presented not just the better deal, but the only deal. Daladier, known as the Bull of Vaucluse, had instructed General Doumenc to “bring us back an accord—at any price,” but whether a bold French initiative to break with democratic Britain could have produced a binding bilateral military alliance with the undemocratic Soviet Union remains unclear.¹⁹⁰ The French, in any case, remained joined at the hip to the British, and the latter were immovable.¹⁹¹

Chamberlain wanted to prevent further Nazi aggression, but, through thick and thin, he had held fast to his policy of conciliation with Hitler. It is not difficult to condemn the vain, overly self-confident, obdurate British PM.¹⁹² But Chamberlain’s goals of avoiding war and safeguarding the empire were widely shared.¹⁹³ And although Stalin had offered a deal, the despot did not exactly inspire trust. Indeed, unlike many of his critics (then and subsequently), Chamberlain understood that the Soviet Union was a terrifying menace, writing to his sister and sounding board, “I distrust [the Soviet Union’s] motives which seem to me to have little connection with our ideas of liberty.”¹⁹⁴ The PM’s worst nightmare was well founded: that if Britain invited the Soviets to help beat back Hitler, Stalin would take advantage, and Communism would end up occupying the heart of Europe.¹⁹⁵

Of course, had Chamberlain confronted Hitler before the latter’s seizure of Austria or of Czechoslovakia, when the Wehrmacht was weak, the PM would have had far less need to rely on the Red Army (as opposed to merely threatening Germany with a British-Soviet united opposition), but before those armed actions, few people understood who Hitler really was. Chamberlain contributed to but did not create what was a genuine dilemma: whether to work with Hitler’s professed desire not to dominate all Europe or to facilitate Stalin’s suspected desire, if invited, to encroach into Central Europe.

As a traditional conservative, Chamberlain was disgusted by Nazism, and he privately described Hitler as “the blackest devil he had ever met.”¹⁹⁶ But because the PM was unwilling to ally with Stalin, the result was not just the Munich debacle, which had severely narrowed his options, but the two-faced guarantee to Poland, the wishful thinking that Hitler might calm down once all the Germans lived under one roof or be removed by Germans worried about the socioeconomic costs of his adventurism, or, barring all that, that Germany might even serve as a bulwark against the dangerous Communists.¹⁹⁷ Such views seem delusional, but Chamberlain was hardly alone in holding them. George Kennan, the American foreign service officer in Moscow, made precisely the same argument regarding Hitler—he merely wanted to unite all Germans—and precisely the same contrast with the supposedly graver threat of Communism.¹⁹⁸ Kennan, too, was wrong, however. Hitler was at least as great a threat as Stalin. Up until 1939, Stalin had been by far the more murderous, and Communism had a clearly stated global ambition as well as party members and fellow travelers in all the main countries, but Stalin was more susceptible to deterrence than Hitler.

Despite Stalin’s domestic house of horrors, as well as the Comintern’s unscrupulous, albeit often pitiful, machinations abroad, the main armed, expansionist power seeking domination of Europe was Nazi Germany (and in Asia, Japan). Hitler’s Versailles revisionism was limitless; Stalin’s was limited to opportunities others might present. Chamberlain’s final, related error, also self-serving, was his belief that the decapitated Red Army could not really fight anyway.¹⁹⁹ Of course, the Red Army was fighting, showing its mettle against Japan all throughout the 1939 Soviet negotiations with Britain and France.