Stalin

During all the foreign policy gamesmanship, Stalin remained in constant private conversation with Lenin, rereading his teacher’s texts, inserting strips of paper to mark his place, writing marginal comments. For example, on his copy of the 1939 reissue of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), a philosophical work that had attacked the non-Leninist Bolshevik Alexander Malinovsky, known as Bogdanov, Stalin wrote: “1) Weakness, 2) Idleness, 3) Stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue.”²⁹⁷ But Stalin was experiencing inordinate difficulty executing a Marxist-Leninist textbook on political economy: the labor theory of value, the proper role and significance of money, wage differentiation, trade, prices. In 1939, he received the second version of the text (out of six between 1938 and 1941), which he marked up extensively.²⁹⁸ In his estimation, the draft did not supersede the old handbook that he continued to consult, A Course on Political Economy (1910), last issued in 1925, and written by Bogdanov (1873–1928). The perceived need for an updated treatise on Marxist political economy based on the now twenty-two years of Soviet experience demonstrated again Stalin’s fundamental commitment to ideology and putting phenomena in theoretical terms.

Real-world political economy also pressed upon the Little Corner. Economic preparation for war demanded every ounce of labor power, no matter how low its relative productivity. Back on June 10, 1939, Stalin had ended most early releases from the Gulag. Inmates could still be released before term by special boards, but solely on a case-by-case basis. No longer would slave laborers automatically obtain sentence reductions for fulfilling work quotas. The Gulag held around 3 million prisoners, but it probably took more than two camp inmates to perform the labor of one regular worker, which meant forced laborers amounted to just 2 percent of the labor performed in the Soviet economy.²⁹⁹ But in July 1939, some 160,000 Uzbek and Tajik collective farm “volunteers,” watched by NKVD guards, were drafted to build a nearly 200-mile Great Fergana Canal, to move water from the Syr Darya for irrigation of cotton fields. It had been pronounced complete after a mere forty-five days of construction, without mechanization—another propaganda feat.³⁰⁰ The canal would devastate the inland Aral Sea.

Gulag labor was a Beria responsibility. Since his transfer to Moscow, he had been meeting with Stalin in the Little Corner at least twice weekly and, during some stretches, even every day. By spring 1939, Beria’s audiences were lasting two hours or more. He well understood the place of Molotov in the hierarchy, but on August 10, 1939, Stalin had permitted the airing of accusations of “enemy spy elements” in the entourage of Molotov’s wife, Zhemchuzhina, one of the few women leading a government agency. As the Red Army was seizing Poland and clashing with the Wehrmacht, her “case” was reviewed at the “politburo.” Stalin pronounced the accusations against her “slanderous,” but he had her removed as fishing industry commissar “for imprudence in her contacts.” After a month of uncertain fate, she was named head of textiles in the light industry commissariat of the RSFSR. The close call, whatever the intrigues behind it, conveyed a message to Molotov and the entire inner circle.³⁰¹

FRIENDSHIP AND THE BORDER

Stalin had second thoughts about Poland. Even before Warsaw had fallen, he had Schulenburg summoned to the Kremlin, on September 25, 1939, to receive a message indicating that the Soviets wanted to trade their share of ethnically Polish Poland for Lithuania, which, except for two ice-free ports, the Pact had assigned to Germany. Stalin’s precise motivations remain unrecorded. He had Molotov inform the Germans that the foreign affairs commissar could not reciprocate Ribbentrop’s visit to Moscow with one to Berlin, because on the Soviet side the negotiations would require the involvement of “the highest personage,” who “could not go abroad.”³⁰² Ribbentrop and his entourage had to fly to Moscow a second time. He arrived on September 27 at around 6:00 p.m.³⁰³ This time, swastika banners, alongside hammer-and-sickle flags, as well as a phalanx of Red Army men and a guard of honor, greeted him.

In Molotov’s Kremlin office that same evening, between 10:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m., Ribbentrop tried to convince Stalin that the Soviet Union was geographically immense compared with little Germany, and that Germany had been the one that annihilated Poland, so the Soviet Union ought to yield not just the ethnic Polish territories Stalin was proposing but also those around the San River, with the oil. Stalin launched a soliloquy about how “the main element of Soviet foreign policy had always been the belief in the possibility of German-Soviet cooperation. At the very beginning, when the Bolsheviks came to power, the world accused the Bolsheviks of being paid agents of Germany. . . . The Soviet Government has now renewed cooperation with Germany with a clear conscience.” He observed that “the Soviet government never had sympathy for England. It is only necessary to glance at the works of Lenin and his pupils to understand that the Bolsheviks always cursed and hated England above all.” Stalin wanted to hand over Polish territories “with ethnic Polish population,” but the oil region was occupied by ethnic Ukrainians, and these lands had already been “promised to Ukraine.” Finally, Stalin now wanted Lithuania, too. Overall, he said he was proposing a trade of four million people for two million, “and people are the most important thing one could receive.”³⁰⁴

Stalin and Molotov, according to the German notetaker, “insisted on their point of view.”³⁰⁵ Ribbentrop indicated that he would send a cable to Hitler regarding the Soviet proposals. He knew the Führer wanted Lithuania, where the Teutonic Knights had settled centuries before, and he was concerned about reports that Stalin was pressuring the Estonians—thought to be racially close to the Germans—for military bases. Soviet ultimatums were issued to the three Baltic states for “mutual assistance pacts,” beginning with Estonia, where the Red Army had massed 150,000 troops on the frontier. The next day at 3:00 p.m., the German delegation was back in the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate, but there had been no response from the Führer, who was off inspecting U-boats. Ribbentrop nonetheless indicated that he had consulted with Hitler, saying he was in agreement overall but wanted a few small changes. Soviet chief of staff Shaposhnikov unfolded a giant map on the green felt of Molotov’s conference table. The two sides discussed their differences, but within the parameters of Stalin’s proposal; Stalin offered a few tiny concessions (keeping a railhead here, yielding a forest there), and German and Soviet cartographers set to work on the details. Ribbentrop underscored the expected great value of Soviet economic assistance in the trade negotiations, then asked about the Baltic states. Prematurely, Stalin indicated that Estonia had agreed to his proposals for a pact and a military base.³⁰⁶ With regard to Bessarabia, he stated that “the Soviet government has no intentions at the current time of touching Romania.”³⁰⁷

Just before 6:00 p.m., Stalin announced a break for a banquet in Ribbentrop’s honor. Rather than the usual venue for foreign dignitaries (Spiridonovka), the festivities took place in the gilded St. Catherine’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace.³⁰⁸ Ascending the majestic sixty-six-step staircase, Ribbentrop was startled to encounter, in the land of Bolshevism, an immense oil painting of Alexander III. Twenty-four courses were served. The drink flowed like the Volga. Stalin sipped his customary wine, but the ex–wine merchant Ribbentrop sampled the pepper vodka (“so potent it took your breath away,” he noted). Here, with the amplitude of ancient Russian power on display, Stalin evinced his solicitousness but also his mischievousness. He introduced Ribbentrop to Beria by saying, “Look, this is our Himmler.” (SS chief Himmler, a onetime chicken farmer, also happened to wear a pince-nez.) Stalin was not done. As Molotov, the official host, pronounced toasts “in honor of Germany, its Führer, and its minister” and then toasted each member of Ribbentrop’s ample delegation, Stalin circumambulated the hall, clinking glasses with them. Suddenly the despot said, “Let’s drink to our people’s commissar of railways, Lazar Kaganovich!” and walked over and clinked glasses with Kaganovich, a Jew. The Nazi Ribbentrop was compelled to do likewise.³⁰⁹

Ribbentrop and entourage were whisked to the imperial box at the Bolshoi to catch an act of Swan Lake with one of the great dancers of all time, imported from Leningrad for the occasion, for one of the greatest roles in ballet: Galina Ulanova (b. 1910) as Odette/Odile.³¹⁰ This diversion allowed Stalin and Molotov to apply the final screws to the delegation from Estonia. The world might have been divided between capitalism and socialism, but it was also divided between large and small powers. “Poland was a great country,” Stalin told the Estonians. “Where is Poland now?”³¹¹ When the Germans returned to complete the negotiations in the Kremlin, at around 1:00 a.m., the browbeaten Estonians were made to glimpse the Nazis in Molotov’s suite.

The despot shook down Ribbentrop almost the same way he had the Balts, only affably and, in Ribbentrop’s case, not for his own homeland but for a third party’s territory. Finally, Hitler surfaced: Ribbentrop spoke to him on a line in Molotov’s office. The Führer assented to handing Stalin Lithuania as well as to Stalin’s language for the joint communiqué.³¹² Ribbentrop asked the despot about the British. Stalin said there would be talks with them about possible economic cooperation, but that “the Soviet government had no intention of entering into any ties with such states as England, America, and France. Chamberlain is a blabbermouth. Daladier is an even bigger blabbermouth.” Stalin further related how Daladier had called in Soviet ambassador Surits to inquire what was going on between Germany and the Soviet Union. “The French government,” Stalin noted, “was given to understand that the Soviet Union does not tolerate having its representatives subjected to interrogation.”³¹³ (Unless that was done by the NKVD.) In voicing his dislike, distrust, and dismissiveness of England, Stalin also showed his respect for the United States and its economic prowess, and his glee at having killed so many Japanese in the border war. “This is the only language these Asiatics understand,” he told the German diplomats. “After all, I am an Asiatic, too, so I ought to know.”³¹⁴

At around 5:00 a.m. on September 29, the state documents were signed (but dated the previous day). They included a full-color map of some three by five feet (scale: 1:1,000,000), which, unlike the Pact, was autographed by Stalin himself, in a ten-inch flourish of blue pencil. The readjusted border was moved 70 to 100 miles east of Warsaw, from the Vistula to the Bug River, placing nearly 5 million more people (Poles and Jews) on the German side and helping to provoke formation of a so-called General Gouvernement for those parts of Poland not directly annexed to the Reich. The Soviet Union, all told, had acquired nearly 13 million inhabitants: 7 million Ukrainian speakers and 3 million Belorussian, as well as just 1 million Poles and 1 million Jews.³¹⁵ Ribbentrop, who had arranged for a Mercedes to be given to Molotov’s wife as a gift, had been goading Schulenburg into requesting that the Soviets “lease” him hunting grounds in what was now western Ukraine, which was rich in stag, but Molotov demurred. Still, the Nazis did retain a small area on the Polish-Lithuanian frontier, the Suwałki protrusion, which was said to contain prime hunting grounds. Stalin also had Beria extradite 4,000 German political refugees sought by the Nazis. Many were Jewish, and at least 1,000 were Communists. They and their family members would be handed over in ceremonies at the frontier bridge at Brest-Litovsk. Let Hitler expend the bullets.

As Ribbentrop boarded the Condor to depart, the Soviet honor guard raised their right arms in Nazi salute. “The Gauleiter of Danzig, who had accompanied me,” Ribbentrop later recalled, “told me on our return flight that at times he had almost imagined himself among old party comrades.”³¹⁶ Hailed in Pravda as “another glorious confirmation of the policy of peace,” the September 28 “Treaty of Friendship and the Border” raised eyebrows even among the Communists who had swallowed the nonaggression pact with fascism.³¹⁷ “What kind of friendship?” exclaimed the arrested Soviet airplane designer Andrei N. Tupolev (who was working at a so-called prison institute) while crumpling the newspaper. “What’s going on with them over there? Have they gone out of their minds!”³¹⁸

A month earlier, Stalin had brushed aside Ribbentrop’s desire for a preamble to the Pact on the “friendly” character of Soviet-German relations. In connection with their economic agreement, a Soviet commission of almost fifty members was touring German production facilities and constantly upping its appetites, seeking—and, in many cases, getting—the best that Germany had to offer, from naval cruisers to fighter aircraft.³¹⁹ Mikoyan, following Stalin’s instructions, was driving a hard bargain, demanding specific machines, ships, and chemical processes, at rock-bottom prices.³²⁰ Many Nazis suspected that the Soviets would not live up to their promises to supply critical raw materials, a suspicion that proved false, while German industrialists whined that they were being forced to give away their secrets, which was true. Equally important, because Stalin had held firm, using armed force, over the Galician oil fields at Drohobycz, he was in effect trading Hitler oil that the Wehrmacht had effectively seized.

KINDRED INTERESTS

In the Little Corner on September 30, 1939, not long after Ribbentrop and the Nazi delegation had departed, Stalin heard a report on lengthening the workday at military factories. To compensate for the extra hours, wages were supposed to be raised. The despot, several times, asked those present about the parameters of the wage hikes; unsatisfied with their answers, he said he would not vote for their proposal until it had been clarified. “Stalin,” according to the government notetaker, “turned to Shvernik”—head of the trade unions—“and, jokingly, said, ‘What about you, the representative of the workers? You do not defend the interests of workers.’ But I, a ‘bureaucrat,’ defend them, and you are silent!’ and he laughed.”³²¹ Of course, the great friend of the workers had just cut a second, even deeper deal with the Nazis. The intelligence defector Krivitsky, who had predicted the Hitler-Stalin Pact, along with Trotsky, went further than the latter and suggested that the agreement had arisen from regime affinity.³²²

Each was a dictatorship with administered mass organizations, an institutionalized ideology, mass state violence against purported enemies, and a leader cult. But salient differences existed, and not just in their irreconcilable worldviews. Nazi party membership stood at 5.3 million by 1939, at a time when the German population was close to 80 million, thus representing approximately 6.5 percent of the population.³²³ In 1939, the Soviet Communist party ranks regained some strength, rising to 2.3 million (1.51 million full members and 793,000 candidates), up from 1.9 million the previous year, but, given that the population stood at around 170 million, this represented just 1.3 percent.³²⁴ At the same time, however, Communist party cells were far more ubiquitous. Nazi party “cells” did not exist in every single institution. Hitler abjured a party-state, concerned that an over-empowered Nazi movement could revolt and choose a different leader. German military officers were not allowed to join the party. To be sure, symbolically, the Nazi party spectacularly dominated the German public sphere.³²⁵ But the Nazi party had not victimized itself and the state in enemy hunting.

A second crucial difference consisted in the degree of control over life chances. The Nazi economy was not owned or even managed by the state. Many banks that had been nationalized during the Depression had been reprivatized in 1936–37, and, aside from the Hermann Göring Works (low-quality iron ore), the Nazi regime created few state enterprises. A robust finance ministry opposed state companies as inefficient and expensive. Private companies that refused ministerial directives suffered no consequences. To be sure, plenty of incentives existed for private business to curry favor with the regime, and foreign policy considerations also shaped private investment (one quarter of the labor force worked in industry directly connected with weapons). Still, freedom of contract was preserved as enterprises continued to select their own customers. Private corporate profits had risen 400 percent higher than they had been a decade earlier. Hitler and his regime viewed private property, entrepreneurship, and market incentives as valued instruments for the advance of the German race.³²⁶ Stalin himself explained to the Soviet government notetaker that bourgeois states “have not absorbed the economic organizations, but our state is not only a political organization but an economic one.”³²⁷ His point was that the absence of private companies (and legal markets) had created a complex and difficult challenge of management; but it also meant the Soviet state was the only employer, the only source of housing, the only arbiter of schooling for one’s children, the only provider—or not—of a host of necessities and amenities. The possibility of self-employment, a private housing market, private religious schools, and private holiday resorts provided for significantly less life control over non-Jews under Nazism.

All that said, the two regimes did share a crucial attribute: personal rule. The Pact had been made possible not by an affinity between the regimes but by the two leaders’ unquestioned authority. Hitler and Stalin had no need to worry about parliamentary majorities, genuine ratification votes, a free press, or even independent voices in the inner circle, giving each an absolute freedom to act.³²⁸ They did so because of a temporary confluence of interests against Britain and the Versailles offspring, Poland, engaging in a parallel, if differing, revisionism. In his most revealing comment on the Pact (made later to a British official), Stalin would explain that “the USSR had wanted to change the old equilibrium. . . . England and France had wanted to preserve it. Germany had also wanted to make a change in the equilibrium, and this common desire to get rid of the old equilibrium had created the basis for rapprochement with Germany.”³²⁹

• • •

FROM LATE AUGUST through late September 1939, Stalin had the month of a lifetime, convincingly winning a major border war against Japan and obtaining a sweetheart deal with Hitler. Mekhlis, the despot’s mouthpiece, had boasted at the 18th Party Congress, in March 1939, that in the event of the outbreak of a “second imperialist war,” the Red Army would “carry the battle to the territories of the enemy and fulfill its international duty to increase the number of Soviet republics.”³³⁰ In truth, Stalin had lacked the confidence and the external facilitation for such expansionism on his own. Hitler was driving world politics. Stalin presented him a draft pact that greatly favored the Soviet side, and Hitler took it.³³¹ Stalin was an opportunist, and Hitler had opened the door.³³² Chamberlain, rightly fearing Soviet expansionism in Europe, had nonetheless helped push the Soviet despot through that very door of expansionism by not only rejecting Stalin’s offer of a genuine military alliance but playing charades with him. Perhaps Stalin would have agreed to a deal with the Western powers if he had faced a certain imminent British-German agreement at his expense, but Chamberlain would have taken the German deal instead. Hitler, for his part, had done something remarkable: he had scorned Chamberlain’s July 1939 feelers to double-cross Poland in a repeat of Munich.³³³

Had the Führer accepted the British PM’s entreaties to once again “negotiate” a handover of someone else’s territory, it likely would have fatally undermined the talks between Nazi and Soviet intermediaries. Hitler’s snubbing of Chamberlain did not signify that the Führer would necessarily cut a deal with Stalin, however. Japan had drawn back from a military alliance with Germany on the latter’s terms, influencing Hitler’s moves. But the bottom line was that, even if he could obtain a great deal of Polish territory for free, Hitler had thirsted for a war—and Stalin, over many years, had positioned the Soviet Union to reap the rewards of that action.³³⁴ Stalin’s Pact with Hitler had not been inevitable, especially the specific content. In the circumstances of the time, the Pact constituted a significant achievement for Soviet state interests. Whereas in the 1938 Munich Pact, Nazi-Western collusion had excluded the Soviets from European affairs, now the Soviet Union had reemerged as an arbiter of European power politics. In the bargain, the revolutionary expansionist fantasy outlined by Mekhlis had begun to be realized.³³⁵

Burning with animus toward Britain, Stalin appears to have suspected that the Western “imperialists” would, at some point, declare war on him over Poland.³³⁶ In the meantime, editing the draft of an Izvestiya editorial, “Peace or War?” (October 9, 1939), he inserted a remarkable passage about the inadmissibility of any war to “destroy Hitlerism.” “Each person is free to express his relation to this or that ideology, and has the right to defend or repudiate it, but it is a senseless and stupid brutality to exterminate people for the fact that someone does not like certain opinions and a certain worldview,” Stalin warned of Western opposition to Nazi Germany. He added, “One can respect or hate Hitlerism, as in the case of any system of political views. This is a matter of taste.” (So much for the “popular front” against fascism.) Launching a war in opposition to Nazi Germany, Stalin concluded, “returns us to the dark times of the Middle Ages, when devastating religious wars were conducted in the name of eliminating heretics and those who thought differently.”³³⁷

The First Blow, the bestselling novella by Nikolai Shpanov about an easy Red Army victory over Nazi Germany, was quickly withdrawn.³³⁸ But a nonaggression pact founded on mutual state interests would last only as long as those interests did not fundamentally clash. The multisided machinations were in many ways just beginning. Back when the Nazi war machine had been gearing up to launch the assualt on Poland, the German diplomats at the Warsaw embassy had been ordered to evacuate to Germany. This included those secretly working as Soviet agents: Rudolf von Scheliha (“Aryan”) and Gerhard Kegel (“X”), as well as the high-placed journalists Ilse Stöbe (“Alta”), Kurt Welkisch (“ABC”), and Margarita Welkisch (“LCL”). Stöbe headed to Berlin, but her husband and handler, Rudolf Herrnstadt (“Arbin”), was Jewish and could not be posted to the Nazi capital; he headed for Moscow. (The couple would never see each other again, their dedication to antifascism trumping their dedication to each other.) Instead, Captain Nikolai Zaitsev (b. 1895), a relatively recent recruit to the bloodied ranks of military intelligence, would become the principal handler of the Soviet spies in Berlin, under the cover of the Soviet trade mission and code name of “Bine.” A graduate of an artillery academy, Zaitsev had learned German from Volga Germans he grew up with in his native Saratov; they had since been internally deported. His first boss during an earlier posting in Berlin, Soviet trade representative Kandelaki, had been executed. After familiarizing himself, in Moscow HQ, with the top-secret mission files generated by Herrnstadt, Zaitsev took up residence in Berlin as the new handler for Stöbe in the field. She, in turn, reestablished contact with Kegel, who was hired into the German foreign ministry economics department for the east, and Scheliha, who would be hired into the German foreign ministry press bureau, a prime crossroads of secret information.³³⁹

Hitler remained volatile. As Warsaw was still burning, in mid-September 1939, the Führer had returned from his triumphal promenade in Danzig and ordered a gathering of his military brass to prepare for an attack against the West at the end of October—that is, within a few weeks. Even Göring was flabbergasted.³⁴⁰ A handful of old-line German conservatives began to whisper about somehow stopping Hitler—the very Chamberlain fantasy of a German palace coup. Halder, the Wehrmacht chief of staff, had taken to carrying a loaded revolver, but, though he saw the Führer often, Halder shrank from using it.³⁴¹ Still, a more resolute conspirator, acting alone, was found among Germany’s working classes. On November 8, 1939, at around 8:00 p.m., Hitler arrived at the Munich Beer Hall—where he had staged the failed putsch in 1923—to deliver his annual commemorative address to the old fighters and the Bavarian leadership. Goebbels, Heydrich, and Hess were in tow. This was one of the largest beer halls in the city, seating 3,000, and therefore ideal for political gatherings. Munich’s upper crust turned out in numbers: party men, military officers, bankers, business owners. The rite usually lasted from around 8:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. At 9:20, a time bomb exploded in the high-ceilinged, chandeliered hall, killing eight and wounding more than sixty. Many of the bleeding survivors thought a British warplane had dropped a bomb. In fact, a German cabinetmaker, Georg Elser (b. 1903), had planted the explosive in a pillar right behind the podium.

Elser held Hitler responsible for deceiving the workers and fomenting war. As he would explain, “I considered that the situation in Germany could only be changed by the elimination of the current leadership.”³⁴² During the course of some twelve months, he had planned and stolen explosives and a detonator from his workplace and begun taking his meals at the beer hall. Later, before closing time, he would hide in a storeroom, then come out and set to work by flashlight, creating a secret door in place of the pillar’s wood paneling, until the staff returned at 7:30 a.m. and he would sneak out the back. Elser spent more than thirty nights in the beer hall, and carried out cement and other debris, even sawdust, in a suitcase; at least once he was caught on the premises after closing but not turned over to the police. In the daytime he worked on the bomb and the timer. As fortune would have it, on the night of November 8, the fog was too thick to risk flying, and Hitler did not have his own separate train, so he would have to take the regularly scheduled one. This meant he had to begin his speech early, at 8:00 p.m., and end it early, and instead of staying for the usual chitchat, rush out to catch the train back to Berlin, where he was scheduled to finalize the approved battle plans for an offensive in the west. Only the musicians and the cleaning staff remained in the beer hall. The dais was crushed by the collapsed ceiling. The Führer’s speech had ended at 9:07 p.m.; he departed the venue no more than ten minutes before the deadly blast.