Stalin

CHAPTER 13 GREED

Stalin takes advantage of the hour. . . . All from our success. We make victory easy for the others.

JOSEPH GOEBBELS, diary entry, June 28, 1940 ¹

If the Germans propose a partition of Turkey, then you can reveal our cards.

STALIN, instructions to Molotov for meeting with Hitler, November 13, 1940 ²

BRITAIN AND FRANCE had supplied weapons to Finland and contemplated attacking a strategic vulnerability—the insatiable thirst for oil—of both the Soviets and their trade partners the Germans, with whom the Western powers were at war. In what was designated Operation Pike, the idea emerged to launch air raids using airfields in Syria, Turkey, and Iran to obliterate the rigs, refineries, and storage tanks in Soviet Baku, Grozny, and Batum. The British put out rumors that the plans were afoot, evidently in part to distract the Soviets from possible Western operations planned to defend Scandinavia, but the Royal Air Force did not undertake reconnaissance flights over the intended Caucasus targets until after Finland had capitulated. Of course, any Western bombing of Baku might have backfired, rendering the perennial British-French accusation—that the USSR and Nazi Germany were in alliance—into a reality. Be that as it may, Pike never occurred.³ A French threat to intervene militarily on Finland’s behalf had never materialized, either: Daladier had once more left the key decision to Chamberlain, and when nothing came of it, the French leader resigned. The upshot was the worst of all worlds: Stalin had escaped without damage, but with his profound distrust of the British and French reinforced.⁴

Hitler, in April 1940, had occupied Norway and Denmark with relative ease, protecting his vital raw material imports from Sweden. On April 9 in Norway, Major Vidkun Quisling seized power in a Nazi-backed coup d’état. Nazi assertions that the Wehrmacht had been compelled to seize these countries to protect them from British-French violations of their neutrality were repeated in the Soviet press. Molotov voiced Soviet approval of the Nazi occupation of Denmark and Norway to Schulenburg, wishing Germany a complete victory in these “defensive measures.” The British, he added, “have gone too far.”⁵ Similarly, Zhdanov, on April 13, stressed that “from the USSR’s point of view,” it was “more pleasant, useful, and valuable to have nearby not the anti-Soviet Anglo-French allies who intended to attack either Germany or Leningrad, but a country that is in friendly relations with us.”⁶ Four days later, at a meeting with the high command, Stalin complained of Britain and France that “they are, you know, fighting a war over there, but it is a weak war; either they are in combat or they are playing cards. They might suddenly make peace.”⁷

Stalin and his minions were dead wrong on the latter point. On May 10, 1940, Germany smashed into the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, on a path to France. Luxembourg effectively did not oppose the German occupation, while the Netherlands capitulated on May 15; the Belgians did so slightly later (without even consulting their French allies). Such was “the peace” between the Nazis and the Western powers: further conquests by Hitler.⁸ A disgraced Chamberlain announced his resignation to the cabinet. His fate had been sealed with the abysmal failed defense of Norway, which had sparked a searing debate in the House of Commons on May 7–8. (One conservative MP had admonished him, “In the name of God, go.”) No one had contributed more to Britain’s Norway debacle than Winston Churchill, who, as first lord of the Admiralty, was responsible for naval operations. But aided by Conservative rebels, Churchill outmaneuvered his main Tory party rival, foreign secretary Viscount Halifax (a member of the House of Lords, not the Commons), and got himself named the prime minister of a new coalition government with Labour.

Churchill, the scion of a British aristocrat and an American heiress, was lucky to be alive. Back in December 1931, he had been struck by a taxi on Fifth Avenue in New York City, after looking the wrong way while crossing the street. “A man has been killed,” a witness had called out erroneously.⁹ Churchill was a staunch imperialist, perhaps even more so than Chamberlain, having advocated for using poison gas against rebellious Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq, a British mandate. Also like Chamberlain, Churchill was ready, for the sake of the empire, to bargain with nasty types, but, unlike Chamberlain, he viewed the German national character as dangerous under certain leadership, such as Hitler. Regarding Munich, Churchill had prophetically told the House of Commons that Britain “has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame and will get war.” In 1940, many British elites were still waffling, urging a “settlement” with the Nazis. Chamberlain remained in government as lord president of the Privy Council (responsible for much of domestic policy, which did not much interest Churchill) and as formal leader of the Tory party. When Chamberlain entered the House of Commons on May 13, 1940, for the first time since resigning as prime minister, the “MPs lost their heads, they shouted, they cheered, they waved their order papers, and his reception was a regular ovation.”¹⁰ Churchill, however, steadfastly refused all entreaties to seek terms with Hitler, a man he would never meet, but whose measure he took.¹¹

Born the same decade as Churchill, Stalin missed these important cues. The ideologically blinkered despot tended to be dismissive of all British “imperialists,” lumped together, and kept in force the Comintern directive that “not fascist Germany, which entered into an agreement with the USSR, but reactionary anti-Soviet England, with its immense colonial empire, is the bulwark of capitalism.”¹²

Stalin had gone in deeper than ever with Nazi Germany. After the signing of the most recent commercial agreement, in 1940, Soviet demands had gone through the roof: they sought the nearly finished “surplus” cruisers Seydlitz, Prinz Eugen, and Lützow, and the blueprints for the battleship Bismarck, 31,000 tons of armor plating, torpedoes, ammunition, artillery, dehydration equipment (for synthetic fuel), steel-hardening technology, and all models of German planes in production (Messerschmitts, Dorniers, Junkers, Heinkels). The Germans were incredulous. Stalin, through Mikoyan, employed pressure tactics, holding up grain and oil deliveries, which induced the Germans to deliver some thirty state-of-the-art warplanes. He also interceded to reduce some Soviet demands. But Molotov and Mikoyan insisted to the Germans that the partially finished heavy cruiser Lützow had to be handed over. On May 26, 1940, for a price of 104 million reichsmarks, Germany allowed the ship, renamed Petropavlovsk, to be towed to Leningrad for completion, with their help.¹³ The Germans were worried that Soviet intelligence would be able to duplicate advanced German construction methods.¹⁴ Soviet counterintelligence would outfit the German team’s residence with listening and photographic devices, and promptly set up a honey trap with a young beauty.¹⁵

Stalin was still obsessing over Trotsky as well. On May 27, word came to the Little Corner that the NKVD had failed, yet again, to assassinate the exile, despite an assault on his villa by some twenty men and the discharge of more than 200 bullets into Trotsky’s bedroom. Beria demanded a report from the head of the operations team, Sudoplatov, then whisked him to Stalin’s Near Dacha, a half hour’s drive from Lubyanka, so that the operative could report in person on the failure—and on new plans to fulfill the assignment. Stalin was said to have asked a single question, then issued instructions: the entire global Trotsky surveillance network should be put on the line to eliminate Trotsky, because once Trotsky was eliminated, the need for surveillance would disappear.¹⁶

Beyond his greed and distraction, Stalin’s inability to pick up on the political changes in London was driven by an abiding antipathy toward the Western powers.¹⁷ But Churchill, too, had trouble perceiving all his options. He reveled in little Finland’s fight against the Soviets, publicly declaring that it proved how “Communism rots the soul of a nation.”¹⁸ He had ceased his cultivation of Maisky. But the West’s war against Germany was going poorly. Even after the first British evacuation of Dunkirk, the new PM had dispatched still more ground troops to France, to prevent that country’s fall. In doing so, Churchill almost lost his land army—and the war—right then and there. The commander of British reinforcements in France was soon imploring the PM to evacuate these troops, too. Some 338,000 British as well as French and Belgian soldiers did manage to escape from Dunkirk back across the Channel, thanks only to a blunder by Hitler and his top commander, halting their ground attacks, as well as French sacrifices in a rearguard action. “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be,” Churchill exhorted on June 4, 1940, as Britain’s land army fled in boats. “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” This ringing oratory elicited a lukewarm domestic reception, a further sign of British precariousness.¹⁹ It did not take a genius to grasp that the only formidable land army remaining on the continent, besides Hitler’s, was Stalin’s.

NEW REALITIES

On June 5 and 6, Pravda printed portraits of Soviet military brass, apparently to reassure the public in the face of the latest triumphal march of the Wehrmacht. By June 14, after a little more than four weeks, the Germans had already entered Paris.²⁰ The fathers and grandfathers of these troops had fought for more than four years and never seized that prize.²¹ On June 17, a new French government sued for peace. “Honor, common sense, and the interests of the country require that all free Frenchmen, wherever they be, should continue the fight as best they may,” a general named Charles de Gaulle quixotically broadcast from London to France over BBC radio on June 18.²² Three days later, the German victory was sealed in the same French forest, inside the very same railway carriage—a rickety old wagon-lit used by Marshal Foch—in which the Germans had surrendered in the First World War. Hitler sat in Foch’s former seat.²³ Nazi Germany decided to occupy more than half of France, including the Atlantic and English Channel coasts.²⁴ A collaborationist rump French state was allowed in the southern city of Vichy.

France’s fall came to seem inevitable, especially since it lacked the protection afforded by the Channel, but in the years leading up to 1940, French military industry had created an arsenal roughly equal to the Nazi one.²⁵ True, the French air force significantly lagged the Luftwaffe, but France fielded more ground soldiers and tanks than did the Wehrmacht. And the German tanks were often inferior.²⁶ French intelligence operated a remarkable agent network, signals intelligence, and photoreconnaissance, but after France’s famed Second Bureau had issued a dozen secret warnings of an imminent German attack—going back to November 1939 and including four in April 1940—and the predicted invasion had failed to materialize, the officers had lost their credibility.²⁷ French higher-ups, for their part, failed to make proper use of the plentiful information acquired of German plans.²⁸

An even deeper problem involved tactics: the French fought a war of position, the Nazis a war of movement.²⁹ France’s plan of battle had two aspects: fixed defensive fortifications, known as the Maginot Line, and a motorized northern army intended to thrust into Belgium and Holland and establish front lines there.³⁰ Between the two lay a soft spot, the Ardennes, which some French military experts considered traversable even by mechanized forces, despite its forested and mountainous terrain and a substantial river, but the French had done nothing to prepare for such an eventuality, laying no antitank obstacles and only scattered bunkers. This was exactly where the audacious Germans struck.³¹ The Wehrmacht could not conceal its massing of troops for an assault through the Ardennes, of course, but Germany conducted a feint, invading the Low Countries through the Gembloux Gap, drawing the bulk of French forces northward to interdict a presumed Wehrmacht advance to the Channel coast. By instead slicing with its main strike between the French and British land forces massed in Belgium, to the north, and the Maginot Line, to the south, the German army stormed into a vacuum and achieved the largest encirclement in military history.

This brilliant plan of battle had been serendipitous. The first three versions of the German battle plan had called for an attack via the north, into the teeth of the French deployments, but inclement weather had compelled a delay in Hitler’s winter attack scheme, during which two careless German staff officers were shot down over France carrying a portfolio with staff maps. The battle plan could not remain the same. In the meantime, a German intelligence officer playing the part of the French and British commanders in war games had demonstrated to the German general staff that the enemy would position its top forces in Belgium, but only weakly defend the Ardennes, and would be slow to shift forces to counter a German attack there. The late-in-the-day fourth and final battle plan, under Erich von Manstein (b. 1887), a staff officer, hit upon the feint (by 29 divisions through northern Belgium and the Netherlands) and the massive “sickle cut” (by 46 crack divisions through the Ardennes).³² The plan was beyond audacious, and a nervous high command threw everything into the initial assault, without any reserve panzer divisions, on a very narrow front, in vulnerable columns 250 miles in length, with flammable fuel trucks in front. Yet the much-feared Western bombing raids and counterattacks against exposed German flanks did not materialize until it was too late.

Even then, decisive victory had come only after the German tank specialist Heinz Guderian ignored his orders and, exploiting his Ardennes breakthrough, suddenly raced for the Channel—a bold act of insubordination.³³ He had punched through to the Channel by May 20, a mere ten days into the war (admittedly, over high-quality French roads outside the Ardennes).³⁴ But neither he nor Hitler had expected this armored blitz to seal the fate of France (Guderian later called it “a miracle”). After all, once caught out by surprise, no foe remains passive. But even after being shown aerial photographs of German traffic jams in the Ardennes woods, the French brass did not manage to redeploy their formidable war machine to seize back the initiative, being, in effect, defeated psychologically.³⁵ Tactical military failures were compounded by administrative and political ones. Maxime Weygand, an ultrarightist, replaced the initial top French commander, Maurice Gamelin, and undercut the Third Republic’s civilian leadership; the lion of the Great War, the eighty-four-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, had been brought into government, and immediately plotted against it, too. France’s political class folded, opening the way for hard rightists to pursue their long-sought authoritarian regime in rump Vichy. Despite German air superiority, therefore, the defeat of France’s Third Republic was contingent—derived from egregious generalship, political treachery, and German audacity.³⁶

The myth of a planned blitzkrieg—annihilation of the enemy’s fighting capacity in a lightning strike—was born. The improvisation notwithstanding, armored warfare had succeeded spectacularly.³⁷ The French lost 124,000 killed and 200,000 wounded, while 1.5 million Western troops were taken prisoner; German casualties were fewer than 50,000 dead and wounded. (Mussolini had waited until Paris fell to attack southern France; Italy suffered some 4,000 casualties in direct fighting, the French 104.) The Wehrmacht became intoxicated by its swift victory, and bound ever more tightly to Hitler.³⁸ The Führer, unlike Stalin, had embraced integrated, independently operating armor and panzer divisions, overriding the conservatism of the majority of German generals and standing by Guderian, who had led a minority in the push for the novel formations.³⁹

More broadly, Hitler’s foreign policy recklessness had once again resulted in exhilarating success. It had taken Stalin 105 days to subdue the Finnish nation; it had taken Hitler less than half that time to subdue a nation ten times the size. “Stalin was very quick-tempered and irritable at that time,” recalled Khrushchev. “I had rarely seen him like that. At meetings he hardly ever sat down in his chair but constantly paced. Now he literally ran around the room and cursed like a longshoreman. He cursed the French and he cursed the British, asking how they could have let Hitler smash them like that.”⁴⁰

The despot needed to find a mirror. Besides him, there had been a total of thirty-two members and candidate members of the politburo between inception (1919) and 1940. Three of them (Lenin, Dzierżyński, Kuibyshev) had died of natural causes; two (Kirov and one on Stalin’s orders) would be assassinated; two (Tomsky, Orjonikidze) had killed themselves. Fourteen had been executed as enemies: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin, Uglanov, Krestinsky, Kosior, Baumanis, Syrtsov, Chubar, Eihe, Postyshev, Rudzutaks, Yezhov. One (Petrovsky) had been expelled but spared. The remaining ten—Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Kalinin, Zhdanov, Andreyev, Shvernik, Khrushchev, Beria—were alive, at his forbearance. Such despotism smothered policy give-and-take. Stalin summoned them when he saw fit; they fed him the information he sought. The conduct of Soviet foreign policy, unlike that of most great powers, was significantly less subject to the usual vagaries of internal regime jockeying among interest groups, but it was utterly hostage to Stalin’s misconceptions.⁴¹

Right after he made the deal with the Nazis, Stalin had privately observed that “the nonaggression pact is to a certain degree helping Germany. Next time we’ll urge on the other side.”⁴² This looks like a blustery lie to soften the political damage of the Pact. Molotov, on June 17, 1940, offered German ambassador Schulenburg his “warmest congratulations . . . on the splendid successes of the German Wehrmacht” (according to the German notetaker), while adding (according to the Soviet notetaker) that “Hitler and the German government could scarcely have expected such rapid successes.”⁴³ It was, of course, Molotov’s and Stalin’s expectations that had been upended.⁴⁴

Stalin had staked Soviet security on France’s fighting capabilities, then contributed mightily to France’s defeat: the 1940 economic agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany was four times larger than the 1939 one. Altogether, in 1940, the Soviets would supply 34 percent of German oil, 40 percent of its nickel, 74 percent of phosphates, 55 percent of manganese ore, 65 percent of chromium ore, 67 percent of asbestos, and more than 1 million tons of timber and of grain.⁴⁵ True, big new Soviet shipments from the February 1940 agreement did not arrive in time for the offensive against France, but, knowing that Stalin’s shipments were coming, German military planners were confidently depleting stocks. “Hitler conducts his military operations, and Stalin acts as his quartermaster,” Trotsky had quipped.⁴⁶ The Wehrmacht’s actual quartermaster general remarked, “The conclusion of this treaty has saved us.”⁴⁷ Stalin’s Pact also allowed Hitler to confidently retain a mere 10 divisions in the east. The Soviet contribution to German logistics was crucial as well. British sea power had once blockaded Napoleon’s bid for continental empire, but now, thanks to Stalin, Nazi Germany managed to circumvent a British naval blockade with the transshipment of goods from the Near and Far East through Soviet territory. Thus could a Central European country take on a global empire.⁴⁸

To be sure, Stalin was also making out like a bandit. Berlin dragged its feet over shipments, but he got samples of artillery, tanks (along with the formulas for their armor), chemical warfare equipment, a naval cruiser, the plans to the battleship Bismarck, heavy naval guns, locomotives, turbines, generators, diesel engines, machine tools. Stalin evidently was not going to risk that German bounty—and Hitler’s wrath—by playing both sides of the conflict. But his overwhelming support of the Nazi war machine, when he was counting on the French land army, smacks of miscalculation and pettiness.

With France’s defeat, the strategic ground shifted radically.⁴⁹ In the very early morning of June 23, 1940, for the first and only time in his life, an exultant Hitler toured Paris, accompanied by two of his favorites, the architect Albert Speer and sculptor Arno Breker. The Führer was driven first to the neobaroque Opéra, which he examined in light of the architectural plans he had studied as a young man. Later he posed for photographers in front of the Eiffel Tower and took in Napoleon’s tomb. “It was the dream of my life to be permitted to see Paris,” he remarked. He had been expected to preside over a German victory parade, and in anticipation, some staff inside the British security establishment proposed bombing the reviewing stand, but their suggestion was rejected. In the event, Hitler opted not to stage a parade, evidently because of the danger of a British air raid, and already by 9:00 a.m. on June 23 he was back at the airfield for the return to Berlin. He would tell his entourage, “I am not in the mood for a victory parade. We aren’t at the end yet.”⁵⁰

As it happened, also on June 23, Semyon Kotko, an opera by Sergei Prokofyev, premiered at the Stanislavsky Opera Theater, in Moscow, following many postponements. It was based on a novella by Valentin Katayev, I Am the Son of the Working People, and marked Prokofyev’s first foray on a quintessential Soviet theme.⁵¹ The score was infused with folk song intonations. “That evening, when I first heard Semyon Kotko, I understood that Prokofyev was a great composer,” recalled the virtuoso pianist Svyatoslav Richter.⁵² When Prokofyev first composed the score, his friend Meyerhold, who also felt a need to demonstrate his allegiance to the regime, begged to be the one to stage it. After Meyerhold had vanished without trace and Sergei Eisenstein claimed to be otherwise occupied, the direction fell to an actress. In the story, Kotko (a tenor) returns, in 1918, from the Romanian front of the Great War to his village in Ukraine, where pillaging foreign interventionists are trying to restore the landlords; an embittered kulak, the father of Kotko’s teenage fiancée, Sofia (a soprano), forbids her from marrying a poor peasant. Thanks to heroic partisan warfare and the resolve of this “son of the working people,” Semyon and Sofia are reunited as anti-Soviet forces are driven away or executed. Stalin’s Pact with Hitler precluded using the novella’s portrayal of Germans as the villains, and so in the opera’s staging the Germans (as well as Austrians) mostly became Ukrainian nationalists.⁵³

A NEW UNION

Molotov had not only congratulated Schulenburg, but also stated—and here the congratulations look like a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down—that from June 14, 1940, the Red Army had sent substantial additional forces to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, where “changes of governments” were in process.⁵⁴ In the wee hours of June 15–16, Molotov summoned the envoys of Estonia (1:00 a.m.) and Latvia (1:10 a.m.) to inform them that, just as in Lithuania, the Red Army would soon be crossing their borders, and instructed them not to resist militarily but to await the formation of a new government.⁵⁵ In other words, the USSR was violating its recent pledges to respect the sovereignty of the three Baltic states. Of the three, Lithuania had the largest Communist party in early 1940—a mere 1,500 members, following Stalin’s mass terror.⁵⁶ “There are no Communists outside Russia,” he had told the Lithuanian foreign minister a few months before. “What you have in Latvia are Trotskyists: if they cause you trouble, shoot them.”⁵⁷ By summer 1940, Estonia had a mere 150 Communists, out of a country of 1.3 million. Latvia had a similar number.⁵⁸ But Stalin’s coercive, rapid-fire Sovietization did not rely on indigenous Communist movements. Rather, the operations followed the formula laid down by the Red Army’s thrust into eastern Poland in fall 1939.⁵⁹

In eastern Poland, the NKVD had deported more than 1 million of the 13.5 million residents to labor camps. (Interrogators called their truncheons “the Polish Constitution.”) Soviet operatives and local collaborators nationalized industry and redistributed some farmland, although an arduous collectivization was put off for the time being. To smoke out locals unreconciled to Soviet rule, the NKVD used provocateurs. The Polish officer in charge of the fledgling Polish underground turned Soviet informant.⁶⁰ But even with this formidable apparatus of coercion, the Soviet secret police had lacked the bureaucratic resources to themselves smash all existing institutions and associations. In a cunning type of revolution, however, the NKVD allowed free rein to criminal gangs and vigilante groups, which they glorified as citizen militias, and set up anonymous denunciation boxes and walk-in centers, leveraging the grievances built up in society. Who had been fired from a job and could now seek revenge? Who had lost a court case? Who had sold a cow for a price that in retrospect seemed too low? Who had been cuckolded? By bringing forth these denunciations and then acting upon them without verifying, the NKVD effectively allowed state power to be “privatized” by thousands of people looking for redress, survival, cover-up, or promotion. It was Poles themselves who undermined pre-Soviet social bonds, clearing the way for Communist monopoly.⁶¹ That was the essence of totalitarianism: people’s agency was elicited to destroy their own agency.

Despite people’s evasions and self-misrepresentations, the NKVD—full of half-educated people—amassed a stunning amount of operational information, seizing local archives and personnel files, and using censuses and tax registers, to enumerate the entire population politically. The NKVD locked factory gates with the workers inside until registrations were complete, and put the onus on urban landlords, who would answer with their heads, to march whole apartment buildings to prearranged sites for “registration.” In villages, volunteer or conscripted facilitators were promised rewards for meeting “quotas” of farmers delivered to in-person registrations.⁶²

Then, across nearly 80,000 square miles of territory littered with impassable marshes, served by sparse rail or paved roads fit for vehicles, with a mass influx of refugees and other wartime dislocation, functionaries managed to ensure that every adult in former eastern Poland took part in single-candidate “elections” to a “People’s Assembly.” Posters went up, film screenings were organized, marches staged. The elections provided a legal façade for the transfer of sovereignty, but, more profoundly, they entailed political conditioning in the new regime. The coerced voting took place in full view of others, some of whom were eager or reluctant stool pigeons. Many people nonetheless crossed off the name of the candidate, and some slipped manure into the ballot envelopes. But many of those who spoiled ballots or failed to show were arrested. After the vote, the public displays and slogans remained, and political speeches with mandatory attendance continued. State-sponsored associations were established. State schools replaced private ones, and a new political vocabulary reflecting Communist ideology took over the public sphere and people’s identities.⁶³ In less than two years, western Ukraine and western Belorussia recapitulated much of what had been carried through in the Soviet Union over two decades.

In summer 1940, a similar “revolution from abroad” was enacted in the Baltics. Stalin ordered forced Sovietization of Estonia, to be overseen by Zhdanov; of Latvia, overseen by show-trial prosecutor Vyshinsky; and of Lithuania, overseen by Dekanozov, the Beria protégé and Molotov deputy at foreign affairs. Each commanded gangs of functionaries newly promoted as a result of the terror. But here, too, local inhabitants were incited to orgies of denunciation, such that, in avenging wrongs, assuaging hunger, and satisfying greed, they helped level their societies and pave the way for Communist monopoly. Once again, the local archives were seized for operational purposes.⁶⁴ Scores of thousands of local inhabitants would be deported to Siberia, and those not removed were compelled to take part in single-candidate “elections” to People’s Assemblies; the installed deputies, in turn, “voted” to form Soviet socialist republics and join the USSR. The economies were confiscated (“nationalized”), including land, although collectivization was held off. Even as underground resistance units formed, substantial numbers of people on the political left in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—including the ethnic Russian and Jewish workers—supported this Sovietization.⁶⁵

All told, between March and June 1940, five new Soviet socialist republics were established (including Karelia, elevated to Union republic status), increasing their total to sixteen and the Soviet population to 200 million. On June 5, 1940, a “Ten-Day” culture festival celebrating the expanded Belorussian SSR, involving 1,200 participants, opened in Moscow.⁶⁶ The regime had long since shifted from award ceremonies for milkmaids and cotton pickers, with Stalin and entourage donning national costume, to showcases of the Union’s national cultures. The first Ten-Day, in 1936, had celebrated Soviet Ukraine, with some 500 participants, numerous awards bestowed on artistic organizations, and additional funds allocated for the arts in the republic.⁶⁷ Similarly extravagant Ten-Days had followed for Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, whose troupes and ensembles performed in the top theaters and conservatories of the capital.⁶⁸ The USSR committee on artistic affairs took no chances, dispatching composers to republics and lavishing robust sums on them to compose a “national” opera or ballet.⁶⁹ Moscow-worthy performances required the addition of singers or musicians from the capital and a large crew comprising everything from choreographers to hairdressers.⁷⁰ Each “national” folk dance or “national” opera became recognizably Soviet.⁷¹

CLASH

Hitler took Stalin’s Baltic annexations badly. The secret protocols of the Pact delimited “spheres of influence” but did not specify the actions permitted—or forbidden—within the respective spheres. There was not a word in the Pact about Soviet occupation of any countries, let alone implanting clone regimes. Stalin was well aware that Hitler had not authorized him to annex former tsarist possessions. But for a long time the despot had cultivated the idea that a fratricide among the imperialist powers might afford unique opportunities to expand “the revolution” in the resulting chaos and destruction. At the Bolshoi back on January 21, 1940 (the sixteenth anniversary of Lenin’s passing), he had boasted, of eastern Poland’s Sovietization, that “Red Army activities are also a matter of world revolution.”⁷² Then, in the face of the lightning German conquest of France, he had decided to unleash his revolutionary opportunism again. In the seemingly endless rows about whether Stalin’s Kremlin was pursuing Soviet security, defensively, or revolutionary expansionism, the answer was: both, if someone else provided the opportunity.

On June 26, Molotov conveyed an ultimatum to Romania for former tsarist Bessarabia, which again surprised Germany. German officials pressured the Romanian government not to resist the landgrab and thereby afford Moscow a pretext for a full takeover of the country, whose oil fields thirty-five miles north of Bucharest were a life-or-death resource for the Wehrmacht. The Romanians hastily—and angrily—withdrew as the Red Army occupied Bessarabia. Hitler refrained from public criticism but told his adjutants that this was “the first Russian attack on Western Europe.”⁷³ The Führer became angrier still at the Soviet seizure of northern Bukovina, which had never been tsarist, was not covered by the Pact, and was full of ethnic Germans. Molotov told Schulenburg that “Bukovina constitutes the last part that is still missing from a unified Ukraine.”⁷⁴ The mass-circulation magazine Ogonyok printed photographs of Romanians greeting the Red Army (“the Great Liberator”) with flowers and smiles.⁷⁵ The Nazi inner circle seethed. The Wehrmacht had smashed Poland on the battlefield while the Soviets had waltzed in and grabbed the Polish territory with the oil. This time, the Wehrmacht had smashed the French land army while the Soviets seized large pieces of Romania, as well as the defenseless Baltic states. “Grave robber!” Goebbels wrote of Stalin in his diary.⁷⁶

Berlin demanded transfer to Germany of the 125,000 Volksdeutsche in Bessarabia and Bukovina, receipt of the 100,000 tons of grain from Bessarabia specified in a German contract with Romania, and guarantees for all German property as well as the railroad tracks transporting Romanian oil to the Reich.⁷⁷ Stalin began stationing what would increase to 34 divisions on former Romanian soil, linking what was now Soviet Lvov (Lwów, Lemberg) with Soviet Chernovitsy (Cernăuţi, Czernowitz), in the Ukrainian SSR, while improving the security of Odessa. The fundamental clash of interests between Moscow and Berlin and the Soviet need to counterbalance Germany’s continental aggrandizement could scarcely have been plainer. Just as the Winter War had definitively pushed Finland into the German camp, the seizure of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina consolidated Romania as a staunch German ally.⁷⁸

Stalin also needed to reckon with the circumstance that his own value to Hitler was declining in relative terms. German-annexed Silesia and the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia were major industrial centers. (Austria had minimal industry, but it gifted Germany an underemployed labor force.) France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands all possessed significant industries as well, from steel and autos to aircraft and electronics, as well as railway locomotives and freight cars that exceeded the stock of the Reich. France and Norway produced chemicals and aluminum, too. The combined population of Greater Germany and the occupied lands, along with Italy, was now 290 million, and in terms of territory it was almost as large as the United States. This vast potential remained to be consolidated (Denmark refused a move toward a customs-and-currency union), but the direction was clear.⁷⁹ And the coup de grâce? Following his self-destructive bloodbath to extirpate phantom enemies, Stalin now acquired an actual fifth column on Soviet territory: resolute anti-Soviet saboteurs in the newly annexed territories of western Ukraine, western Belorussia, and the Baltic republics. In 1940, these regions, which contained a mere 10 percent of the Soviet population, would account for some 60 percent of the arrests by the NKVD. At the same time, thanks to the multiple German economic and trade delegations Stalin was allowing onto Soviet territory and into Soviet factories in 1940, direct German intelligence gathering, which had been almost nonexistent, became significant.⁸⁰

TOYING WITH THE BRITISH

Stalin was presented an opportunity for a strategic shift, thanks to Sir Stafford Cripps, a high-profile, wealthy vegetarian and leftist whose agitation for an anti-fascist united front against Germany had gotten him expelled from the Labour party. The day before the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, Cripps had urged his friend Foreign Secretary Halifax to send a mission to Moscow to negotiate a nonaggression pact with Moscow, paralleling the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The idea had gone nowhere, but in February 1940, en route to the UK from war-torn China, Cripps had been received by Molotov in Moscow, where he drew the conclusion that the countries could work out a bilateral trade agreement, and possibly more than that. Maisky, in London, had also proposed reviving discussions on trade, but the foreign office had questioned Soviet motives and worried about Soviet reexport of British goods to Britain’s enemy Germany. Then, in May 1940, with France about to fall, Churchill, now PM, had acceded to the suggestion by Halifax, perhaps initiated by Maisky, to send Cripps to Moscow as a special envoy to spur trade talks. Molotov refused to accept Cripps under special envoy status. On June 3, 1940, the Soviet spy Gerhard Kegel (“X”), now in the economics section of the German embassy in Moscow, reported to Soviet military intelligence that the Germans were concerned about the pending Cripps visit and a possible Anglo-Soviet trade agreement.⁸¹ At Soviet insistence, London appointed Cripps as a normal ambassador.⁸² He arrived in Moscow on June 12.

Britain’s imposing embassy, the former residence of a sugar magnate, was located on the embankment directly across the Moscow River from the Kremlin, with a spectacular view. Inside, its condition was appalling: not merely tasteless—sickly looking silk brocade of hideous colors (as Cripps observed)—but dilapidated. The embassy tableware consisted of bits and pieces—no dishes, no glasses, no silver—and the facility lacked a butler or maid, making diplomatic receptions that much more of a challenge. The small staff was unable to keep up with the volume of cipher work, let alone the diplomatic rounds in the complex city. Most British embassy staff were Russians and Soviet ethnic Germans, making German the dominant language.⁸³ That was British grand strategy: everything on the cheap—you fight my war, you staff my embassy.

Two days after his arrival—the very day Paris fell to Hitler—Cripps saw Molotov in the Kremlin for an hour and expressed a desire to improve relations. That same day, Molotov and his deputies sent birthday cards for the king (George VI) for the first time. But Molotov was not forthcoming with Cripps: also on June 14, the Soviet government head signed off on the Soviet ultimatum to the Lithuanians, a prelude to the occupation of the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina. These aggressive Soviet actions proved to be an indirect boon to Cripps, though: soon, more than a hundred crates of ill-matched furniture and furnishings were evacuated from shuttered British missions in the three Baltic states and sent to the embassy in Moscow. Still, the moves exacerbated anti-Soviet sentiment in London.

Not everyone in the British establishment was hostile. On June 16, 1940, old David Lloyd George, who had once been an ardent partisan of appeasement, calling Hitler “the George Washington of Germany,” told Maisky—during a discussion about a possible evacuation of the British government to Canada, if necessary—that “peace between England and Germany is impossible.” When Lloyd George inquired whether the Soviets might finally stand up to Hitler, Maisky demurred. Lloyd George raised his finger: “Watch out that it does not turn out to be too late!”⁸⁴

The British government, for its part, had both minimalist aims—induce the Soviet Union not to increase its largesse toward Nazi Germany—and maximalist ones: attain significant Soviet exports to Britain. Cripps believed it was possible to go beyond even the latter and get Britain and the Soviet Union to join forces against Germany, notwithstanding the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression and trade pacts, the dismemberment of Poland, the aggression against Finland, and now the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states.⁸⁵ A lawyer rather than a diplomat, Cripps was capable of criticizing Soviet realities, but he had defended Stalin’s arrests of British nationals as spies in fabricated trials, as well as the Soviet Union’s 1939 seizure of eastern Poland. Unlike Churchill (or Chamberlain), Cripps harbored no anxieties about Soviet penetration of Europe as a catalyst for spreading socialist revolution; he saw Stalin as security-minded and defensive. But Cripps met a wall of skepticism from the British foreign office, whose officials warned against enabling Stalin to exact better terms from Hitler by using “negotiations” with London. Surprisingly, at least to Cripps, the Soviet side was no more receptive.⁸⁶ He waited and waited to be received a second time after his first chilly audience with Molotov.

Finally, on July 1, bearing a message from Churchill (dated June 24) on “the prospect of Germany establishing hegemony over the Continent,” Cripps was received by none other than Stalin—and in the Little Corner, in the presence of Molotov, between 6:30 and 9:15 p.m.⁸⁷ Among the difficult matters aired during what Cripps described as a “severely frank discussion” was that of British sanctions on Soviet imports of nonferrous metals. (The British suspected they would be rerouted by Stalin to Hitler; in fact, Germany needed these raw materials to produce the goods it owed to the Soviet Union.) “I could of course give a promise that not a single pound of metal would go to Germany,” Stalin stated acidly, “but that would be dishonest. A promise is of no use which is not fulfilled.” He went on to categorize Churchill’s message about German expansionism as reactionary. “If the prime minister wants to restore the old equilibrium,” he told Cripps, “we cannot agree with him.” On the contrary, the despot remarked, “We must change the old balance of power in Europe, for it has acted to the USSR’s disadvantage.”⁸⁸

Stalin was still preoccupied with British “imperialism” even now. He could not fail to have noticed that Hitler had become uppity following the conquest of France, but seared into the despot’s mind was the debacle of the Western-Soviet military talks in summer 1939 and the enmity over the Soviet-Finnish War. Churchill’s private communication calling for “harmonious and mutually beneficial” bilateral relations had a concrete aspect—encouraging strong Soviet actions in the Balkans, beyond even Bessarabia, to deny their strategic exploitation by Nazi Germany—but to Stalin this looked like the usual scheming to embroil the USSR in the war, allowing the British to escape. After the session, Cripps soberly wrote, “If anything is to be accomplished here, there is a very difficult past to be got over, and it’s going to be slow work at the best.”⁸⁹

Cripps’s failure to create any momentum toward rapprochement might be blamed on a stubborn Churchill (as well as knaves in the foreign office).⁹⁰ Churchill, however, had provided the basis for bilateral cooperation in his resolve. On July 3, 1940, to prevent French warships from falling into German hands, he had scuttled the main part of the French navy, stationed near Algeria, killing 1,297 of his ally’s sailors. A French battleship and five destroyers escaped, but Churchill’s ruthless action made an impression on Hitler, as well as on Roosevelt. That same day, Churchill received Maisky at 10 Downing Street and told him Britain would never come to terms with Hitler. The next day, when Churchill reported on the naval destruction, the British Parliament rose in ovation; Maisky was present.⁹¹ Stalin kept insisting that Churchill refused to accept how the Versailles order had been shattered, but in truth, the British PM did admit Versailles was kaput.⁹² What the Bulldog did not want to admit was that a replacement international order would require a significant place for the Communist Soviet Union, in its now expanded borders, including Poland and the Baltics, the same tiny former tsarist possessions causing Stalin trouble with Hitler. The arch-imperialist Churchill, while holding one quarter of the world, took offense at these Soviet annexations of white peoples.⁹³ He wanted to prevail in the war without empowering the Soviets in Europe in the bargain. Neither he (nor most subsequent scholars) would admit as much, but this was the same sticking point that had inhibited Chamberlain from signing any alliance with Stalin.⁹⁴