Stalin

The dilemma was stark. “We cannot defeat Germany fully without allies,” The Economist would editorialize in late July 1940. “Patiently, if need be, but with great persistence, we must work for a Russian alliance.”⁹⁵ Churchill, however, held to the minimalist British aim of stopping an escalation in Soviet material support of Germany, and he was already fixated on salvation from Roosevelt and the United States, which had the eighteenth-largest land army in the world, with fewer troops than Bulgaria, and no air force to speak of, but had immeasurable potential.⁹⁶ Such considerations amounted to formidable obstacles for Stalin to overcome. Perhaps they could not have been overcome. But the despot did not try.

Rumors were swirling in Berlin of a change in the USSR’s foreign policy orientation.⁹⁷ Back on the eve of Cripps’s arrival in Moscow, Soviet military intelligence had warned Stalin that German delays in military deliveries to the USSR stemmed from Berlin’s concern that Cripps would be bearing “some gifts.”⁹⁸ On July 13, Stalin had Molotov send a Soviet record of his conversation with Cripps to the Soviet envoys in London, Berlin, and Rome—and to the German ambassador in Moscow. Stalin aimed not to intimidate Hitler but to demonstrate his continuing loyalty. Stalin, as if speaking not to Cripps but directly to Hitler, was recorded as having replied to the ambassador’s suggestion that Britain and the USSR “ought to agree on a common policy of self-protection against Germany and on the re-establishment of the balance of power” by saying that “he did not see any danger of the hegemony of any one country in Europe and still less any danger that Europe might be engulfed by Germany.” He added that he “knew several leading German statesmen well” and “had not discovered any desire on their part to engulf European countries. Stalin was not of the opinion that German military successes menaced the Soviet Union and her friendly relations with Germany.”⁹⁹

German intelligence was closely following Cripps’s activities, thanks to intercepted telegrams sent to Belgrade by the Yugoslav envoy in Moscow, Milan Gavrilović, a Cripps confidant. Hitler was in a position to know the talks were fruitless. But to the Führer, Britain and the USSR were talking. The Wehrmacht, for its part, was monitoring Stalin’s troop buildup on the Soviet side of the border throughout southeastern Europe. German military aircraft were violating Soviet airspace but then claiming that these were errors committed by pilots in training.¹⁰⁰ On July 3, 1940, the German army chief of staff, Halder, in a conversation with the head of his operations section, had noted that a “military intervention . . . will compel Russia to recognize Germany’s dominant position in Europe.”¹⁰¹

INCOHERENCE

Other Soviet actions belied this pro-German bluster. That same July of 1940, Shaposhnikov, in his last days as chief of the general staff, signed off on a detailed assessment of what a German attack on the USSR would look like.¹⁰² He never acted without Stalin’s approval.¹⁰³ Red Army force dislocation also spoke volumes: of its 188 divisions, just 18 were in the Soviet Far East, and 10 in Eastern Siberia. The main concentrations were on the western frontier: the Kiev special military district (27), Western special military district (25), Odessa military district (11), Baltic special military district (18), and Leningrad military district (15).¹⁰⁴ After August 1940, by which time Meretskov had replaced Shaposhnikov, Germany (supported by Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Finland) was being explicitly named as the likely enemy in the Soviet strategic deployment plan; Britain was no longer mentioned. What is more, the Soviet military districts on the frontier had fleshed out detailed contingencies for war against Germany.¹⁰⁵

At the same time, the economic benefits of the relationship with Germany were still flowing to Moscow. In the second quarter of 1940, the Škoda Works in German-annexed Bohemia would ship orders to the USSR for 393 devices to manufacture machine tools worth billions of rubles.¹⁰⁶ Equally crucial, Ogonyok printed dramatic photographs of European war devastation, including the urban bombing, vivid reminders of how the Soviets had remained outside the conflict.¹⁰⁷ Maisky, according to the British foreign office, said that whereas, according to conventional accounting, in the air war between Britain and Germany, Royal Air Force losses were placed on one side and Luftwaffe losses on another, “he was in the habit of adding them together in one column.”¹⁰⁸ Stalin, furthermore, was absolutely convinced that Churchill wanted not to fight Hitler together with him but to deflect the Wehrmacht eastward and conclude a separate peace with Germany.¹⁰⁹

But Stalin’s views on Britain and geopolitics bordered on incoherence. Steeped in Marxism-Leninism, he was given to dismissing the British—the world’s number-one arms exporters—as a supposed “nation of shopkeepers” (among the ultimate Marxist insults), yet he was also inclined to regard Britain as the arch-imperialist manipulating all world affairs.¹¹⁰ Germany, dominating nearly the entire continent, somehow still remained the victim of the Versailles order.

Soviet propaganda banged on about how the British empire constituted the world’s principal bloodsucker and threat.¹¹¹ The regime called on the full force of its astonishing ideological arsenal: nearly 9,000 newspapers, with a combined daily circulation of 38.4 million, and almost 6 million “radio points” delivering radio by wire (as well as 1 million radio receivers with dials), not to mention countless cinemas showing newsreels, live theater, posters, and publicly displayed slogans. Even if the Soviet masses remained skeptical about this or that regime pronouncement, the population was marinated day and night in Stalin’s worldview.

Inside the Little Corner, in the narrow circle that had regular access to the despot, there were no Anglophiles—like Göring, the counterweight to Ribbentrop in the Nazi regime—who could counter Stalin’s Germanophilia or the Germanophile influence of Molotov, whose signature was on the Pact and who combined the functions of a Göring (overseeing the economy) and a Ribbentrop (foreign affairs).¹¹² As for Voroshilov, even had he admired Britain—he did not—he lacked Molotov’s strength of character to stand up for any view that contravened Stalin’s. Mikoyan, a skilled operative, was too clever to advocate for or against specific policies, knowing Stalin’s personality as well as anyone (and having had some clashes with him in the 1920s). The policy views of Beria could best be described as “Yes, comrade Stalin. It shall be done, comrade Stalin.” Anyway, it is not even clear whether Stalin informed his minions, besides Molotov, about the details of the new British ambassador’s approaches.

In summer 1940, Eugene Lyons published Stalin: Czar of All the Russians, reusing the interview he had obtained a decade earlier, only now it was not to humanize the despot but to dehumanize him. He alluded inaccurately to Stalin’s “modest apartment of three rooms,” a space the journalist never saw, but he wielded the credibility of his rare face-to-face encounter and long service as the Moscow correspondent of the United Press. Disabused dupes had a lot to make up for. Having previously called Stalin a “thoroughly likable person,” Lyons (prodigiously borrowing from Souvarine’s biography) now cast him as a duplicitous tyrant.¹¹³ According to Lyons, Stalin nursed a youthful humiliation all his life over his lack of any distinction, “the ugly-duckling of Gori, the sulking professional revolutionist of Tiflis and Baku, the shadowy figure among the giants of the overturn of 1917.” The author tore into the despot’s foreign machinations, from the Spanish civil war to the attack on Finland. “It is not beyond possibility that Stalin may double-cross Hitler at some point, particularly if an Allied victory seems inevitable,” Lyons speculated. “There is even more chance that Hitler may double-cross Stalin.”¹¹⁴

A DESPOT MEETS HIS LIMITS

The Red Army was expanding toward 4 million men (as compared with just 1 million in 1934). Some 11,000 of the 33,000 officers discharged during the terror had been reinstated. Industrial production (in constant prices) had tripled since 1928.¹¹⁵ That said, 1940 GDP per capita in the Soviet Union was not very different from projected trends based on economic performance during the tsarist era. The regime had industrialized in no small part by severely repressing consumption. Consumer shortages had been worsening since 1938.¹¹⁶ At the same time, alcohol production reached 250 million gallons, up from 96.5 million gallons in 1932. By 1940, the Soviet Union had more shops selling alcohol than selling meat, vegetables, and fruit combined.¹¹⁷

None of the wildly ambitious industrial targets in the Five-Year Plans (1928–32, 1933–37, 1938–) had been or would be reached. Output continued to be dogged by input shortages, which managerial black marketeering struggled to overcome through hoarding (which exacerbated the shortages) and bartering. Some enterprising factory officials reopened closed mines and sold the coal on the side, which fetched more than four times the state price; others established commercial exchanges for goods that had vanished from factory books and were in high demand throughout the Union, thereby making markets. But extra-plan entrepreneurialism was illegal.¹¹⁸ In 1940, a Leningrad military-industrial research institute fulfilled just 14 percent of its plan, and yet the director and the chief engineer, possessing scarce know-how that factories craved, managed to contract with state companies to obtain not just gramophone records and a piano but also vital engineering tools, pneumatic devices, and plastics. Criminal charges resulted, however.¹¹⁹

More than one third of all industrial workers were classified as “Stakhanovites,” but worker go-slows, also known as Italian strikes, and the constant queuing for food and basic goods continued to depress productivity. So did quitting in search of lower norms and better pay.¹²⁰ Back on June 26, 1940, Stalin had had the criminal penalties for absenteeism and unauthorized job changing augmented; additionally, lateness of just twenty minutes was now criminalized. Violations were punishable with “corrective labor,” mostly in the form of reduced pay at one’s place of employment, but sometimes with several months in a camp.¹²¹ Some 30 million people were now in the Soviet state workforce, and over the next year more than 3 million of them would be investigated for absenteeism and job changing. Of these, nearly half a million would be sentenced to prison for four months; the rest would be sentenced to “forced labor” at their regular place of employment, meaning pay reductions, for six months.¹²² And yet the number of such infractions was likely higher. Some people stole goods from work or otherwise violated discipline deliberately to get fired, so that they could leave undesirable jobs.¹²³ But managers did not investigate many instances of lateness or refrained from sending cases to the procuracy, instead imposing “fines” that were not collected.¹²⁴ Stalin’s orders to mete out punishments for even minor infractions clashed with his directives to meet production targets at all cost.¹²⁵

STUMPED, WRATHFUL, RESTLESS

Hitler stood at a new zenith of power in July 1940. And yet, despite all his conquests and Britain’s manifest inability to dislodge him from the continent, the British government vowed to keep on fighting. He had repaired to his alpine retreat, to confer with his military on the feasibility of a cross-Channel invasion. Germany would need control of the Channel by sea and air, which was not remotely in prospect.¹²⁶ Under Chamberlain, the British had built several ships and radar stations and greatly expanded production capacity for fighter airplanes without actually making many of them, thereby controlling peacetime expenses and limiting stockpiles of obsolete weapons. In 1940, when fighting broke out, Britain quickly managed to outproduce Germany in single-engine fighters, which contributed significantly to the British ability to beat back the Luftwaffe air assault. The British Home Fleet alone—only a part of the Royal Navy—possessed 5 battleships, 11 cruisers, and 30 destroyers.¹²⁷ The Norwegian campaign had weakened the German navy, which at this point was down to one heavy cruiser, two light cruisers, and four destroyers. Grand Admiral Raeder, the German naval commander in chief, and others harbored grave doubts about landing on the British Isles without a huge prior buildup. All seemed to depend on the Luftwaffe.¹²⁸

Churchill, under German bombardment, dreamed of escape. “If Hitler fails to beat us here he will probably recoil eastwards,” he had written to the prime minister of the Union of South Africa (June 27, 1940). “Indeed, he may do this even without trying invasion [of the UK], to find employment for his Army, and take the edge off the winter strain upon him.”¹²⁹

Hitler understood the transcendent value that Britain attached to its global empire and, in his own way, was sincere in his offers to allow that empire to remain intact, certainly in the medium term, in exchange for a free hand on the continent, where raw materials and racial Lebensraum awaited him. Churchill, however, genuinely cared about the balance of power on the continent, on which the empire’s existence ultimately depended.¹³⁰ But Hitler could not fathom Britain’s “futile” resistance to an accommodation, except by imagining some hidden encouragement—from the United States, from the USSR.¹³¹ On July 16, he issued Directive No. 16: “Since England, despite her hopeless military situation, still shows no sign of willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare, and if necessary to carry out, a landing operation against her. . . . The preparation for the entire operation must be completed by mid-August.” The lack of confidence (“if necessary”) was evident. On July 19, he gave a much-delayed address to the Reichstag, reviewing German military conquests, current strength, and future strategy, while offering vague “final” peace terms to Britain.¹³² The British press and radio were immediately dismissive. Churchill initially greeted the “offer” with cold silence.¹³³

At a “Führer conference” with only the highest military men, on July 21, 1940, Hitler stated that “even though Moscow is unenthusiastic about Germany’s great success, she will nevertheless make no effort to enter the war against Germany of her own accord.” Rumors—duly conveyed to Stalin—were rife that Germany was getting ready to attack the USSR even before France had fallen.¹³⁴ The Wehrmacht was transferring back eastern units that had been called to France and Belgium, and Soviet military intelligence was reporting German troop concentrations on the eastern frontier (railroads were under covert surveillance).¹³⁵ German officers were said to be studying Russian language at courses given in occupied Prague. Ethnic Russians and Ukrainians living in Poland had been organized. Everyone was talking, everywhere: troop exercises, planned diplomatic evacuations, imminent war. Was it real? Disinformation? German fortifications in the east were being greatly expanded; then again, the German state had expanded, so this was to be expected. Germany’s military attaché in Moscow, Köstring, told his Soviet interlocutors (July 9) that German forces were being “demobilized” from the west and stationed in East Prussia and former Poland, where new garrisons were being formed, “since retaining many troops in the West is no longer necessary.”¹³⁶

The “parking” of German troops in the east was accelerating, but bombing raids by the Luftwaffe over Britain continued, as Soviet intelligence also reported.¹³⁷ Could Hitler really intend to initiate a two-front war? At the secret July 21 Führer conference, Hitler called an attack on Britain “not just a river crossing, but the crossing of a sea which is dominated by the enemy.”¹³⁸ Nonetheless, Raeder was given ten days to work out the parameters of a cross-Channel invasion. At the same time, the Wehrmacht was to make a preliminary study of invading the USSR that very fall of 1940.¹³⁹

Germany endeavored to goad Japan into attacking Singapore, so as to provoke Britain into war in the Far East and perhaps also drag the United States in (and away from European affairs), but Tokyo’s ability to commit remained stymied by interest group infighting.¹⁴⁰ At the same time, Major General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff, had raised the possibility of bringing Britain to its knees indirectly, by hitting vulnerable spots in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, reasoning that as the screws were tightened on Britain’s global position, it would surrender, to stem its losses. The Italians, he thought, could occupy the Suez Canal. Spain or another country could grab Gibraltar. The oil terminus in Haifa could just be blown up.¹⁴¹ This had sparked the notion of a broad anti-British front of Italy, Spain, and maybe the Soviet Union, even as Hitler was contemplating smashing the latter to bits, as a way to get Britain to capitulate. “Crossing of Channel appears very hazardous to the Führer,” army chief of staff Halder recorded in his diary (July 22). “Invasion is to be undertaken only if no other way is left to bring terms with England.”¹⁴² That same day, Halifax broadcast a definitive British rejection of the German terms for “peace.” On July 23, Hitler went on his annual pilgrimage to Bayreuth for the Wagner Festival, taking in Götterdämmerung.¹⁴³

Jodl and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, de facto war minister, managed to convince Hitler that a fall 1940 date for an invasion of the USSR was “hopelessly impractical” (according to a memo written by the former and signed by the latter).¹⁴⁴ On July 29, at another Führer conference at the Berghof, Hitler shifted a Soviet invasion target date out to May 1941, which was both the earliest feasible date and the latest date from the point of view of safe concentration of forces in the east.¹⁴⁵ Jodl informed only a tiny group of war planners, headed by Walter Warlimont, in the strictest secrecy, for Halder and other top Wehrmacht generals saw no basis for a war against the Soviet Union, and plenty of opportunity for rapprochement with Stalin.¹⁴⁶

On July 31, Hitler convened yet another narrow-circle Führer conference at the Berghof.¹⁴⁷ Raeder and Halder reported. Those present argued that a cross-Channel invasion of Britain could not be carried out until September 1940 (if then). Hitler signed Directive No. 17, on stepping up the air war (which would be called the Battle of Britain) “to prepare the ground for the final crushing of England.”¹⁴⁸ He rejected Raeder’s postponement of the Channel invasion, Operation Sea Lion, until spring 1941, but postponement is effectively what happened, for Hitler stated that if the results of the air attacks on Britain proved unfavorable, Sea Lion preparations would be stopped.¹⁴⁹ As for the Wehrmacht, despite a plan to reduce its size to lessen the strain on the economy, Hitler ordered a ramp-up from 120 to 180 divisions (a number that would grow) and the launching of a massive logistics program in the east.¹⁵⁰ Göring, when told, would be thrilled.¹⁵¹ This represented a policy victory for both the peripheral strategy against Britain and the full-scale invasion of the USSR. “Our action must be directed to eliminate all factors that let England hope for a change in the situation,” Hitler told the attendees. “Russia is the factor on which Britain is relying the most. . . . With Russia smashed, Britain’s last hope will be shattered.”¹⁵²

Hitler had effectively conceded that he lacked the resources to defeat the world’s leading navy and air force, but he felt he could summon the resources to defeat world’s largest land army. This was, in a way, logical, reflecting his own force structure. But several top Wehrmacht officers viewed an unprovoked invasion of the east before securing victory in the west as unsound.

It was, in any case, passing strange. For decades, the Führer had been hammering the necessity of annihilating Bolshevism and following the siren call of Lebensraum in the east, in an existential war, but now he was asserting that the way to defeat Britain was to attack the Soviets.¹⁵³ Stalin felt secure, because Britain was the one stuck doing the fighting against Nazi Germany, but the more Britain resisted Hitler, the more Hitler entertained an attack on the Soviet Union. And the more Soviet intelligence warned Stalin about Hitler’s aggressive attitudes toward the USSR, the more Stalin suspected British efforts to embroil him in war with Germany.

MISPLACED JOY

On August 10, 1940, Stalin hosted a banquet in the Grand Kremlin Palace to celebrate his newest and expanded Union republics: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Moldavia (which included Bessarabia and northern Bukovina). He seated their Soviet-installed leaders at his own table, alongside marshals Timoshenko and Voroshilov.¹⁵⁴ Hitler’s directives and the accompanying feasibility studies for an attack on the USSR remained supersecret. Soviet military intelligence, on the basis of agent information, reported that, at a conference in Salzburg on August 9, Hitler had proposed to Romania joint regulation of all disputed issues with Hungary and Bulgaria; stated that all territorial changes in Eastern Europe up to that point were temporary; and “declared that current actions were the first stage in preparation for a war against the USSR, which would begin immediately after the end of the war with England.”¹⁵⁵ Five days later, Hitler handed out diamond-studded batons to his field marshals in the Reich Chancellery. “Russia has once shown an inclination to overstep the agreements made with us,” he remarked privately. “But she remains loyal at present. But should she reveal the intention of conquering Finland or attacking Romania, we shall be forced to strike. Russia should not be allowed to be the sole master of the eastern Baltic. Furthermore, we need Romania’s oil.”¹⁵⁶

Mikoyan reported on August 11 that for the first six months of 1940, the Soviets had received goods worth 80 million reichsmarks, while shipping goods worth 190 million.¹⁵⁷ (In the fourth quarter of 1940, Stalin would again shut off the export valves.) Molotov, on August 15, wrote a revealing letter to his wife, Polina, who was away on holiday in Crimea. This was his second letter to her in three days, divulging, in passing, that political negotiations had been launched with Japan (“I hope something serious will result”). He also complained that, “unfortunately, I cannot stay current in economic matters, but I do try not to lose sight of the most important of them, and it seems there is a turn for the better.” He broached the idea of holidaying together the next year in Sochi. “I wait impatiently for you in order to hug you tightly-tightly and kiss you all over, my dear, sweet love.”¹⁵⁸

Stalin had not written a letter like that in a decade. He could, at least, rejoice in the fact that Beria’s agents, finally, had proved better than Yezhov’s: Ramón Mercader managed to smash an alpine pick into the head of Trotsky on August 20, 1940. The exile survived in a coma for twenty-six hours before succumbing.¹⁵⁹ He was sixty years old. “The murder of Leon Trotsky at Mexico City,” The Times of London editorialized (August 23), “will relieve the Kremlin of not a few anxieties and will draw few tears from the majority of mankind.” When the celebrity’s open casket was driven through the streets of the Mexican capital, nearly a quarter million people turned out. Stalin edited the Pravda report on the “inglorious death of Trotsky” (August 24) and, among many insertions and cross-outs, he altered the conclusion to say, “Trotsky became a victim of his own intrigues, treacheries, and treason. Thus, he ingloriously ended his life, this despicable person, entering the grave with the stamp of an international spy on his skeleton.”¹⁶⁰

The draft was dated August 16, indicating Stalin’s sense of anticipation over the operation. The omnipotent despot had maintained a collection of everything written by and about Trotsky in a special cupboard in his study at the Near Dacha: Stalin School of Falsification, An Open Letter to Members of the Bolshevik Party, The Revolution Betrayed, The Stalinist Thermidor. These texts, published in dozens of countries, helped shape Stalin’s image in world opinion.¹⁶¹ Trotsky had taken to predicting that war between Hitler and Stalin would sweep away both, in social revolution, and that he (Trotsky) and his Fourth International would replace them. “Under cover of darkness, revolutionary elements in Berlin are putting up posters in the working-class districts saying ‘Down with Hitler and Stalin!’ and ‘Long Live Trotsky!’” he imagined in 1940. “It’s lucky Stalin does not have to black out Moscow at night, otherwise the streets of the Soviet capital would also be covered with equally meaningful posters.”¹⁶² When the spectral Fourth International, its meager archive pilfered and delivered to Stalin, had finally managed its founding congress, it was attended by a mere twenty-one delegates, who had met in secrecy in a village outside Paris for just a single day, the stateless Trotsky himself had not been able to attend.¹⁶³

Hitler’s troop movements and the high tensions in Nazi-Soviet relations were playing out in Eastern Europe.¹⁶⁴ Stalin had begun inciting Hungarian irredentism over their conationals in Romanian-controlled Transylvania; Hitler unilaterally handed northern Transylvania over to Hungary in late August 1940. Stalin had a protest lodged with the German ambassador regarding what he considered to be a violation of their Pact’s clause on prior consultation.¹⁶⁵ Romania would also be forced to cede southern Dobruja to Bulgaria, losing the last of the territories it had gained as a result of the Great War and sinking the popularity of the Bucharest government and the monarch. “I was not an enemy of Your Majesty,” General Ion Antonescu (b. 1882), the former war minister and the leader of the pro-Nazi Iron Guard, wrote in protest to King Carol II. “I was a fanatic servant of this nation. I was removed through intrigue and calumny by those who have led this country to where it is now.”¹⁶⁶ Carol promptly had him arrested. Mass public demonstrations and Iron Guard shock troops known as Legionnaires got Antonescu released. In a quick coup, he would force the beleaguered king to step down in favor of his nineteen-year-old son, Mihai I (a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria). But most of the monarchy’s dictatorial powers would be transferred on September 5 to Antonescu, newly designated as “Conducător” (Führer).¹⁶⁷ He deepened Romania’s relationship with Nazi Germany.

ENEMIES RECAST

The writer Vishnevsky had managed to take over the executed Isaac Babel’s dacha in Peredelkino, then, in his diary, decried a lack of material incentives (“The stimulation by pay is lacking; we are well cared for, many of us writers fully so, for years to come”).¹⁶⁸ He was right only in respect to elite writers. In 1939, when the deputy boss of Central Committee agitprop, Georgy Alexandrov, earned an enormous salary of 27,000 rubles, Nikolai Pogodin, the playwright, had taken in 732,000 in royalties and payments.¹⁶⁹ Vishnevsky went on to lament the lack of attention from Stalin and other top political figures. “After the death of A. M. Gorky we have had fewer possibilities and places where we could speak with big people on big questions of life and our work,” he was recorded as stating by the writers’ union duty officer in discussion with a colleague. “The last big conversation in the Central Committee was spring 1938. It gave us a lot, but already two years have passed, and writers as a collective, as an ‘active,’ have not spoken with the Leaders.”¹⁷⁰

As it happened, on the evening of September 9, 1940, party leaders and cultural functionaries assembled to discuss a film, The Law of Life, by Alexander Stolper and Boris Ivanov, which had been released in early August. It portrayed a student Communist youth leader as corrupt, yet it had somehow managed to pass all the censorship authorities, from the studio (Mosfilm) through the state committee for cinema affairs (headed by Ivan Bolshakov) right to the Central Committee propaganda department. Pravda’s unsigned review, edited by Zhdanov, condemned the film as “insincere,” and after ten days, despite being the lead draw of the day, it was withdrawn.¹⁷¹ Stalin, in the course of extended remarks, reminded those present that workers were not ipso facto trustworthy; Tomsky had been a worker yet fell into conspiracy with Trotsky. Some workers were scum, he added. “It’s a law of life.”¹⁷²

When Fadeyev, head of the writers’ union, praised the ethnic Polish writer Wanda Wasilewska as “a genuine artist,” Stalin responded, “I do not know if she’s a genuine artist or not, but I do know that she writes truthfully, honestly. I read three of her works: The Face of the Day, which depicts the life of a worker correctly, honestly; then Motherland, which takes up the life of a farmhand working in bondage for a landlord—wonderfully, nicely, simply conveyed; Land Under the Yoke, which depicts the life of an individual poor peasant, middle peasant, and farmhand. Wonderfully well conveyed. But about her, for some reason, there is silence.”

At this point, Nikolai Aseyev, the poet and screenwriter, who was attending such a gathering for the first time, committed a remarkable act. “I will speak openly,” he stated. “Comrade Stalin said that he likes the writings of Wanda Wasilewska. Very well, I should say, that you liked the works of Wanda Wasilewska. Personally, I read them and they did not touch me deeply. Why am I saying this? Because tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, Wanda Wasilewska will suddenly become the single standard of writerly achievement.” Aseyev continued, “I am not afraid of anything; I believe that here everything will be properly taken into account and weighed, but sometimes it happens thusly: ‘But comrade Stalin said it!’ Of course we must take this into account, but if comrade Stalin likes this or that written work, this or that painting, it does not signify that such works should be repeated, three hundred thousand times repeat the same written work, the same painting.” Stalin interjected: “It does not mean that.”

Aseyev was dead right: Stalin’s tastes were dispositive. The despot offered closing instructions. “I would prefer that we portrayed enemies not as beasts, but as people, harmful to our society, yet not devoid of some human qualities,” he advised. “The worst scoundrel has human qualities; he loves someone, he respects someone, he is prepared to sacrifice himself for someone.” Then this: “Why not depict Bukharin, no matter what kind of monster he was—he had certain human qualities. Trotsky was an enemy, but he was an able person, indisputably. Portray him as an enemy with negative qualities, but also with positive qualities, because he had them, indisputably.”¹⁷³

Who in their right mind might take up Stalin’s suggestion to depict Bukharin and Trotsky as having had positive qualities?

Stalin declared that evening that he disliked The Law of Life’s depiction of those who unmasked enemies, such as the protagonist Communist Youth League student, as not properly Soviet people. “We had, for example, 25 to 30 million people who starved—there was not enough grain—but now they have started to live well,” Stalin suddenly acknowledged. “Our enemies inside the party think as follows: ‘We’ll give this piece [of land] to the Germans, that to the Japanese; we have plenty of land.’ But it has turned out the opposite: we give nothing to anyone. On the contrary, we are expanding the front of socialism. . . . This is beneficial for humanity; indeed, the Lithuanians, western Belorussians, Bessarabians, those we freed from the yoke of the landowners, capitalists, police, and every other kind of scum, consider themselves lucky. From the point of view of the world struggle of forces between socialism and capitalism, this is a big plus, for we are expanding the front of socialism and shrinking the front of capitalism.”¹⁷⁴ After midnight, he repaired to the Little Corner with Zhdanov, Molotov, and Beria.¹⁷⁵

AMBIGUITIES

Thanks to Hitler’s secret July 1940 order to expand Germany’s already sizable military, shipments to the Soviet Union fell far behind contractual obligations. Beginning in August 1940, in a show of strength, Stalin had his trade representatives convey that the Soviets would be cutting back on all deliveries, including oil.¹⁷⁶ Germany had more options than ever, following the occupation of France, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Norway, to go with strong commercial ties to neutral Sweden and its ally Romania. Continued reliance on the Soviet Union, moreover, was becoming a sore point. Even if Stalin might be ready to resume and perhaps deliver even more, it was better, in the words of the Nazi economics minister, not to be “dependent upon forces and powers over whom we have no influence.”¹⁷⁷ By September 1, German divisions in East Prussia, former Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, and Austria climbed to 94 from 27 (as of June 15), according to a report from the new head of Soviet military intelligence, Lieutenant General Filipp Golikov, to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and the military high command.¹⁷⁸

On August 31, 1940, Molotov had received Schulenburg and complained that Germany had violated the Pact by failing to consult the USSR regarding German moves in Hungary and Romania. On September 2, the Soviet envoy in Berlin, Shkvartsev, had an audience with Ribbentrop, who stated of the Pact, “I share your satisfaction and think that the year has brought great benefits to both Germany and Russia. Germany has achieved great victories and will achieve them.” That same day, Shkvartsev requested Moscow not to send wives and children to Berlin, “in light of the almost daily systematic bombing” by Britain.¹⁷⁹ On September 3, TASS announced the signing of a clarification agreement in Berlin on regulating the Germany-USSR border, “negotiations for which had proceeded in a benevolent atmosphere.”¹⁸⁰

Ambassador Ott, in Tokyo, had been instructed to inform Germany’s ally, as Sorge reported to Moscow, “that the German troops being sent to the eastern borders have no relation whatsoever to the USSR. They were sent there because there is no longer a need for them in France and the time for their dispersal has not arrived.”¹⁸¹ On September 6, Jodl issued a secret order explaining that the concentration of forces in the east would accelerate even more over the following weeks.¹⁸² In parallel, on September 6 and 18, Admiral Raeder submitted detailed plans on the peripheral strategy against Britain.¹⁸³ Hitler’s Directive No. 18, concerning war in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, was drafted that month. Perhaps that was the reason for the massive troop concentrations not only in Nazi-occupied Poland but also in southeastern Europe?

Stalin was sitting on an analysis written in the aftermath of France’s fall by Jenő Varga, the director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, in Moscow, and a long-standing foreign policy adviser, who argued that the “contradictions” had disappeared between Britain and the United States, such that the latter would enter the war against the Axis. “Comrade Varga!” Stalin answered on September 12. “Your interpretation is completely correct. . . . Matters changed radically after Germany destroyed France and got its hands on all the resources of the European continent, and England lost France. Now the bloc of Germany, Italy, and Japan threatens not only England but also the U.S. In that light, a bloc between England and the U.S. is a natural result of such a turnabout in international affairs. With Communist greetings.”¹⁸⁴

On September 23, 1940, Stalin held a meeting in the Little Corner, summoning, among others, the historian Arkady Yerusalimsky, who had been tasked by the foreign affairs commissariat with preparing the Russian-language reissue, in three volumes, of Otto von Bismarck’s Thoughts and Recollections (Moscow, 1940–41). Stalin hand-corrected Yerusalimsky’s introductory essay, softening its tone where it pointed out the potential consequences of Germany ignoring Bismarck’s solicitousness toward Russia.¹⁸⁵ Bismarck had been the lodestar of Stalin’s conservative imperial Russian predecessors, Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin. What, if anything, the Soviet despot absorbed from the German’s thinking remains unknown. But he seems to have presumed, based on the way things worked inside the Soviet Union, that the Germans would read the introduction to a history book as a statement or signal of Soviet policy.

Stalin gave indications of the economic strain. After the thirty minutes devoted to Bismarck, he received Mikoyan and Khrushchev, followed by the aviation industry commissar (Shakhurin) and a deputy commissar (Vasily Balandin); the heavy machine building commissar (Vyacheslav Malyshev); and the first deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (Nikolai Voznesensky). “When one gives a new task to our people’s commissars, they make obligatory the construction of new factories to fulfill it,” Stalin complained to them. “But the main thing is that one needs to look at what can be done at the old factories. This is the most reliable and shortest way. One can expand production at old factories more quickly than build new factories.”¹⁸⁶

The tension in the Little Corner was heightened by the arrival at this time of Wehrmacht troops in Finland. Germany had provided no advance warning, in contravention of the consultation clause of the Pact, which, of course, had put Finland in the Soviet sphere.¹⁸⁷ Stalin’s war there had brought about the very eventuality it had sought to forestall. His spies passed on details about 1.5 billion reichsmarks in secret military aid from Germany to Finland, deliveries that were supposed to go to the Soviet Union. Stalin suspended all long-term projects for export to Germany, diminishing further any German economic dependency on him.¹⁸⁸ Nothing more starkly demonstrated the deterioration of the Soviet position than Finland, where the Soviet Union had expended so much blood, treasure, and reputation.

TRIPARTITE RELIEF

Japan, Germany, and Italy, on September 27, 1940, signed a Tripartite Pact in the Reich Chancellery. The three Axis signatories delineated spheres of influence and pledged for the next ten years “to assist one another with all political, economic and military means when one of the three contracting powers is attacked.” This represented a turnabout for Japan. Pro-German circles in Tokyo had been systematically removed from influential posts, thanks to Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, but with the defeat of France, the Japanese hoped to use German victories in the west to expand southward in French Indochina, which would require deterrence of the United States.¹⁸⁹ “The basic aim of the pact is to avoid war with the United States,” Prime Minister Konoe told the cabinet. “However, I think it is necessary for us to display firmness, because if we act humbly, it will only make the United States presumptuous.”¹⁹⁰ Perhaps there was also anticipation of some spoils from a British surrender to Germany. Hitler saw Japan’s enthusiasm as an attempt “to cash in” on Germany’s victories by offering to serve as “harvest helpers.”¹⁹¹ But following the debacle of the air campaign against Britain, the Führer had come around to seeking to deter U.S. support for Britain by wielding the Japanese cudgel.¹⁹²

The agreement still fell short of a binding military alliance. It also specifically excluded the Soviet Union as a target. “Its exclusive purpose,” Ribbentrop informed Molotov, two days before the scheduled signing, “is to bring the elements pressing for America’s entry into the war to their senses.”¹⁹³ When Weizsäcker briefed the Soviet ambassador in Berlin on September 28, he underlined the desire on the part of the three signatories for better relations with the USSR.¹⁹⁴ “Exceptional significance,” noted Comintern chief Dimitrov in his diary for September 28. “Further expansion of the war to world-war dimensions.”¹⁹⁵ An unsigned front-page analysis in Pravda (September 30)—written by Molotov—maintained that the new three-country pact signed in Berlin signified formation of two blocs: Germany, Italy, and Japan versus Britain and the United States, the fantasy Stalin had divulged to Varga, with the Soviet Union as happy bystander. Molotov, anonymously, further reassured readers that the Tripartite Pact had been “no surprise” and reemphasized Soviet neutrality and the continuing validity of the bilateral nonaggression pacts with Germany and Italy.¹⁹⁶

Japanese ruling circles now hoped for improved relations with the USSR, to secure the country’s northern flank and increase the pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to capitulate. Secretly, on October 3, 1940, Japanese and Soviet negotiators were working on a draft nonaggression pact and preliminarily agreed that “the USSR will abandon its support for Chiang and will repress the Chinese Communist party’s anti-Japanese activities; in exchange, Japan recognizes and accepts that the Chinese Communist party will retain as a base the three northwest provinces (Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia).” Negotiators further agreed that the Soviets would acquiesce in any Japanese moves in Indochina, and Japan would not oppose any future Soviet moves in Afghanistan.¹⁹⁷

The fly in the ointment remained German troops in the east. Golikov had reported (October 2) that the Germans were moving many of the troops from within East Prussia and the General Gouvernement closer to the Soviet border. Stalin’s NKVD station chief in Bulgaria secretly reported the shipment of German heavy armaments on barges along the Danube to the Black Sea, right on the Soviet doorstep. But Soviet intelligence adhered to the line that the sharp troop buildup reflected only the unavoidable necessity of moving troops out of France, given the anti-German attitudes prevalent in conquered France. Still, analysts also mentioned Germany’s desire to strengthen its influence in Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans.¹⁹⁸

HITLER’S LATIN FRUSTRATIONS AND BALKAN AMBITIONS

Schulenburg was in Berlin in late September, trying to put relations with Moscow back on track by encouraging a German invitation for a state visit.¹⁹⁹ Ribbentrop had never abandoned his efforts to restore friendly bilateral relations by inviting Molotov, or even Stalin, to Berlin. The Germans, like the British, mistakenly believed that Molotov had never been out of the country (he had visited fascist Italy in 1922), but they nonetheless believed he would reciprocate the German foreign minister’s two visits to Moscow.²⁰⁰ Ribbentrop let the count know that a new invitation to Molotov was in the works. This hoped-for meeting was predicated on a vast European-Asian bloc directed against the British, Ribbentrop’s dream castle.²⁰¹

Hitler’s failure to subdue Britain was eating at him. Britain’s Royal Air Force not only had prevented the Luftwaffe from attaining the air superiority required for a cross-Channel invasion, but was bombing Berlin and other German cities.²⁰² Between July 10 and October 31, 1940, in the so-called Battle of Britain, Hurricanes and Spitfires shot down 1,733 Luftwaffe aircraft. The British lost 915 planes. (“Never had so many owed so much to so few,” Churchill would remark of the air war.) Both Sea Lion and the vague preliminary plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union had been postponed, from fall 1940 to spring 1941. The Wehrmacht was the largest unemployed land army in the world. The Führer, losing the initiative, went into seclusion at the Berghof from October 5 to 8 to contemplate his options.