Stalin

The Japanese government, for its part, was disappointed that nothing had emerged from the Hitler-Molotov summit; the Tripartite Pact had been expected to facilitate Japanese-Soviet rapprochement at U.S. and British expense in East Asia (especially the base at Singapore), but these hopes appeared unfulfilled. On November 18, 1940, Molotov received Japan’s ambassador, Yoshitsugu Tatekawa, and, referring to his conversation with Ribbentrop, declared that he welcomed Japan’s desire to normalize relations with the USSR, but he added that Soviet public opinion could not accept a bilateral nonaggression pact unless Soviet territorial losses in the Far East were “restored.” Molotov named Southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, adding that if Japan was not prepared to discuss these claims, then he could recommend only a lesser “neutrality pact,” as well as a special protocol stipulating the liquidation of Japanese economic concessions on Soviet-controlled Northern Sakhalin.²⁹¹

That same day, Hitler received Bulgaria’s tsar Boris III and his foreign minister at the Berghof, aiming to trump any Soviet entreaties to them. The king, fearing a Soviet backlash, “appeared less inclined than ever” to join the Tripartite Pact, even as he assured Hitler that “down here you have a true small friend, whom you do not have to disown.”²⁹² On November 20, Hungary joined the Tripartite Pact, followed by Romania (November 23), then Slovakia (November 24), all of them in the Soviet backyard and all agreeing, in effect, to become junior partners in a German-dominated Europe. True, also on November 24, Italy was routed in Albania by Greece. And Soviet intelligence sources passed on word that Bulgaria’s king was resisting German pressure. But upon his return to Sofia, Boris did reject Soviet entreaties.

Eisenstein, the Jewish-born convert to Orthodoxy, revived his career with, of all things, a monumental Wagner opera production, which premiered in Moscow on November 21, 1940. The filmmaker’s masterpiece, Alexander Nevsky (November 1938), which depicted the medieval destruction by invading Teutonic knights, remained on ice, but in spring 1940 he had been commissioned to produce Wagner’s Die Walküre. The last staging at the Bolshoi had been in 1925, and it had been a revival of the prerevolutionary (1902) production. Eisenstein had not worked in theater since the heady “Proletarian Culture” movement (also 1925). He plunged into the task, reading up on Wagner and mythology, writing in Ogonyok that Wagner attracted him by his use of legend and folklore, vital ingredients of art.²⁹³ Eisenstein had found a kindred spirit.²⁹⁴ His staging, with an ample budget and the Soviet Union’s best singers, proved to be original, seeking a Wagnerian synthesis of the spatial, aural, and visual. “People, music, light, landscape . . . color and movement,” he explained, “all brought together by a single piercing emotion, a single theme and idea—this is what the filmmaker strives to achieve, and the producer finds the same when he becomes familiar with Wagner’s works.”²⁹⁵

Stalin sent a special envoy, Arkady Sobolev (b. 1903), foreign affairs commissariat secretary general, to Sofia, uninvited, ostensibly on a transit flight to Bucharest. The Bulgarians were informed only a few hours in advance of his arrival. “My impression,” the misled Bulgarian envoy to Moscow surmised, “is that they are prepared to do anything if only they could sign a pact with us.” On November 25, Sobolev was received by, first, the Bulgarian prime minister, Bogdan Filov—a professor of ancient art and president of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences—then King Boris, telling them, in elliptical language, that he sought an agreement for transfer of Red Army troops, via Bulgaria, toward the Turkish Straits in case of need, while pledging noninterference in Bulgarian domestic affairs. Sobolev noted that such a bilateral deal did not preclude Bulgaria’s also joining the Axis, because a Bulgarian-Soviet pact “might very probably, almost certainly” result in the USSR’s own entry into the Axis. Filov was stunned. He obfuscated about “Bulgaria’s complicated situation” but shrank from mentioning Nazi Germany by name.²⁹⁶

That same day, Dimitrov was summoned to the Little Corner, in the presence of Molotov and first deputy foreign affairs commissar Dekanozov. It was the Comintern head’s only audience in the Little Corner in all of 1940, and lasted a half hour.²⁹⁷ After confirming China policy with Stalin, Dimitrov dispatched an order to Mao not to attack the Nationalists.²⁹⁸ The main discussion concerned Bulgaria, Dimitrov’s homeland. “Historically, this is where the threat has always originated,” Stalin told him. “The Crimean War—the taking of Sevastopol, Wrangel’s intervention in 1919, and so forth.” Stalin added that Sobolev had already been received in Sofia by Filov and that, “in concluding a mutual assistance pact, we not only have no objections to Bulgaria’s joining the Tripartite Pact, but we ourselves in that event will also join the pact.” Stalin further indicated that he would seek to secure the Straits directly, by pressuring Turkey. “What is Turkey?” he continued. “There are two million Georgians there, one and a half million Armenians, one million Kurds, and so forth. The Turks amount to only six or seven million.” Amid the bluster, however, Stalin noted to Dimitrov, “Our relations with Germany are polite on the surface, but there is serious friction between us.”²⁹⁹

Fifteen minutes after Dimitrov’s visit ended, Molotov departed the Little Corner to hand Schulenburg the Soviet Union’s formal assent to join a pact of four—by now much expanded in members—but with major conditions: (1) German troops would have to leave Finland; (2) a pact would be signed between the USSR and Bulgaria for Soviet security on the Black Sea; (3) the Soviets would obtain a privileged position on the Turkish Straits and a “center of gravity” south from Batumi and Baku to the Persian Gulf; and (4) Japan would renounce its oil and coal concessions on Northern Sakhalin, with reasonable economic compensation.³⁰⁰ In other words, facing the threat of ever more German troops arriving on his borders, Stalin sought everything: not just Persia, which Hitler was offering, but Finland, the Baltics, the Balkans, and the Straits. (“As I was accompanying Schulenburg out, I was overcome with emotions,” recalled the Soviet interpreter. “Soviet bases in the Bosporus and Dardanelles!”)³⁰¹ Molotov told Schulenburg he hoped for “an early answer” to the Soviet conditions.³⁰²

Stalin had expressed his readiness to deepen Soviet involvement in German aggression, and to join the aggression of Italy and Japan, which would have been a fateful step for the British empire and the United States. But the despot offered Soviet services to Berlin as if Moscow were, or would be, an equal partner. The depth of his global miscalculation was unintentionally laid bare in little Bulgaria. Evidently Dimitrov was instructed or under the impression that Sobolev’s confidential oral proposal to the Bulgarian prime minister and tsar should become known, to increase the pressure, and the next day he wired a written summary to the Bulgarian Communist party, informing Stalin that he had done so. The Bulgarian Communists printed up and distributed the summary as leaflets. The clumsy tactic failed to intimidate the Bulgarian government. Sobolev, the special envoy, had found the government “already committed to Germany to the hilt.”³⁰³ Meanwhile, copies of the Soviet demands were whisked to Hitler. “Our people in Sofia have been disseminating leaflets about the Soviet proposal to Bulgaria,” Molotov exploded at Dimitrov over the phone on November 28, 1940. “Idiots!”³⁰⁴

READING HITLER’S INTENTIONS

Bismarck liked to say that pacts must be observed so long as conditions remain the same (“Pacta sunt servanda rebus sic stantibus”), meaning they could be abrogated. His worldview had been predicated upon a sense of limits and international balance. He had refrained from conquering even all German speakers, despite the wherewithal to do so. Hitler possessed the ambition for a total continental conquest, but, unlike Bismarck, he had initially lacked the wherewithal. Over time, Hitler’s ambition had delivered the wherewithal, from the Rhineland remilitarization (1936) through the Anschluss (1938), the Munich Pact (1938), and, especially, the brazen violation of Munich with his unpunished seizure of all of Czechoslovakia (1939), followed by lightning conquests of Poland (1939) and the Low Countries and France (1940). None of this had been foreordained. Strength deters aggression, as Mussolini had shown with Austria in 1934, while weakness encourages it. By 1940, however, it was not clear that Hitler, given his strength and successes, remained susceptible to conventional deterrence. Britain posed no threat to Germany’s continental domination, but the crushing of France had failed to compel Britain’s surrender, a snub that the “invincible” Führer could not abide. Equally important, he feared dissipation of Nazism’s élan.³⁰⁵ In other words, Hitler had become both more capable of and more impatient for still greater conquest.

Hitler’s calculations are difficult to read even now. “The Führer hopes he can bring Russia into the anti-British front,” army chief of staff Halder, after a meeting with the Führer, recorded in his diary (November 1, 1940).³⁰⁶ Ribbentrop had explained to Mussolini on the eve of Molotov’s Berlin visit that the acid test would be Stalin’s position vis-à-vis the “dangerous overlapping of interests” in the Balkans: if the Soviets backed down, the Germans could have their way without war. Hitler himself told Mussolini that there would be no accommodation with Stalin beyond Turkey, certainly not regarding Bulgaria or Romania—indicating that some accommodation was possible.³⁰⁷ Of course, Hitler’s sincerity even with his own army, foreign ministry, and principal ally could never be accepted at face value. The Führer’s internally stated aim for meeting Molotov—“to entice Russia into participating in a grand coalition against England”—might have been disingenuous. The big play Molotov’s visit got in the Nazi press smacks of a transparent effort to drive the wedge still deeper between Britain and the Soviet Union. Hitler had already ordered internal explorations for an invasion of the USSR in fall 1940, a secret idea that remained operative for spring 1941. But then, on the very eve of Molotov’s visit to Berlin, Hitler’s army adjutant, Major Gerhard Engel, observed that a “visibly depressed” Führer gave the “impression that at the moment he does not know how things should proceed.”³⁰⁸

On the very day of Molotov’s arrival in Berlin, the Führer had signed the secret Directive No. 18, which read like a warning to himself not to fall into temptation to strike a bargain with Moscow again. “Political discussions have been initiated with the aim of clarifying Russia’s attitude for the time being,” the November 12, 1940, directive explained. “Irrespective of the results of these discussions, all preparations for the East [war] which have already been verbally ordered will be continued.”³⁰⁹ Molotov’s ostentatious lack of deference in the Nazi capital afforded the Führer a sense of release. “He is vastly relieved; this won’t even have to remain a marriage of convenience,” Engel wrote of the Führer’s daily noontime military conference on the day of Molotov’s departure. “Letting the Russians into Europe would mean the end of central Europe. The Balkans and Finland are also dangerous flanks.”³¹⁰

But the question had not been settled. Lingering doubts and possible reversibility in Hitler’s momentous decisions, paradoxically, were raised precisely because subsequent directives were issued to reaffirm them. Consider, further, that after the invitation to Molotov had been sent, Hitler had had his utterly fruitless meetings with Franco and Pétain. Could Stalin fill the breach left by the failures of Spain and Vichy France to join Hitler in undercutting Britain’s Mediterranean positions? Also on November 12, Hitler signed the order for Germany’s “peripheral strategy” to fight Britain, undergirding the quest for allies in an anti-British front. Even after Molotov’s abrasive visit, moreover, Jodl, Hitler’s closest military adviser, was of the opinion that the Soviets continued to offer important value to Germany, above all in the war against Britain, which had not yet been won.³¹¹ Similar views were expressed by Admiral Raeder and even by Göring.³¹² Halder expected the Soviets to join the Axis and, apropos of Molotov’s visit, recorded the following in his diary (November 16): “Result: Constructive note; Russia has no intention of breaking with us. . . . As regards the Tripartite Pact it is clear that Russia wants to be a partner, not its object. Pact must be reframed!” Halder judged Hitler inclined to avoid a war with the Soviet Union, provided that Stalin did not demonstrate expansionist tendencies into Europe.³¹³ On November 18, Halder wrote in his diary that the “Russian operation” had been “pushed into the background.”³¹⁴

That same day, Hitler told Italian foreign minister Ciano that “it is necessary to apply strong measures in order to divert Russia from the Balkans and push her southward.” Two days later, the Führer made almost the identical statement in a letter to Mussolini.³¹⁵ On November 19, when the commander of the Luftwaffe mission in Romania expressly asked for instructions in the event of a German-Soviet war, Hitler had Jodl delay a reply until the arrival of the formal Soviet response to the invitation to join the Tripartite Pact.³¹⁶ On November 26, Hitler told the Hungarian prime minister, Count Pál Teleki, that “Russia’s conduct is either Bolshevist or Russian nationalist, depending on the situation. . . . Nonetheless we could try to bring her into the great worldwide coalition that stretched from Yokohama to Spain,” but “divert them to the south Asiatic continent.”³¹⁷ Also on November 26, however, Hitler received the Soviet reply to the invitation to join a pact of four, with its over-the-top demands. ³¹⁸

SUPREME CUNNING?

In 1940, the USSR had only one third as many tractors as the United States, but twice as many as the whole of Europe. The United States had twenty-eight continuous strip mills for steel, while the Soviet Union possessed five, and all of Europe just three.³¹⁹ Stalin had discontinued most new civilian construction and imposed higher assessments on collective farmers (from a calculation based on actual sown acreage to one based on the farm’s potentially cultivatable land), while delivering less machinery to farms. Soviet per capita grain production still had not reached pre-1914 levels.³²⁰ At the same time, urbanites were now awarded garden plots en masse to grow their own food. In this tight context, Stalin was nonetheless prepared, in exchange for his demands in joining the Axis, to sweeten his economic contributions, including the delivery (by May 1941) of 2.5 million tons of grain, 1 million above existing Soviet obligations.³²¹ Stalin feared any interruption in the imports of German military technology, even though he suspected the Germans were deceiving him, and made deputy aviation commissar Yakovlev travel three times to Berlin to verify that the Soviets were getting the best Germany had. (“See to it that our people study the German planes,” Stalin told him. “Learn how to smash them.”)³²²

Stalin’s larger objective remained to keep Hitler focused on the West and avoid entanglement in war himself. But the despot’s secret instructions to Molotov regarding a four-power pact indicate more than merely probing Hitler’s intentions. If Hitler had been willing to meet the despot’s key conditions in 1940—conceding Finland, southeastern Europe (the Balkans), and the Straits, so that Stalin could protect his entire western flank—the despot likely would have signed on to the Axis.³²³ Territorial annexations and spheres of interest, in Stalin’s mind, provided for security. At best, however, the Führer was offering Stalin only a junior partnership in this new world order dominated by a Germanocentric Axis.³²⁴ Ribbentrop had done his best to make the “continental bloc” against Britain attractive to the Soviets, but the Nazi foreign minister felt undercut by Molotov’s dogged insistence on expansive Soviet interests in Eastern Europe. Ribbentrop “could only repeat again and again that the decisive question was whether the Soviet Union was prepared and in a position to cooperate with us in the great liquidation of the British empire. On all other questions we would easily reach an understanding.”³²⁵ That statement, however, looks delusional. The 1939 Pact had promised a joint division of Eastern Europe, but the November 1940 summit made manifest that Hitler was going to take all of it for himself.³²⁶

Stalin was game to a new permanent division of Europe that excluded Britain and a vanquished France, provided it made Germany and the Soviet Union equals. He laid out his conditions to Hitler as if from a position of strength—but this was a different Germany now. The despot’s unilateral territorial seizures and his further demands had done nothing for those inside the Wehrmacht, the navy, the foreign ministry, or even some top Nazi officials who doubted the wisdom and necessity of war against the Soviet Union. On the contrary, his greed had played right into Hitler’s own long-standing anti-Bolshevik, anti-Slav worldview. Stalin’s air force, Hitler noted, could turn Romania’s Ploieşti oil fields, by far Germany’s biggest supplier, into “an expanse of smoking ruins,” choking the Axis war machine.³²⁷ Stalin had also held up Soviet compensation payments for Baltic property, contracts for oil deliveries (ostensibly over pricing), shipments of rubber from the Far East via the Trans-Siberian, and Afghan cotton. On top of all this came Molotov’s refusal inside the Chancellery to be hypnotized or bullied by Hitler. In the event, Stalin’s insistence on forceful tactics in the talks not only clarified Hitler’s aggressive intentions but seem to have helped solidify them.³²⁸ Ribbentrop later recalled that, in Hitler’s mind, Molotov was “pressuring” Germany, and Hitler “was not willing to be taken by surprise once he had recognized a danger.”³²⁹

After Stalin’s conditions for joining a four-power pact were conveyed through Molotov, Hitler did not respond. The Soviets would repeat their proposals; again, nothing from Berlin.³³⁰ The silence should have been all Stalin needed to hear. At the same time, the deafening whistles of the British bombs over Berlin during Molotov’s visit had offered their own resounding message: namely, that the Kremlin had a possible partner against Nazi aggression. But the bottom line, for Stalin as for Molotov, was that those bombs raining down on Berlin meant that Britain, not the Soviet Union, was at war with Germany.

In the Pact with Hitler, Stalin had been lucky but also shrewd. Now he remained adamant not to let the conniving imperialist Churchill drag him into war with Hitler. Any dramatic chess moves with Britain might provoke Nazi Germany to attack the USSR, while a nonaggression pact and trade agreement with Britain would not have done much for Stalin’s principal problem: the massing of scores of German army divisions on the Soviet border. And yet, what if Hitler proved ready to attack the USSR in response to the very idea of a British-Soviet rapprochement, even when that option appeared to have been rejected by both parties? This might be the worst possible circumstance: no actual Soviet deal with Britain to deter Hitler, but Hitler acting upon the fact that his enemies were in contact. Stalin had less to lose by giving London a try than he thought. A balancing relationship with Britain might have given pause to the German high command, the wider Nazi elite, and even Hitler.

Stalin erred in not testing the real limits of a possible geopolitical pivot toward Britain. At the same time, that was not the only move that he might have tried but did not. He could have instructed Molotov, in Berlin, to say yes to a new deal with Germany, this time entirely on Hitler’s terms, conceding most of Eastern Europe, in exchange for a division of the spoils of a dismembered British empire. Acceding to German vassal status would have been an admission of weakness. But Hitler had acceded to Stalin’s terms in 1939, when he needed the Pact. What if Stalin had lived up to his reputation for supreme cunning and just accepted the offer of a junior partnership under Nazi Germany (the way Mussolini had done)? Of course, such a surprise embrace would not have removed the German land army from Finland, occupied Poland, or Romania. But might it not have thrown Hitler, his military men, and Nazi propaganda for a loop and, as Stalin wished, refocused them all on Britain?

We shall never know. Stalin confided to Dimitrov that at the end of the day, Hitler would have no choice but to recognize that the Soviets required a strong position on the Black Sea to make sure the Turkish Straits were not used against Germany.³³¹ Hitler, however, was not Bismarck; he did not recognize other states’ interests as a factor for stability. The combination of German power and Hitler’s person was something that neither Stalin nor the rest of the world had faced before. It was, however, most immediately the Soviet despot’s problem, given the contiguous geography. His room for maneuver had become ever more circumscribed as the outside world closed in on the Little Corner.

• • •

FROM THE START, the Soviet-German rapprochement had been fraught—burdened with tensions and uncertainties. The path from the Munich Pact (September 1938) through the Hitler-Stalin Pact (August 1939), the joint partition of Poland and clashes over the oil fields, with Western declarations of war against Germany (September 1939), the Soviet-German Treaty of Friendship and the Border (September 1939), the Soviet Winter War against Finland (November 1939–February 1940), the German victory over France (June 1940), Soviet annexations of the Baltic states and parts of Romania (June 1940), and Molotov’s visit to Berlin (November 1940), had been a roller-coaster ride. Stalin’s apprenticeship in high-stakes diplomacy showed him to be cunning, but also opportunistic, avaricious, obdurate. His deal making with Hitler had played out one way in 1939 and altogether differently in 1940. Stalin’s strategy remained the same.

Soviet insiders continued to exhibit confidence bordering on arrogance. “The policy of a socialist government consists of using the contradictions between imperialists, in this case the military contradictions, in order to expand the position of socialism whenever the opportunity arises,” Zhdanov had crowed at a closed party meeting in Leningrad on November 30, 1940. “Ours is an unusual neutrality: without fighting, we are gaining territory. (Laughter in the hall.)”³³² Stalin’s bold seizure and Sovietization of Romanian territory, including Bukovina, as well as the Baltic states, including the strip in southwestern Lithuania that he had promised to Hitler, had ensured that these territories would not fall into Hitler’s hands, but the actions had also removed buffers between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and risked a clash, right when Berlin’s dependence on good relations with Moscow had been reduced. Most fundamentally, Stalin had failed to follow his own advice: even with France kaput, he had not taken the initiative to balance ever-growing German power. Instead, he had allowed the long-standing mistrust in British-Soviet relations to overshadow the escalating imbalance and tensions in German-Soviet relations. Once again, the initiative for a bilateral deal had come from Ribbentrop, and, in response, Stalin had once again revealed his exorbitant appetites, but this time the context was radically different.

One might surmise that Stalin’s extravagant demands vis-à-vis Hitler in November 1940 had been diabolically clever, for they managed to expose the irreconcilability of German-Soviet interests and, therefore, the de facto end of his mutually beneficial Pact with Hitler. But Stalin’s November 1940 pie-in-the-sky wish list was not a cynical ploy to flush out Hitler. Rather, the despot had instructed Molotov to negotiate a new pact. In doing so, Stalin egregiously overestimated his leverage. His exhorbitant demands for joining the Axis turned out to be his most momentous decision to date. Soviet military intelligence estimated at this time that between 76 and 79 German divisions were in former Poland, and 15 to 17 in Romania. Germany was thought to have 229 to 242 divisions in total (the real number was closer to 185).³³³ Even journalists were reporting that Germany was stationing its most mechanized divisions on the Soviet border, and that German construction of roads and infrastructure in the east had become furious. German military exercises for a possible war against the USSR, based on recently completed operational studies by General Friedrich von Paulus, took place in the latter part of November and early December.³³⁴

Stalin knew he had bungled the Finnish campaign, and he was meeting often with the new top commanders he had promoted in its aftermath, Timoshenko and Zhukov.³³⁵ The USSR now had an army of 4.2 million, triple its size just three years earlier, and the world’s largest. The transformation of the country’s economic base had been far reaching. Soviet steel production in 1927–28 had been around 4 million tons, and the 1932 plan target had been set at 10.4 million; the actual amount in 1932 was reported as 5.9 million, but by 1940 the regime reported steel production at 18.3 million tons—a huge leap, even allowing for exaggeration.³³⁶ In 1940, industry would produce 243 heavy, 833 medium, and 1,620 light tanks and more than 10,000 aircraft, including 4,657 fighter planes and 3,674 bombers.³³⁷ But the massive military reorganization still had a long way to go.³³⁸ On December 7, 1940, Timoshenko completed his evaluation, which proved to be a brutal indictment of Voroshilov’s leadership and a candid enumeration of the weaknesses of the massive war machine, which suffered from a severe lack of experienced commanders, low levels of training for masses of new conscripts, and a glut of now obsolete weaponry. Training was supposed to be year-round, but much army time was lost to working at collective farms during planting and harvesting, and on construction sites.³³⁹

Nor was it easy for a peasant country to continue supporting such a military. Even officially, the Soviet economic growth rate would drop precipitously, from 10–12 percent per annum in 1928–37 to a mere 2–3 percent per annum in 1937–40, and the key shortfalls occurred in strategic areas: steel, coal, chemical products, crude oil. The terror had exacerbated skilled labor turnover and managerial dearth, while often paralyzing survivors.³⁴⁰ Mass arrests for “wrecking” struck the highest-priority military factories, too.³⁴¹ Military budgets were bloated. Whereas, in 1938, the military had consumed 23.2 billion rubles, or 18.7 percent of the 124 billion in state outlays, in 1940, from a total budget of 174.4 billion rubles, the military would get 56.8 billion, or 32.6 percent.³⁴² Against GDP, Soviet military spending would rise in 1940 to probably 17 percent (as compared with 2 percent in 1928 and 5 percent in 1913).³⁴³ The Soviet regime’s ability to spend that quantity of money efficiently, or indeed to spend it all, was another matter.³⁴⁴ Moreover, Nazi Germany had been spending 15 percent of a larger national income on its military already since 1937, and that number had grown.³⁴⁵ Khrushchev, who was in Moscow when Molotov returned from Berlin, would remark, “In Stalin’s face and in his manner, one could sense agitation and, I would add, fear.”³⁴⁶