Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

CHAPTER 5 A GREAT POWER

They talk about it in Soviet institutions, factory smoking rooms, student dormitories, and commuter trains. The most widespread sentiment is the feeling of national pride. Russia has again become a Great Power whose friendship even such powerful states as France desire. . . . In Soviet institutions the philistine functionaries, silent for years, now speak confidently about national patriotism, about the historical mission of Russia, about the revival of the Franco-Russian alliance.

Émigré Socialist Herald, May 1935 ¹

FRANCE AND BRITAIN, to the west, and the Soviet Union, to the east, had a Hitler problem. All the powers were slowly coming to grips with the Nazi leader, whose turgid masterpiece, Mein Kampf (a crisp title suggested by his publisher), had been reissued after he became chancellor.² The prison-dictated autobiography, first published in 1925–26, had been issued in English translation only in 1933, and in abridged form, cleansed of “offensive” paragraphs; Britain’s foreign office possessed a single copy of an unexpurgated edition (which it misplaced for a time). A French translation had finally appeared only in 1934 (few French politicians read German).³ A Russian translation would be published only in 1935, and only in the Shanghai emigration.⁴ Soviet foreign affairs commissariat personnel, many of whom were Jewish, could read the original German with all the “Drang nach Osten” and “Judeo-Bolshevism” riffs.⁵ Still, people were unsure what to make of the book’s ravings in policy terms. Hitler’s calls for rearmament could be misread as standard German nationalism. His radical anti-Semitism could be misconstrued as in line with remarks by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had blamed the Jews for the Great War.⁶ Even the Führer’s expansionist Lebensraum could be stretched to resemble a defensible, if emotional, reaction to the circumstance that so many German speakers had been left out of Bismarck’s “unified” Germany.

While Hitler exploited a national politics of salvation and an international politics of national self-determination, Stalin was conjuring up a domestic politics of siege and anticapitalist mobilization and an international politics of anti-imperialism. But he did no better than his British and French counterparts in taking the measure of the Nazi regime. Between January and March 1935, the newspaper Red Star published a series of articles about supposed tensions between Hitler and his Nazi entourage, on one side, and the German military on the other. The German army supposedly “sought to reestablish the old relations with Russia,” and German generals “foresee a military clash with France in the first instance.”⁷ Alongside this provocation—or was it a fantasy?—the Soviet war plan for the western theater still identified Poland as the main enemy, anticipating that Romania would join Poland’s side, but assuming that Germany, because it coveted Polish territory, would at least indirectly support Soviet defense by threatening Poland’s rear. Soviet intelligence, however, forwarded a report of intensified rumors of a Franco-German rapprochement, possibly leading to a larger bloc with Poland—supposedly Piłsudski’s dream—and maybe drawing in Finland, Hungary, Romania, even Italy.⁸ In fact, Poland had no intention of sacrificing its precious independence to the victor of a German-Soviet clash, continuing its neutrality toward both of its giant neighbors, along with separate alliances with France and Romania—in short, bilateralism, not multilateralism.⁹ This was a truth the British understood, the French regretted, Hitler relished, and Stalin never accepted.

Finally, during two unusually long sessions with the military men in the Little Corner (February 28, March 8), Stalin acknowledged reality.¹⁰ The regime resolved to be more forceful in standing up to Japan, and admitted that Germany might start a war against the Soviet Union not opportunistically, waiting for Japan to act, but on its own initiative.¹¹ Above all, the PR (Poland-Romania) war plan was displaced by a new GP (Germany-Poland) plan, in which Poland as well as Romania remained enemies, but only as auxiliaries: Nazi Germany eclipsed them.¹² Soviet diplomacy, predicated upon disruption of European solidarity and avoidance of commitments, was even slower to turn. Membership in the League of Nations had brought little, and negotiations for the regional security system known as the Eastern Pact were effectively dead, but time and again the politburo instructed the Soviet envoy Vladimir Potyomkin in Paris, “Do not rush ahead and thereby foster the misconception that we need the [Franco-Soviet bilateral alliance] more than the French. We are not as weak as some suggest.”¹³ By spring 1935, however, Soviet foreign policy more seriously contemplated securing the country against Nazi Germany.¹⁴ Stalin both countenanced and exerted a break on that shift, refusing to abandon pursuit of closer economic, and ultimately political, ties with Berlin. At the same time, he wanted the world to recognize that the country he led was a revived great power.

THE HITLER PROBLEM

British officials feared that an arms race would derail its fragile economic recovery, and that another war would no better solve the German problem than had the Great War. Hitler had invited foreign secretary Sir John Simon as well as Lord Privy Seal Anthony Eden to Berlin. On March 7, 1935, three days before the scheduled visit, London published a policy paper urging a sheepishly modest ₤11 million increase in military spending, citing German rearmament and bellicosity. Hitler developed a “cold,” and the visit was put off (“Those ruling England must get used to dealing with us on an equal footing”).¹⁵ On March 9, Göring assembled foreign military attachés to announce the existence of a German air force, which was prohibited by Versailles. On March 15, the French National Assembly debated a doubling of army service, from one to two years. Using this as a pretext, the next day, in a further flouting of Versailles, Hitler declared reintroduction of conscription for the Reichswehr—renamed the Wehrmacht—tripling its size to 300,000, which was to rise at some unspecified date to 550,000 (pundits predicted 3 million). Pravda prominently reported Nazi Germany’s actions.¹⁶ On March 17, representatives of France, Britain, Italy, and the Soviet Union discussed “protesting” Hitler’s actions at the League, but Britain and France demurred.¹⁷ That same day, Heroes’ Memorial Day in Germany, Hitler celebrated the rebirth of the German army in the State Opera House, and afterward staged a review of the Wehrmacht, effectively a military parade, to jubilant crowds.¹⁸ Belatedly, the Führer now deigned to receive Simon and Eden after all. The pair, rather than cancel in protest, paid the first visit by British high officials to Hitler as chancellor.

Hitler met them in the morning and the afternoon on both March 25 and 26, wearing a brown tunic with a red swastika armband, and launched with a monologue on the menace of Bolshevism and Soviet expansionism, insisting that he merely wanted to improve the welfare of the German people, who had been through a bitter fifteen years. He further declaimed that Germany’s exit from the League of Nations had been approved by 94 percent of the people, and that no one in Germany imagined annexing Austria, given the principles of state sovereignty and noninterference. He raised hopes for a bilateral naval pact by accepting that his fleet be limited to no more than 35 percent the size of Britain’s—three times the size of the Versailles restrictions—provided the Soviet Union did not expand its own military even more than it had. He also boasted that he had already achieved air parity with Britain, a falsehood that, when leaked, would set off a storm in London. “He emphasized his words with jerky, energetic gestures of the right hand, sometimes clenching his fist,” Hitler’s interpreter wrote. “He impressed me as a man who advanced his arguments intelligently and skillfully.”¹⁹

Hitler parried the Britons’ efforts to draw Germany into any multilateral agreement, such as a pact covering Austria or German readmission to the League of Nations. He noted that he “could give the British ministers the assurance that Germany would never declare war on Russia,” but added that Bolshevik doctrine, political aims, and military capabilities meant that “from Russia there was greater probability of war than from other countries. Moreover, the risks for Russia in a possible war were smaller than those for other powers. Russia could with impunity allow the occupation of great tracts of her territory as large as Germany; she could permit bombardment of great regions; she could therefore wage war without risking destruction.” It was a shrewd lament, and revealed Hitler’s deepest preoccupations.

A skeptical Eden voiced doubts that the Soviet Union would initiate a war. Hitler pronounced himself “firmly convinced that one day cooperation and solidarity would be urgently necessary to defend Europe against the Asiatic and Bolshevik menace.” The Führer thanked his guests and voiced hope that they had understood his efforts to raise his country to equal status with other nations. “The British ministers,” according to their record, avowed that they “would take away very pleasant memories of the kindness and hospitality shown them.”²⁰ In the evening, Hitler, in tails, hosted a banquet and concert at the Chancellery. Press accounts made it hard to discern what, if anything, had transpired. But the mere fact of the visit conveyed British readiness to renegotiate already imposed treaty obligations.

Stalin’s spies in London (the Irish John King, a cipher clerk at the foreign office, recruited in mid-February 1935) and in Rome (Francesco Constantini, an Italian employee at the British embassy) each delivered copies of the British foreign office record of the conversation, which ran to 23,000 words. But NKVD intelligence forwarded a severely condensed Russian translation of just 4,000 words, selecting only certain statements, which they removed from context, to form a new single stream. Their editing made it seem that the British had given Hitler carte blanche to annex Austria and schemed to instigate a Nazi-Soviet clash.²¹ “Mister Hitler,” the NKVD version of the British record had the Nazi stating, “would not sign an agreement he could not accept, but if he did take on obligations, he would never violate them.”²²

Being fed what he craved, Stalin’s suspicions were further incited by the fact that Eden, on the way to Berlin, had stopped over in Paris to sound out the French about readmitting Germany into the League and a possible arms limitation agreement. French foreign minister Pierre Laval, Stalin knew, had been noncommittal. “Laval told Eden France could renounce aid from the Little Entente and the USSR only if England signed a military alliance, a Franco-English military alliance,” according to an intelligence report about the conversation from a Soviet agent in the French foreign ministry, on which Stalin wrote, “Important. (Truthful.) My archive.”²³

Laval waved the Soviet card to break through British hesitation, but the British establishment was cool even to the “entente” it had signed with France in 1932, let alone to a real bilateral alliance.²⁴ British secret services, starved of resources, a bit old-fashioned, and uncoordinated, contributed to government ignorance, sometimes willful, of the capabilities, let alone the intentions, of Hitler’s regime.²⁵ Never mind that Hitler’s boasting that Germany would be a “world power” or nothing uncannily echoed British declarations about their own empire: many British officials believed or wanted to believe that German rearmament was, or would be, limited, gradual.²⁶ The fright over Hitler’s assertion of air parity did consolidate moves to some British rearmament.²⁷ But even those Brits who took a dark view of Nazi Germany remained eager to nip the developing arms race in the bud with some sort of accommodation.

STRANGE PEOPLE

Simon did not bother to travel to Moscow, instead returning home to report on Hitler to the cabinet; Eden was transported from the German border in a Soviet-supplied luxury rail coach equipped with a phonograph that played English jazz. From his car window he found Moscow drab, the people poorly dressed. On the day of his arrival, March 28, Litvinov and Soviet envoy to Britain Ivan Maisky received him, along with British ambassador Lord Chilston and Strang of the foreign office, who had been with Eden in Berlin. Eden conveyed that Hitler had harped on the Soviet threat and how Germany was the bulwark of “European civilization” and needed to be permitted to rearm. “We do not have the slightest doubt about German aggression,” Litvinov answered, according to the Soviet notetaker. “German foreign policy is inspired by two main ideas—revanche and domination in Europe.” Litvinov elucidated that the Soviets wanted “mutual assistance” against Germany and possibly Poland, according to the British notetaker. When the British offered congratulations on the Soviet sale of the Chinese Eastern Railway, Litvinov remarked, “In Japan, even in military circles, a tendency to maintain peaceful relations with the USSR is growing rapidly.”²⁸

That evening, Litvinov hosted a banquet in Eden’s honor at the Neo-Gothic Spiridonovka, an expropriated merchant’s mansion, and made a speech in English about the ominous state of the world.²⁹ The next day, the group returned to the German theme, with Eden again stressing that people in Britain were less convinced than those in the USSR of Nazism’s aggressiveness. Litvinov answered: “The original German plan had been to attack France and then to attack in the East. . . . The plan now apparently is to leave France alone, but to attack in the East only.”³⁰ Eden raised the perennial complaint about Comintern propaganda abroad. Litvinov, in the Soviet account, responded, “What in reality is ‘propaganda’? Is what the British press publishes about the USSR propaganda?”³¹ Eden and entourage were taken to view the collections of priceless jewels, silver sent from Queen Elizabeth to Ivan the Terrible, and the wedding dress of Catherine the Great in the Kremlin, which Eden called “Aladdin’s cave glittering with history.” They walked over to Catherine’s former Imperial Senate, where, in Molotov’s office, Eden became the first high Western official to be received by Stalin.

Eden opened with a statement about the integrity of Soviet state borders and said that the same should apply to the British empire, then asked for Stalin’s views on the current situation; Stalin replied by asking for Eden’s. He volunteered that matters were “anxious but not alarming,” and commended the League of Nations, which the world had lacked before the Great War. “I think the situation now is worse than in 1913,” Stalin answered, “because in 1913 there was only one center of military danger—Germany—and now there are two: Germany and Japan.” Contradicting the previous day’s remarks by Litvinov (present now), Stalin stated that “the situation in the Far East is extremely alarming,” and any recent “improvement temporary.”

The main topic was the Hitler problem. “We are not trying to isolate Germany,” Stalin explained. “On the contrary, we want to live with Germany in friendly relations. The Germans are a great and valiant people. We will never forget that. It was impossible to hold that people down for long in the chains of the Versailles Treaty. Sooner or later the German people had to liberate themselves from the Versailles chains.” He added that the Soviet Union would not defend Versailles but stressed that the way Germany overcame its pariah status mattered. He inquired of Eden’s impressions from his Berlin visit and, after a short, evasive answer, stated, “Strange people sit there in Berlin. For example, about a year ago the German government proposed a 200-million mark loan to us. We agreed and began negotiations, and after that the German government suddenly started spreading rumors that Tukhachevsky and Göring were secretly meeting to work out a joint plan to attack France. Is that really a state policy? That is trivial policy.”³² When Stalin asked whether, as Litvinov reported of his own conversations with Eden, Hitler had raved about a Soviet threat, Eden answered affirmatively. Stalin: “Well, you know, at the same time the German government has agreed, in connection with the loan, to sell us products about which it is awkward to talk openly—arms, chemicals, and so on.” Eden claimed to be incredulous. “Completely true,” Stalin replied. “Really, is this a state policy? Is this serious policy? No; trifling, clumsy people sit there in Berlin.”³³

Molotov invited everyone to the long table for tea. Eden, taking in the USSR map on the wall, remarked (according to the Soviet notetaker), “What a wonderful map and such a huge country.” Then Eden “looked at the place on the map occupied by Great Britain and added, ‘England is such a small island.’ Comrade Stalin looked at Great Britain and said, ‘Yes, a small island, but a lot depends on it. If this small island tells Germany, “We will not give you money, raw materials, metal,” peace in Europe would be guaranteed.’ Eden did not reply to this.”³⁴

LEVERAGE

The Red Army’s new GP war plan entailed significant advances, based on covert mobilization, surprise, and preemption. Rigorous internal debate had reaffirmed the value of the offensive and what were known as deep operations—that is, efforts that combined armor, motorized infantry, and close air support to smash through fixed enemy defenses, exploiting gaps to strike deep in the enemy’s rear and cause disarray, so as to preempt regrouping and counterattacking and to radically shorten the length of engagement.³⁵ Covert troop buildups for quick strikes and penetration, to disrupt enemy mobilization, made irrelevant traditional mobilization or declarations of war: attacking armies that had achieved tactical surprise could complete deployments of mobilized reserves on enemy territory. Preemptive seizure of Poland, to deny its use to Germany, now loomed large in the Soviet ability to disrupt the latter’s mobilization and counterattacking strength.³⁶

A shift to recognition of Germany as the enemy surfaced publicly on March 31, 1935, when Pravda published a sensational essay under Tukhachevsky’s byline: “The Military Plans of Today’s Germany.” Stalin had softened the title from the even more provocative “The Military Plans of Hitler.” Still, the article, quoting extensively from Mein Kampf, presenting figures on German rearmament, and spelling out new German war doctrines, exploded like a bomb.³⁷

Tukhachevsky believed mid-1930s Europe to be in a state similar to that on the eve of the Great War, with Poland playing the role of Austria-Hungary, but whereas Germany in that war had made the mistake of attacking France before Russia, this time around it would strike the USSR first, believing it needed to go after the stronger force, then take on a weak France. Stalin twisted this around: Germany’s first strike would be against France and Czechoslovakia, and only after an Anschluss with ethnic German regions would Hitler attack the USSR. Thus, Tukhachevsky’s article, in a new ending the dictator had inserted, stated that behind the “convenient screen” of anti-Soviet fulminations, Germany was really plotting to attack in the west (France and Belgium, for ore and ports) and in the center (the Polish Corridor, Czechoslovakia, Austria). Stalin further inserted that “in order to realize its plans of revanche and conquest, Germany by this summer will have an army of 849,000, that is, 40 percent larger than that of France, and almost as large as that of the USSR. (The USSR has 940,000, considering all types of forces.) And that will be despite the fact that the USSR has 2.5 times the population and ten times the territory.”³⁸ German diplomats indignantly protested to Moscow.³⁹

Eden’s Moscow visit came to a close. Pravda (April 1, 1935) and The Times of London (April 1) published a joint communiqué: “Mr. Eden and MM. Stalin, Molotov, and Litvinov were of the opinion that in the present international situation it was more than ever necessary to pursue the endeavor to promote the building up of a system of collective security in Europe . . . in conformity with the principle of the League of Nations.” Eden’s telegrams to London reported that Stalin showed “a remarkable knowledge and understanding of international affairs,” that Stalin’s “sympathies seemed broader than those of M. Litvinov,” and that “he displayed no emotion whatever except for an occasional chuckle or flash of wit.” The dictator had struck Eden as “a man of strong oriental traits of character with unshakeable assurance and control whose courtesy in no way hid from us an implacable ruthlessness.”⁴⁰ Later, in his memoirs, Eden amplified these impressions: “Stalin’s personality made itself felt without effort or exaggeration. He had natural good manners, perhaps a Georgian inheritance. Though I knew him to be a man without mercy, I respected the quality of his mind and even felt a sympathy which I have never been able entirely to analyze.” Eden concluded, “I have never known a man handle himself better in conference. Seldom raising his voice, a good listener, prone to doodling.”⁴¹

In Berlin on April 9, the Soviet trade representative, Kandelaki, and the Reichsbank president, Hjalmar Schacht, finally concluded the proposed loan agreement, which extended a 200-million-mark credit for five years, at 2 percent interest. Stalin had been right: the Germans, needing to supply the rearming Wehrmacht, had made the concessions. The USSR pledged to place new orders with German industrial firms, as well as to complete within eighteen months current orders for German industrial goods and contracts for German shipping. Soviet payments would take the form of 100 million marks in gold and foreign currency and 100 million marks’ worth of raw materials: naphtha, timber, furs, manganese ores.⁴² So much for Stalin’s warning to Eden not to supply Hitler. Sergei Bessonov, a counselor with a trade profile at the USSR’s Berlin embassy, who wore a Hitler mustache, reported to Moscow that “Schacht reiterated to both me and comrade Kandelaki that his course of rapprochement with the USSR was being carried out with the consent and approval of Hitler.”⁴³ Only now did the French cabinet approve going forward with a treaty with the Soviets; Laval informed Potyomkin and issued a public statement.⁴⁴

STAGING GROUNDS

On Red Square on May 1, 1935, upward of 30,000 tank drivers, artillerymen, cavalry, and infantry marched past the Mausoleum as 800 warplanes flew in a choreographed formation.⁴⁵ The next day, Voroshilov presided over the annual banquet for select participants in the Grand Kremlin Palace.⁴⁶ The palace had been built under Nicholas I and dedicated in 1849 as the residence of the tsars when they visited the old capital. Its construction had folded in parts of nine churches, including Moscow’s oldest extant structure, the Church of the Resurrection of Lazarus (1393), and the Palace of Facets (1491), which had been used by Ivan the Terrible. The 150-foot-high building had two stories, despite appearing to have a third (the upper floor contained two sets of windows). Its main entranceway opened to a stunning sixty-six-step staircase and a gigantic mural by Ilya Repin, “Alexander III Receiving Rural District Elders in the Courtyard of Petrovsky Palace” (1886), which depicted the strapping sovereign in full-dress uniform. The ground floor, facing the front façade, was taken up by the royal apartments (where Voroshilov lived). One floor up were five dazzling halls named for the High Orders of the empire: the St. George, the Vladimir, the Alexander, the Andreyev, and the Catherine. The Soviets had combined the St. Andrew and St. Alexander, creating a larger, plainer space for party congresses. A raised stage was added to the St. George’s Hall, the main venue for banquets, which boasted dazzling white marble, fifty-foot ceilings, eighteen columns bearing allegories of imperial Russian military victories, and hundreds of marble plaques with the names of military heroes.⁴⁷

Inside, no more than one in fifteen parade participants could be accommodated for an experience that would reverberate over a lifetime. Around 800 places could be set at tables in the St. George’s Hall, with spillover accommodated in the adjacent Facets (which could hold around 400) and the rose-marbled St. Vladimir Octagon, linking the two. Seats were preassigned, the most prestigious being those closest to Stalin’s table, known as the Presidium, where Molotov occupied seat number 2 and Voroshilov 3. Each table, holding twenty to thirty people, was piled with caviar, fish, game, fresh vegetables, and fruit, although the food could seem incidental to the finest-flavored vodkas, brandies, wines, and Crimean champagne. One or two NKVD officers in civilian dress sat at each table (identifiable by the glaring circumstance that they did not drink) and listened attentively to the conversations, but enough actresses and other eye candy were distributed about to counteract some of the intimidation. The well-lubricated affairs had been publicly, albeit laconically, reported in Pravda.⁴⁸ The imperial splendor—giant fireplaces and mirrors, chandeliers, antique furniture, parquet floors polished to a brilliant shine—stirred embarrassment in the worker and peasant state.⁴⁹ Stalin exhibited no such qualms.

N.B. (a thinly disguised Nikolai Bukharin) reported in Izvestiya that upon Stalin’s entrance “suddenly the applause, which grew like a snowstorm, covered everything, and became a blizzard, thunder, blustery spontaneous joy and ecstasy.” During the endless toasts, Stalin sipped red wine, a glass of mineral water nearby.⁵⁰ (Voroshilov preferred vodka; after each shot he would cut off a slice of butter from a mound and swallow it.)⁵¹ The dictator customarily delivered a speech in the form of his own toast, and now proposed that glasses be raised to the health of the Red Army rank and file (“Bolsheviks in the party and non-party”). Then, trailed by his entourage, he made the rounds, personally greeting attendees. Suddenly, a few exuberant types lifted him up and carried him about the hall, putting him down at each table for a toast. Ubiquitous NKVD guards in full-dress uniform had proved powerless in the face of the hall’s fervor and Stalin’s desire to soak it up.⁵²

At events like these, after the dictator and his retinue departed, the tables would be removed and functionaries and military officers in uniform approached the actresses and ballerinas to ask them for a dance.⁵³ Before exiting, Stalin might duck into the kitchen to congratulate the chefs, after which they—like his bodyguards, drivers, or film projectionists—would walk through fire for him.⁵⁴ But it was the artists at these events, often non-party members, whom he worked most to bend to his will. Stalin addressed them with the formal vy (“you”), paid attention to their performances amid the din, and invited some to drink at his table, inquiring whether they might have requests of him for themselves or their organizations. Relaxed, convivial, he engaged in freewheeling conversation.⁵⁵

Earlier that same day of May 2, the Soviet envoy to Paris had signed a mutual assistance pact with France—the Soviet Union’s first formal alliance. Pravda hailed it as a triumph.⁵⁶ It had taken nearly eight months of negotiations since the Soviet Union had been voted into the League of Nations. Article 2 stipulated “immediate aid and assistance” if either country became the victim of unprovoked attack and the Council of the League of Nations failed to reach a unanimous decision, but the “immediate” was diluted in an accompanying protocol that, at French insistence, left out any time limit to act while the council deliberated.⁵⁷ The treaty dumbfounded many Soviet Communist party members.⁵⁸ The Soviet press reported that Stalin approved of French imperialism’s military buildup “at the level consonant with its security.”⁵⁹ French domestic audiences were better prepared, thanks to a drawn-out public discussion. France’s ally Poland was angry, even though it shared responsibility for catalyzing the treaty.⁶⁰ In Hitler’s Chancellery, the reaction was incandescent rage. The Führer now obsessed over the “Bolshevization of France” and “Judeo-Bolshevik encirclement” of Germany the way Stalin obsessed over an “anti-Soviet imperialist bloc” and “capitalist encirclement.”

“CADRES DECIDE EVERYTHING”

On May 4, 1935, Voroshilov, with Stalin in attendance, was back presiding in the Grand Kremlin Palace amid a sea of dress uniforms, this time over the annual graduation of military academies. The defense commissar issued “an order” for everyone to fill their glasses, then toasted Stalin at length, stirring the standing hall to frenzy. The orchestra played a flourish. Molotov was next. “You already know, comrades, about our new success in the struggle for peace,” he said. “You already know from newspapers about the agreement on mutual assistance, which the Soviet Union has signed with one of the most visible powers of Europe—France. . . . The signing of the Soviet-French Agreement became possible because of the growth and strengthening of the power of our country and the force of our Red Army under the genius leadership of our party, comrade Stalin. Our enormous growth has become plain to our friends and to those whom it is impossible to call friends.” Molotov, along with Stalin, went up to Voroshilov and exchanged kisses.⁶¹ Stalin sounded his now habitual populism.

“Comrades, now, when our achievements are great in all branches of industry and governance—now it has become typical to speak a lot about leaders, bosses of the upper echelon, to credit the successes to them,” he stated. “This is incorrect.” The Soviet people had triumphed over backwardness, he continued, which had required “great sacrifices, great efforts, . . . and patience, patience.” Some had lacked stamina. “There is a saying, ‘Let bygones be bygones,’ but all the same, a person’s memory retains things.” Stalin rebuked those who, he remembered, had wanted to expend scarce resources on consumer goods and “all kinds of trifles,” instead of “tractors, automobiles, airplanes, tanks. . . . You will recall the declarations, from leaders of the Central Committee, that ‘you are embarking on adventurism’; you heard such speeches, indeed it was not only speeches. . . . Others threatened to kill some of us, they wanted to break apart the leadership. It’s plain as day we are people forged in fire, unbreakable, and did not retreat. (Stormy applause.)”

Stalin opened himself up: “It’s plain as day that, back then, we did not retreat; we are Bolsheviks, people, so to speak, of a special cut. Lenin forged us, and Lenin was a man who did not know and did not acknowledge fear; this man was our teacher, our educator, our father—this was a person who, the more enemies raged and the more opponents inside the party fell into hysterics, the more he gathered force and the more resolutely he went forward. We learned a bit from him, this person. . . . We did not retreat; we went forward to attack and smashed some people. I must admit, I also had a hand in that.”⁶²

He could not let the thought go: the fork in the road, supposedly either a more comfortable life, with small-scale, backward agriculture and no security, or large-scale mechanized farms and a socialist great power. “There were victims—it is true—some of us fell by the wayside, others from a bullet.” The country overcame its “famine of technology,” he said, using a resonant word. “But now we have a new famine: a famine of people. . . . If, earlier, technology decided everything, now people decide everything, because now we have the technology. . . . Cadres are the most valuable capital. Not everyone in our country understands this, unfortunately.” He told a story about his exile days in Turukhansk, how at the time of the spring flood, when a group went out to pilfer some of the giant pine logs being floated down the Yenisei, one man went missing, but no one bothered to look for him. “If a cow had disappeared, they would have gone searching, but a person perished, a trifle. . . . We do not value people. People can always be produced, but a mare, go try. (Stormy applause.)” ⁶³

Stalin, an avid gardener, had already been instructing officials to “cultivate people with care and attention, the way a gardener cultivates a beloved fruit tree,” a skill he had shown since his youth.⁶⁴ As the hall quieted again, he continued: “I drink to you, to the higher cadres of our Red Army, and wish you every success in the organization of the defense of our country, in the practical leadership of this defense, because you will lead it. We, here, will lead the speechifying, but you will lead the practical work. (Stormy applause.)” His toast concluded: “Only those good cadres who are not afraid and do not hide from difficulties, but overcome them. Only in the struggle with difficulties can one grow genuine cadres who are not afraid of difficulties. Then our army will be invincible. (Stormy applause of the entire hall. Everyone stands and addresses comrade Stalin with loud shouts of Hurrah and applause.)”⁶⁵

Stalin edited the above raw transcript with his stenographer on May 5, producing the version published in Pravda the next day, sharpening the key point, a shift in slogans from “Technology decides everything” to “Cadres decide everything.” ⁶⁶ The newspaper version enjoined officials to “show the greatest concern for our functionaries, ‘great’ and ‘small,’ . . . help them when they need support, encourage them when they show their first success, move them forward,” and warned, “We have a whole series of instances of soulless, bureaucratic and outright scandalous attitudes toward workers.”⁶⁷ On May 9, Stalin’s in-laws received permission to pay him a late-night visit at the Near Dacha. The dictator recalled his elder son Yakov’s attempted suicide and groused, “How could Nadya, condemning Yakov’s act, shoot herself. She did a very bad thing, she maimed me for life. Let’s drink to Nadya!” Those gathered got to reminiscing about the recent spontaneous metro ride, “the ecstasy of the crowd, the enthusiasm. Iosif again expressed his thought on the fetishism of the people’s psyche, on the striving to have a tsar,” Maria Svanidze noted. “Iosif was in a down mood; more accurately, he was preoccupied, something was occupying him to the depths, for which he had not yet found the answer.”⁶⁸

REVEALED PREFERENCES

Stalin’s tête-à-tête with Eden had yielded nothing. French foreign minister Laval, who, in signing the nominal alliance with Moscow, still hoped to goad London into a real one, belatedly traveled to Moscow, but conspicuously stopped in Warsaw, where he informed Beck that France’s new alliance was neither anti-German nor even pro-Soviet. In the Soviet capital for three days, beginning May 13, 1935, Laval met with Litvinov, Molotov, and Stalin.⁶⁹ The politburo had just decreed a Red Army expansion to 1.094 million troops by the end of 1936, and before the summer was out, Stalin would accept Voroshilov’s proposal to lower the conscription age by six months each year (dropping it from twenty-one to nineteen by 1939).⁷⁰ Laval was brought to a military airfield for a demonstration. When he appeared at the Bolshoi on May 15, he drew an ovation.⁷¹ But barely a week after the treaty with France had been signed, Litvinov informed the new German ambassador, Werner von der Schulenburg, that a bilateral nonaggression pact was urgently needed and would “lessen the significance of the Franco-Soviet alliance.”⁷²

Maisky, in London, was brought into the loop, and he recorded in his diary that Stalin had asked Laval about his recent trip to Poland and, when Laval proceeded to predict a shift in Warsaw away from pro-German attitudes, had cut him off: “You are friends of the Poles, so try to persuade them that they are playing a dangerous game that will bring disaster on themselves. The Germans will trick them and sell them short. They will involve Poland in some adventure, and when she weakens, they will either seize her or share her with another power.”⁷³

Stalin had something the tsar never had—control over a political party in France’s parliament—and he acceded to Laval’s request to stop the French Communists from opposing France’s military budget and its new two-year service law. French Communists turned on a dime.⁷⁴ Stalin, in return, told Laval that he thought it prudent to prepare for the worst and wanted to add concrete military obligations to their treaty. Reluctantly, Laval agreed to open talks after the Soviets reached an accord with France’s ally Czechoslovakia.⁷⁵ That very day in Prague, May 16, foreign minister Beneš and Soviet envoy Sergei Alexandrovsky signed a mutual assistance pact. Beneš had drafted the text. He, understandably, did not want to dilute France’s obligations and was anxious not to allow the Soviets to invoke the pact on their own and possibly draw Czechoslovakia into a Soviet-Polish conflict. The Soviets, predictably, were keen to have France retain the main burden and themselves avoid being drawn into a possible German-Czechoslovak conflict over Austria. And so, even though the Czechoslovak-Soviet treaty carried the same obligation of mutual assistance in the event of a third-party attack as did the Franco-Soviet pact, a special clause stated that the Soviets were obliged to act only if the French fulfilled their obligations first.⁷⁶

Laval, again, stopped in Poland, where Piłsudski had died of liver cancer on May 12, 1935. “Stalin,” Laval told one Polish confidant, “is wise, cold, detached, and ruthless.” To another he said, “Oh, oh! Very strong. He is a grand figure, but an Asiatic conqueror type, a species of Tamerlane.”⁷⁷ At Piłsudski’s funeral, in Kraków (May 18), Laval assured Göring, who was representing Hitler, of France’s good intentions. Göring, for his part, renewed his wooing of the Poles with tall tales of Soviet air bases about to appear in Czechoslovakia.⁷⁸ In Berlin, at St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, in a sensational gesture, Hitler attended a holy mass, with a symbolic coffin draped in a Polish flag in honor of the deceased Polish president. On May 21, in another long speech to the Reichstag, the Führer held out the prospect of nonaggression pacts with all of Germany’s neighbors except Lithuania (“What else could I wish for other than calm and peace?”). He criticized the Franco-Soviet treaty, while stating in a moderate tone that, in the matter of rearmament, Germany expected to be treated equally by Britain.⁷⁹

Soviet military intelligence, meanwhile, had suffered another self-inflicted disaster by violating tradecraft yet again, recruiting agents among Communists under police surveillance—this time in Denmark, which ran the Soviet agents in Nazi Germany. Danish police had gone looking for a suspected spy on charges of raping a chambermaid (possibly an invented pretext) and netted the current and former station chiefs for Germany, as well as cash, fake passports, and codes. In early May, over several sessions in the Little Corner with Voroshilov, among others, Stalin promoted Semyon Uritsky from deputy head of the tank armor directorate to chief of military intelligence, retaining Artuzov as deputy head. (Artuzov would be replaced on May 21 as concurrent head of NKVD espionage by his deputy, Abram Slutsky.) Stalin told the Jewish Uritsky to recruit operatives and agents among ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Latvians, and Jews, but to avoid Poles, Finns, Estonians, Hungarians, and Austrians. As spies in the field risked their lives to combat fascism, Uritsky went to war to force out Artuzov, seething that he “would be the idiot with the genius deputy.”⁸⁰

CONNECTING THE DOTS

All this while, Stalin was reading interrogation protocols about elaborate terrorist “centers” of cleaning ladies and librarians plotting his assassination. By now, only nine persons hired by Yenukidze remained on the Kremlin staff.⁸¹ On May 12, 1935, Yagoda had sent Stalin proposals for punishment of the 112 people who had been arrested in the Kremlin Affair. Yagoda left blank Lev Kamenev’s sentence; Stalin wrote in ten years for him, and execution instead of ten years for Nina Rozenfeld.⁸² The next day, Yenukidze was named central executive committee plenipotentiary for the resorts group in the North Caucasus, which included elite Kislovodsk, second after Sochi.⁸³ Stalin also dispatched a secret circular to all party organizations announcing a party card verification campaign to “introduce Bolshevik order in our house.”⁸⁴ Over the years, 200,000 duplicate cards had been issued for those reported lost or stolen. Nearly 15,000 party cards in the Donbass and 13,000 in Central Asia were still unaccounted for. (Several months later, the verification campaign would miss its completion deadline, inciting Stalin to irate charges of “family-ness,” or self-protection, by colluding local elites.)⁸⁵

Yezhov had drafted the circular and was overseeing the verification. In parallel, he was demanding stronger oversight of foreigners in the USSR, calling them spies.⁸⁶ He also asked Stalin to read his ambitious theoretical manuscript, “From Factional Activity to Open Counterrevolution (On the Zinovievite Counterrevolutionary Organization).” It set out how the Zinovievites, right deviationists, and Trotskyites were working together for a coup.⁸⁷ Stalin received the draft on May 17 and underlined various passages (“The Zinovievite counterrevolutionary band definitively chooses terror as its weapon in this battle against the party and working class”). Whether he had instigated the work remains unknown; Yezhov had pretensions and had absorbed Stalin’s worldview. “There is no doubt that the Trotskyites were also informed about the terrorist side of the activity conducted by the Zinoviev organization,” Yezhov’s text asserted, concluding that “from testimony . . . we have established that [the Trotskyites] had also embarked on the path of terrorist groups.”⁸⁸

Trotsky had predicted, almost immediately after his expulsion from the territory of the Soviet Union, that “there remains only one thing for Stalin: to try to draw a line of blood between the official party and the opposition. He absolutely must connect the opposition with assassination attempts, and preparations for armed insurrections.”⁸⁹

Stalin had decided to devote a Central Committee plenum (June 5 and 7, 1935)—one of only two during the year that lasted more than a day—to the Kremlin Affair. He assigned the main report not to Yagoda but to Yezhov, who began not with Yenukidze but with Kirov, explaining that the “embittered” Zinovievite-Kamenevite-Trotskyite “group” had been driven “to the most extreme forms of struggle—namely, terror,” and charged the rightists with complicity, citing attempts to link up with the Zinovievites in 1932. Yezhov deemed Yenukidze “a corrupt and self-complacent Communist” who had unwittingly allowed White Guards to infiltrate the citadel of power. Yenukidze, given the floor on the second day, averred that all hiring in the Kremlin “was carried out with the participation of the NKVD,” prompting Yagoda to interject from the floor, “That’s not true.” Yenukidze insisted on the point, denied cohabiting with the arrested women, and seemed incredulous that helping former Menshevik families could be treason. Yagoda charged him with creating “his own parallel ‘GPU’” in the Kremlin and called for his expulsion from the party, going beyond Yezhov’s call for expulsion from the Central Committee.⁹⁰

Stalin had kept strangely silent, but he finally professed himself unable to abandon a good friend with whom he had spent many a holiday, so he suggested that Yenukidze be expelled from the Central Committee and the party but not handed over to the NKVD.⁹¹ Attendees voted unanimously for expulsion from the Central Committee and voted—with some hands raised in objection—for expulsion from the party for “political and personal dissoluteness.” The minutes for internal circulation and Pravda’s public report were falsified to conceal the objections.⁹² Yenukidze became the first Bolshevik who had joined the party before the revolution and who had never joined an opposition afterward to be expelled.⁹³

WISHFUL THINKING

Hitler was zealously driving a revision of the Versailles order; Stalin did not oppose revision, provided it did not come at Soviet expense. As the sequential visits in spring 1935 of Eden and Simon to Berlin and Eden to Moscow had shown, each dictator was central to the other’s grand strategy, but in differing ways. For Hitler, the Soviet Union was the principal evil, and Britain his principal wedge. For Stalin, Britain was the principal evil, and Germany his principal wedge. For France, the courting of the Soviet Union, a step that Britain disliked, was a way to woo a hard-to-get Britain. For Britain, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were both evil, but avoiding the costs of direct confrontation with Germany was paramount. Britain signed the proposed naval pact with Germany on June 18, 1935, which happened to be the anniversary of Waterloo.

Britain possessed the largest maritime force in world history, but it faced shipyard capacity limits and treasury austerity. The pact formally limited Germany’s fleet to 35 percent of Britain’s, while ostensibly locking Germany into a quality standstill. (Eden in Moscow had assured Stalin that Germany’s 35 percent demand was out of the question.) But Hitler’s special envoy, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had negotiated for Germany to have 45 percent as many submarines as the British did at that time, and to eventually reach parity, a giveaway of true intentions.⁹⁴ Hitler gave the go-ahead for two already planned super-battleships, the Bismarck and the Tirpitz, both exceeding the treaty’s quality limits.⁹⁵ Ribbentrop had been invited to lunch the day before the signing by an influential journalist at The Times and told him he was keen for prime minister Stanley Baldwin (who had just assumed that office for the third time) to meet the Führer, because he wanted “Baldwin to hear Hitler’s ideas about Western solidarity against Bolshevism.”⁹⁶

FRENCH CONNECTIONS

In reply to Nazism, a group of French intellectuals who had attended the Soviet writers’ congress—André Malraux, André Gide, Louis Aragon—decided to mount an International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which was scheduled to open at the 3,000-seat Maison de Mutualité, in the Latin Quarter, on June 21, 1935, and run for five days. Around 250 invitations went out to writers in thirty-eight countries, including many political émigrés.⁹⁷ Koltsov arrived early to assist in the organizing and deliver the secret financing (20,000 gold rubles). Thanks to Ehrenburg, Gide, and Malraux, Isaac Babel (who had once lived in Paris) and Boris Pasternak (whose poems were untranslated, but whose name was well known) got added as late as June 19. (They arrived late, in new suits specially sewn for them.) Gorky declined Stalin’s urgings to attend, citing poor health.⁹⁸ About a week before the opening, outside a Paris café, André Breton encountered Ehrenburg—who was infamous for having denounced surrealism as “onanism, pederasty, exhibitionism, and even bestiality”—and smashed him in the face. Ehrenburg cut Breton from the speaker list.⁹⁹

From the podium, Malraux declared that “the humanism we want to create . . . finds its expression in the line of thought running from Voltaire to Marx,” while Gide averred that “one can be profoundly internationalist while remaining profoundly French.” Aldous Huxley deplored the “endless Communist demagogy,” while E. M. Forster would write that he’d had “to hear the name of Karl Marx detonate again and again like a well-placed charge, and draw after it the falling masonry of applause.”¹⁰⁰

During the congress, the leftist French writer, dramatist, and musicologist Romain Rolland traveled the other way—to the USSR, at Gorky’s invitation. After rounds of theater, cinema, and banquets, on June 28, he enjoyed a long audience in the Little Corner.¹⁰¹ Wispy, compulsive, puritanical, Rolland (b. 1866) had won the Nobel Prize in Literature “as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings.” His masterwork, a ten-volume novel cycle, Jean-Christophe, depicts a German-French friendship. He also harbored a long-standing fascination with the Russian Revolution and once observed that “this order is all bloody and soiled like a human baby just wrested from his mother’s womb,” but, “in spite of disgust, in spite of the horror of ferocious crimes, I go up to the child, I embrace the newly-born: he is hope, the miserable hope of the human future. He is yours in spite of you!”¹⁰²

Rolland told Stalin that he saw him as the embodiment of the “new humanism.”¹⁰³ He observed that Westerners shared the idealism inside the USSR but had trouble comprehending, for example, the news in the Soviet press that, as of April 7, 1935, criminal law was being applied to children twelve and up, and that minors could be executed. After letting Rolland speak for twenty minutes, Stalin requested permission to respond. “We had to pass this repressive law threatening the death penalty for child criminals, especially their instigators,” he answered. “In fact, we will not enforce this law. I hope that it will not be enforced. Naturally, publicly, we cannot admit this; the desired effect would be lost, the effect of intimidation.”¹⁰⁴ The dictator deployed his customary flattery (“I am happy to chat with the greatest writer in the world”), but came across as genuinely enamored of the grand écrivain even while throwing dust in Rolland’s eyes.¹⁰⁵ Stalin called in the “Kremlin photographer” to record the event for propaganda purposes. But he would refuse all of Rolland’s entreaties to publish the transcript.¹⁰⁶

On June 30, Rolland, a guest on the Mausoleum at a physical culture parade involving 127,000 participants, was taken aback by the idolatry of the “emperor”—including the airplanes writing Stalin’s name in the sky—but also by the dynamism of the young people of the revolutionary epoch. His surprise reflected reading about Soviet failures before his arrival. “The economic situation, it seems, is good,” he wrote in a letter from Moscow to a literary critic friend in France. “During the last year, the conditions of life have improved significantly. This gargantuan city, which now numbers four million inhabitants, is a waterfall of life, healthy, warm, well-ordered. Among this crowd of strong, mobile, well-nourished people, you and I would look like strangers from a famine land.”¹⁰⁷

At a soirée at Gorky’s mansion, Rolland supped with the inner circle. Here, Stalin came across as “a jester, a bit rude and peasant in his jokes, relentlessly showering this or that person with pleasantries, laughing heartily.” This was a coarser side to the decorous dictator encountered in the Little Corner, yet still self-disciplined. “Stalin eats and drinks thoroughly, but he knows well when to stop,” Rolland added. “After a reasonable number of full glasses”—toasts to all and sundry—“Stalin unexpectedly stops, refusing refills and further helpings. . . . He sucks his small wooden pipe with pleasure.”¹⁰⁸

PROFLIGACY

Poland’s foreign minister Beck paid a visit to Berlin (July 3–4, 1935), where he was received one-on-one by Hitler, who complimented the genius of Piłsudski, averred that Poland should never be pushed from the Baltic, and enlarged upon the Soviet menace.¹⁰⁹ On July 5, Stalin received Kandelaki, back from Berlin, where Schacht had proposed a whopping new ten-year, 1-billion-mark loan, reasoning that Soviet counter-deliveries of raw materials could solve Germany’s shortages without overly taxing precious hard currency reserves.¹¹⁰ Internal jostling had begun among the Soviets over their own economic plan for the next year, and the total amount of investment was the key state decision.¹¹¹ For three years running, capital investment had been allowed only modest increases, and when the commissariats fought back, the hard-nosed Molotov—backed by the finance commissariat, the state bank, and Stalin—had held the line, warning against higher inflation and imbalances. On July 19, the chairman of the state planning commission, Valērijs Mežlauks, the son of a Latvian nobleman and a German mother, proposed that 1936 capital investment be slashed by 25 percent, to 17.7 billion rubles.¹¹² He explained that the reduction would facilitate a budget surplus and the goals of “increasing real wages and gradually reducing [retail] prices.”

Stalin’s involvement in the nitty-gritty of economic policy had tapered as he allowed Molotov and others to carry the burden. Molotov happened to be on holiday, and two days after Mežlauks’s opening gambit, Stalin convened a meeting in his Old Square office. By now, Mežlauks’s investment plan had already been forced up to 19 billion. He was present for just an hour and twenty minutes, and fifty minutes of that overlapped with the military men (Voroshilov, Yegorov, Tukhachevsky).¹¹³ That evening, Stalin reported to Molotov that he had decided on 22 billion. “We shall see,” Stalin observed. “There are some things which we must not cut: the defense commissariat; repair of rail track and rolling stock, plus the payment for new wagons and locomotives (railroad commissariat); the building of schools (enlightenment commissariat); re-equipment (light industry); paper and cellulose factories (timber); and certain very necessary enterprises: coal, oil, open-hearth furnaces, rolling mills, viscose factories, power stations, chemistry (heavy industry commissariat). This makes it more difficult.”¹¹⁴

Molotov replied (July 25) by trying to hold the line at 22 billion rubles (“It’s possible and necessary”). Mežlauks wrote to Stalin and Chubar (Molotov’s deputy), acknowledging the difficulties that 22 billion would present for the industrial commissariats but insisting that this had to be the ceiling “for financial reasons.” On July 28, Stalin convened a politburo meeting, summoning some seventy-five people.¹¹⁵ The group voted a 1936 investment plan of 27.3 billion, while stipulating that the commissariats reduce their construction costs (somehow) so that the actual number would turn out to be 25.1 billion. Stalin wrote to Molotov that “22 billion was not enough and, as can be seen, could not be enough.” None of the economic officials had resisted Stalin, and Molotov, too, bit the bullet (“I would have preferred a smaller amount of capital construction”).¹¹⁶ The decree was published and, as usual, the tenacious lobbying persisted. Stalin continued to indulge it. The final 1936 investment plan would be 32.635 billion, not a 25 percent decrease from 1935 but a nearly 40 percent increase.¹¹⁷ It appears that Stalin had gained confidence in the economic system, which was having its second-straight good year, and, despite the risks of inflation, yearned to have more of both guns and butter.¹¹⁸

ANTIFASCIST FRONT

Stalin, sensing his leverage, had sent Kandelaki back to Berlin, and on July 15, 1935, according to Schacht, Kandelaki told him he had just spoken with Stalin, Molotov, and foreign trade commissar Rosenholz, and that German obstruction and price gouging had prevented the USSR from fully utilizing the existing 200-million-mark credit, but Kandelaki “expressed the hope that it might also be possible to improve German-Russian political relations. I replied that we had indeed already previously agreed that a brisk exchange of goods would be a good starting point for the improvement of general relations, but that I was not able to enter into political negotiation.”¹¹⁹

The much-delayed 7th Comintern Congress, the first in seven years, opened on July 25 in the House of Trade Unions with 513 delegates (371 with the right to vote), representing sixty-five Communist parties. The last party member at liberty in Japan had just been arrested. German Communists had dwindled to a tiny group.¹²⁰ Wilhelm Pieck, a German in Soviet exile, delivered the opening report, but Dimitrov made the key speech, formally announcing a policy shift to “a broad people’s antifascist front.” Dimitrov explained that an alliance with non-Communist leftists was a temporary expedient in response to a special threat. “Fascism in power, comrades, . . . is the openly terrorist dictatorship of the more reactionary, more chauvinist, more imperialist elements of finance capital,” he observed. “The most reactionary variant of fascism is fascism of the German type.” He called Nazism impudent for claiming to be socialist when “it has nothing in common with socialism. . . . It is a government system of political banditry, a system of provocations and torture of the working class and the revolutionary elements of the peasantry, petit bourgeoisie, and intelligentsia. It is medieval barbarism and atrocity. It is unbridled aggression against other nations and countries.”

Dimitrov cautioned that “Soviet power and only Soviet power can bring salvation!” but exhorted the delegates to learn “the parliamentary game.”¹²¹ A photograph of Stalin with the Comintern delegates was published in Pravda, but he did not deign to deliver a speech.¹²² Yezhov was soliciting reports on hidden spies among resident foreign Communists and other political émigrés. (There were 4,600 Germanophone expatriates alone, thanks to Nazism.)¹²³ While the congress continued, on July 27, the USSR military collegium passed sentences in the Kremlin Affair on thirty people: two got the death penalty, and the rest between two and eight years in camps. The NKVD special board had sentenced eighty others in the case. Lev Kamenev, already serving a five-year term for the Kirov case, got another ten.¹²⁴

Beria delivered a sensation. He had sacked Toroshelidze as head of his Stalin project, in favor of Yermolai “Erik” Bedia, Georgia’s enlightenment commissar, who set to work on “The Rise and Development of Bolshevik Organizations in the South Caucasus.” Documents of the conspiratorial underground years were few, so people were invited to reminisce, sometimes writing their own texts, often allowing Beria’s apparatchiks to write or type them up. Those who participated were usually given envelopes of cash (“Comrade Stalin remembers you and asked me to convey this”). Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria’s top aide, shaped the final text, and on July 21–22, 1935, in a special meeting of the South Caucasus party active, with some 2,000 attendees, Beria read it aloud. The audience spent much of the five hours standing and applauding each mention of “the Great Stalin.” Dawn of the East published the full text, under Beria’s byline, in two issues (July 24–25).¹²⁵ Pravda reprinted it over the course of eight days, making Beria famous in the party outside the Caucasus.¹²⁶ The text was also issued as a stand-alone pamphlet in a print run that would reach 35 million.¹²⁷ The central apparatus instructed all party organizations to organize study groups on Beria’s report, which “offered the richest material on the role of Stalin as a Supreme Leader and theorist of our party.”¹²⁸

Also during the Comintern Congress, on July 30, following a five-day conference of 400 railroad industry personnel, Stalin hosted a banquet in the St. George’s Hall. He rose to speak “under the thunder of applause, and an ovation that long did not let up,” according to the account he edited for Pravda. “He said that the existence and development of our state, which exceeds in its size any other state in the world, including England and its colonies (excluding its dominions), is unthinkable without well-laid-down rail transport connecting the gigantic provinces of our country into a single state whole. . . . England, as a state, would be unthinkable without its first-class sea transport, which connects its myriad territories into a single whole. Exactly the same way the USSR, as a state, would be unthinkable without first-class rail transport, connecting its myriad provinces and territories into a single whole.”¹²⁹ Left unsaid was that precisely the underdeveloped rail network posed the gravest impediment to Soviet war planning. In the western theater, the most glaring rail vulnerability lay at one of the most strategic points, south of the Pripet Marshes, along the Kiev military district frontier, while in the Far Eastern theater, throughput deficiency was still worse: a mere twelve pairs of trains per day, a level not much improved since the Russo-Japanese War defeat in 1904–5.¹³⁰

Stalin inserted a remarkable political paragraph when editing the transcript. “In capitalist countries there are several parties—for example, England: Liberals, Conservatives, Labourites,” he wrote. “There’s not much difference between them—all of them stand for the continuation of exploitation—but one party criticizes the other. When the party in power missteps and the masses begin to get disaffected, that party is replaced by another. . . . We do not need such a lightning rod. We have a one-party system, but this system has its darker side—there’s no one to criticize us, even gently—so we have to criticize ourselves, check, not be afraid of our shortcomings, difficulties, confront them. We all should teach the masses, but also learn from the ‘little people,’ listen to them. . . . Self-criticism, that’s the key to our successes. The bourgeoisie put forward their smartest and most skillful people to govern the state: Roosevelt, Baldwin, Hitler—he’s a talented person—Mussolini, Laval, but nothing comes of it. We have victories, and these victories come not from the genius of someone; that’s stupidity. We do not have geniuses. We had one genius: Lenin. We are all people of middling capabilities, but we Bolsheviks take correct stances and implement them—that’s why we gain victories.”¹³¹

The Comintern Congress rolled on, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Engels’s death at the session on August 5.¹³² Four days later, Ivan Tovstukha, deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, died from tuberculosis, at age forty-six. His obituary provided what might have been the first public information on Stalin’s group of top aides who actually ran the country.¹³³ Internally, Tovstukha had sabotaged the efforts of Yaroslavsky to write a comprehensive Stalin biography. Now Yaroslavsky appealed directly to the dictator, but Stalin wrote across his letter: “I am against the idea of a biography about me. Maxim Gorky had a plan like yours, and he asked me, too, but I have backed away from this matter. I don’t think the time has come for a Stalin biography.”¹³⁴

That very summer, a foreign author struck again: Boris Lifshitz, who had been born in Kiev (1895), moved with his family to Paris at age two, helped found the French Communist party, went by the name Souvarine, and had been expelled from the Comintern for voicing his and his comrades’ anger at the persecution of Trotsky (with whom Souvarine eventually fell out). Souvarine exacted revenge by publishing Stalin: A Critical Study of Bolshevism in French, which portrayed Stalin as both devoted to the cause and painstaking in intrigue, a doer rather than a thinker like Lenin or Trotsky, a man who struggled long and hard for recognition amid supposed insignificance in the revolutionary movement and overcame seemingly insuperable obstacles, such as Lenin’s Testament calling for his removal. Souvarine demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of Stalin’s successful political ruthlessness.¹³⁵

The Comintern Congress ratified the new line of Communist–Social Democrat cooperation in Europe. In Asia, Stalin had long been forcing Communist-“bourgeois” cooperation against Japanese imperialists in a “united front.” But Chiang Kai-shek had launched the fifth in a series of encirclement campaigns against the Chinese Communists, most of whom had found refuge at a mountain redoubt far southwest of Shanghai, adapting the precepts of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (“The enemy attacks, we retreat; the enemy halts, we harass; the enemy retreats, we pursue”). With Nationalist troops pressing the final annihilation, about 130,000 rank-and-file Communist troops and civilians had managed to break out, fleeing on a horrendous “Long March” into the deep interior. (Survivors of the rout-retreats would straggle first into Sichuan province, then Yan’an, in Shaanxi province, covering 3,700 miles over 370 days.) With the Long March still under way, a Chinese Communist delegation had set out for the Comintern Congress, but would arrive only after it had concluded. Meanwhile, the congress ordered the Chinese Communists to link up with “cooperative” Nationalists, whom they were to somehow cleave off from Chiang.¹³⁶

Stalin was satisfied. “The Comintern Congress turned out not so bad,” he had written to the holidaying Molotov. “The delegates made a good impression. The resolutions came out not bad.” Stalin also divulged (“I think it’s time”) that he was going to hand the organization over to Dimitrov. “I really am a bit tired. I’ve had to spend time with the Comintern-ites, the investment plan for ’36, all sorts of issues—you get tired, willy-nilly. No big deal. Fatigue passes quickly, if you relax for a day or even a few hours.”¹³⁷ On August 10, the politburo approved creation of a Comintern secretariat, with Dimitrov as general secretary.¹³⁸ That same day, Stalin departed for his southern holiday. Although he had eliminated the de facto second secretary post in favor of multiple deputies, he left Kaganovich in charge again. The inner circle had solidified over several years: Molotov at the government, Kaganovich at the party, Voroshilov at the military, Orjonikidze at heavy industry, Mikoyan at trade. Kaganovich and Molotov had inevitably become rivals for his favor, and officials below them divided between the “Lazariches” (sons of Lazar) and the “Vyacheslaviches” (sons of Vyacheslav). Both men were indispensable—Molotov as the principal confidant, Kaganovich as the ultimate troubleshooter—and both shouldered immense burdens, following the example Stalin set.¹³⁹

Before the congress adjourned (on August 21, 1935), it formally “elected” Dimitrov to the new Comintern executive committee, which in turn “elected” him as Comintern general secretary.¹⁴⁰ An American delegation led by Earl Browder had attended, even though the U.S. secretary of state had warned the Soviet ambassador that any American participation would be taken as yet another violation of their diplomatic recognition agreement.¹⁴¹ After Browder boasted at the congress of the revolutionary movement’s progress in the United States under his guidance, Bullitt recommended closing Soviet consulates in San Francisco, curtailing visas, and having President Roosevelt lay the case of Soviet violations before the American people.¹⁴² The president opted to protest in writing, and on August 25 Bullitt handed a strongly worded note to Krestinsky, who rejected it out of hand but informed Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, and Kaganovich that the note threatened a break in relations.¹⁴³

Soviet officials blamed domestic American politics; one surmised that Bullitt had been trying to make his career on improved relations but, failing that, had turned to anti-Soviet careerism.¹⁴⁴ Stalin did not overreact.¹⁴⁵ He had already given up on any kind of pact with the United States against Japan. Negotiations over repayment of tsarist and Provisional Government debts had failed, with no long-term credits extended to Moscow to purchase American goods.¹⁴⁶ Predictably, the Soviets denied any control over Comintern affairs (even though the congress met in Moscow in a government facility, and its official bulletins were issued by TASS). An irate Bullitt soon left for a holiday back home.¹⁴⁷

HOLIDAY COMMANDS

The dictator would be away from Moscow for nearly three months.¹⁴⁸ From Sochi, he telegrammed Kaganovich that “Svetlana, Mistress of the House, will be in Moscow August 27. She demands permission to leave for Moscow soon, in order to supervise her secretaries.”¹⁴⁹ About Vasily he said nothing. In Moscow on August 30, Henri Barbusse, who had contracted pneumonia, passed away.¹⁵⁰ Soviet officials had waffled on whether to publish a Russian translation of his Stalin, but finally would do so posthumously, in a print run of 100,000.¹⁵¹ Both the spring sowing and the fall gathering had been organized in a timelier, more efficient manner than in years past, and the 1935 harvest would be good: 79 million tons. The state would procure 23.9 million tons, up from 19.7 million the previous year.¹⁵² Stalin finally would be able to build a substantial strategic grain reserve (9.4 million tons). “What is happening with grain procurements this year is our completely unprecedented stunning victory,” Kaganovich exulted to the holidaying Orjonikidze (September 4), “a victory of Stalinism.” Of Stalin he wrote, “He’s holidaying now, it seems, none too badly. Klim [Voroshilov] is with him now. He went to settle some military matters.”¹⁵³

On September 5, 1935, Kaganovich reported to Sochi that Kandelaki had returned to Moscow and conveyed that only 25 million of the 200-million-mark credit had been spent, because of the complexity of Soviet orders. “It seems affairs in Germany are not going very badly,” Stalin wrote back. “Give Comrade Kandelaki my regards and tell him to insist on getting from the Germans everything we need with regard to the military and dyes.”¹⁵⁴

Stalin sent a ciphered telegram (September 7) directing that Yenukidze be posted elsewhere (“to Kharkov, Rostov, Novosibirsk or another place, but not Moscow or Leningrad”), after learning that he had been visiting with Orjonikidze and Orakhelashvili when they were on holiday and “talked politics with them day and night.”¹⁵⁵ The next day Stalin wrote again, to Kaganovich, that Agranov had sent him a note about “a Yenukidze group of ‘old Bolsheviks’ (‘old farts’ in Lenin’s expression). Yenukidze is a person alien to us. It is strange that Sergo and Orakhelashvili continue to be friends with him.” A politburo decree ordered Yenukidze immediately transferred to Kharkov road transportation.¹⁵⁶ Yezhov, meanwhile, wrote to boast to the dictator, regarding his investigation of terrorism plots against the leadership, that “only in the past months have I succeeded in dragging the NKVD into this work, and it is beginning to yield results.”¹⁵⁷ But Yezhov’s conspiracy to uncover conspiracies would have to wait: he was ill. “You should leave on holiday as soon as possible—for a resort in the USSR or abroad, whichever you prefer, or whatever the doctors say,” Stalin ordered (September 10). “Go on holiday as soon as possible, unless you want me to raise a big ruckus.”^{158, 159}

A medical report (September 1935) by the Kremlin’s Dr. Levin noted Stalin’s completion of a course of medicinal baths at Matsesta, and his being advised to curtail his smoking. Stalin seems to have felt vulnerable during his own medical exams. He asked one of the physicians who attended him, Miron Shneiderovich, if he read newspapers, to which the doctor replied that he read Pravda and Izvestiya. Stalin supposedly told him, “Doctor, you’re a smart man, and you should understand, there’s not a word of truth in them.” Typical Stalin mischief: the dictator laughed, but then asked, “Doctor, tell me, but the truth, do you sometimes have the desire to poison me?” Shneiderovich went silent. Stalin: “I know, doctor, that you are a timid person, weak, that you would never do that, but I have enemies who are capable of doing it.”¹⁶⁰

The same ostensible paranoiac took a drive and then a stroll in Sochi. “Why are you leaving, comrades?” he said to a group of Soviet holidaymakers shocked to encounter him, according to one’s recollections. “Why are you so proud that you shun our company? Come here. Where are you from?” They approached. “Well, let’s get acquainted,” Stalin said. “This is comrade Kalinin, this is the wife of comrade Molotov . . . and this is I, Stalin.” He shook hands. Stalin called over his bodyguard-photographers, mocking them as “mortal enemies,” and instructed them to photograph not just himself but “all the people.” He invited over a woman at a kiosk selling apples and a salesclerk from a food stand. The latter hesitated to leave her post, but finally did so. When an empty public bus happened to pull up, Stalin invited the driver and the ticket taker to have their photos taken, too.¹⁶¹

FALL MANEUVERS

Red Army maneuvers were held (September 12–15, 1935) in the Kiev military district, commanded by Iona Yakir.¹⁶² The exercises entailed a lightning counteroffensive supported by tanks, fighter aircraft, and artillery, directed both frontally and at the enemy’s rear, in a variant on “deep operations,” to employ speed and mobility to punch through enemy lines. The scale and armor were staggering: 65,000 troops, 10,000 tanks, 600 aircraft, and 300 artillery pieces, covering an area of nearly 150 by 120 miles on the western border.¹⁶³ Tanks were organized in mechanized corps for slashing attacks, while for the first time 1,188 parachutists were dropped from TB-3 bombers. Just 10 of the 4,000-plus motorized machines that saw action suffered any kind of breakage. “The French, Czechs, and Italians who attended the maneuvers felt our power, definitely, to the fullest,” Voroshilov boasted to Sochi (September 16). “Our commanders who have returned from French, Czech, and Italian maneuvers report that the difference in our favor is definitely very substantial.”¹⁶⁴

General Lucien Loizeau, deputy chief of the French general staff and head of their delegation, was quoted in Red Star (September 18) offering high praise. “I saw a mighty, serious army, of very high quality in terms of both technology and morale,” he stated. “I think it would be right to consider the Red Army first in the world in terms of tanks. The paratrooper drops of large units that I observed in Kiev I consider a fact that has no precedent in the world.”¹⁶⁵ In his secret summary for the French staff, Loizeau concluded, “This army appeared to me therefore capable of a great initial effort, which would permit it to retain on the eastern front important countervailing forces during the period so critical as the beginning of a conflict.”¹⁶⁶

Loizeau’s eyewitness assessment would be rejected at French staff headquarters by skeptics opposed to a binding military convention in the Franco-Soviet alliance. The proud Soviets would send films of the maneuvers to their embassies to be shown to foreign governments. The immediate official internal report praised the mechanized corps and three tank battalions, which had averaged a speed of 15 miles an hour and in some cases covered 400 miles. But later, in his final summary, Voroshilov would criticize the separate armored forces and praise the role of the unmotorized infantry.¹⁶⁷ This quiet reversal reflected the defense commissar’s threat perception—from his forward-looking subordinates, Uborevičius and Tukhachevsky, whose stature was rising even higher.

Nazi Germany was not invited to send a delegation to the Soviet maneuvers, but the consulate in Kiev sent Berlin a report, evidently based on informants, which highlighted the Red Army’s maneuverability.¹⁶⁸ Almost simultaneously, from September 10 through 16, 1935, the Nazis staged a party congress at Nuremberg. Hundreds of thousands celebrated the reintroduction of compulsory military service and emancipation from Versailles diktat. Leni Riefenstahl delivered her third annual documentary, Day of Freedom: Our Wehrmacht, which culminated in a montage of Nazi flags and German fighter planes flying in a swastika formation to the national anthem, with its refrain “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.” Hitler delivered seventeen separate speeches.¹⁶⁹ On September 15, the Reichstag unanimously passed hastily composed laws forbidding marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans, and establishing that only those of German or related blood could be citizens.¹⁷⁰ Hitler gave his first remarks expressly on the “Jewish Question” since becoming chancellor and called what became known as the Nuremberg laws defensive, congratulated himself for using legal means, and warned that if “Jewish elements” persisted in their agitation and provocations, the issue would have “to be transferred to the final solution of the National Socialist party.”¹⁷¹ Goebbels cited Bolshevism as motive and justification.¹⁷²

Also on September 15, Kaganovich and Molotov wrote to Stalin of rumors among Berlin journalists that Germany would sever diplomatic relations. “Do not allow hysterical noise in our press, and do not succumb to the hysteria of our journalists,” Stalin advised. “Nuremberg is the answer to our Comintern congress. The Hitlerites could not not curse us if one takes into account that the Comintern congress poured latrine filth over them. Let Pravda criticize them on principle and politically, without street vulgarity. Pravda could say that Nuremberg confirms the Comintern assessment of National Socialism as the most primitive form of chauvinism, that anti-Semitism is the animal form of chauvinism and hatred of humans, that anti-Semitism from the point of view of the history of culture is a return to cannibalism, that National Socialism in that light is not even original, for it slavishly repeats the Russian pogromists of the tsarist period of Tsar Nicholas II and Rasputin.”¹⁷³

STRATIFICATION

Fourteen-year-old Vasily Stalin was having a crisis. He had taken to smoking. Although he had enough wits not to touch his father’s cigarette box, his primitive efforts to hide the odor on his breath by sucking candy failed. His grades had sunk even lower. One day at school, several boys teamed up to thrash him. Stalin called the teacher and asked if Vasily had provoked his assailants; she reported that he had made them angry. “So be it,” he said. “I won’t bother you any longer.”¹⁷⁴ Vasily played soccer after school, which became an excuse for him to skip homework (too tired), according to a note from the Zubalovo dacha commandant to Vlasik (September 22, 1935). “Vasily thinks he is an adult,” the commandant wrote, “and insistently demands we fulfill his wishes, which are often stupid.”¹⁷⁵ Stalin gave his son two months to get his act together, threatening to replace him at home with other boys of exemplary behavior.¹⁷⁶

A letter from seventy-year-old Fekla Korshunova, who lived on her husband’s pension from the “Leader of the Proletariat” peat plant, was forwarded to Stalin in Sochi. She wanted to give him one of her cows as a gift but was unsure that it was a good idea (“That will be clearer to you”). She signed off by noting that she used to receive 15 rubles 64 kopecks per month in pension, but now got 24 rubles. Stalin wrote back (September 30), “Thank you, mama, for your kind letter. I do not need a cow, because I do not have any farmland—I’m just a white-collar employee, I serve the people the best that I can, and white-collar types rarely do their own farming. I advise you, mama, to keep the cow yourself and maintain it in my memory. Respecting You, I. Stalin.”¹⁷⁷

More than 10 million women were employed outside the home—in retail, local soviets, schools, traditional textiles—but they had also barged into industrial employment, a consequence, one trade union official said, of “massive desire.”¹⁷⁸ On October 1, the regime abolished rationing for meat, fish, sugar, fats, and potatoes, portending price rises, but lowered the retail price of bread. The party mobilized agitators at workplaces to impart the “correct” understanding.¹⁷⁹ One typical couple in Leningrad, he a hauler and she a teacher, lived in a room of 150 square feet, the husband and wife sleeping on the bed, the elder son on a cot, two younger daughters sharing another cot (foot to head), and the youngest girl on an ottoman. “That’s how we lived for ten years,” the son, who did homework in the magnificent prerevolutionary Saltykov-Shchedrin Library until midnight, would recall. “And we were happy in our way. The main thing: everyone was studying—even Mama at forty-five years old finished the pedagogical night school.”¹⁸⁰

Amid the endemic shortages, the regime manipulated consumer goods as reward or punishment.¹⁸¹ Elites enjoyed privileged access to staples and luxuries such as restaurant meals or fashionable winter coats.¹⁸² Purchase of desirable goods usually required a special coupon as well as money, and a leather jacket bought for 300 rubles in a subsidized state store by those awarded coupons could be resold at the market for three times that or more—which technically was a crime, but also a way of life. Midlevel NKVD operatives were paid just 150–350 rubles per month (an overcoat cost 700 rubles in 1935), and they, too, had to buy “voluntary” government bonds, usually at a cost of a month’s salary. True, operatives received subsidized meals at work, but higher-ups made at least five times as much in salary and received nearly a thousand rubles extra per month in cash “bonuses.” Bosses’ high living was a constant refrain in secret reports. “That’s enough laughing at the workers, enough starving, enough teasing them like dogs” read an anonymous letter to Zhdanov in 1935. “Our enemies are our aristocrats who harm the working people.”

FOREIGN POLICY REVEALED

Stalin exposed his grasp of world affairs to Kaganovich and Molotov in connection with a crisis developing over East Africa, where, on October 3, 1935, after prolonged tensions and border clashes, a large Italian army stationed in Eritrea invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) without a declaration of war. This was the Second Italo-Abyssinian War: Italy had lost the African territory in 1896 in a humiliating military defeat at Adwa. Italian forces, meeting fierce resistance, used aerial bombardment of villages and mustard gas against tribesmen.¹⁸³ On October 7, the League of Nations pronounced Italy the aggressor and began the process of imposing sanctions, but the League’s failure to punish Italy would soon be manifest. During the League debate, a Czechoslovak spectator shot himself.

Stalin was taking it in stride. “Kalinin reports that the foreign affairs commissariat doubts the possibility of grain exports and other products from the USSR to Italy in view of the dispute in Abyssinia,” he wrote from Sochi during the buildup to the invasion. “I think that these doubts of the foreign affairs commissariat derive from their non-understanding of the international situation. The conflict is not so much between Italy and Abyssinia as between Italy and France, on one side, and England on the other. The old Entente is no more. In its place, two ententes are forming: the entente of Italy and France on one side and the entente between England and Germany on the other. The worse the brawl between them, the better for the USSR. We can sell grain to one and the other, so they can fight. It is not at all advantageous for us now if one side smashes the other. For us it is advantageous for their brawl to be as long as possible, without a quick victory by one over the other.”¹⁸⁴

In reality, Britain and France were on one side, and, increasingly, Italy and Germany on the other.

When Litvinov had requested permission to walk demonstratively out of the Assembly of the League of Nations to protest its failure to elect the USSR representative (himself) as one of the six vice presidents, Stalin had agreed (“Let the Assembly eat the Abyssinian kasha”). But when Litvinov’s walkout induced the British and French to scramble to include him in the League’s presidium, Stalin erupted to Kaganovich and Molotov over the easy acceptance of the face-saving gesture. “Litvinov was frightened by his own proposal and hurried to extinguish the incident,” he fumed. “Litvinov wants to follow the British line, but we have our own line.” Stalin called the League’s leadership “thieves” who “did not treat the USSR with the proper respect,” and charged Litvinov with being guided “not so much by the interests of the USSR as by his own overwhelming pride.”¹⁸⁵

On October 26, Tukhachevsky—not seen at the German embassy since Hitler’s ascent—appeared at the farewell reception for departing counselor Fritz von Twardowski. “Tukhachevsky was unusually frank and cordial,” Twardowski reported. “His remarks were full of the greatest respect for the German army, its officer corps, and its organizational capacity, which led him to express the view that the new German Reich army would be fully prepared for war already this year, or at latest next year.” Twardowski pushed back against such an idea, but the deputy defense commissar persisted: “If it should come to war between Germany and the Soviet Union, which would be an appalling misfortune for both nations, Germany would no longer be confronted with the old Russia; the Red Army had learned a great deal and done a great deal of work.” Twardowski noted that Tukhachevsky had volunteered that “if Germany and the Soviet Union still had the same friendly political relations they used to have, they would be in a position to dictate peace to the world.”¹⁸⁶

KEKE

On holiday, Stalin again suffered from stomach pains and caught influenza.¹⁸⁷ Very unusually, he stopped in to see his septuagenarian mother.¹⁸⁸ Since he had become a widower for the second time, his letters to Keke had changed. “Greetings, Mother Dear, I got the jam, the ginger, and the churchkhela [Georgian candle-shaped candy],” he had written in 1934. “The children are very pleased and send you their thanks. I am well, so don’t worry about me. I can bear my burden. I do not know whether or not you need money. I am sending you 500 rubles just in case. . . . Keep well, dear mother, and keep your spirits up. A kiss. Your son, Soso. P.S. The children genuflect to you. After Nadya’s death, my private life has been very hard, but a strong man must always be manly.”¹⁸⁹

Stalin was in the company of Beria, who had erected a grandiose marble pavilion over the dictator’s wooden birth hovel in Gori and opened it to the public.¹⁹⁰ Beria also instigated approval for construction of a Stalin museum in Gori, next to which were supposed to be a cinema, drama theater, library, hotel, and House of the Collective Farmer. The low estimate for the total cost nearly equaled Gori’s annual budget (900,000 rubles).¹⁹¹ Keke was still living under Beria’s care, in the single room on the ground floor of the former tsarist viceroy’s palace, where Georgia’s Council of People’s Commissars had its offices. She ventured to the market dressed in black, a widow for more than a quarter century now, and shadowed by secret police. Beria’s wife, Nino, visited her regularly. In June 1935, Svetlana and Vasily had paid a visit. The children were staying with “Uncle Lavrenti” for a week and, according to Svetlana, saw their grandma for half an hour. Neither Svetlana nor Vasily understood Georgian; they communicated through their half brother, Yakov. Svetlana would recall being shocked at the sight of Keke’s spartan metal bed. Keke was ill (she received them while in bed, as demonstrated by photographs, which Stalin permitted to be published).¹⁹² Stalin’s own visit—a further indication that she was ill—took place on October 17. There is plausible hearsay from her attending physician that Stalin asked, “Mother, why did you beat me so hard?” and that she responded, “That’s why you turned out so well.”¹⁹³

Stalin’s Georgian origins had been muted over time, with his features softened in photographs (his long pointed nose was reduced, his arched left eyebrow lowered, his chin moved forward, his face made oval).¹⁹⁴ Three days after the visit, Pravda’s correspondent interviewed Keke, and on October 21 Poskryobyshev passed a draft of his article to the dictator with a request to publish it. “I won’t undertake to approve or reject,” Stalin answered. “It’s not my business.”¹⁹⁵ The article appeared in Pravda (October 23). “The 75-year-old Keke is affable, cheerful. . . . ‘He came unexpectedly, without warning. The door opens and he walks in. He kissed me a long time, and I reciprocated. How do you like our Tiflis? I asked him.’” The newspaper further quoted her as saying, “‘I worked each day and raised a son. It was hard. . . . We ate poorly. . . . An exemplary son! . . . I wish everyone such a son!’”¹⁹⁶

Pravda followed up (October 27) with additional details from Keke: “‘Our Lavrenti came and announced that Soso had arrived and that he was already here and coming in. . . . The door opened, and there he stood on the threshold: it’s him, my own. . . . I look and I can’t believe my eyes.’” She notices that he has gray hair. “‘What’s that, son, have you gone gray?’” Stalin answers: “‘It’s nothing, Mother, a little gray. It’s not important. I feel terrific, and you should not doubt it.’”¹⁹⁷ (The account omitted the part where she said, “What a shame that you didn’t become a priest,” which Stalin, according to Svetlana, liked to repeat.) Keke was quoted as revealing that Stalin’s father had removed him from school to apprentice him to a shoemaker, against her strenuous objections. On October 29, Stalin exploded. “I ask that you prohibit the vulgar rubbish that infiltrated our central and local press, publishing an ‘interview’ with my mother and sundry other promotional nonsense right up to portraits,” he wrote from Sochi to Molotov, Kaganovich, Andreyev, Zhdanov, and Boris Tal (head of publishing in the apparatus). “I ask that you spare me from the promotional hoopla of these scum.”¹⁹⁸

LIFE BECOMES MORE JOYOUS

Stalin’s first order of business back in Moscow, on November 2, 1935, was to receive Kandelaki, just returned from a meeting in Berlin with Schacht, who had revisited the proposal for a large new credit, now half a billion marks, while Kandelaki had again raised the need for political rapprochement and reemphasized Soviet interest in state-of-the-art military technology (automatic piloting of aircraft, remote control of vessels). France’s Laval, who had concurrently become prime minister, was also working all channels to secure rapprochement with Germany while delaying formal ratification of the Soviet alliance. Hitler perceived weakness.¹⁹⁹ Schulenburg, Germany’s ambassador, reported that at the dinner for the diplomatic corps on Revolution Day, Litvinov had raised his glass and loudly proclaimed, “I drink to the rebirth of our friendship!” Schulenburg added, “The British ambassador, who was sitting opposite, said: ‘Well, that’s a fine toast.’”²⁰⁰

The capital was having its usual chilly, white winter, but at the November 7, 1935, parade, for the first time, Voroshilov, Tukhachevsky, and others appeared with gold shoulder boards. Not long thereafter, Stalin allowed the reintroduction of the snapped-hand salute and formal ranks.²⁰¹ The dictator named five “marshals”: Voroshilov, Yegorov, Tukhachevsky, Blyukher, and Budyonny.²⁰² In the process of awarding ranks for thousands of others, some officers were effectively demoted because it was remembered that they happened to be the sons of priests or gentry or had once run afoul of a bigwig.²⁰³ The NKVD also got ranks. Zakovsky, conductor of the post-Kirov meat grinder in Leningrad, became commissar of state security first rank, equivalent to general in the army; Stalin had raised this from the proposal in the draft. Yagoda became general commissar of state security, the sole person in that rank.²⁰⁴ Grasping for rank, uniforms, and medals, as well as grand apartments, dachas, and cash bonuses, the new elite was becoming ever more conspicuous.²⁰⁵

On November 8, the extended family of the Alliluyevs and Svanidzes gathered for the third consecutive year in memory of Nadya. The night before Stalin had spent with the cronies until 3:00 a.m. Now, concerned about the dictator’s mood on the occasion, Molotov called to suggest watching a film together, but Stalin begged off.²⁰⁶ His elder son, Yakov, had found a new woman, Judith Meltzer (b. 1911), a ballerina from Odessa who went by Yulia. Yakov had been cohabiting with and gotten engaged to Olga Golysheva (b. 1909), a fellow student at the Moscow Aviation School from Stalingrad province, but they broke up and she went home.²⁰⁷ Meltzer had evidently come to Yakov’s attention at a Moscow restaurant, where he had an altercation with her second husband, Nikolai Bessarab, an NKVD officer who served as an aide to Redens, Stalin’s brother-in-law and now head of the Moscow province NKVD. “She is a fine woman, 30–32 years old, coquettish, speaks stupidities with aplomb, reads novels, gave herself the goal of leaving her husband and making a ‘career,’ and succeeded,” Maria Svanidze acidly wrote of Meltzer at the holiday dinner. “She already lives with Yasha, but her belongings are with her husband.”²⁰⁸

Between November 14 and 17, 1935, the regime held the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites in the Grand Kremlin Palace. Pressure for labor intensification had been high even before Stalin’s approval of capital investment increases—but an apparent solution fell into the regime’s lap. At the Central-Irmino mine in Kadievka (Donbass), Alexei Stakhanov (b. 1906), a jackhammer operator, hewed 102 tons of coal in a single overnight shift, more than fourteen times his quota of seven. At 6:00 a.m., the mine’s party cell voted to award Stakhanov bonus pay of 220 rubles (a month’s salary) and give him permanent passes to the workers’ club. Pravda carried a report of Stakhanov’s feat (September 2); the next day he had a new apartment. Stakhanov’s innovation was to ask that hewers like himself be freed from periodically setting down their jackhammers in order to prop the coal face. Additionally, a local party organizer had hauled in extra equipment and workers, whose names went unmentioned in the shower of publicity he arranged. Orjonikidze, in Kislovodsk, read the Pravda account and telephoned aides in Moscow and the coal trust in Kadievka. Pravda (September 11) launched a “movement” across industrial sectors and into the Gulag.²⁰⁹

Record chasing often left follow-on shifts bereft of supplies and labor to meet, let alone exceed, norms, provoked breakdowns and injuries, and exacerbated tensions among workers. But managers who tried to contain Stakhanovism’s deleterious consequences risked accusations of sabotaging worker initiative.²¹⁰ (The mine director at Central-Irmino would be arrested for “wrecking”; his place would be taken by the party organizer.)²¹¹ Stakhanovism became a truncheon against both managers and workers, forcing norms upward. At the Stakhanovite conference, Orjonikidze, as always, stressed the need to raise quality, not just quantity.²¹² On the closing day, as Voroshilov regaled the Stakhanovites with the paratrooper exploits at the recent army maneuvers, Stalin walked in, inciting delirium.

The dictator soon took the podium, attributing the “profoundly revolutionary” movement to initiative from below, in the country’s new conditions. “Life has become better, comrades,” he observed. “Life has become more joyous. And whenever life is joyful, work goes better.” (Earlier in the proceedings, the 3,000 attendees had spontaneously broken out into the catchy march from Jolly Fellows.) “If there had been a crisis in our country, if there had been unemployment—that scourge of the working class—if people in our country lived badly, drably, joylessly, there would have been nothing like the Stakhanovite movement. (Applause.) . . . If there is a shortage of bread, a shortage of butter and fats, a shortage of textiles, and if housing conditions are bad, freedom will not carry you very far. It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone. (Shouts of approval. Applause.)”²¹³

Stalin closed by asking for approval to reward the country’s best workers with the highest state honor, again inciting delirium. Stakhanov would be awarded the Order of Lenin, admitted to the party, promoted into mine management, and made the author of texts extolling Stalin for originating his movement.²¹⁴ He would take to drinking, lose his Order of Lenin and party card in a drunken brawl, smash the mirrored walls at the Metropole Hotel restaurant, and wed a fourteen-year-old. Stalin would lose interest in Stakhanovism, but he now paid still more attention to the cultivation of public heroes.

DIPLOMATIC DELUSIONS

The Soviet envoy to Bulgaria, Fyodor Ilin, the son of a priest and himself a storied Bolshevik, who adopted the surname Raskolnikov (from Dostoevsky’s character), was in Moscow in late November 1935. He and his wife decided to see Oleksandr Korniychuk’s play Platon Krechet, about the new Soviet intelligentsia’s quest for genuine humanism and social justice, at the affiliate of the Moscow Art Theater on Theological Lane. Unexpectedly, Raskolnikov encountered Stalin and Molotov. (The pair had first gone to the Moscow Art Theater, but the show they went to see had been switched out.) During intermission, Stalin engaged Raskolnikov in a discussion of Soviet policy in Bulgaria. Molotov took note of Stalin’s respect for Raskolnikov, and the next morning Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s wife, phoned to invite Raskolnikov and his wife to their dacha. During billiards, drinking, and dancing, the men discussed the threat of fascism, and Molotov exclaimed, “Our main enemy is England!”²¹⁵

At the theater, Stalin had asked Raskolnikov to visit him in his office, but when the envoy phoned from the foreign affairs commissariat, a disbelieving Poskryobyshev gave him the runaround. Once, when Raskolnikov dialed Stalin’s number, the dictator himself picked up—and invited him over right then. It was December 9, 1935. Raskolnikov got twenty minutes one-on-one, his first (and sole) visit to the Little Corner. “Stalin’s working office in the recently refurbished Kremlin building was furnished, point for point, the same way as his office on the top floor of the immense building of the Central Committee on Old Square,” Raskolnikov noted. The dictator came out from behind the desk, placed Raskolnikov at the large felt table, took a seat, and, after pinching some tobacco, lit his pipe. Raskolnikov relayed that his superiors had declined Sofia’s request to buy Soviet weapons. “A mistake!” Stalin interjected, adding that the Bulgarians would just buy them from the Germans. Raskolnikov received authorization to report Stalin’s view at the commissariat. The conversation widened. “‘England now stands for peace!’ Stalin stated ironically, opening his palms wide, animatedly approaching me,” Raskolnikov recalled. “‘England now will be plucked. Its colonies are spread around the whole world. Defending them is unthinkable: they would need 100 navies to do that. It’s not like us, where everything is gathered in a single space. Therefore, England, of course, stands for peace.’”²¹⁶

Behind the scenes, Litvinov persisted in his anti-Nazism, writing to Stalin to confirm a TASS report that Schacht had confided to a French banker that Germany intended to partition Soviet Ukraine with Poland. Litvinov urged that the dictator issue “a directive about opening a systematic counter-campaign against German fascism and fascists,” whose attacks on Bolshevism had reached “Homeric proportions.” But other foreign affairs personnel pushed in Stalin’s preferred direction. Twardowski, back in the German foreign ministry, phoned Yakov Surits, the Soviet envoy to Berlin, to arrange a courtesy appointment—and suddenly Sergei Bessonov, the embassy counselor for trade, called asking to be received before Surits. Twardowski arranged to see them separately on December 10. Bessonov, given the first meeting, bluntly opened: “How could German-Soviet relations be improved?” Surits posed the same question in the guise of seeking advice. Bessonov wrote to the foreign affairs commissariat that his conversations confirmed “the existence of strata and groups in Germany interested, for various reasons, in normalizing relations,” singling out big business and the old-line military, and said they were looking for concrete steps from the USSR to help them in domestic policy battles.²¹⁷

Hitler had his own idées fixes. On December 13, he received UK ambassador Sir Eric Phipps at the latter’s request to discuss stalled air force limitations talks. Germany’s decision to build a fleet and the ensuing naval arms race had helped precipitate the Great War, but British officialdom feared an air arms race even more.²¹⁸ Phipps had been telling himself that the feral Führer was more reasonable than the lunatic entourage surrounding him. But Hitler launched a tirade, condemning the Franco-Soviet pact as a “military alliance unmistakably directed against Germany” (according to the German notetaker) and observing (according to the British notetaker) “that Berlin might easily in a few hours be reduced to [a] heap of ashes by a Russian air attack.” He lashed out at British diplomatic engagement with Moscow, asserting that Whitehall was cozying up to the Soviet Union only because it wanted a counterweight to Japan. Phipps denied this, and insisted that “we are living in the same house” with the Soviet Union and could not ignore it. Hitler countered that the Soviets were “a foul and unclean inhabitant of the house with whom the other dwellers should have no political truck whatsoever.”

Hitler, ever more darkly and loudly, raged on that Communist pledges in bilateral pacts not to interfere in the affairs of other countries were belied by Moscow’s “most aggressive and insolent underground interference in the affairs of all civilized states, not excluding the British empire.” He shouted that he had resisted internal demands to request a fleet half the size of the British navy, taking only one third, yet Britain still tolerated the French alliance with Bolshevism and was contemplating one of its own. “At one moment Herr Hitler referred savagely to Lithuania, declaring that neither that country nor the Baltic states in general would present any obstacle to a Russian attack on Germany,” Phipps noted in his summary, adding that “even when pretending to fear a Russian attack, he spoke of Russia with supreme contempt, and declared his conviction that Germany was vastly superior to her both militarily and technically. At times he ground the floor with his heel.”²¹⁹

SMASHED PIPE

Moscow’s Triumphal Square was renamed for Mayakovsky.²²⁰ Lily Brik, who lived in Leningrad caring for Mayakovsky’s archive, had written to Stalin in despair that the dead poet’s books were nearly impossible to obtain, a special room at the Communist Academy promised for his literary heritage had never been provided, and a request to turn his last residence in a small wooden house into a library had never been supported. “I alone cannot overcome this bureaucratic indifference and resistance—and after six years of work I am turning to you, since I see no other means to realize the enormous revolutionary bequest of Mayakovsky,” she wrote. Stalin instructed Yezhov that “Mayakovsky was and remains the best, most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. The indifference to his memory or his works is a crime. Brik’s complaints are correct.”²²¹ Suddenly, Pravda (December 5, 1935) published a laudatory essay on the poet, citing Stalin calling him “talented” (an intentional toning down, which would be corrected).²²² Pasternak wrote privately to the dictator expressing gratitude for the recognition of his fellow poet (“warmly loving you and loyal to you”).²²³

Japan was busy confirming Stalin’s prescience about its vaulting ambitions.²²⁴ In Manchukuo, it had gone on to create a vast autonomous province for ethnic Mongols and fostered preservation of traditional lifestyles, the opposite of Soviet social engineering in its Mongolian satellite.²²⁵ Chiang Kai-shek had conceded territory to the Japanese occupiers, planning to take them on decisively after he had annihilated the Communists, but the Communist escape to the interior had put off that reckoning. Surviving Communists had united in a new sanctuary in impoverished Shaanxi province, where Mao, carried on a palanquin during the Long March, emerged as the paramount leader.²²⁶ Chiang approached the Soviet envoy Dimitri Bogomolov asking for weapons, as if the Nationalists were finally going to launch a war to evict the Japanese. “From all my conversations, I am left with the impression that they would like to precipitate a possible conflict between ourselves and Japan,” Bogomolov informed Moscow (December 9, 1935).Stalin agreed to ship the arms (via Xinjiang), worried that Chiang might otherwise cut a side deal with Japan. On December 9, the Comintern’s “united front” policy was stretched to include cooperation with Chiang—unbeknownst to Mao in the remote interior, who would erupt when apprised.²²⁷

A Soviet official “close to the Kremlin” told U.S. embassy personnel that any moves by Japan against Mongolia would be regarded as a threat to Soviet territorial integrity, but a week later Japanese-Manchukuo forces burned down a Mongolian frontier post, killing or kidnapping several Mongolian border guards, and this drew only a protest.²²⁸ In the meantime, on December 12, a Mongolian delegation arrived in Moscow, again led by Prime Minister Genden, who was dragging his feet over Stalin’s orders to extirpate lama influence and enlarge the penurious country’s military budget.²²⁹ Genden was quick-tempered, and known to indulge in wine, women, and indiscreet song. Before his departure from Ulan Bator, he had supposedly boasted, “I’ll deal with that Georgian with the knife-tipped nose. . . . I’ll enjoy a quarrel with him.”²³⁰

The Mongols in Moscow had to cool their heels. On Stalin’s official fifty-sixth birthday (December 21, 1935) at the Near Dacha, the Alliluyevs and Svanidzes discovered that they were now outnumbered by politburo officials. “Zhdanov played the accordion beautifully, but it broke down on him a few times,” Maria Svanidze recorded in her diary. “They sang graceful Abkhaz and Ukrainian songs, old student songs, and some plain silly ones. Postyshev was in high spirits. He was jokingly dancing the Russian national dance with Molotov, spoke to him in Kazakh, and this pair entertained I[osif] and all the guests. After supper, everyone went through to the study (the large room). I[osif] wound up the gramophone and people danced the Russian dance, Anastas Ivanovich [Mikoyan] danced the lezginka, wildly, and sometimes lost the rhythm. As usual, we danced the foxtrot. . . . We asked I[osif] to join in, but he said that since the death of Nadya he no longer danced.”²³¹

The regime held a Central Committee plenum from December 21 to 25, and on the final day Yezhov reported on the ongoing party card verification campaign: of the 2.34 million members and candidate members, 1.915 million had gone through the process, and of those, 175,166 had been expelled. Two thirds of the expulsions were for “passivity,” that is, failing to attend meetings, pay dues, or study. Some 20 percent were dropped as White Guards or kulaks, 8.5 percent as swindlers and scoundrels, and some 1 percent as foreign spies. Around 3 percent, 5,500 party members, were expelled as “Trotskyites and Zinovievites.”²³² About 15,000 of those expelled would also be arrested. The process, still not complete, was now to be followed by a physical exchange of party cards, old for new. Yezhov congratulated himself.²³³ On the plenum’s eve, resistance to Stakhanovism had been designated as terrorism.²³⁴ At a heavy industry conference the day after the plenum, Orjonikidze conspicuously mentioned nothing of sabotage.²³⁵

Stalin had decided to allow, for the first time, the genuine number for projected Soviet military spending for the coming year to be released—a staggering, meant-to-impress 14.8 billion rubles, 16 percent of the state budget.²³⁶

Late on December 30, he and his inner circle received the delegation from Mongolia in Molotov’s office, and took an aggressive posture. Molotov: “You, Genden, when drunk, all the time speak anti-Soviet provocations. We know that before your departure to come here, you said that we would recommend a long stay in the Kremlin hospital or holiday in Crimea, ‘in connection with your health.’” Stalin reprimanded Genden for spending only 25 percent of the state budget on the military, asserting that the USSR would spend 70–80 percent when necessary, and demanding that Mongolia spend 50–60 percent. “If you, Genden, are not concerned with the defense of your country, and you think that Mongolia suffers from its ties to the USSR, which you think cheats and takes advantage of Mongolia, and you want to get friendly with Japan, then go ahead!” Stalin declared disingenuously. “We do not compel you to have relations with us if you do not want to.” He added: “You do nothing about the lamas. . . . They can undermine a good army and the rear.”²³⁷

Molotov declared a break and invited them to “tea” (often code for spirits). Demid, the defense minister, understood that his country could not manage against possible Japanese aggression without Soviet assistance, while Genden preferred to rely on the country’s own army, with more Soviet weapons, even as he feared excessive debt to, and therefore dependence on, Moscow.²³⁸ Whether at this Kremlin session or a New Year’s reception at the Mongolian embassy, Genden, in a drunken state, did something no one else ever had or would—he snatched Stalin’s pipe and smashed it.²³⁹

“INTERESTING”

Stalin welcomed the year 1936 with a larger crowd than usual at the Near Dacha: the inner circle and nearly all the people’s commissars as well as his relatives.²⁴⁰ “The country has never lived so full-blooded a life as at present,” Pravda announced in an editorial (January 1, 1936). “Vivacity, confidence, and optimism are universally dominant. The people are, as it were, taking to wing. The country is in the process of becoming not only the richest but also the most cultured in the entire world. The advance of the working class to the level of professional engineers and technicians is on the agenda.” The editorial, “The Stakhanovite Year,” was accompanied by an oversized portrait of Stalin smiling and smoking a pipe.

Molotov boasted to the central executive committee, as reported by the Soviet press, that “representatives of the German government had raised the question of a new and larger credit facility covering a ten-year period.”²⁴¹ In Berlin, Kandelaki presented a list of desiderata that included submarines, IG Farben chemical patents, and Zeiss optical technology.²⁴² The British embassy in Berlin warned the foreign office about a grand deal in the offing.²⁴³ Schacht, who had originally deflected Kandelaki’s attempts to shift their conversations to political matters, now remarked to him, “If a meeting between Stalin and Hitler could take place, it would change many things.” Stalin wrote on his copy of the secret report: “Interesting.”²⁴⁴

“Trotskyites” had also seized attention. Valentin Olberg, a provincial teacher who happened to have just returned from Germany, was arrested by the NKVD (January 5, 1936), which extracted “testimony” from him that he had come back with a special task assigned to him by none other than Trotsky: a “terrorist act” against Stalin. Olberg named other “terrorists” he had “recruited”; arrests followed.²⁴⁵ By spring the NKVD would arrest 508 “Trotskyites,” one of whom was found in possession of Trotsky’s personal archive for 1927. Stalin ordered the NKVD to furnish Yezhov with copies of all documents pertaining to Trotskyites and freed him from overseeing party organs, a task passed to Yezhov’s deputy, Georgy Malenkov (b. 1902). Yezhov now oversaw the NKVD full time.²⁴⁶

In Ulan Bator on January 20, Choibalsan, minister of livestock and agriculture, made an impassioned speech in favor of accepting Soviet “proposals.” Many of the top Mongolian party officials present were reluctant to submit to Stalin’s diktat; some perhaps even favored negotiations with Japan, but they knew someone would immediately inform Moscow. They approved a formal invitation to the USSR for two army brigades, and resolved to increase their own army to 17,000 and their national guard to 2,500.²⁴⁷

Also on January 20, King George V died near midnight, at age eighty-three, after being administered a lethal dose of morphine and cocaine to put him out of his suffering and, according to his physician, to allow his death to feature in the morning rather than the afternoon papers.²⁴⁸ Stalin named Tukhachevsky, alongside Litvinov, to the Soviet delegation for the funeral, in Windsor Castle on January 28. Tukhachevsky traveled by train via Berlin, where he stopped off for a few hours, setting off a speculative frenzy about meetings with the German general staff. The Soviet press was silent about the stopover; Germany denied the rumors.²⁴⁹ Stalin does seem to have tried to contrive a meeting.²⁵⁰

Tukhachevsky had visited Germany nine times, but despite his respect for German military achievements, he distrusted that country.²⁵¹ In Britain, where he spent not hours but thirteen days, he met French general Maurice Gamelin, also in London for the funeral, who hosted him at an embassy reception, where the Soviet commander met officers who had been interned with him in the German POW camp. Gamelin invited him to stop in Paris, where Tukhachevsky was afforded a lavish program of meetings and military inspections. In long hours with Gamelin, Tukhachevsky made plain his concern over the threat of German aggression.²⁵² Maisky and Litvinov were urging Eden, newly named foreign secretary, to use the League of Nations and other instruments to halt the German danger before it came to war. Eden wrote in an internal memo that he told them he was “unable to imagine what else could be done,” and to Litvinov’s suggestion for a Soviet-British-French bloc against Germany, he responded, “I cannot imagine how that could be done.”²⁵³

“FRIENDSHIP OF PEOPLES”

On January 27, 1936, Stalin and his entourage received a sixty-seven-person delegation of milkmaids, artists, and functionaries from Buryat-Mongolia in the Russian republic. A report sent by the region’s leaders in advance noted that the autonomous republic had 82 percent collectivization and stood first in the Union among national republics in livestock per capita, with 3.36 cows, 3.91 sheep, 0.9 goat, and 0.23 pig held collectively per household. (The numbers for Kazakhstan were 0.84, 1.47, 6.9, and 0.09.)²⁵⁴ Pravda’s coverage of the Kremlin reception included a photograph of Stalin in Buryat robes, with a dagger in his sash. These receptions for national groups in traditional dress constituted a recent invention.²⁵⁵ Pravda had hit upon the slogan, enunciated at one such reception, of the “Friendship of Peoples.”²⁵⁶

In the Buryat-Mongolia coverage, there was also a photo of Stalin with Engelsina “Gelya” Markizova, a seven-year-old Buryat girl wearing a brand-new sailor’s outfit and beaming in his arms.²⁵⁷ Named for Engels (her brother was named Vladlen, after Vladimir Lenin), she was the daughter of a Buryat-Mongolia official and lived on Stalin Street in Ulan Ude. She had presented him with two bouquets that her mother, a student at the Moscow Institute of Medicine, had thought to purchase (one was supposed to be for Voroshilov). Stalin had picked her up, and she had wrapped her arms around his shoulders, creating an indelible image.²⁵⁸ Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, had recently appeared with him in a photograph in Pravda (he was shown looking down, cupping her head with his good arm, her bright face smiling).²⁵⁹ Stalin also permitted a photograph of Vasily and Svetlana together in Pioneer Pravda (which he instructed Svetlana to “treasure”).²⁶⁰ Thereafter, his two younger children faded from public view. But the images with children persisted, creating a sense of a paternal leader. The depictions of traditional dances and rural females—which had once conveyed the backwardness to be overcome—now signified supposed harmony in diversity, embodied by a happy father figure.²⁶¹

Russians, too, constituted a nation, but their folklore was presented as imperial culture.²⁶² Even as workers remained the vanguard class, Russians became the vanguard nation.²⁶³ “All the peoples, participants in the great socialist construction, can take pride in the results of their work,” Pravda editorialized (February 1, 1936). “But first among equals are the Russian people, the Russian workers, the Russian toilers, whose role throughout the whole Great Proletarian Socialist Revolution has been exceptionally large, from the first victories to the present day’s brilliant period of development.” Celebration of the expansion of the state from Muscovy allowed restoration of even Ivan the Terrible to a pedestal. Stalin’s leftist critics decried what they perceived as his abandonment of pure Marxism, a perception of retreat that Stalin’s rightist critics shared but welcomed.²⁶⁴ In fact, Stalin’s embrace of the imperial Russian inheritance was selective, showing little concern for churches, large numbers of which had been destroyed. (Kaganovich had dynamited Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the world’s largest Orthodox church, built in the nineteenth century to commemorate the victory over Napoleon.)²⁶⁵ The absence of private property, the leading role of the party, and the red flag with hammer and sickle amply reinforced the fact that this was a Communist regime. But Stalin’s willingness—and ability—to blend imperial Russian étatisme with Marxist-Leninist class approaches strengthened the socialist state.²⁶⁶

MUDDLE

Stalin revealed his theory of cultural oversight in a letter to Shcherbakov’s deputy, Vladimir Kirpichnikov, known as Stavsky. “Take a look at comrade Sobolev,” the dictator instructed. “He is, unquestionably, a major talent (judging by his book Capital Repairs). He is, as you see from his letter, capricious and uneven. . . . But these traits, in my view, could be found in any giant literary talent (perhaps with a few exceptions). It is not necessary to oblige him to write a second Capital Repairs. Such an obligation would lead to nothing. It is not necessary to oblige him to write about collective farms or Magnitostroi. It is impossible to write about such matters under obligation. Let him write what and when he wants. In a word, let him. And take care of him.”²⁶⁷ But apparatchiks capable of nurturing talent as well as loyalty were rare. Stories of poorly educated censors forbidding the music of someone named Schubert over the radio because he might be a “Trotskyite” were the least of it.²⁶⁸ The censor (glavlit) had obtained power over plays, films, ballets, broadcasts, and even circus acts, as well as literature, but it was often overwhelmed and had the NKVD and party commissions looking over its shoulder. Taking chances (saying yes) carried no upside; prohibition was the safest recourse, leading to round after round of supplication, paperwork, and foot dragging, unless someone with sufficient authority and confidence put an end to the runaround and said yes.²⁶⁹

Shcherbakov admitted to Stalin that, after fifteen months as secretary of the writers’ union, he was being criticized for not being sufficiently on top of things.²⁷⁰ But Stalin was besieged, and trying to preserve himself to oversee only the most outstanding cultural figures. Finally, on his initiative, the politburo approved the creation of an all-Union Committee for Artistic Affairs, placed not in the party apparatus but in the Council of People’s Commissars, with Platon Lebedev, known as Kerzhentsev (b. 1881), as chairman. The son of a physician–cum–tsarist Duma deputy, he had been educated at gymnasium and then Moscow University, was a prolific writer on topics ranging from the new science of time management to the Paris Commune, and an experienced functionary, whose most recent appointment had been as head of Soviet radio.²⁷¹

Kerzhentsev arrived just when a storm broke in music. During the entire previous year, only three long-playing records with Soviet music had been issued, and only one was symphonic: the score of Dmitry Shostakovich (b. 1906) for Hamlet.As for opera, Shcherbakov had written to Stalin, Andreyev, and Zhdanov (January 11, 1936) that Leningrad’s Maly Opera Theater was, “in essence, the sole theater that vigorously and systematically is working out the extremely important problem of the Soviet theater—namely, the creation of a contemporary musical spectacle.” He cited Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, by Shostakovich; Quiet Flows the Don, by Ivan Dzerzhinsky (b. 1909); and two works by Valery Zhelobinsky (b. 1913). Shcherbakov proposed that the Leningrad theater be renamed the State New Academy Opera Theater, and that its personnel receive state awards and pay raises to the level of the Kirov Ballet. Stalin redirected Shcherbakov’s letter to Kerzhentsev.²⁷² The Leningrad theater was not renamed, but its ambitious conductor, Samuil Samosud, was anointed a “people’s artist” of the RSFSR and got approval to showcase his theater at a festival in Moscow. On opening night, much of Moscow’s creative intelligentsia showed for Quiet Flows the Don, based on the novel by Sholokhov. The opera—a patriotic glorification of the Don Cossacks’ immutable spirit and readiness to defend the motherland—proved a crowd-pleaser, with its lyrical and accessible music. After the final act, Stalin edged forward in the imperial box, making himself visible, and applauded demonstratively.

Stalin summoned Samosud to his box, and the discussion ended up lasting two hours; TASS distributed an account, heralding the advent of a Soviet opera repertoire. On January 17, 1936, Stalin ordered the director of the Bolshoi to stage its own production of Quiet Flows the Don, and the director decided to stage all the Samosud works, engaging Fyodor Lopukhov as principal dancer (he had danced the operas in Leningrad). The Bolshoi opened with Lady Macbeth, which was easier to mount than the other two. On January 26, Stalin and entourage attended. Unlike Quiet Flows the Don, Shostakovich’s music was subversive of operatic convention, with discord and hyper‐naturalistic portrayals of rape and murder. Stalin exited before the final curtain. This afforded Kerzhentsev a chance to establish his authority as the head of the new committee, at the expense of the existing culture power brokers, above all Shcherbakov. An unsigned denunciation, “A Muddle Instead of Music,” appeared in Pravda (January 28). (Kerzhentsev was the likely author, not Stalin, as rumored.)²⁷³ Only a short while before, Pravda had been over the top in praising the same opera. Even though Samosud had originated the production of the Shostakovich opera, the dictator had seen the Bolshoi version. He named him artistic director of the Bolshoi effective immediately.²⁷⁴

Shumyatsky, who remained head of Soviet cinema (and became Kerzhentsev’s second deputy), learned that Stalin viewed the Pravda article as “programmatic,” a demand “not for rebuses and riddles,” but music accessible to the masses, citing the “realistic music” of great Soviet films, especially Jolly Fellows, in which “all the songs are good, simple, melodic.”²⁷⁵ The “signal” got across. (“Don’t you read the papers?” a voice from the audience shouted at a speaker during a meeting of the Moscow Artists’ Union, referring to the denunciation of Shostakovich.)²⁷⁶ Shostakovich inveigled an audience with Kerzhentsev (February 7), and accepted “the majority” of the criticisms. Kerzhentsev advised the composer to travel around villages and acquaint himself with the folk music of Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Georgia, as Rimsky-Korsakov had once done. Shostakovich promised to do so, while noting that composers would appreciate a meeting with Stalin.²⁷⁷ The press launched a vicious campaign against “formalists,” which targeted not only Shostakovich but also Eisenstein and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, leaders of the 1920s avant-garde. Kerzhentsev soon took the initiative to purge avant-garde works in museums.²⁷⁸

Bulgakov had two plays about to run: Molière (originally titled The Cabal of Hypocrites), at the Moscow Art Theater, which was to premiere on February 15, 1936, and Ivan Vasilevich, which was in final revisions for the Theater of Satire. Molière opened to a packed hall and wild applause.²⁷⁹ Behind the scenes, Kerzhentsev pointed out to Stalin and Molotov that Bulgakov had written Molière back when most of his works were banned and that, in the travails of a writer under the Sun King (Louis XIV), he intended to evoke what it was like when a playwright’s ideas “went against the political system and plays were prohibited.” He conceded the brilliance of the play, which “skillfully, in the lush netherbloom, carries poisonous drops,” and recommended killing it with damning reviews.²⁸⁰ Pravda ran just such a damning article (“external brilliance and false content”).²⁸¹ Molière closed after seven successful performances. Ivan Vasilevich—a comedy mocking Ivan the Terrible—never opened, a blow to the writer but also, given Stalin’s views, a blessing.²⁸² On February 19, after a month in his new post, Kerzhentsev wrote to Stalin and Molotov proposing a competition for a play and screenplay on 1917, promising to “show the role of Lenin and Stalin in the preparation and implementation of the October Revolution.” Stalin took a pencil and crossed out his own name.²⁸³

AMERICAN MIRROR

Being a great power meant looking into the American mirror. Shumyatsky had launched the idea of a Soviet Hollywood. A severe lack of factory capacity meant that Soviet film prints were in short supply—usually fewer than forty copies per film for the entire country—and he wanted a film industry capable of producing its own quality film stock, cameras, projectors, sound-recording machines, and lighting, all of which were expensive to import.²⁸⁴ He had headed an eight-person commission to Paris, London, Rochester (Eastman Kodak), and Los Angeles, whence he published stories about his film viewings and meetings, returning determined to found a Soviet Cinema City in the mild, sunlit climate on the Black Sea, permitting year-round work.²⁸⁵ At a Kremlin screening, he had gotten Stalin to approve the Hollywood idea. “Opponents cannot see farther than their own noses,” the dictator had intoned. “We need not only good pictures but also more of them, in quantity and in distribution. It becomes obnoxious when the same films remain in all the theaters for months on end.”²⁸⁶ At a follow-up screening, when Stalin saw Chapayev for the thirty-eighth time, the dictator said he had heard that Mussolini would build his Cinecittà outside Rome in just two years. But despite Stalin’s verbal support, the expensive Hollywood on the Black Sea never materialized.²⁸⁷

Opposition came not just from industrial and budget officials. Yechi’el-Leyb Faynzilberg, known as Ilya Ilf, and Yevgeny Katayev, known as Petrov, wrote a letter to Stalin opposing the Soviet Hollywood idea (February 26, 1936).²⁸⁸ Already household names for their satirical novels The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf, featuring the con man Ostap Bender, Ilf and Petrov had just returned from several months in the United States and would write One-Story America, which was about not only the “girls who are half naked, three-quarters naked, and nine-tenths naked [who] dance, or act,” but the real America—that of working people, a country of democracy if not of socialism. Their book related details of traveling in a Ford through twenty-five states with set pieces about skyscrapers, well-paved roads, vending machines, Mark Twain’s hometown, hunters, cowboys, boxers, farmers, Negroes, Indians—an unimaginable world for a Soviet audience.²⁸⁹

America surfaced in Yagoda’s reports, too. Gulag camps and colonies together held around 1.2 million forced laborers, while exiled “kulaks” in “special settlements” numbered around 900,000.²⁹⁰ Camps were releasing invalids, which burnished mortality statistics, and Yagoda pressed for financial accountability and better sanitation.²⁹¹ Gold output in the Kolyma camps would jump to 36.77 tons in 1936 (from 15.94 the year before), which, an internal report stressed, beat California.²⁹² Mass arrests by the NKVD in 1936 would decline to 131,168, as compared with 505,256 in 1933 (and with 205,173 in 1934 and 193,093 in 1935). In March 1936 Yagoda bragged at the Council of People’s Commissars that, because of increased professionalism, reorganization, and new methods, criminality had been sharply reduced, and the problem of mass social unrest (such as during collectivization) resolved. He conceded that organized hooliganism, robbery, and theft of socialist property persisted, and that ordinary police did not feel safe patrolling working-class districts in mushrooming industrial cities. He also admitted that crime rates were not diminishing as noticeably in rural settlements, where police were almost absent. Still, in the previous year, he gloated, there had been fewer reported murders across the Soviet Union than in the city of Chicago.²⁹³

HITLER, AGAIN

Hitler continued his manipulative mastery. On February 21, 1936, he granted an interview to Bertrand de Jouvenel for Paris-Midi, stressing his policy of peace, the unifying threat of Bolshevism, and the folly of Franco-German enmity. “Let us be friends,” the Führer pleaded, calling his Mein Kampf outdated and promising “correction of certain pages.”²⁹⁴ (Unlike Stalin, with his useful idiots, Hitler did not get to edit the transcripts.) A few days later, the Führer sought out Arnold Toynbee, a philosopher of history who was in Berlin to address the Nazi Law Society. “I want England’s friendship, and if you English will make friends with us, you may name your conditions—including, if you like, conditions about Eastern Europe,” he told the professor, who predicted to the foreign office that “any response from the British side . . . would produce an enormous counter-response from Hitler.”²⁹⁵ Göring, hunting in Poland again (February 19–24), proclaimed at a luncheon hosted by Beck, “in the name of the Führer and chancellor, that any rumors that Germany intended to enter into closer relations with the Soviet Union were unfounded.”²⁹⁶

In Mongolia on February 26, Choibalsan was named head of a new interior ministry (the NKVD equivalent) and, along with Demid, promoted to marshal. (Soviet personnel accounted for one quarter of Mongolian interior ministry personnel.) That same day, in Tokyo, young officers of the Imperial Japanese Army staged a putsch, intending to submit demands to the emperor for the dismissal of their rivals and the appointment of a new prime minister and military-dominated cabinet. They occupied central Tokyo and assassinated two former prime ministers and other high officials, but failed to capture the sitting prime minister or the Imperial Palace. The emperor opposed the action; on February 29 the rebels surrendered.²⁹⁷

On March 1, 1936, Stalin granted an interview to Roy Howard, president of Scripps-Howard News, which, unlike his earlier exchanges with foreigners, he allowed to be published in mass-circulation newspapers. Stalin observed that the situation in Japan after the recent putsch remained unclear, but that “for the time being, the Far Eastern hotbed of danger shows the greatest activity,” and issued an unequivocal public warning: “If Japan should venture to attack the Mongolian People’s Republic and encroach upon its independence, we will have to help.” Howard suggested that the Italian fascists and the German Nazis characterized their systems as state-centric, and the Soviets had built “state socialism.” Stalin rejected the term (“inexact”) and any comparison: “Primarily, this is because the private ownership of the factories and works—of the land, the banks, transport, and so on—has remained intact, and therefore capitalism remains in full force in Germany and in Italy.” Howard pressed Stalin about world revolution. Stalin: “We never had such plans and intentions.” Howard countered with examples. Stalin: “This is all the result of a misunderstanding.” Howard: “A tragic misunderstanding?” Stalin: “No, a comic, or, perhaps, a tragicomic one.”²⁹⁸

Stalin gestured toward Rome, telling Howard that fascist Italy’s much-condemned invasion of Abyssinia was a mere “episode,” but he noted that, even as Hitler spoke about peace, the Führer could not “avoid issuing threats”—Stalin’s first unequivocal public rebuke of Nazism. He added that Germany might join with Poland or the Baltic states against the USSR, just as it had in the Great War against Russia.²⁹⁹

Hitler excelled at the bold gesture. On March 7, 1936, which happened to be two days after Pravda and Izvestiya published Stalin’s interview, the Führer sent troops into a zone on the left bank of the Rhine River that bordered France and had been demilitarized for an indefinite period by the Versailles Treaty. His wooing of Britain had partially succeeded, getting him the Anglo-German naval pact, which fell short of the total acquiescence he sought but put some distance between Britain and France. His scheming to drive a wedge between Italy and France had failed—until Mussolini moved to realize long-standing designs by invading Abyssinia, opening a rift between Rome and the Western powers. True, Hitler’s maneuvering with Poland had helped provoke the Franco-Soviet pact, but that agreement seemed only to have spurred more Soviet approaches to him. In the Rhineland occupation, Hitler had overcome his foreign ministry’s opposition and his own usual last-minute attack of nerves.³⁰⁰ “Fortune favors the brave!” Goebbels had written in his diary the day Hitler informed him of the decision for the Rhineland action. “He who dares nothing wins nothing.”³⁰¹

British officials were exasperated: they had been about to offer Germany remilitarization, but, as Eden told the cabinet (March 9), “Hitler has deprived us of the possibility of making to him a concession which might otherwise have been a useful bargaining counter in our hands in the general negotiations with Germany which we had it in contemplation to initiate.”³⁰² London appealed pro forma to the League of Nations (March 12) and strenuously worked to restrain any French response.³⁰³ French ruling circles lacked the confidence to stand up to Germany alone.³⁰⁴ Only a small contingent of the fledgling Wehrmacht had entered the demilitarized zone, ostensibly so as not to give the impression of a Western invasion. One or two French divisions would have sufficed to drive them out.³⁰⁵ Instead, German industry could now be organized for war without concern for the security of the Rhine and the Ruhr. France was humiliated. “In these three years,” Hitler exulted at a hastily summoned session of the neutered Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House, “Germany has regained its honor, found belief again, overcome its greatest economic distress, and finally ushered in a new cultural ascent.” He cited the recently ratified Franco-Soviet alliance as justification for his remilitarization. “The revolution may take place in France tomorrow,” he added. “In that case, Paris would be nothing more than a branch office of the Communist International.”³⁰⁶

France managed to get Britain to sign a diplomatic note specifying that in the event of a German attack on France, the two Western powers would enter into general staff talks, which fell short of automatic military assistance but was a step.³⁰⁷ Stalin locked down his Mongolian vassals in a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, signed in Ulan Bator (March 12), which formalized the already imposed military alliance for a ten-year period.³⁰⁸ Some observers also expected Hitler’s action to deepen Franco-Soviet ties, but French officials complained that Stalin was more interested in provoking war between France and Germany than in cooperating with France to fight.³⁰⁹

Stalin just did not view the French as offering anything remotely comparable to Germany economically. (Thanks to a well-placed spy, Karl Behrens, the Soviets were receiving technical blueprints from AEG, Germany’s preeminent heavy electrical engineering firm.) Also, the Rhineland’s remilitarization indicated that the USSR might not be the principal target of German aggrandizement.^{310, 311} Molotov gave an extended interview in Moscow to the editor of the influential French newspaper Le Temps (March 19, 1936) stating that Germany might start a war—in the west. He did reaffirm the Franco-Soviet pact and admit that “a certain part of the Soviet people” felt implacable hostility toward Germany’s current rulers, but he volunteered, unartfully, that the “chief tendency, determining the policy of Soviet power, thinks an improvement in Soviet-German relations possible . . . yes, even Hitler’s Germany.”³¹²

CHARISMATIC POWER

A Georgian delegation was received in the Kremlin, also on March 19, and Molotov greeted them in Georgian: “Amkhanagebo! (Stormy applause, turning into an ovation.)” When he noted that they had given the country Stalin, there was “an eruption of applause” that would not cease.³¹³ In the Grand Kremlin Palace between April 11 and 21, the Communist Youth League 10th Congress took place. “Stalin had yet to make an appearance,” the writer Konstantin Paustovsky wrote of the final day. “We want comrade Stalin, Stalin, Stalin,” the delegates shouted, stamping their feet. “And then it happened! Stalin emerged suddenly and silently out of the wall behind the Presidium table. . . . Everyone jumped. There was frenzied applause. . . . Unhurriedly, Stalin came up to the table, stopped, and, with hands linked on his stomach, gazed at the hall. . . . The first thing that struck me was that he did not resemble the thousands of portraits and official photographs, which set out to flatter him. The man who stood before me was stumpy and stocky, with a heavy face, reddish hair, low forehead, and a thick mustache. . . . The hall rocked with all the shouting. People applauded, holding their hands high over their heads. At any moment, one felt, the ceiling would come crashing down. Stalin raised a hand. Immediately there was a deathly hush. In that hush, Stalin shouted abruptly and in a rather hoarse voice, with a strong Georgian accent, ‘Long Live Soviet youth!’”³¹⁴

The children’s writer Chukovsky was close to the front (sixth or seventh row). “What took place in the hall! HE stood, a bit fatigued, engrossed in thought, titanic,” Chukovsky noted in his diary. “One sensed the immense habituation to power, the force, and at the same time something female, soft. I looked around: everyone had loving faces, kind, inspirational, and smiling faces. Just to see—simply see—was happiness for us all.” Chukovsky, too, had sensed the power. “Never,” he concluded, “did I think I was capable of such feelings.”³¹⁵

On May 1, 1936, the regime staged the massive military display on Red Square, and the next day the emotive Voroshilov once again served as a deft master of ceremonies. “Comrades, by the ancient Soviet custom, it is proposed that we fill our glasses,” he told a boisterous hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace, proceeding with toast after toast (for Stalin, Molotov, Kalinin, Orjonikidze, Kaganovich). Before each pronouncement, Voroshilov employed Soviet jargon, tongue in cheek: “Comrades, I do not doubt your vigilance in general, but in this case a check is needed. How’s the situation with glasses?” (Refills, quickly.) And on it went, until Stalin rose to toast Voroshilov, and Molotov rose to toast “the Great Stalin,” whereupon the entire room of cadets and officers stood as one.³¹⁶

The Red Army, across 1935 and 1936, acquired a staggering 7,800 tanks, 4,200 airplanes, 9,600 artillery systems, and 6.7 million rounds of ammunition, and soon reached 1.423 million men, on a par with the tsarist army in peacetime. The USSR’s spring 1936 war games again had Nazi Germany as the main enemy, but the exercises revealed that pre-positioning of massive forces on the frontier would not be enough: without a prior Soviet occupation of the independent Baltic states to seize the strategic initiative from Germany, victory could be elusive.³¹⁷ But Stalin would not countenance such aggressive preemptive moves. It was, in any case, doubtful whether the Red Army could even launch a preemptive war, even as its massive size and disposition made it seem poised to do so.³¹⁸ Such combat would have put to a severe test the Soviet rail network, known both at home and abroad to be a weak point.³¹⁹ Also, the military expansion, overly rapid and incoherent, had led to a critical dearth of well-trained junior officers.³²⁰ Stalin, who received Tukhachevsky nine times in the Little Corner in 1936, including on April 3 and May 28, with a slew of military brass and intelligence officials, had moved him from running armaments to a reorganized directorate for military training.³²¹

BLINDERS

In Berlin on May 4, the Soviet embassy hosted a banquet to celebrate a recently signed modest new bilateral trade protocol, without new credits—the existing 200-million-mark loan remained to be drawn down—but with procedures to fix short-term clearing of accounts (inhibited by currency regulations).³²² Bessonov told a German foreign ministry official of Soviet readiness to do what was necessary to create the “preconditions of (Soviet-German) détente.”³²³ Hitler had appointed Herbert Göring head of a new office for raw material and foreign exchange, crucial for the rearmament economy.³²⁴ The indefatigable Kandelaki managed to obtain an audience with him (May 13) through a cousin of the Luftwaffe head, during which an amiable Göring promised to make inquiries about Kandelaki’s request for assistance in obtaining the military technology he sought, and professed delight at the recent trade protocol. Göring also pledged that “all his efforts were directed toward making closer contacts with Russia again, politically, too, and he thought the best way would be through intensifying and expanding mutual trade relations.” He added, “If the Russian gentlemen encountered difficulties in Germany or were faced with questions with which they were making no headway, he most cordially invited them to turn to him at any time. He was always ready to receive them and assist them by word and deed.”³²⁵ Schacht, the next day, tried to downplay Göring’s remarks, but Kandelaki departed immediately to report in Moscow.³²⁶ A few days later, Göring would agree with a group of German industrialists that business with the Soviet Union was important and promised at some point to bring the issue up with Hitler, “whose attitude to it, admittedly, was not very sympathetic.”³²⁷

Göring wanted no more from the Soviets than raw materials in a strictly nonpolitical trade relationship, and he played a complex game. The day after meeting Kandelaki, he received Polish foreign minister Beck and informed him that the Soviet representative had been insisting on a meeting and, finally, had been granted one, during which Kandelaki had made “a concrete proposal for the purchase of several warships and armaments in Germany. The Soviet delegation gave us to understand that Stalin, in contrast to Litvinov, is positively inclined to Germany.” Göring claimed he had presented the Soviet enticements to “the chancellor,” who “energetically spoke against such suggestions.” That was what the Poles wanted to hear. Still, Beck had to understand that Soviet-German rapprochement was at least under discussion. Thus did Göring put pressure on Warsaw to improve Polish-German relations—on Berlin’s terms—while continuing to sabotage any possible Polish-Soviet rapprochement by dangling the possibility of German-Polish joint military action, should the Red Army attack.³²⁸

Inside the Soviet regime, the British remained the fixation. “Fascism’s strength is not in Berlin, fascism’s strength is not in Rome,” Kalinin, head of the Soviet state, said in May 1936, echoing comments by Molotov. “Fascism’s strength is in London, and not even in London per se but in five London banks.”³²⁹ Mussolini—infuriated by League of Nations sanctions over his Abyssinian invasion—had threatened to quit that body, but it hardly mattered. He publicly drew closer to Nazi Germany.³³⁰ On the battlefield, Italy had snatched victory from what briefly looked like possible defeat, and in early May 1936, Emperor Haile Selassie, although refusing to vacate the throne, fled into exile. Italy would merge Abyssinia with Eritrea and Somaliland, forming Italian East Africa; King Victor Emmanuel III would be proclaimed emperor. Mussolini was denounced as the worst of the dictators, a “mad dog act,” or, in the words of Britain’s Anthony Eden, a “gangster”—language that was not heard publicly from Whitehall about Hitler.³³¹ A smiling Hitler told British ambassador Phipps, in regard to Mussolini’s aggression in Abyssinia (May 14), “With dictators, nothing succeeds like success.”³³² Four days later, Germany’s foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, confidently told William Bullitt, now the U.S. ambassador in Berlin, that Germany would annex Austria at some point, and no one would stop it.³³³

CULTURAL TRIUMPHS, TROTSKYITES

Sergei Prokofyev’s Little Peter and the Wolf, commissioned by the Central Children’s Theater run by Natalya Sats, had premiered at the Moscow Philharmonic on May 2, 1936, before moving to the children’s venue.³³⁴ Although Soviet functionaries had failed to cajole the self-exiles Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninov to return, they had succeeded in retrieving Prokofyev, who lived among the constellation of émigré luminaries in Paris with his Spanish wife, Lina Codina, and their Paris-born children. He would receive a four-room apartment in an elite neo-constructivist building (Zemlyanoy Val, 14) and immediately set to work on a plethora of commissions. He had never gravitated to vaudeville or the Hollywood musical, and he took Shostakovich’s public humiliation as promising that there would be ample space for his own diatonic melodies, determined, as he was, to become a central player in what was a serious musical culture. Prokofyev underestimated the bureaucratic deadweight (approval committees made up of third- and fourth-rate musical talent would rewrite his works), but in the meantime the orchestral storytelling of his Little Peter and the Wolf enchanted young audiences.³³⁵

Alexandrov, Eisenstein’s former assistant, had done it again: his film Circus premiered on May 23, 1936. Alexandrov, who had once been a circus performer himself, based the film on the Ilf and Petrov play Under the Big Top, from the Moscow Music Hall. Circus lacked the disorganized zaniness of Jolly Fellows: the cameraman had been to Hollywood with Shumyatsky and introduced American storyboarding and Disney’s matching of sound and image. Circus followed the winning Hollywood formula of the transformation of a spunky underdog into a smash success. The female lead, Marion Dixon (played by Lyubov Orlova), a name evocative of Marlene Dietrich, is a performer in an American circus that comes to the USSR on tour. She had given birth to a son with a black lover and suffered racism in the United States; in the USSR, she falls for a Russian performer named Ivan and defects, which spurs the circus director to threaten to expose her illegitimate black child, but the Moscow audience embraces him, and Marion remains in Moscow with her Ivan. The film climaxes with a lullaby sung, in turn, by representatives of the various Soviet nationalities. (The final kiss cliché, characteristic of American comedies, between the little black boy, Jimmy, and a little white girl was cut.) Dunayevsky supplied six catchy songs, performed by Yakov Skomorovsky’s jazz band, including the colossally popular, easily memorized “Song of the Motherland,” with lyrics by Lebedev-Kumach (“I know of no other country where a person breathes this freely!”). The film’s final production number has Orlova dancing at the pinnacle of a multilayered cake structure. One million people saw Circus during just its first two weeks in Moscow. Orlova crisscrossed the country. In Chelyabinsk, she was awarded a piston ring from the factory foundry engraved with lyrics from the Jolly Fellows march: “Song helps us build and live.”³³⁶

Party Card, directed by Ivan Pyryev, had premiered in Moscow on April 7, 1936. In the film, the year is 1932 and Pavel Kurganov, from Siberia, the son of a kulak, signs on at a Moscow factory. Becoming a shock worker there, he seduces and marries a young woman, Anna Kulikova, an outstanding assembly-line worker and loyal party member. Unbeknownst to Anna (played brilliantly by Ada Voitsik), Pavel (Andrei Abrikosov) has murdered a Communist Youth League activist, to take over his identity, while secretly working for foreign intelligence, which assigned him the task of obtaining a party member’s card to commit sabotage. Despite her initial lack of vigilance, which Anna’s party colleagues at work denounce, she teams up with her former sweetheart to expose her husband as an embittered kulak enemy. The lesson: Pavel, a peasant lad, had looked trustworthy, but no one can be trusted. The most dangerous enemy is the one with a party card.³³⁷ In the initial draft of the screenplay (by Yekaterina Vinogradskaya), titled Little Anna, Pavel had not been a spy. Stalin helped recast it.³³⁸ Party cards, long a sign of status in the Soviet Union, allowing holders to attend secret meetings, receive secret information, and shoulder extra responsibilities, now endangered those who held them.

Yagoda had written to Stalin recommending that the multitude of “Trotskyites” in custody be executed, in accordance with the Kirov assassination anti-terror law.³³⁹ Some were said to have “ties” to the Gestapo. He reported that two arrested Trotskyites had been found to have thirteen issues of the Bulletin of the Opposition in a suitcase hidden in the wall—Stalin kept his in a cupboard—as well as a copy of the defector Grigory Besedovsky’s book On the Road to Thermidor. The NKVD had also found an address book—more “Trotskyites” to arrest.³⁴⁰ On May 20, 1936, pointing to “the unceasing counterrevolutionary activity of Trotskyites in internal exile, and of those expelled from the party,” the politburo stipulated that more than 600 “Trotskyites” should be sent to remote concentration camps, while those found to have engaged in terrorism were to be executed.³⁴¹ Yagoda furnished Stalin with additional testimony about “Trotskyite-Zinovievite organizations” on June 1.³⁴²

From June 1 to 4, 1936, the Central Committee held its first plenum of the year. It was devoted to agriculture, the pending adoption of a new constitution, and the appeals/reinstatement process for party members expelled during the recent verification campaign (more than 200,000 total). With the regime under severe financial pressure, Stalin had reduced the interest paid on government bonds subscribed to by ordinary people from 8–10 percent to 4 percent, with maturity extended from 10 to 20 years, which he now felt compelled to mention. Some 50 million Soviet inhabitants were affected, most of whom had “subscribed” only under severe pressure from trade unions and party organizers. “As you are well aware, we spend an alarming amount of money on things that cannot be postponed,” he told the plenum attendees (June 3), who would have to face the people’s resentment back in their locales. “Much money has been spent, and is being spent, on such matters as building schools, teachers’ pay, urban improvement, irrigation, afforestation of a number of parts of the country, . . . and constructing canals. Money is being spent on defense and even more will be spent in the future. . . . We do not yet have a navy, and a new one must be established. . . . This is the situation, comrades.”³⁴³

These remarks were not reported in the press. Pravda, however, did castigate provincial-level party bosses for “mistakes” made in party expulsions.³⁴⁴ Yezhov in his report had admitted that far from everyone expelled was an enemy, but he ominously stated that “we ought not to think that the enemy, who yesterday was still in the party, will rest content with being expelled from the party and quietly wait for ‘better times.’” Stalin made some rambling interjections about clearer procedures for appeals, and allowed Yenukidze to be reinstated in the party. Several matters were not recorded even in the rough draft materials of the plenum, including an exchange between Yagoda and Stalin on the “Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc.”³⁴⁵

Gorky had taken gravely ill during the plenum, four days after visiting his son Maxim’s grave in Novodevichy Cemetery. “We came to see you at 2:00 a.m.,” Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov wrote in a short note (June 10). “They said your pulse was excellent (82, more or less). The doctors forbade us from seeing you. We had to comply. Greetings from all of us, a big greeting.”³⁴⁶ On the morning of June 18, he died at his dacha. Levitan, on Soviet radio, called him “a great Russian writer, brilliant artist of the word, friend of workers, and fighter for the victory of Communism.” Gorky’s brain was removed and taken in a bucket, by his secretary, to Moscow’s Brain Research Institute, which housed the brains of Lenin and Mayakovsky. That day and the next, the brainless body lay in state as half a million people paid their respects. (When Stalin entered for the solemn farewell, applause broke out, which was shown on newsreels.)³⁴⁷ On June 20, at the state funeral, Gide, on the Mausoleum, delivered one of the eulogies, along with Aleksei Tolstoy and Molotov. Rolland sent a letter from Switzerland, published in Pravda (June 20): “I recall his youthful ardor, his sparkling enthusiasm when he spoke of the new world in whose building he took part. I recall his goodness and the sorrow hidden in its depth.”

Gorky’s ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall. Stalin afforded Andreyev, his apparatchik for culture, the honor of placing the urn. The regime seized the writer’s archive (Yagoda especially was in for infuriating surprises).³⁴⁸ Rumors circulated of poisoning. One of those accused was Gorky’s former mistress Baroness Moura Budberg, who got her surname through marriage to an Estonian aristocrat, started an affair with H. G. Wells, and was thought to be a double British and Soviet agent. But the main suspect in the whisperings was Stalin.³⁴⁹ In fact, Gorky, who was sixty-eight, had been extremely sick, and was properly diagnosed and treated by a battery of top physicians.³⁵⁰ His autopsy revealed bronchitis, tuberculosis, and a damaged left lung. The writer had smoked nearly three packs of cigarettes a day, and needed an oxygen tank. Pravda gave the cause of death as “a cardiac arrest and paralysis of the lungs.” Gorky had never spiritually recovered from his son Maxim’s untimely death.³⁵¹ “What has brought you to the Bolsheviks?” Yekaterina Kuskova, Gorky’s lifelong friend, recalled asking him once, in an obituary published in the emigration (June 26). “Do you remember how I began to read Marx with you in Nizhny Novgorod, and you proposed to throw the ‘German philistine’ into the fire?”³⁵²

• • •

THE MARXIST-LENINIST REGIME that emerged in the blood and fever dreams of the years 1929–36 was buffeted by global structural forces, from fluctuations in commodity prices to innovations in tank designs, and by the deepening of a new historical conjuncture, the mass age. The most powerful countries achieved and maintained their great-power status by mastery of a set of modern attributes: mass production, mass consumption, mass culture, mass politics. Great Britain had not only powerful ships and airplanes, engineers and trained military officers, but also a broad-based political system, an integrated national culture, and a deep degree of societal cohesion. Every other aspiring great power had to achieve its own mass-based version of modernity, which imparted new impetus and form to their geopolitical rivalries. That competition took place not just across the liberal-illiberal divide but among the democratizing parliamentary countries Britain, France, and the United States, and among avowedly authoritarian regimes: fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. All of them either had to match the others in some way or risk becoming, like the rest of the world, colonies. Modernity was not a sociological but a geopolitical process.³⁵³

Stalin forced into being a socialist modernity, presiding over the creation of a mass-production economy, a Soviet mass culture, an integrated society, and a mass politics without private property.^{354, 355}

This upheaval, in addition to geopolitics and ideology, reflected Russia’s long-standing sense of world-historical destiny combined with profound insecurity and relative weakness vis-à-vis the European powers. This gap had long goaded Russia into catch-up acquisition of Western technology to protect the country’s non-Western identity, borrowing not ideas and institutions of liberty but technology for industry and techniques for administration of resources and population—the social-engineering part of the Enlightenment. But even as Russia advanced, the West did not stand still and remained richer, more advanced, more powerful. Still, under Stalin the Soviets had imported and copied Western technology and skills, enforced deprivation on the populace, and created a massive land army and air force that would be the envy of other powers—just as imperial Russia had done.³⁵⁶ Stalin’s use of the state to force-modernize the country was far more radical and violent than that of his tsarist predecessors because of the Great War conjuncture, which accelerated the use of violence for political ends, and the anticapitalism, which coercion alone could achieve. Thanks to the Great Depression, Stalin was also able to secure technology transfer with greater independence from foreign desiderata.³⁵⁷

In imperial Russia, only a strong personality—a Sergei Witte, a Pyotr Stolypin—had been able to impose something of a unified will on the ministries, while toiling to implant loyalists across the entire bureaucracy, but the tsar and his agents deliberately undermined strong central government, because that threatened the prerogatives of the autocrat. Stolypin, arguably Russia’s greatest statesman, had occupied the position of prime minister, but Stalin occupied the position of supreme ruler, like the tsar, and he favored unified government.³⁵⁸ Through Molotov and others, he achieved coordination, and over a much larger apparatus. And while Stolypin had had to contend with a quasiparliament to legalize his policies, the Congress of Soviets possessed none of the powers even of the tsarist Duma. To be sure, Stalin had to obtain politburo approval. But he either manipulated the members or just acted unilaterally. He possessed instruments Stolypin could not have dreamed of: a single-party machine that enveloped the whole country, a Soviet secret police that vastly exceeded the tsarist okhranka in personnel and acceptable practice, a galvanizing ideology that morally justified any and all means, and housebroken nationalisms as well as a supranational Soviet identity that bound the peoples of the former Russian empire to the regime.³⁵⁹

Perhaps the biggest difference was that the Soviet regime mobilized the masses on its behalf. Machiavelli had suggested that princes aim to restrict or eliminate access to public spaces—amphitheaters and squares, town halls and auditoriums, streets and even parks—but Stalin flooded them. His state’s power was magnified by a host of mass organizations: the party and Youth League, the army and civil defense associations, trade unions that dispensed social welfare, a kind of mass conscription society.³⁶⁰ The dictator coerced and cajoled the artistic intelligentsia into state service as well. His regime actively engaged the new Soviet society at every level, in identities and practices of everyday life, through which people became part of the system.³⁶¹ The populace absorbed the regime’s language, ways of thinking, and modes of behavior. Aspirations, in turn, emerged from the new Soviet society, and Stalin became attentive to quality of life, consumer goods, entertainment, and pride. By the mid-1930s the revolution and Stalin’s leadership were seen as having enabled a great country to take its rightful place among the powers, with a supposedly morally and economically superior system.³⁶² “In Germany bayonets do not terrorize a people,” Hitler had boasted in spring 1936. “Here a government is supported by the confidence of the entire people. . . . I have not been imposed by anyone upon this people. From the people I have grown up, in the people I have remained, to the people I return. My pride is that I know no statesman in the world who with greater right than I can say that he is representative of his people.”³⁶³ Similarly, Stalin had boasted to Roy Howard that same spring of 1936 that the USSR was “a truly popular system, which grew up from within the people.”³⁶⁴

Stalin had improvised his way toward attainment of the modern authoritarian dream: incorporating the masses without empowering them. Europe’s democratic great powers were put on the defensive by the dynamic mass politics and stated aspirations of the authoritarian regimes. France’s dilemma was particularly stark. Fearful of revived German power, it had turned to a pact with the Communist USSR, but its willingness to do so was based precisely upon the pact’s absence of a military convention, alongside a desperately desired deepening of cooperation with Britain, as well as mollification of Italy and the marginalization of the French Communists.³⁶⁵ In the event, Britain had shown itself ready to surrender the continental guarantees that France viewed as bedrock, France’s precarious placation of a prickly Mussolini was failing, and France’s Communist party was growing significantly in strength, winning more than 15 percent of the vote and seventy-two seats in spring 1936 (versus 8 percent and ten seats four years earlier). All of this damaged Paris’s already weak commitment to alliance with Moscow.

Stalin’s dilemma was no less stark. Suspicious that the imperialists Britain and France would galvanize an anti-Soviet front and goad countries on his border into attacking, he had worked to neutralize Poland and recruit Germany, keeping them out of the feared anti-Soviet coalition. On his eastern flank, Japan had seized the Soviet sphere of influence in Manchuria and taken other parts of northern China, directly threatening Soviet territory. All of this had spurred his turn toward outright militarization, membership in the League of Nations, an antifascist front in the Comintern, and mutual assistance pacts with France and its ally Czechoslovakia. But Stalin, like the tsarist conservative and Germanophile Pyotr Durnovó, questioned the wisdom of such an orientation. He held to his quest for rapprochement with Nazi Germany, to acquire advanced technology while preventing a broad anti-Soviet coalition. Hitler, however, increasingly named the Soviet Union as his principal target. Stalin’s options were to deter or deflect the penetration in his direction of Germany and Japan, via an alliance with binding military obligations; secure some form of accommodation (nonaggression pacts); or fight Germany and Japan on his own, perhaps simultaneously, a two-front nightmare the tsars had not faced.³⁶⁶

Russia’s perennial quest to build a strong state, to match an ever-superior West, had culminated, yet again, in personal rule. That person was extraordinary, a man of deep Marxist-Leninist convictions and iron will, but dogged by Lenin’s purported Testament calling for his removal and internal opposition over the searing episode of forced collectivization-dekulakization. At least 5,000 “Trotskyites” and “Zinovievites” were arrested in the first half of 1936 (as compared with 631 in all of 1934). Before the year was out, the total would reach 23,279.³⁶⁷ And that would be the beginning. A fixation on former oppositionists, above all Trotsky, would begin to consume the country. None of that was caused by the foreign policy dilemmas, but it would exacerbate them. Could Bolshevism’s avatar Stalin solve the deep challenges of Russian history that, along with anticapitalism and the mass age, had produced him and his epigones?