Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

———PART III——— THREE-CARD MONTE

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is, that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.

PRIME MINISTER NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, radio broadcast, September 27, 1938, speaking of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia¹

COLONEL JEAN DELMAS, French military attaché in Romania: “Do you not think it is time and possible to arrest Germany’s expansion?”

LIEUTENANT GENERAL GHEORGHE ŞTEFAN IONESCU, Romanian chief of staff: “In my view, it is the last opportunity. If we let it pass, we can no longer contain Germany and, in that case, enormous sacrifices would be required, while today the victory appears certain.” (September 28, 1938)²

HITLER WAS A FORCE OF NATURE because potential counterforces allowed him to be. For years he had been seeking an audience with one of his idols, Benito Mussolini, who had been handed power after a colossal bluff, the March on Rome, in 1922. Finally, in 1934, after the Führer, too, had been handed power—also by traditional conservatives wary of leftist revolution and desperate for an authoritarian mass base—the duce condescended to a meeting. Afterward, Mussolini reassured an Italian Jewish leader, “I know Mr. Hitler. He is an imbecile and a scoundrel; an endless talker.” The duce added, “In the future there will be no remaining trace of Hitler while the Jews will still be a great people. . . . Mr. Hitler is a joke that will last only a few years.”³ On July 25, 1934, advantageously misconstruing a question that had been posed by Mussolini (who had conducted the conversation in his atrocious German), Hitler and his overzealous minions had colluded with Austrian Nazis in a putsch against Mussolini’s friend the Austrian authoritarian leader Engelbert Dollfuss.⁴ Even as his wife and family were guests of Mussolini’s at his seaside villa in Riccione, Italy, the Austrian chancellor—known as the Jockey for his five-foot-two height—was slowly, agonizingly bleeding to death on his office couch in Vienna. An enraged duce mobilized 100,000 troops on the Brenner Pass to support the Austrian armed forces—and Hitler backed down. “If this group of criminals and pederasts should take over Europe,” the duce fumed, “it would mean the end of our civilization.”⁵

Mussolini had demonstrated that Hitler could be deterred. In the meantime, the Italian fascist had switched sides, because of his expansionism in Africa in 1935 and the next year’s outbreak of the Spanish civil war, when the duce and the Führer found common cause supporting Franco.⁶ On November 1, 1936, during a bombastic outburst in Milan, Mussolini had mused that a Rome-Berlin “Axis” had formed, around which all of Europe would be “reorganized.” The British cartoonist David Low called Mussolini “the man who took the lid off.”⁷ Hitler and Mussolini became a corrosive duo, but hardly genuinely committed allies. Following a duce state visit to Berlin in September 1937, according to Albert Speer, Hitler pantomimed him. “His chin thrust forward, his legs spread, and his right hand jammed on his hip, Hitler, who spoke no foreign languages, bellowed Italian or Italian-sounding words like giovinezza, patria, victoria, macaroni, belleza, bel canto, and basta. Everyone around him made sure to laugh, and it was indeed very funny.”⁸ The histrionic duce would be derided as a cardboard Caesar presiding over a regime of gestures, from the Roman salute that replaced the handshake to the leader cult.⁹ But his playacting about an Axis with Germany put a heavier onus on France and Britain. Even in the face of Hitler’s illegal rearmament and public statements about expansionism, however, the Western powers strove to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the Great War.¹⁰

Most contemporary statesmen assumed that great powers acted out of self-interest, that international discord was the norm, that peace was provided for by balance of power, and that the overturning of the balance (or equilibrium) would bring consequences that even anti-status-quo (or revisionist) powers failed to foresee.¹¹ Here was the rub, however: the Versailles order had not been a genuine equilibrium. The treaty had been possible solely because of an anomaly in 1919: the simultaneous collapse of both German and Russian power. One or the other of these big countries was certain to come back strongly. In the event, both rose to be major military powers, and within a single generation. As if that were not enough, the old Habsburg buffer was gone. The revived Polish state and expanded Greater Romania exacerbated the instability with their barbed rivalries with, respectively, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Lack of resolve on the part of the Western powers was in many ways a symptom, not a cause, of the death rattle of Versailles. Stalin, for his part, hardly objected to Versailles revisionism—the Bolsheviks had not even been invited to the peace conference—provided, of course, that any “new order” did not come at Soviet expense.¹² Versailles’s obsolescence offered extraordinarily fertile ground for Hitler’s appetites and, in his wake, for Stalin’s opportunism.

The Führer could mesmerize people. Winston Churchill, the Tory politician, had written in September 1937 that “one may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among nations.”¹³ Churchill would soon experience a drastic change of heart, coming around to the view that Hitler was serious about his martial and racialist aspirations.¹⁴ But many observers, perhaps most, would continue to assume that, like all politicians, the Nazi, too, would eventually “come to see reason.”

Hitler posed a profound danger to Stalin’s personal dictatorship as the Führer not only rearmed his country but raged ever more rabidly against “Judeo-Bolshevism,” transforming Germany from partner of convenience with the USSR during the Weimar years to menace. Stalin was bafflingly slow to come to grips with the centrality of ideology in the Nazi program. On the Soviet despot’s Asian flank, meanwhile, the long-standing threat of an expansionist Japan had only strengthened. The symbolic November 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan, which Italy joined the next year, and the relentless Soviet border clashes with Japan, including the summer 1938 limited war at Lake Khasan, meant that the Soviet Union faced the prospect of a two-front war—and without allies.¹⁵ Mongolia, the world’s only other socialist state, had a total population far smaller than the Red Army. Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Chiang Kai-shek’s China, but a decade of bitterness and distrust was not easily overcome, and China’s ability to continue holding off a Japanese military onslaught, while battling internal Communist subversion, remained uncertain. Could Stalin somehow achieve a military alliance with the Western capitalist democracies, even as he was conducting grisly mass executions at home and engaged in forms of Communist subversion of his potential partners abroad? Czechoslovakia provided the key test.

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CZECHOSLOVAKIA CALLED TO MIND the old Habsburg empire in miniature—Mussolini dubbed it Czecho-Germano-Polono-Magyaro-Rutheno-Romano-Slovakia. Of the new country’s approximately 15 million people, Czechs formed a bare majority, and the main minorities—3.25 million Germans, 3 million Slovaks, 750,000 Hungarians, 100,000 Ruthenians [Ukrainians], 100,000 Poles—chafed at real and perceived discrimination. Politically, the country remained a parliamentary democracy, but in some ways it was too divided, too nationalist, and even too small to sustain the limited stability that old Austria-Hungary had fitfully managed.¹⁶ Hitler preyed upon these vulnerabilities, taking advantage of Czechoslovakia’s democracy to subvert it: spreading lies to discredit its democratic institutions while claiming the protections of laws to defend freedom of expression; covertly funding pro-Nazi political groups while irately denouncing the evidence of its complicity fake, even inciting armed revolt by Czechoslovakia’s German speakers, who were concentrated mostly in the horseshoe-shaped Sudetenland, contiguous with Germany. With regional tensions high, on February 24, 1938, the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Red Army, the Soviet embassy in Prague threw a glittering reception for 350 guests. (The German, Italian, and Polish ambassadors stayed away.) General Ludvík Krejčí, chief of the Czechoslovak general staff, stated in the presence of journalists that if Germany were to attack, “We will fight and we will never fall to our knees.” He added that the Czechoslovak general staff wanted relations with the Soviet general staff to be on a par with those it had with the French. Still, doubts existed in Prague about whether the USSR was really prepared to defend Czechoslovakia.¹⁷

Events moved very rapidly. On March 12, a different Habsburg successor state vanished when the Wehrmacht, unopposed, seized Austria, a country of 7 million predominantly German speakers. It was the first time since the Great War that a German army had crossed a state frontier for purposes of conquest, and, in and of itself, it constituted an event of perhaps greater import than the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which had helped spark the Great War mobilizations in 1914.¹⁸ The Versailles and Saint-Germain treaties of 1919 expressly forbade a forcible annexation of Austria by Germany, but Berlin deemed what it called Anschluss a “reunification” with the German speakers whom Bismarck had left out of his unified Germany. Even Germans not enamored of National Socialism rejoiced. Hitler overcame the stain of his failed 1934 putsch, and this time Mussolini, estranged from Britain and France and judging a deal with Hitler more prudent than paying the cost of opposing him, allied Italy to Germany’s expansionism even as the latter threatened Italy’s own territorial interests.

France, for its part, lacked a government on the day Hitler invaded Austria; the coalition cabinet had just resigned—again. (France would have sixteen governments over the eight years beginning in 1932.) British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s special envoy to Hitler, Edward Wood, First Earl of Halifax, leader of the House of Lords, had conveyed (back on November 19, 1937) that London would not stand in his way over Austria—or the ethnic-German-majority provinces of Czechoslovakia and Danzig—provided such revisions to the Versailles Treaty came through “peaceful evolution.” In the conversation it had been Halifax, not Hitler, who first mentioned these other territories coveted by Nazi Germany.¹⁹ Chamberlain (b. 1869) did publicly warn Germany not to attack Czechoslovakia, but he privately informed Paris that London would not join a military counteraction should Hitler repeat his aggression.²⁰ France wanted it both ways as well: it publicly affirmed its resolve to defend Czechoslovakia while privately wanting British pusillanimity as an excuse not to have to live up to its own treaty obligations.²¹

Rationalizations were to hand. The Versailles peace had been pummeled by pundits as unjust and self-defeating, while state borders in Eastern Europe were widely viewed as arbitrary, including by the East Europeans themselves. What would the powers be shedding blood to defend? All true, but Austria’s disappearance should have and could have been stopped. Germany’s mobilization was so sudden, ordered by the Führer at 7:00 p.m. on March 10, 1938, that it nearly collapsed. “Nothing had been done, nothing at all,” chief of staff General Ludwig Beck fumed of the planning.²² Only the long lists of Austrian Jews had been meticulously prepared. Once across the frontier, the German army had to purchase gasoline at private Austrian petrol stations; lucky for them, it was for sale. The Austrian leader, Kurt von Schuschnigg, had decided not to resist militarily, and yet, even without resistance, and in perfect weather, nearly one in six German tanks broke down before reaching Vienna. Many of the Wehrmacht’s horses, meanwhile, lacked shoes: German farmers, forced to remit horses by quota, had turned over their most decrepit.²³ Fatefully, however, the improvised chaos of the German invasion was not immediately recognized as such. The French did not even have a military attaché on the ground to observe the near disaster.²⁴

What outsiders did see was that much of the Austrian population greeted Hitler’s show of force with euphoria: Nazi banners, Hitler salutes, flowers. By March 13, Austria was already officially a province of Germany, and the Austrian army had sworn an oath to Hitler personally. The Führer issued a decree banning all parties save the National Socialists on what had been Austrian territory. Many Jews were rounded up in Vienna, whose 176,000 citizens of that extraction (10 percent of the urban population) made it the largest Jewish city in the German-speaking world. The Gestapo arrived at Berggasse 19, the offices of Sigmund Freud, who possessed the wherewithal to get himself and some of his possessions out, to London, but others were not so lucky (his four sisters would all be murdered farther east). Much of the Austrian political class was deported to Dachau or an Austrian camp soon opened at the quarries in Mauthausen. Austrian gold and foreign currency reserves, including private holdings, were looted—780 million reichsmarks’ worth, more than Germany’s own.²⁵ On March 14, Hitler entered Vienna as conqueror, staying at the Imperial Hotel, near whose entrance he had shoveled snow many years earlier to earn a few Habsburg crowns.

For two days, Soviet newspapers did not even comment on the Nazi seizure of Austria: Pravda and Izvestiya were consumed with blaring the death sentences for Bukharin and other accused “war provocateurs.”²⁶ When Hitler delivered a rousing speech before a quarter million people on Vienna’s Heroes’ Square on March 15, 1938, in Moscow Bukharin was made to watch as the other defendants from his “trial” were shot, and then he, too, was executed. Stalin took his colored pencils to the transcript of Bukharin’s last statement in court, before it was published in the Soviet press, and crossed out several passages, including: “I accept responsibility even for those crimes about which I did not know or about which I did not have the slightest idea”; “I deny most of all the prosecutor’s charge that I belonged to the group sitting on the court bench with me, because such a group never existed!”²⁷

Czechoslovakia was now surrounded on three sides by German troops, and its western border defenses were gone. Back when Stalin had agreed to mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia, he had pledged to come to the latter’s aid if France did so first.²⁸ On the same day Hitler spoke in Vienna and Bukharin was executed, deputy foreign affairs commissar Potyomkin, who had taken over for the arrested Krestinsky, told the Czechoslovak ambassador that requests for reassurance should be addressed to Paris.²⁹ On March 21, 1938, Sergei Alexandrovsky, the Soviet envoy in Prague, warned his interlocutors that the defense of Czechoslovakia was not in the first instance the Red Army’s responsibility.³⁰ On March 26, Litvinov wrote to Alexandrovsky that “the Hitlerization of Austria has predetermined the fate of Czechoslovakia.” That day he had been in Stalin’s Little Corner, along with Molotov, Voroshilov, and others, for two hours.³¹ By March 27, the despot was compelled to close the Soviet embassy in Vienna “in connection with the elimination of the Austrian state.” Austria’s legation in Moscow was signed over to Hitler. On March 28, Stalin sent Marshal Kulik to Prague. Krejčí was again ingratiating, joining denunciations of Trotsky and asking Kulik point-blank, “Will you help us if the Germans attack?” According to the Soviet notetaker, “Comrade Kulik answered ‘that help will be forthcoming.’”³² But on March 29, Pravda warned that “German aggression against Czechoslovakia will occur only if Germany is sure that the other powers will not intervene on the Czech side. Thus, everything depends on the attitude adopted by France and Britain.”³³

Over in Spain, Franco’s forces reached the Mediterranean, slicing the Republic’s zone in two. At the same time, French intelligence, citing a “top-secret and completely reliable” source, reported on Germany’s war plans against Czechoslovakia.³⁴ On April 21, Stalin met in the Little Corner with Molotov, other minions, Litvinov, and Alexandrovsky, who was instructed to reaffirm that the Soviet Union stood with France and Czechoslovakia—a reminder of France’s obligations.³⁵ Hitler traveled to Italy, his second visit since becoming chancellor, seeking Mussolini’s assent to a Nazi plan to “take out” Czechoslovakia. Despite seven days of pomp, sightseeing, and spectacle recalling the visit of Holy Roman emperor Charles V in 1536, the Führer came away without a binding military pact.³⁶

Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš, who had studied for a law degree in France and had represented the new Czechoslovakia at Versailles, showed resolve, telling the Soviet envoy (May 18, 1938) that he would defend his state’s frontiers and sovereignty “with all the means at his disposal” and urging that this message be conveyed personally to Stalin.³⁷ Between May 19 and 22, under the impression that a German strike was imminent, in a repeat of the Austrian scenario, Beneš called up reservists, 199,000 men, which doubled the force structure, and he repositioned troops to the front lines in the Sudetenland. The British issued a formal protest of Hitler’s presumed war plans and evacuated nonessential staff from their Berlin embassy.³⁸ Whether a German offensive had been imminent remains uncertain; it appears that the Czechoslovaks had been fed disinformation.³⁹ The emergency Czechoslovak mobilization, in eliciting the warning from Britain to Germany, had made it seem as if Hitler had had to abandon his putsch at the last minute under pressure, which provoked his fury. In fact, Hitler had already decided on an attack, and the planning was well under way for a short war against Czechoslovakia, but now those secret plans were given stronger impetus and refined (with a target completion date of October 1).⁴⁰ Even more consequentially, hyper-war-averse Britain had accidentally emerged as the ostensible roadblock to Hitler’s continental Lebensraum and racial aspirations. French hostility—which Hitler took for granted—would be far more threatening if Britain stood shoulder to shoulder with France. The Führer began to contemplate the necessity of a war in the west as prelude to his eventual expansionism in the east.⁴¹

Germany’s heightened spring–summer preparations against Czechoslovakia became known to Stalin, who ordered the Kiev and Belorussian military districts reorganized into a special military command (with a completion deadline of September 1), but to unspecified purpose. The Soviet high command internally noted that the Czechoslovak army and populace were in a fighting mood, and that President Beneš, who had been born to a peasant family, seemed inclined to stand up for his country.⁴² But in Prague, the severe doubts about Moscow, which General Krejčí had expressed back in March, persisted. Would Stalin help defend them?

• • •

ALTHOUGH STALIN HAD SUCCESSFULLY stood up to the Japanese at Lake Khasan in summer 1938, that border war had exposed Soviet military weaknesses, which were aired at a meeting of the Main Military Council on August 31. Stalin had reduced Soviet involvement in the Spanish civil war, but he had ramped up military involvement on behalf of China and remained deeply preoccupied with shoring up defenses in the Soviet Far East while, paradoxically, continuing to massacre his own military personnel there.⁴³ He was also preoccupied with Polish-German collusion. Poland’s leadership had been among the first to recognize the March 1938 German takeover of Austria. A few days after that, Poland itself took advantage, compelling independent Lithuania, in an ultimatum, to recognize Poland’s annexation of Wilno (which the Poles had occupied militarily back in 1920–22). Lithuania had no defenders, west or east, but whereas Poland’s power play did not turn Western opinion definitively against Warsaw, it reconfirmed Stalin’s ingrained suspicions of likely German-Polish revisionist collaboration.⁴⁴ Potyomkin, under a pseudonym, had publicly mocked Polish fantasies of annexing all of Lithuania and predicted a coming German-inspired Polish invasion of the USSR. “Hitler wants to let Poland loose against the Soviet Union,” he wrote, adding that the Führer “only wants [the Poles] to clear the road for Germany. . . . He is preparing Poland’s fourth partition.”⁴⁵

Moscow’s assistance to Prague faced formidable logistical challenges: Soviet territory was not contiguous with Czechoslovakia. Four of the five partially mobilized Soviet army groups were on the border with Poland, the best transit route, but Poland adamantly refused to permit a military crossing. Some contemporaries speculated that the Soviets could still have gone through Poland on a contrived League of Nations authorization.⁴⁶ Romania, also a Soviet enemy, provided a less advantageous but still valuable land route, along with overflight options, but discussions with Bucharest were inconclusive, partly because of Soviet claims to Romania-controlled Bessarabia and partly because of King Carol II’s objections.⁴⁷ Even though Romania did not shut the door entirely to passage, the rail gauge differed, so the Red Army would have needed to change the undermount wheels at the border or obtain substantial European rolling stock from someone.⁴⁸

London, Paris, and Berlin all judged the Red Army incapable of decisive intervention abroad—after all, Stalin had decapitated his own officer corps.⁴⁹ A Soviet spy secretly transmitted to Stalin the brutal internal intelligence assessment of his French ally to the effect that Soviet armed forces “were not capable of conducting an offensive war” and that the USSR had been “weakened by an internal crisis.”⁵⁰ Officials in France and Britain began spreading self-exculpatory rumors that the Soviets would do nothing in defense of Czechoslovakia.⁵¹ Stalin again had Kalinin publicly reaffirm that Moscow would honor its treaty obligations “to the last letter”—that is, take action provided France did so, a position that was announced on public radio loudspeakers throughout the Soviet Union. France had secretly warned the Czechoslovak government in July 1938 that it would not take up arms over the Sudeten issue under any circumstances.⁵² In trying to back off their treaty obligations, the French grasped a convenient pretext: they knew that Germany had broken some British codes and that, therefore, thanks to telegrams out of Prague by the British special envoy Viscount Walter Runciman, Hitler could see how far—very far, indeed—the British would go to avert war.⁵³

The Führer, ratcheting up the pressure, had ordered that the harvest be gathered as quickly as possible (to free up horses for the Wehrmacht), private trucks be requisitioned, border defenses with France be fully manned, and reserves be called up for fall “maneuvers” in East Prussia. But no peacetime market economy had ever managed Germany’s level of military expenditures, and Germany was already the highest-taxed major economy, and approaching insolvency. The German stock market had dropped 13 percent between April and August 1938.⁵⁴ German military circles had begun plotting to remove the reckless Führer in a palace coup before he could embroil Germany in a new world war for which the country and the army were not ready.⁵⁵ Troops of the elite 23rd Infantry Division, stationed in Potsdam, were to occupy Berlin’s ministries, its radio station, and the facilities of the regular police, the Gestapo, and the SS. Hitler’s bodyguard division, the SS-Leibstandarte, who were stationed in Saxony near the border with Czechoslovakia, would be blocked on-site. A final action involved seizure of the Chancellery and of Hitler himself. The plotters were not fully coordinated, but some sort of putsch seemed to be coming to a head right after Hitler’s Nuremberg rally closing speech on September 12, when many expected him to declare war on Czechoslovakia. He did not. Still, one conspirator told his brother on September 14 that “Hitler will be arrested tomorrow.”⁵⁶

Then the news broke: on September 15, Neville Chamberlain boarded an airplane for the second time in his sixty-nine years and, for the first time, would meet with Hitler. The British PM touched down only one day after the Nazi party had concluded its annual weeklong rally in Nuremberg, a ferocious, torchlit spectacle whose images were seen worldwide.

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A MAJORITY OF THE BRITISH establishment believed, or wanted to believe, that an agreement with Germany over Czechoslovakia was possible.⁵⁷ But what kind? The PM proposed awarding Germany the Czechoslovak border territories with majority ethnic German populations in exchange for Hitler’s not resorting to force and a great-power “guarantee” of rump Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity.⁵⁸ A diplomatic deal, even such a stunningly advantageous gift, was precisely what the war-thirsty Hitler feared. He had been startled by Chamberlain’s offer to come to Berlin.⁵⁹ During a fortnight, as the Führer got ever more expansive in his demands, the elderly, unwell Chamberlain would fly to him three times. (“If at first you can’t concede,” went a nasty ditty that made the rounds, “fly, fly again.”)⁶⁰ On the eve of the first encounter, Chamberlain had written to his sister Ida, “Is it not positively horrible to think that the fate of hundreds of millions depends on one man and he is half mad?”⁶¹ Eight days later (September 19), he wrote to her again: “Here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”⁶²

Of course, Stalin had been straining to elicit his own deal with Hitler, who would have none of it. Sorge, the agent of Soviet military intelligence at the German embassy in Japan, was reporting on secret German-Japanese negotiations for a binding military alliance.⁶³ In Moscow, three meetings of the Main Military Council took place on September 19, with Stalin in attendance, and much of the discussion was taken up with shortcomings and planned construction in Soviet Far Eastern military districts.⁶⁴ That same day, Beneš, in receipt of Anglo-French proposals that day for territorial concessions to Germany—which he was inclined to reject—asked Alexandrovsky specifically if the Soviets would support Czechoslovakia should Germany attack and France fulfill its treaty obligations. Potyomkin telegrammed Alexandrovsky that the answer was yes, and that Moscow was transmitting the same answer immediately to Paris, all of which was conveyed to Beneš by telephone on September 20 while he was meeting with the Czechoslovak government.⁶⁵ Beneš, the next day, was aggressively pressured by Britain and France into accepting the “deal.” From September 21 to 23, Stalin undertook a redeployment and partial mobilization in his western borderlands—which held 76 divisions—and had the Red Army troops informed that they would be defending Czechoslovakia.⁶⁶ On September 23, the Führer flat out rejected the British-French “compromise”—the prize of the Sudetenland without having to fight for it. France and Czechoslovakia partially mobilized.⁶⁷ The Soviet envoy in Paris briefed the French on intensified Soviet troop movements.⁶⁸

Chamberlain again took the lead to defuse the bellicosity. “However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account,” the PM stated on the radio on September 27. “If we have to fight, it must be on larger issues than that.”⁶⁹ That same day, the German general staff moved its troops to forward positions on the frontier with Czechoslovakia. The French and British governments reluctantly felt that they would be compelled to fight if the Wehrmacht forcibly seized Czechoslovakia. The Royal Navy was on full alert. Britain’s populace was digging trenches and air-raid shelters and filling sandbags; the authorities were distributing gas masks. The mood was grim.⁷⁰ Hitler, in fact, was hours from ordering an invasion. But on September 28, Mussolini accepted a British entreaty to coordinate a disorganized four-power summit with Chamberlain (Britain), Édouard Daladier (France), and Hitler (Germany), with the duce (Italy) acting as dishonest broker.⁷¹

Hitler chose the site of the Führer Building in the Nazi movement’s capital, Munich. The British and French governments consented to consigning the Czechoslovaks to an adjacent room, apart from the negotiations. The Soviet Union, despite its treaties with France and Czechoslovakia, was not even invited. Chamberlain, along with Daladier, agreed not only that Czechoslovakia would cede the Sudetenland but also that all fortifications and weapons there would be left intact. Hitler acceded to this granting of his original demands rather than unleash the war he had been promising, and the infamous Munich Pact was signed in the small hours on September 30 (it was dated the day before).⁷² Wehrmacht troops marched into western Czechoslovakia with international authorization. Nazi Germany absorbed, gratis, industrial plants, coal and other natural resources, and 11,000 square miles of territory, on which lived 3 million Sudeten Germans and 800,000 Czechs. Non-German Sudeten inhabitants were given fewer than ten days to evacuate, and forced to relinquish everything—homes, household possessions, livestock. The German government was absolved from paying compensation.

Chamberlain allowed himself to imagine that he was “fixing” the Versailles Treaty by removing the supposed cause of German aggression: too many ethnic Germans living outside German borders. Hitler, recounting what he had told Chamberlain, had remarked in a public speech on September 26, 1938, at the Sports Palace in Berlin, that the Sudetenland was “the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe, but it is a claim from which I will not swerve, and which I will satisfy, God willing. . . . And this I guarantee. We don’t want any Czechs at all.” That had been the straw that Chamberlain grasped. To win over Britain’s head of state, George VI, to the deal with the distasteful Hitler, the PM had played up “the prospect of Germany and England as the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against Communism.”⁷³ In fact, Chamberlain prioritized the higher purpose of preserving the British empire. (The self-governing dominions would, in any case, not join a war over Czechoslovakia.)⁷⁴ What Chamberlain and his ilk missed was that Germany was not militarily strong, but, if unopposed now, it would never be so weak again.

Daladier had heard from an adamant French general staff, which wanted more time to build up the military, that the Luftwaffe was too strong for France.⁷⁵ But if he understood how the French brass tended to exaggerate German capabilities, Daladier, a veteran of the Great War, also recognized the antiwar sentiment in French society, which, along with Germany, had borne the heaviest devastation in that conflict. Still, the former history teacher from Provence also understood that France had failed to honor its commitments. “No, I am not proud,” Daladier told colleagues concerning Munich. “I do not know what you think, you others, but I, I will say it again, I am not proud.”⁷⁶

Whatever the worries in Paris and London over their own military unpreparedness, in fall 1938 the Wehrmacht was woefully unready for a major military clash against the combined forces of Czechoslovakia (36 already mobilized divisions), France, and possibly the Soviet Union. True, in Czechoslovakia, half the Sudeten German conscripts had deserted to Germany, and many ethnic Poles had failed to report to the colors, but more than 1 million troops, including reservists, were called to the colors.⁷⁷ Nazi Germany possessed around 70 divisions, but that included a great many rated second class, while some would have to remain home to protect Germany against an attack from the west. If Germany were forced to employ nearly the full weight of its army (and air force) in a war in Czechoslovakia, France might be left with as much as a seven-to-one advantage in Germany’s west, at a time when Germany’s Siegfried Line (or Westwall) was perhaps 5 percent complete (recently poured concrete had not yet set).⁷⁸ Chief of staff Ludwig Beck had been trying to rally the military brass to oppose Hitler’s plans, curb the SS, and “reestablish orderly conditions in the Reich,” because he feared that the French general could take advantage of adventurism in Czechoslovakia and strike a decisive blow from the other side.⁷⁹ To be sure, by August 1938, Beck had resigned, but his replacement, Lieutenant General Franz Halder, was perhaps even more anxious over the Wehrmacht’s inadequacies and the German public’s antiwar mood, and on September 28 he pleaded with military commander in chief General Walther von Brauchitsch to restart the coup against Hitler, to prevent war.⁸⁰ Brauchitsch, however, worried that such an act would divide the army, and in any case he and others were undercut by the announcement of the diplomatic gathering in Munich.

Stalin had a copy of the French intelligence assessment, via a Soviet spy, which indicated both German weaknesses and lack of French resolve stemming from worries about its own weakness.⁸¹ The despot seemed off the hook. Nonetheless, he had had the Red Army augment its military preparedness: on September 28, Voroshilov reported that 246 high-speed bombers and 302 fighter planes were ready to take off within two days; some 330,000 Soviet reservists in the interior were called up. On September 29, chief of staff Shaposhnikov issued an order not to discharge Red Army soldiers and commanders who had completed service.⁸² In the event, none of the mobilized troops or planes would see action. The cynical Germans had long anticipated that the absence of a common frontier with Czechoslovakia would serve as a convenient pretext for Stalin to demur on living up to his commitments and coming to Prague’s rescue.⁸³ Beneš had had his own doubts on that score.⁸⁴ Still, we shall never know whether Stalin would have fulfilled his obligations, because France failed to fulfill its own treaty obligations, the precondition for Soviet action.

• • •

NOTHING IN THE TREATIES of mutual assistance with France and Czechoslovakia precluded unilateral Soviet action. We have no reliable record of Stalin’s deliberations, if any occurred, over this question.⁸⁵ But indirect evidence is available. Back on September 19, 1938, after the French and British indicated that they would not go to war to defend Czechoslovakia, Beneš hoped to reverse Western policy by obtaining a unilateral Soviet commitment: he received the Soviet envoy Alexandrovsky, who encouraged the Czechoslovaks to fight the Germans come what may; in response, Beneš privately said to his secretary, “They naturally play their own game. We cannot trust them completely either. If they get us into it, they will leave us twisting in the air.”⁸⁶ On September 25, Beneš had grilled the Soviet envoy point-blank about the specifics of possible Soviet military action under any circumstances—and Alexandrovsky had sat in stone silence. They met again the next day and the day after, and the Soviet envoy again offered nothing; on the contrary, he reported to Moscow that Beneš appeared to be trying to drag the Soviet Union into a war.⁸⁷ On September 28, the Czechoslovak legation in Moscow inquired directly; Beneš received no commitments. No Soviet official ever initiated or responded to Czechoslovak requests for elementary military coordination.

Stalin made no moves whatsoever toward unilateral military action to defend Czechoslovakia.⁸⁸ He never even issued an explicit warning to Germany. That did not mean, however, that Soviet troop movements constituted a ruse. They were directed, along with multiple diplomatic and public warnings, at Poland. Back on September 23, Potyomkin had roused the Polish chargé d’affaires at the undiplomatic hour of 4:00 a.m. to warn him that the Soviet Union would renounce their bilateral nonaggression pact if Poland attacked Czechoslovakia; that evening, the Polish diplomat responded in the name of his government that the Soviets ought not to get involved in matters that did not concern them.⁸⁹ Izvestiya (September 26) published the Soviet note to Poland, and the next day Polish diplomats stationed in Minsk reported to Warsaw on Soviet military preparations. Poland officially protested Soviet overflights of their common frontier.⁹⁰ The Soviets also asked the French for their views on a Soviet military response to a Polish armed attack on Czechoslovakia.⁹¹

Polish foreign minister Józef Beck wrote to the Polish ambassador in Berlin (September 28), about the Soviet military actions, that “the character of these demonstrations was distinctly political, and the forms at times outright comical. From the military point of view, this so far has no great significance.”⁹² When the Polish ambassador inquired of Nazi foreign minister Ribbentrop how Germany would view a Polish military action against Czechoslovakia, Ribbentrop, according to the German account, responded supportively but also noted that “if the Soviet Union undertakes an offensive against Poland, which I, however, consider excluded, then a completely new situation in the Czechoslovak question would arise for Germany.”⁹³

Did Stalin fantasize about delivering a blow to Poland, in revenge for 1920, and achieving a new partition of that country—seizing Galicia, with its large Ukrainian and Belorussian populations—if the Czechoslovaks decided to fight alone and became embroiled in war against Germany?⁹⁴ The despot certainly inclined toward opportunism, and he had kept his options open. Conversely, he might have just wanted to deter any Polish or combined Polish-German military action against Ukraine. Or perhaps in mobilizing he was angling to ensure that France, not the Soviet Union, would be blamed for any debacle with Czechoslovakia. What we know for certain is that during the biggest foreign policy moment of his regime to date, Stalin went more than 100 hours—from very early on September 28 through late on October 2—without receiving visitors in the Little Corner.⁹⁵ “Have you received any advice, instructions, or comments on the part of comrade Stalin or the comrades in the politburo regarding our work in the current situation?” Dimitrov wrote, in a plaintive request to his Comintern deputies on September 29.⁹⁶ Where was Stalin? He was spending every day at a five-day gathering (September 27–October 1) of propagandists from Leningrad and Moscow to discuss a book, The History of the all-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course.⁹⁷

• • •

NONE OF THE PRIOR EFFORTS to publish a new textbook for Marxist-Leninist ideological training had met Stalin’s expectations. A revised draft of the Short Course party history (not to be confused with the Short Course USSR history) had been presented to him around the time of the Bukharin trial, and he had spent much of summer 1938 in Moscow rewriting it, forgoing his beloved annual Caucasus holiday.⁹⁸ Some pages he rewrote several times. Numerous passages betrayed his preoccupations. A reference to the Greek hero Antaeus, the half giant who had been invincible in battle until he lost physical contact with the earth, indicated his reading of ancient Greek history. (Stalin did not mention that Antaeus had been killing his enemies so as to amass their skulls for a temple dedicated to his father, Poseidon.)⁹⁹ Collectivization received a central place. “The originality of this revolution,” the Short Course stated, “consisted in the circumstance that it was brought about from above, at the initiative of state power, with the direct support from below by the mass of millions of peasants.”¹⁰⁰ Stalin cut much of the material about himself, but he left in Lenin’s return from exile and April 1917 theses as “decisive moments in the history of the party.”¹⁰¹ Yaroslavsky, an author of the draft, lauded Stalin’s deletions as demonstrating the “exceptionally great modesty that adorns a Bolshevik.”¹⁰² Stalin also cut details of the opposition’s deeds—wrecking in industry, treachery in Spain—but highlighted how class enemies with a party card were the most dangerous of all and how “double-dealers” constituted “an unprincipled gang of political careerists who, having long ago lost the confidence of the people, strive to insinuate themselves once more into the people’s confidence by deception, by chameleon-like changes of color, by fraud, by any means, only that they retain the title of political figures.”¹⁰³ He inserted dense philosophical passages about dialectical materialism (“The essence is not in individuals but in ideas, in the theoretical tendency”).¹⁰⁴

Stalin circulated the revised text to his inner circle (only some dared make written suggestions) and then convoked a kind of book club in the Little Corner between September 8 and 18, 1938, to finalize the text, one chapter per day.¹⁰⁵ “I am interested now in the new intelligentsia from the workers, from the peasants,” Stalin said, according to notes Zhdanov took. “Without our own intelligentsia we shall perish. We have to run the country. . . . The state has to be managed through white collar employees.”¹⁰⁶ Pravda began serialization, using centerfolds, publishing the first chapter on September 9, 1938, and another chapter each day thereafter. The stand-alone book then went to press in a first print run of 6 million.¹⁰⁷

At the opening of the propagandists’ gathering, on September 27, Zhdanov delivered the greeting, but Stalin could not refrain from intervening at length already that first day. “If we speak about wrecking, about Trotskyites, then you should know that not all these wrecker Trotskyite-Bukharinites were spies,” Stalin told the agitators, seeming to reverse everything he had previously said. “I would not say that they were spies; they were our people, but then they went astray. Why? They turned out not to be genuine Marxists; they were weak theoretically.” Never mind that the NKVD had fabricated their crimes, tortured them to confess, and executed them whether they confessed or not: if only these middle and lower functionaries had been able to study the Short Course, they would still be alive.¹⁰⁸

Stalin showed impatience, explaining that “religion had a positive significance during the time of Saint Vladimir; there was paganism then, and Christianity was a step forward. Now our geniuses speaking from the vantage point of the twentieth century claim that Vladimir was a scoundrel and the pagans were scoundrels, that religion is vile; that is, they do not want to evaluate events dialectically, such that everything in its time had its place.”¹⁰⁹ He also denounced anti-intellectualism: “What is this savageness? This is not Marxism, not Leninism. This is old-bourgeoisism.” During twenty years, “with God’s help and with your help, we have created our intelligentsia,” but, he complained, “there are people who, if someone left the ranks of the workers and no longer works at the factory, or left the ranks of the peasantry and no longer works in the fields, would consider him an alien. I repeat, this is savagery, this is dangerous savagery. . . . Not a single state without white collar [functionaries], a commanding corps in the economy, in politics, in culture; not a single state could govern the country that way. . . . Our state took over all of industry—almost all—our state took over the significant channels of agriculture. . . . How could we manage without an intelligentsia?”¹¹⁰

He evinced no fondness for workers—unless they had been promoted to white-collar functionaries.¹¹¹ “We have about 8 million officials,” he continued. “Just imagine this. This is the apparatus, with whose assistance the workers govern the country. . . . How could we not cultivate this apparatus in the spirit of Marxism?” He insisted that theory was their weak point. “What is theory?” he asked, in his cathechismic style. “It is knowledge of the laws of society, knowledge that enables one to get oriented in a situation, but in this orientation process they turned out to be bad Marxists, bad because we raised them badly.” The consequences, he repeated, were dire: “If a fascist should show up, our cadres need to know how to struggle against him, and not be scared of him, and not to withdraw from and not to kowtow to him, as happened with a significant part of the Trotskyites and Bukharinites, formerly our people, who then went over to the other side.” Stalin had been compelled again and again to battle against deviations: Communists kept losing their way. These were not petty squabbles among personalities, but battles over correct theory. People who misunderstood theory made mistakes, such as opposing collectivization. He told the propagandists not to fear if some comrades did not enter the kingdom of socialism.

“And so, to whom is this book addressed?” Stalin summarized. “To cadres, and to rank-and-file workers at factories—not to rank-and-file white-collar employees in agencies, but to those cadres about whom Lenin said they are professional revolutionaries. The book is addressed to leading cadres.”¹¹² But in the discussion of Stalin’s remarks, some attendees dared to note the difficulties of assimilating the text. A. B. Shlyonsky, for example, called the Short Course “an encyclopedia of everything known about matters of Marxism-Leninism,” but he wondered where the heroes were. He suggested a need for materials to supplement the text with stories of individuals.¹¹³ Stalin, mentioning Shlyonsky by name, retorted that “we were presented with this sort of draft text [with heroes] and we revised it fundamentally. The draft text was based for the most part on exemplary individuals—those who were the most heroic, those who escaped from exile and how many times they escaped, those who suffered in the name of the cause.” But, Stalin continued, “can we really use such a thing to train and educate our cadres? We ought to base our cadres’ training on ideas, on theory . . . knowledge of the laws of historical development. If we possess such knowledge, then we’ll have real cadres, but if people do not possess this knowledge, they will not be cadres—they will be just empty spaces. . . . It is ideas that really matter, not individuals—ideas, in a theoretical context.”¹¹⁴

• • •

ON SEPTEMBER 30, 1938, around 9:30 a.m. local time (11:30 a.m. in Moscow), eight hours after the signing of the Munich Pact but well before German troops had entered Czechoslovakia, Beneš phoned the Soviet ambassador and inquired whether the Czechoslovaks should take arms and, by implication, whether the USSR would back them in a war even without the French. He asked for an answer between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. local time. Given the repeated negative signals over the previous two weeks, this action is not easy to comprehend. The Soviet ambassador drove to Prague Castle to seek further information, but Beneš was meeting with the cabinet and leaders of political parties. Around 11:45 a.m. local time, the Soviet legation cabled the Czechoslovak president’s query to Moscow.¹¹⁵ Before Moscow replied, Alexandrovsky cabled the foreign affairs commissariat again, at 1:40 p.m. Prague time, to report that Beneš had already accepted the Munich diktat (he had done so at 12:30 p.m. local time).¹¹⁶ The foreign affairs commissariat suspected that Beneš had wanted to claim that his hand had been forced because of the absence of a Soviet reply.¹¹⁷ He in fact made no such claim, though he had to have been tempted. More likely, Beneš did not want to give up. The Czechoslovak high command had told him that the army stood ready to fight, with or without allies. Had Beneš ordered the formidable Czechoslovak divisions into action against Germany, he might have forced Stalin’s hand, and that of the French government, too. The Czechoslovak president chose not to take the gamble.¹¹⁸

Stalin remained at the gathering of propagandists, where his frustrations had been building daily, and on October 1, the concluding day, he vented in a lengthy soliloquy. “Comrades, I thought that the assembled comrades would help the Central Committee and furnish some serious criticism,” he remarked. “Unfortunately, I must say that the criticism turned out to be not serious, not deep, and straight-out unsatisfactory in places.” He condemned the complaints that this or that fact was missing from the text, when the point was to capture the general tendency. “He who would study Leninism and Lenin should study Marx and Engels,” he reiterated. “Lenin arrived at new thoughts because he stood on the shoulders of Marx and Engels.” Stalin narrated the entire history of the party, in detail, from origins, like an agitator of the first rank. He could also turn playful. “It’s often asked: What’s the deal? Marx and Engels said that as soon as proletarian power is established and nationalizes the means of production, the state should wither. What the hell? It does not wither? Its death is overdue. We’ve lived twenty years, the means of production have been nationalized, and you don’t want to wither. (Laughter.)” In fact, he explained, no one had foreseen that the revolution would give birth to a new form of power. “Of course, the Petersburg proletariat, when they created soviets [of people’s deputies], did not think that they were conducting a turnabout in Marxist theory about the specific forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They just wanted to defend themselves against tsarism.” In The Communist Manifesto, which Stalin deemed “one of the best if not the best writing of Marx and Engels,” the founders had based their view of the state on the two months of the Paris Commune. “An experience of two months!” What would they have said, he asked, if they could study the twenty years of Soviet power?

Stalin had been wrestling with the problem of the state under socialism throughout the terror. Now he enumerated the state’s functions: maximizing production and military defense by mobilizing the country’s resources. Only a professional army, he pointed out, could stand up to the armies of the capitalists.¹¹⁹ He made clear that success could not be guaranteed by his leadership alone, or by the 3,000 or so officials who composed what he called the “general staff” of the party-state. “Do not think that governing a country means just writing directives,” he reiterated. “Bollocks. To govern means to do things for real, to be able to carry out the resolutions in practice, and even sometimes to improve the resolutions if they are bad.” In other words, reading the Short Course was going to facilitate handling the confounding challenges of planning and running an entire industrial economy, the complicated operations and logistics of preparing a gigantic army for battle, ensuring that every school building and schoolchild was ready for the school year or graduation. “We need to direct this book to that intelligentsia, in order to give party members and non-party members, who are not worse than party members, the opportunity to acquire knowledge and raise their horizon, their political level. . . . That’s everything. (Rousing applause. Shouts: Hurrah to the Wise Stalin.)”¹²⁰

Pravda (October 1, 1938) had directed its wrath over Czechoslovakia at Poland, predicting a new Polish partition (it was “well known that the German fascists have long been keen on some parts of Poland”). In fact, that very day, the government in Warsaw delivered an ultimatum, with a twenty-four-hour deadline, to Czechoslovakia to hand over two thirds of that country’s partially ethnic Polish territory in coal-rich Silesia known as Těšín (Cieszyn) and Fryštát (Freistadt); Prague capitulated, rendering a Polish attack unnecessary.¹²¹ “An exceptionally bold action carried out in brilliant fashion,” Göring enthused to the Polish ambassador. The Polish envoy in Germany imagined “that our step was deemed here such an expression of great strength and independent action that it is a true guarantee of our good relations with the government of the Reich.”¹²² Stalin knew that Poland’s 1938 war games had been defensive in character, but the collusion in Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment, in his thinking, put Poland on a plane with Nazi Germany.¹²³ Poland had ignored Soviet warnings, although the Polish ambassador to Moscow reassured the Soviets that “the guiding line of Polish foreign policy is the status quo: nothing with Germany against the USSR and nothing with the USSR against Germany.”¹²⁴ Still, the Soviets let it be known that the Poles were engaged in a dangerous game: there were more than 6 million Ukrainians and 2 million Belorussians in Poland.

• • •

CZECHOSLOVAKIA, AFTER AUSTRIA, became the second great collective missed opportunity of 1938. Very late on the night of October 2, 1938, after Germany and now Poland had carved up Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union—diplomatically silent for more than thirty-six hours—delivered an affirmative response to the Czechoslovak president’s request for unilateral Soviet military support. Moscow’s absurdly tardy response, the pinnacle of cynicism, even rebuked Beneš for having failed to fight Germany.¹²⁵ Japan’s military brass were crestfallen that Munich had defused a European war, which they had hoped would diminish European backing for Chiang Kai-shek and compel his capitulation.¹²⁶ As for Hitler, despite the windfall of territory, population, and industry, he had been denied a battlefield triumph, settling for his ostensible aim (the Sudetenland), as opposed to his real one (all of Czechoslovakia).¹²⁷ France’s perceptive military attaché in Berlin rightly reported to Paris that the Führer viewed Munich as a defeat, and that the Nazis wanted to ramp up propaganda to combat “the profound lassitude which the German people demonstrated when faced with the prospect of another war.”¹²⁸

Back in London, Chamberlain, appearing in front of exuberant crowds on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with the king and queen, and again outside his official residence at 10 Downing Street, hailed the Munich Pact as “peace for our time.”¹²⁹ Izvestiya (October 4, 1938) acidly wrote, “It is the first time we know of that the seizure of someone else’s territory, the shift of borders guaranteed by international treaties to foreign armies, is nothing less than a ‘triumph’ or ‘victory’ for peace.” How often did the Soviet press carry the truth? But for Stalin, too, Munich was a defeat. The German ambassador to the Soviet Union had correctly reported to Berlin the sour mood in Moscow.¹³⁰ Soviet inaction—however the Kremlin justified it—damaged the country’s international standing. Munich also starkly demonstrated Soviet international friendlessness while militarily opening a clear path eastward for Hitler. “History tells us,” Stalin himself had observed in an interview with Roy Howard back in 1936, “that when a state wishes to attack a state with which it does not share a border, it begins to create new borders until it neighbors the state it wishes to attack.”¹³¹

Hitler had aggressively shifted his borders farther eastward, in Stalin’s direction, and the Western powers had acquiesced. “The second imperialist war has already started,” reemphasized the twelfth and final chapter of the Short Course. “The characteristic aspect of the second imperialist war is that it is carried on and widened by the aggressive powers, while the other powers, the ‘democratic’ ones, against whom the war is being waged, pretend that the war does not concern them.”¹³² Shrewdly, the Polish ambassador to London, Count Edward Raczyński, likened the 1938 Munich Pact to a football match wherein Chamberlain had defended the British goal and shifted “play” to Stalin’s side of the pitch. Litvinov was said to have exclaimed, according to the NKVD, that the deal handing Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to the Nazis portended “an attack on us. . . . War is coming. The one small hope is that Germany somehow rethinks. Perhaps someone will persuade Hitler.”¹³³

Stalin’s murderous rampage, however, had put out of action his nonpareil spy network in Germany. Zelman Passov (b. 1905), the recently appointed head of the NKVD intelligence, who had completed three grades of primary schooling, wrote that “during such sharpening of the international situation, such as the [German] preparations for the seizure of Austria [and] Czechoslovakia, the foreign department [espionage] did not have one agent communication, not a single piece of information, out of Germany.”¹³⁴

• • •

STALIN WAS NOT FINISHED with the Short Course. On October 11–12, 1938, he convened a two-day expanded session of the politburo (an ersatz Central Committee plenum), tasking Zhdanov with delivering the main report. For the first time since 1935, a stenographic record was kept of a politburo session, indicating an intention to circulate the discussion to party members not present. In attendance was the new crop of regional bosses, most of whose predecessors had been put to death. “Did everyone read it, we need to ask, and what are the remarks?” Stalin inquired of the textbook. Molotov chimed in: “Are there comrades who did not read the draft?” Voices: “No, everyone read it.” Troshin, from the Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) province party committee, spoke up: “Many propagandists and district secretaries at the courses say that they understand chapter 4 [“dialectical materialism”] . . . only with the greatest difficulty.” Stalin angrily interjected: “That means they have read nothing—not Marx, not Engels.” Molotov chided the Gorky comrades for not being able to find a few agitators capable of delivering explanatory lectures. But Oleksandr Khomenko, the head of the propaganda department in the Kiev province party, also said the text was not easy, citing a colleague. Molotov: “If the comrade had earlier read and really knew the history of the party, why are insurmountable difficulties arising for him now?” Khomenko: “He knew the history of the party, comrade Molotov, in terms of those textbooks which we had, and those textbooks were manifestly unsatisfactory.” Stalin erupted again: “So it happens like this: some study the history of the party but do not consider themselves obliged to study Marx; others study dialectical materialism and do not consider themselves obliged to study the history of the party.”

The party officials whom Stalin had promoted to replace those he had murdered were telling him the truth: they could not manage the Short Course intended especially for them.

Stalin asked for the floor. He stressed how, back before 1929, small individual household farms had become predominant, how the establishment of large-scale collectivized farms had been a matter of national survival, and how only Marxism-Leninism allowed one to understand all this. “If cadres determine everything, and that means cadres who work with their intellect, cadres who administer the country, and if these cadres turn out to be politically weakly grounded, that means the state is threatened with danger,” he warned, giving as an example the Bukharinites, calling “their top layer” irredeemable foreign agents. “But besides the heads, Bukharin and others, there were masses of them, and not all of them were spies and foreign intelligence operatives.” Stalin continued: “One may assume that 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, and more were people of Bukharin. One may assume that just as many, and maybe more, were people of Trotskyism. What do you think, were all of them spies? Of course not.”

Here was a startling admission two years into a mass terror that had seen some 1.6 million arrests. “What had happened to them?” Stalin continued. “These were cadres who could not swallow the big changeover to the collective farm system, could not comprehend this big changeover, because they were not politically well grounded; they did not know the laws of development of society, the laws of economic development, the laws of political development.” He allowed that “we lost many, but we acquired new cadres who won over the people to collectivization and won over the peasant. Only this explains why we were able so easily to replace yesterday’s party elite.”¹³⁵

He returned, in conclusion, to collectivization: “The key is the chapter about why we went for collective farms. What was this? Was it the caprice of the leaders, the [ideological] itch of the leaders, who (so we are told) read through Marx, drew conclusions, and then, if you please, restructured the whole country according to those conclusions? Was collectivization just something invented—or was it necessity? Those who didn’t understand a damn thing about economics—all those rightists, who didn’t have the slightest understanding of our society either theoretically or economically, nor the slightest understanding of the laws of historical development, nor the essence of Marxism—they could say such things as suggesting that we turn away from the collective farms and take the capitalist path of development in agriculture.”¹³⁶ The Short Course reconfirmed that the terror emanated from Stalin’s mind, not as a response to crisis but as a theory of Soviet history and his rule: party opposition to collectivization, a new generation of functionaries, pedagogy.

• • •

THE SOVIET POLITICAL landscape resembled a huge forest full of charred stumps as a wildfire raged on ahead, but Stalin, who had set that fire, was still heaping oil on it long after its catastrophic consequences had become manifest. Finally, however, with the September–October 1938 rollout of the Short Course, the training manual for those who had been chosen to go forward (or just got lucky), the mass terror was, in an important sense, complete—and not a moment too soon. Stalin had been barefacedly manipulating the threat of war and foreign intervention to impose and justify this terror, but his murders had shaken the Red Army to its core.¹³⁷ And now Munich: not the threat of some abstract war at some point, but right here, right now.¹³⁸ The danger to the USSR evidently was grave enough that on October 8, 1938, not long after having demonstrably mobilized the Red Army for possible use against Poland, Stalin had Potyomkin tell the ambassador from Poland—which had just seized a piece of Czechoslovakia in the teeth of Moscow’s warnings not to do so—that “no hand extended to the Soviets would be left hanging in the air.”¹³⁹ So much for Stalin’s threat to invalidate the Soviet-Polish nonaggression pact.¹⁴⁰ Poland, too, had been excluded from the deliberations at Munich, but Berlin and Warsaw were in talks.

Supplication of Poland was not Stalin’s only conspicuous immediate post-Munich action: a mere eight days after the pact had slapped him across the face, he had also quietly formed a “commission” to investigate arrests by the NKVD. It was made up of the party functionaries Andreyev and Malenkov, as well as Beria and Vyshinsky, and nominally chaired by Yezhov.¹⁴¹ This heralded the beginning of the end of the mass terror.

Yezhov’s men understood that Stalin was moving to bring the Yezhov era at the NKVD to a close. On November 12, 1938, the same week as Marshal Blyukher’s death at Beria’s hands in Lefortovo prison, Mikhail Litvin, Yezhov’s right hand, shot himself. Two days later, the Ukraine NKVD chief, Uspensky—who was also close to Yezhov—composed a suicide note, had his wife purchase him a train ticket eastward to Voronezh, deposited some clothes on the banks of the Dnieper, and fled to Moscow, bringing wads of rubles, to hide at his mistress’s apartment. When the money ran out, she kicked him out, and Uspensky headed north to Arkhangelsk, hoping to sign up for logging work, anonymously. Stalin told Khrushchev in Kiev, over the phone, that Yezhov, taking advantage of the NKVD’s responsibility for the security of the government communication system, must have listened in on the despot’s previous call to Khrushchev about arresting Uspensky and then tipped him off.¹⁴² The day after Uspensky’s flight, Stalin, receiving his minions in the Little Corner, had a decree approved disbanding the assembly-line death sentence troikas.¹⁴³ On November 17, he summoned Vyshinsky for a “report,” after which the despot issued another decree in the politburo’s name, justifying the terror but blaming the NKVD for “a host of major deficiencies and distortions.”¹⁴⁴

Just like that, without public acknowledgment, with a few pieces of paper in the Little Corner, the mass terror was halted. Coincidence? The terror supposedly was aimed at rooting out enemies lying in wait for a war, but then, at what would appear to be maximum international war danger for the USSR, Stalin suddenly moved to end the mass arrests. Had he become less paranoid? Was it just that he had been waiting for completion of a Short Course? Or was he jolted by events portending actual danger?¹⁴⁵ We cannot definitively establish his motivations. But in the wake of Munich, the despot, in his sixty-first year, had reached a crossroads.

• • •

HENRY KISSINGER, IN his magisterial Diplomacy (1988), deemed Stalin “the supreme realist—patient, shrewd, and implacable.”¹⁴⁶ That is not the Stalin readers have encountered in this book. He often showed himself to be a shrewd operator forced to make difficult choices to defend the interests of his country, but he was never that alone. Just as often, the hard choices that confronted him had been created by his own blunders and gratuitous mayhem. Stalin cannot plausibly be portrayed as a clear-eyed realpolitiker abroad and unhinged mass murderer at home; he was the same calculating, distrustful mind in both cases. Throughout the massacres, he remained thoroughly, passionately engaged in foreign policy, devoted in his way to the cause of the Soviet state and the cause of socialism. He was an ideologue and would-be statesman who forced socialism into being through massive violence—the only way complete anticapitalism could have been achieved—and this building of socialism, in turn, made him the full sociopath he became. Now collectivization was behind him, and the mass terror against his own elites and others mostly behind him, but Hitler was in front of him. Stalin was defiant toward the Western powers and solicitous toward Germany, but fearful of an all-imperialist anti-Soviet coalition incorporating Nazi Germany, too. The resulting pas de trois—Chamberlain, Hitler, Stalin—became, in effect, a Chamberlain-versus-Stalin contest to win over Hitler. Stalin would be put to the supreme test. The stakes were the survival not just of his regime but of the country.