Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

CHAPTER 10 HAMMER

They arrested my first secretary, then they arrested the second. . . . They arrested my first aide. A Ukrainian, also from the workers. He was not especially literate, but I could rely on him as an honest person. They arrested him, it seems they put a lot of pressure on him, but he did not want to say a thing and threw himself down the elevator shaft at the NKVD. That’s the way it was with all my staff.

VYACHESLAV MOLOTOV (“Hammer”) ¹

THE FORMER AVIATOR NIKOLAI SHPANOV, in his novella The First Blow: A Story About the Future War, published in early 1939 in the thick journal Banner, then as a book in the Library of a Commander series, named Nazi Germany as the country’s principal foe.² The action revolved around Soviet Air Force Day (August 18) in an unspecified future year. People are observing a Soviet pilot’s exploits at an air show when suddenly, over loudspeakers, at precisely 5:00 p.m., they hear that Luftwaffe warplanes have violated the Soviet frontier. Within one minute, Soviet fighters are challenging the Germans in the skies. Only twenty-nine minutes later, the last surviving German plane has fled Soviet airspace. The Red Air Force then mounts a lightning counterattack with 700 state-of-the-art planes into Germany’s industrial rear. As bombers reach an aircraft factory at Nuremberg, German workers break out into “L’Internationale” in solidarity. Already the next morning, Soviet ground troops have smashed across the frontier. Quick victory comes with little loss of Soviet life. Vsevolod Vishnevsky, in a review, deemed the book “valuable, interesting, profoundly germane,” and explained that “it entertainingly speaks about how the Soviet people will fight a just war against aggressors, a war that will be fatal for the enemies of socialism.”³

Outside this dream palace, Stalin faced a harsher, ideology-inflected version of the security dilemma that had bedeviled his tsarist predecessors: a now even more aggressive German power on the European continent and a now even more aggressive, militarist Japan moving onto the Asian mainland—two flanking powers that were now formally allied. In Europe, he could keep trying to secure a deal with anti-Communist France and Britain, in order to try to deter Germany, or keep pursuing a deal somehow with Nazi Germany to try to redirect German ambitions westward. In the Far East, no such deal with the United States or Britain seemed even theoretically possible. Stalin had kept Litvinov in place, despite Yezhov’s predations against the foreign affairs commissariat (which Beria would continue).⁴ “We sometimes prefer to be isolated rather than to go along with the bad actions of others,” Litvinov had written to Maisky in London, “and that is why isolation does not frighten us.”⁵ But such a retreat into “fortress Russia”—a temptation also indulged by the party’s chief ideologue, Zhdanov—afforded Stalin little comfort: the British and the Nazis could join in a deal against the Soviet Union, turning Soviet “isolation” deadly. Had that not been the significance of Munich?⁶

German and Italian planes, following General Franco’s directives, had sunk 10 British-registered merchant ships and seriously damaged 37 more that were en route to Spanish Republic ports, but even after outrage had erupted in the House of Commons, Neville Chamberlain had merely told his Tory cabinet that if Franco “must bomb the Spanish [Republic] government ports he must use discretion and that otherwise he might arouse a feeling in this country which would force the government to take action.”⁷ Franco had sent a letter to Chamberlain thanking him for his “friendship” and underscoring how both leaders stood for “world peace.” In Stalin’s mind, Spain had starkly illuminated not only the limits of Soviet relations with the West, but also the expansiveness of British-French accommodation with “fascism” (Germany, Italy, and a Francoist Spain). Conversely, the limited but bloody purges inside the Spanish Republic further reinforced doubts among the Western powers about security cooperation with Stalin.

Unlike Litvinov—no less a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist—Stalin refused to distinguish between the imperialists, as either “pacific” (democratic) or “aggressor” (fascist). He divided the world into just two camps, and for him, as for Lenin, all diplomacy amounted to two-faced intercourse with enemies.⁸ This stance facilitated a flexible readiness to contemplate either of two diametric opposites: the expedient of “collective security” with the “democratic” capitalists, in Litvinov’s parlance, or détente with the “fascists.” Post-Munich, Stalin would renew the Soviet efforts at negotiations with Britain and France against Germany. Simultaneously, he would ramp up his so far failed stratagems to reach rapprochement with Hitler’s Germany, despite the venom about “Judeo-Bolshevism” out of Berlin.⁹ But the image of a wily Stalin brilliantly keeping his options open, to extract maximum advantage, is belied by the fact that neither Hitler nor Chamberlain proved at all forthcoming. Europe’s collective security dilemma, drawing in Japan, had deep structural foundations.

PERSONALITIES, REGIMES

In London, far too many British officials labored under the delusion that “moderates,” such as Göring, existed in the Nazi hierarchy and could act as restraining influences on Hitler.¹⁰ Some British officials held the view, largely originating with Nevile Henderson, the ambassador to Berlin, that Hitler was like Jekyll and Hyde: normally cautious and reasonable, but given to flying off the handle if provoked or humiliated. Others speculated that, like all dictators, he engaged in “foreign adventurism” to quiet domestic dissatisfaction.¹¹ Still others subscribed to the view that his seemingly impetuous actions were driven by economic crisis, a view picked up from disaffected Germans.¹² In Moscow, too, next to nothing of Hitler’s personality or the operation of his regime was well understood, beyond his uncanny success and Western indulgence of it.¹³ Walter Krivitsky, a Soviet intelligence officer (born Samuel “Shmelka” Ginsberg in Austro-Hungarian Galicia), had defected to the West and, in 1938, in the most authoritative Russian émigré newspaper and then in The Saturday Evening Post, predicted an imminent deal between Stalin and Hitler. Krivitsky had divulged secret Soviet flirtations, aiming “to convince German leaders of the genuineness of Stalin’s own intentions, of his readiness to commit himself quite far in bringing about a rapprochement.”¹⁴ But Krivitsky failed to acknowledge how all of Stalin’s backdoor and front-door intermediaries with Nazi Germany had made no headway.

Hitler’s early circumstances had been nowhere near as humble as Stalin’s. (Hitler’s father, a senior customs official in the Habsburg empire, earned roughly the same salary as a school principal, and then enjoyed a handsome pension.)¹⁵ But Hitler, too, had not completed his basic education, let alone attended university. No less a striver than Stalin, he had assembled an extensive private library, but he delighted in melodramas, the occult, German translations of Shakespeare, Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great, Henry Ford’s four-volume The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.¹⁶ (Albert Speer would dub Hitler a “genius of dilettantism.”) The Führer showed little interest in foreign languages or travel beyond Germany. His passions were architecture, painting, cinema, classical music, boxing, roadside picnics, and high-speed motoring in his Mercedes-Benz, sitting up front next to his chauffeur. (Hitler could not drive.) He railed against those who put on what he perceived as intellectual airs, feared committing a faux pas among more refined people, basked in the least signs of others’ approval, and did not hide his megalomania. “I believe,” he had written, echoing Napoleon, “my life is the greatest novel in world history.”

Some contemporaries attributed Hitler’s interminably long monologues, with quivering lips, to an effort to conceal his inadequacies, rather than a proclivity to get carried away, for he could also restrain himself and come across as an amiable conversationalist. He felt most at ease at reunions of the Munich “street brawlers” from the years of Nazism’s rise, but he saw them only once a year. He confided fully in no one. (“Just as I never got close to him, I never observed anyone else doing so, either,” Joachim von Ribbentrop would recall.) Hitler enjoyed unguarded relations only with the Wagner clan in Bayreuth and the family of his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, through whom Hitler had met Eva Braun (when she was then seventeen, he forty). She eventually became his de facto wife and, although blond and blue-eyed, was secretly checked for Jewish ancestry on Hitler’s orders. (She proved to be “Aryan.”)¹⁷ Hitler ate no meat, smoked no cigarettes, and rarely consumed alcohol, but he enjoyed cakes and lumping sugar into his tea (he suffered from dental problems). He exercised in order to hold his right arm upward for long stretches and, despising perspiration, took multiple baths each day. He had insomnia, eczema on his legs and feet (making it uncomfortable to wear boots), and gastric pains. A bout of stomach cramps would set him ranting about death from cancer. His mother had died at age forty-seven, and he told confidants he was fated to die young as well. (In May 1938, following the Anschluss, he dictated a private will.)¹⁸ He ingested pills, prescribed by his quack doctor, but suspected that kitchen staff aimed to assassinate him (the pots were guarded). He carried a pistol, even as he was surrounded by commandos. He was given to uncontrolled farting.

Hitler can look like a crude and banal figure who inexplicably took over a highly industrialized, culturally advanced, politically sophisticated country, but he had proved to be an astute student of German mass sentiment. He attracted followers partly with his consummate acting skills. He cultivated an image of simplicity and humility, did not carry a wallet, and favored military uniforms, while forgoing any medals other than his Iron Cross First Class and Golden Party Emblem. He possessed a phenomenal memory. He also evinced a talent for mimicking people and situations. “In order to depict the barrage of the first day at the Battle of the Somme more vividly,” Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl would recall, “he used a large repertoire of the firing, descent, and impact noises made by French, English, and German howitzers and mortars, the general impression of which he would vividly augment by imitating the hammering tack-tack of the machine guns.”¹⁹

The Führer had commissioned an imposing new chancellor’s complex in Berlin, dismissing the existing one as “fit for a soap company.” The monumental edifice, with 400 rooms, readied in less than a year, was fronted by square columns and seventeen-foot-high double doors, which were flanked by gilded bronze and stone eagles clutching swastikas in their talons. The building’s 480-foot-long upper-floor Marble Gallery, which led to a grand hall for receptions, was twice the length of the Versailles Hall of Mirrors. “On the long walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Hitler boasted to his architect, Albert Speer, “they’ll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!” Hitler, meanwhile, lived in the old “soap” building, using its modest study as his main working office. But off the new Chancellery’s Marble Gallery stood the Führer’s vast “study,” for the audiences he granted, with portraits of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Wisdom above the four doors. Hitler’s lengthy afternoon meals at the Chancellery (beginning at 2:00 or 3:00) involved up to fifty people; they merely had to telephone the adjutant to say they’d be coming—without being summoned. These were not Germany’s military brass or industrialists, but the inner court of Reichsleiters and Gauleiters and old party comrades, often from Munich. Evening suppers were more intimate still, comprising six to eight persons—Hitler’s doctor, photographer, pilot, radioman, private secretary (Martin Bormann)—where, according to Speer, “usually Hitler would tell stories about his life.”²⁰

Frequently, though, Hitler was absent from Berlin, seeking refuge at his Bavarian alpine retreat, the Berghof, where he relished holding forth on race and global conquest in table talks. Like Stalin, Hitler fretted about being alone. (“Hitler needs to have people around him,” Goebbels had observed early on. “Otherwise he broods too much.”)²¹ But unlike Stalin, the Führer was unwilling or incapable of submitting to routine. Nazi Germany was a scrum of divergent interests—party, army, bureaucratic fiefdoms, private industry—with a proliferation of ad hoc agencies and plenipotentiaries.²² Hitler refused to chair committees or agencies, and often went lengthy periods without summoning officials.²³ After February 5, 1938, the infrequent cabinet meetings had ceased altogether. Hitler’s diligence went into preparing the texts for his speeches, which he rewrote with fountain pen after dictating a first draft, and into military affairs. But he awoke late and appeared at work well after noon, glancing through clippings assembled by the Reich press chief, then repairing to “breakfast” and avoiding his own officials. (“I asked myself often: when did he really work?” recalled Speer.)²⁴ His desk was empty, and he almost never worked at it. (“For him, desks were mere pieces of decoration,” the head of the Hitler Youth recalled.) Reports went unread. “He disliked reading files,” recalled Fritz Wiedemann, who in the 1930s served as Hitler’s adjutant. “I got decisions out of him, even on very important matters, without his ever asking me for the relevant papers. He took the view that many things sorted themselves out if they were left alone.”²⁵

Stalin’s regime, too, was beset by improvisation, but the despot devoured documents and, even when away from Moscow down south, used the telephone, telegraph, and field couriers assiduously.²⁶ One comes away flabbergasted not by learning what went on without Stalin’s involvement, but by the quantity of information he managed to command and the number of spheres in which he intervened. He had terminated the increasingly infrequent formal meetings of the politburo, but he was as obsessively hands-on as Hitler was sometimes disengaged. Stalin read and affixed written directives; Hitler conducted state affairs mostly by talking, and his interlocutors—sometimes an oddly assembled bunch—would piece together decisions from the ramblings or try to get him to confirm them later. For all that, no small degree of coordination took place through the Chancellery and the Führer conferences. He hesitated to intervene in bureaucratic struggles to avoid being caught up in unpopular decisions and festering resentments.²⁷ On the issues of greatest importance to Hitler, from foreign affairs to the Jewish question, he encouraged the involvement of multiple agencies. He would sometimes set the players against one another, in “a carefully balanced system of mutual enmity,” as Speer would note. Oscillating between freneticism and lethargy, Hitler tended to postpone the most difficult decisions, biting his fingernails while others waited and waited. “Sometimes,” one secretary recalled, “he would stop and stare silently at Lenbach’s portrait of Bismarck, lost in thought and collecting himself before he started to wander around again.”²⁸

Stalin sometimes took the wives of his top officials hostage and arrested and executed their aides; Hitler allowed pre-1933 comrades—Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, a few others—to build power centers within the state.²⁹ Hitler showed awareness of the need to indulge the preferences of elites and powerful bodies. Supposedly, his style of rule incited minions to forge ahead with initiatives in the hope of anticipating his wishes and earning favor, in what has been called “working toward the Führer,” but that was possible only in certain spheres, and when Hitler became cognizant of underlings’ efforts to take such initiatives, he often intervened to stop them.³⁰ Stalin’s micromanagement and flashes of anger largely precluded proactive risk taking in the first place. Local officials almost always awaited explicit instructions, which, however, often turned out to be impossible to fulfill, so they began a process not of “working toward the vozhd,” but cat and mouse (circumventions, prevarications, concealment), which drove Stalin’s desire to clamp down further. The Soviet political machine often suffered paralysis not from Hitler-style ostensible aloofness but from extreme centralization and dependency on a single person who just could not do everything. In the end, whether at the Little Corner or the Near or Sochi dacha, the Chancellery or the Berghof mountain hideaway, everything revolved around the Person. Every functionary’s dream was to serve as Hitler’s or Stalin’s personal representative—the authority for a designated sphere of activity.

BERIA’S TAKEOVER

Yezhov could have schemed to flee abroad, dealing a blow to the Soviet state and paying Stalin back for mistreatment, but instead he retreated to his dacha. On November 19, 1938, the “politburo” summoned the NKVD commissar to the Little Corner, where, from 11:10 p.m. until 4:20 a.m., they discussed a denunciation of him that Beria had orchestrated from a provincial NKVD boss (Viktor Zhuravlyov).³¹ Yezhov wrote a letter to Stalin, which he likely ended up not sending, saying that “the past two years of tense, highly strung work have acutely strained my whole nervous system.”³² He was accused of having permitted foreign spies to capture Soviet espionage. On November 23, Yezhov was again in Stalin’s office, where he had logged nearly 900 hours over the previous two years, but these three and a half would be his last: Stalin edited Yezhov’s resignation.³³ On November 25, the despot sent a telegram to all regional party secretaries referring to Zhuravlyov’s denunciation of NKVD errors and noting that “the Central Committee had granted Yezhov’s request to resign.”³⁴ Pravda printed a delayed announcement, on its back page (December 8). Executing the NKVD chief could throw into doubt the mass arrests and executions. For now, Stalin retained Yezhov as a Central Committee secretary, chairman of the party Control Commission, and water transport commissar.

Beria, even as deputy NKVD chief, had arrested 332 NKVD leadership personnel between September and December 1938, including 140 in the central apparatus and 18 of the NKVD commissars in Union and autonomous republics. NKVD operatives still on the job became disoriented.³⁵ So did military men. “Now, if you notice or unmask an enemy, there’s no one to inform about it, because the higher the boss, the more likely he’s an enemy of the people,” one Red Army political worker complained. “You have to ask: Who can you believe, and to whom do you report?” Another asked who the enemy was: the person who got arrested or the person who did the arresting?³⁶ At the same time, hopeful letters poured in as people logically assumed that their cases—which had been falsified—would be overturned. At the defense commissariat alone, nearly 2,000 such letters were being received every day.

As NKVD chief, Beria insinuated himself deeply into the regime. Initially, he had brought just a handful of his gang to Moscow, including Vsevolod Merkulov, a graduate of St. Petersburg University and the son of an aristocrat tsarist officer, and son-in-law of a tsarist general (who had served as war minister in the Provisional Government). Merkulov was the only ethnic Russian among Beria’s Caucasus subordinates, and Beria named him first deputy in Moscow. Another was Bogdan Kobulov (b. 1904), a Tbilisi Armenian who had been expelled from the Communist Youth League and arrested for rape in 1921, but became an informant for, and then an operative in, the secret police; Kobulov became deputy chief of the investigation department. But when annihilation of Yezhovites opened up expansive vistas for Beria’s people, he summoned many others from the Caucasus: Lavrenti Janjava, known as Tsanava (b. 1900), who had been expelled from the party in 1922 for abducting a bride (he was reinstated the next year) and became NKVD chief in Belorussia; Goglidze (b. 1901), who would be given the Leningrad NKVD; Solomon Milstein (b. 1898), descended from a wealthy trading family of Vilnius Jews (most of whom had fled abroad after the revolution), who began as deputy head of investigation but would get the new NKVD rail transport department; and Vladimir Dekanozov (b. 1898), who would get a series of high posts.³⁷

Georgians in the NKVD in Moscow would jump from 3.13 percent (January 1938)—already nearly double their weight in the overall population—to 7.84 percent (July 1939).³⁸ Georgians aside, Beria’s NKVD saw a dramatic reduction in minorities, especially Jews, and promotion of ethnic Russians.³⁹ Regime officials who had once looked to Yezhov as someone who would clean up the antiparty actions and mistakes of his predecessor viewed Beria as someone who would do the same. Releases of some people arrested under Yezhov reinforced such illusions. Stalin got credit for correcting his mistaken trust in Yezhov, and for a new, vigorous, loyal top official.⁴⁰ Beria’s power came to exist on a completely different plane from Yezhov’s or Yagoda’s. Stalin, however, made sure to have non-Beriaites inserted into key positions (Sergei Kruglov, who had been on Malenkov’s list of possible NKVD first deputy chiefs, got the critical post of head of NKVD personnel).⁴¹ Stalin also directed Beria to turn in the documents regarding his role in the Musavat; Beria had Merkulov collect and deliver them.⁴²

BUCK-PASSING

Stalin had shattered his own remarkable spy network: of the 450 secret police officials stationed abroad, at least 275 had been arrested by his regime.⁴³ In January 1939, the despot was informed that “the USSR NKVD does not have a single spy coordinator [rezident] abroad and not one proven agent. The work of the NKVD foreign department practically is destroyed and in essence needs to be organized from scratch.”⁴⁴ Similarly, the acting chief of the key western department of the separate agency for military intelligence reported that “the Red Army is essentially without an intelligence arm. The agent networks, which are the basis of intelligence, have almost all been liquidated.”⁴⁵ In truth, recruited foreign agents and underground informants were still out there, but, with a few key exceptions, such as the German embassies in Warsaw and Tokyo, they lacked handlers to receive information. Beria would work to reconstitute espionage.

Even with good espionage, Hitler remained difficult to gauge: how far would he actually go? How far could he really go? He had started from tremendous relative weakness. Germany had lost a war, it lacked an army, navy, air force, or financial prowess, and Hitler’s actions were necessarily full of zigs and zags, opportunistic, hard to read. He decried unfair treatment of his country, made “concessions,” talked ceaselessly of nonaggression pacts and peace. His vision was vague enough to allow people to see it as just an overheated version of long-standing German nationalism.⁴⁶ Indeed, the Nazis’ ultimate goals—eradicating a supposed global Jewish conspiracy; complete German racial dominance of Europe—seemed so improbable that even some minions in the know could scarcely believe Hitler actually meant them in full.⁴⁷ The Munich-born Konrad Heiden had published, in exile, the first serous biography of Hitler, in two volumes in 1936–37, arguing that Germany’s raw materials and food base would be insufficient for taking on the European continent, especially because any new conflict, like the previous one, would be long. Heiden also predicted that Hitler’s rearmament would provoke counter-rearmament and alliances against Germany.⁴⁸ But by early 1939, no such blocking coalition had formed.

For Stalin, rapprochement with the Western imperialists had always been a dangerous game full of illusions: the capitalists could never be trusted because they could never permanently accept the existence of Soviet power. Like Lenin, he held in contempt any promises the imperialists might make. Just as Poland’s Piłsudski had once used the Soviet Union’s courtship to obtain a nonaggression declaration with the supposedly anti-Polish Nazi regime, the British would play the same game, using negotiations with Stalin to obtain a deal with Hitler. If Britain and Germany had joined forces before 1914, they could have destroyed Russia as a world power.⁴⁹ Preventing just such a mésalliance between London and Berlin had become Stalin’s fixation. He had received a continuous flow of intelligence about the relentless British efforts to cozy up to Germany and divert it in the direction of the USSR almost from the moment of Hitler’s accession to power.⁵⁰ British officials harbored the exact suspicion in reverse, perceiving Stalin’s interest in negotiations with them as a ploy to win his own deal with Hitler while “stealthily and cunningly pulling all the strings behind the scenes to get us involved in war with Germany,” as Chamberlain had privately remarked to one of his sisters), when the real quarrel, to British thinking, was between Nazism and Communism.⁵¹

Many members of the British establishment detested the Bolsheviks as incubators of colonial revolutionaries who threatened the British empire, and they viewed Russia as semibarbarous, run by people of the wrong sort. In the early 1930s, Reader Bullard, British consul general in the Soviet Union, described Litvinov—who had been born Meir Henoch Mojszewicz Wallach-Finkelstein, in 1876, to a well-off banking family in Białystok—as a “Warsaw Jew” and “shameless liar.”⁵² Beyond well-grounded suspicions of Russia and ingrained anti-Communism flavored by anti-Semitism, an alliance with the Soviet Union effectively constituted an admission that war could not be avoided.⁵³ Most ordinary Brits, in what was a democracy, were of a mind that the Great War slaughterhouse had claimed nearly 1 million subjects for naught. The war had increased the national debt tenfold in four years.⁵⁴ Most British conservatives—not just those in the Tory government—to a degree shared Chamberlain’s preferred policy of negotiation with Hitler as a way of exerting influence over him.⁵⁵ A majority of the opposition Labour party remained pacifist throughout Nazi aggrandizement, opposing rearmament.⁵⁶ “Lose or win,” one influential British journalist had observed, catching the general view, “a world war would be for England the end of everything.”⁵⁷

Britain felt overextended already, defending a global empire. The Scramble for Africa had never fully subsided, while in India, Palestine, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere, insurgencies drained resources and men. The Depression and misguided fiscal and monetary tightening had undercut confidence as well: real output in 1938 was no better than it had been in 1918 (annual GDP growth averaged 0.5 percent). Various worst-case scenarios in British intelligence reports—which for a long time had been underplaying Nazi Germany’s capabilities but now grossly overestimated them—enhanced the appeal of negotiation. So did underestimation of the Red Army. On top of everything, Eastern Europe and even the continent as a whole were just not a British priority, notwithstanding the Versailles Treaty.⁵⁸ Chamberlain was, by conviction, fiscally conservative. He abjured investing in a continental expeditionary force, which to his mind would only embolden France to take risks against Germany and bankrupt the British treasury.⁵⁹ Still, he was investing in the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy. If all else failed and Hitler tried to overrun Western Europe—which seemed unlikely, given the existence of the French land army—the British home isles, Chamberlain reasoned, could be defended.⁶⁰

Chamberlain not only convinced himself that he could accede to grievances of Nazi Germany without infringing core British interests, but also the grievances of fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, and, via bilateral agreements, diminish these powers’ incentives for trilateral cooperation as well.⁶¹ His combination of diplomacy (engagement, conciliation) and a measure of deterrence (the threat of a massive bombing campaign)—what was known as appeasement (essentially to make peace)—occupied a venerable place in British policy, dating back to the nineteenth century. It offered a way of settling international quarrels by appealing to the other side’s reasonableness and forging compromises, rather than opting for costly war.⁶² Why stumble down the path of turning the latest equivalent of a Balkan squabble into a world war? A repeat threatened equally bloody futility, at a minimum, and potentially far worse: Communist subversion of the continent in the ruins.⁶³

Germany’s other great-power antagonist, France, was also the only other large democracy left in Europe. Its geopolitical position was unenviable. France had triumphed in the Great War, but the conflict had been fought to immense devastation on its soil, and, in the aftermath, it lacked the wherewithal to hold down a rising Germany. The United States had tipped the balance in the war and could have provided the security guarantees that would have allowed France, in the 1920s, to make the kinds of concessions to Germany that Britain advocated and stability required, but the Americans had had no desire to do so.⁶⁴ Instead, French postwar security had come to rest on three shakier pillars: a military occupation of Germany’s Rhineland, military superiority over a disarmed Germany, and alliances with the newly independent small states on the eastern side of Germany. The first two had vanished. As for the third, Eastern Europe roiled with homegrown animosities and irredentism that undermined reliable security partnerships. France’s alliance system with Poland and Czechoslovakia had hollowed out even before Hitler had put it to the test.⁶⁵ And so, behind the defenses of the Maginot Line (named for a defense minister who had launched its construction), France was thrown back onto its familiar options: alliance with the British or alliance with the Russians. Before the Munich Pact, the Tory government had exhibited ruthless caution toward entanglement with France, and after Munich it took only baby steps, initiating staff talks with France.⁶⁶

Munich had almost pushed Stalin in the opposite direction: he contemplated denouncing the Franco-Soviet pact before reaffirming it.⁶⁷ But Stalin’s on-and-off efforts to convert the 1935 Franco-Soviet mutual assistance treaty into a real military alliance against German power—following in the footsteps of Nicholas II—had produced only desultory military talks.⁶⁸ Britain staunchly opposed a Franco-Soviet military convention, and Paris would not break from London, even after the Munich debacle, and even after the French ambassador’s warnings out of Moscow that the Soviet Union was not a colossus with feet of clay and could cozy up to Berlin.⁶⁹ The French general staff continued to dismiss the Red Army’s value in a European war and to underscore the USSR’s lack of common borders with Germany and the fact that Poland and Romania remained disinclined to grant transit routes.⁷⁰ Stalin’s executions of three of his five marshals amid public accusations that they and others had given away battle plans and other secrets to the Nazis cast new doubt on the Red Army as a possible partner.⁷¹ But even before the full denouement of the grisly executions, the French had backed away from the military talks.⁷² For Prime Minister Daladier—the man who had granted Trotsky asylum in France back in 1933—another pan-European war would mean the “utter destruction of European civilization,” opening a vacuum for “Cossack and Mongol hordes.”⁷³

So that was it: Germany foaming at the mouth with anti-Communism and anti-Slav racism, and now armed to the teeth; Britain cautious and aloof in the face of another continental war; and France even more exposed than Britain, yet deferring to London, and wary of its nominal ally, the USSR. Stalin was devastating his own country with mass murders and bald-faced mendacities, but the despot faced a genuine security impasse: German aggression and buck-passing by great powers—himself included.

MUSIC AND TORTURE

Secret police, in their smartest dress uniforms, lined the walls of the cavernous main hall and all the entrances of the Grand Kremlin Palace for the 1939 New Year’s banquet. Soviet officials did not bring their wives unless the latter, too, held official positions, such as Molotov’s Zhemchuzhina (fishing industry commissar). But much of the beau monde was intermarried: the actor Ivan Moskvin attended with his wife, Alla Tarasova, a star of the same theater; the filmmaker Alexandrov with his wife, the singer-starlet Lyubov Orlova; the dancer Igor Moiseyev with his common-law wife, the Bolshoi prima ballerina Nina Podgoretskaya. But Stalin himself could come off as the movie star: the mischievous grin, the lifted head, the pauses, nods, glances. During the toasts, when he called out Soviet triumphs and heroes, people clinked glasses, tapped knives and forks, and shouted his name. By the time the USSR State Jazz Band entered the anteroom of the Andreyev Hall, it was after 2:00 a.m. A Chekist, as the police liked to be called, summoned them to the stage following the Alexandrov Red Army Ensemble—240 singers and dancers—and Moiseyev’s State Folk Dance Ensemble.

“We walked into the dimly lit, deserted Andreyev Hall, which is used by the Supreme Soviet for its meetings,” recalled Juri Jelagin. “The hall was lined with rows of armchairs like a theater auditorium, or perhaps more like a university auditorium, because each chair was equipped with a small writing desk and a radio headset.” They reached a door, behind which was a stage. “The bright lights blinded us. We were in the ornate, white [St. George’s] Hall of the Kremlin. . . . The large tables were crowded with people, and a regular feast was in progress.” In front of the stage, at a distance from the other tables, was the Presidium table, the seats facing the hall, backs to the performers. When the jazz musicians appeared on the stage, Stalin and his entourage turned and applauded. “Stalin was wearing a khaki tunic without any ribbons or decorations. He smiled at us and nodded encouragement. In front of him stood a half-empty glass of brandy.” The jazzmen, with their female vocalist, Nina Donskaya, performed “Jewish Rhapsody,” by Svyatoslav Knushevitsky, perhaps Moscow’s top cellist. (He was married to Natalya Spiller, the Bolshoi soprano much admired by Stalin.) For whatever reason, according to Jelagin, Stalin paid no attention to Donskaya. “He turned away and began to eat.”

The mass murderer was able to differentiate, within his conventional tastes, a sublime performance from a merely good one. He loved opera, and selections were invariably included from the prerevolutionary repertoire (Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Tchaikovsky) and the better-known Western classics (Carmen, Faust, and Aida). But his greatest passion was for Russian, Ukrainian, and Georgian folk songs.⁷⁴ After the jazz band had concluded its six approved numbers—among them Tchaikovsky’s “Sentimental Waltz” and Stalin’s sentimental favorite, “Suliko”—the Presidium table, according to Jelagin, “applauded long and vigorously.” Only now, after exiting and storing their instruments, were the musicians invited to dine—in a separate hall for performers, one floor below, loaded with “caviar, hams, salads, fish, fresh vegetables [in winter], decanters of vodka, red and white wine, and fine Armenian brandy. There were about four hundred of us, but the tables could seat at least a thousand.” Here, the Chekist servers wore their police uniforms. The musicians were addressed by the latest chairman of the committee on artistic affairs, Alexei Nazarov (b. 1905), who toasted Stalin as well as some of the most famous performers, such as the singer Ivan Kozlovsky.⁷⁵

Kozlovsky (b. 1900), the virtuoso soloist at the Bolshoi (since 1926), would receive the Order of Lenin in 1939. (The next year, Stalin would make him a USSR People’s Artist.) He possessed a transparent, even voice, with a beautiful and gentle timbre in the upper register, which was not particularly powerful yet filled the largest spaces. He hailed from a Ukrainian village and had a brother who had emigrated at the end of the civil war and ended up in the United States, which alone would have been enough to doom the tenor. Zealous Chekists went to Kozlovsky’s native village to dig up dirt, but when Poskryobyshev handed Stalin thick files of compromising material, the despot was said to have observed, “Fine, we’ll imprison comrade Kozlovsky—and who’ll sing, you?”⁷⁶ Apocryphal or not, the despot was known to keep track of the schedule for the Bolshoi and to terminate meetings in the Little Corner to catch an aria sung by Kozlovsky, Maxim Mikhailov (a bass), or Mark Reizen (also a bass), the lyrical tenor Sergei Lemeshev, the lyrical sopranos Spiller and Yelena Kruglikova, or the mezzo-soprano Vera Davydova.⁷⁷ At the New Year’s gala, Kozlovsky, who acquired the reputation of being an unbearable person, sang “La Donna è Mobile,” from Rigoletto, at Stalin’s request.⁷⁸

Two days later, Stalin informed USSR procurator general Vyshinsky that he wanted a public trial of those arrested in the NKVD.⁷⁹ “The enemies of the people who penetrated the organs of the NKVD,” the commission on the secret police internally reported to Stalin—as if the secret police rampage had somehow occurred without his directives—“consciously distorted the punitive policy of Soviet power, conducting a mass of baseless arrests of people guilty of nothing, and at the same time protecting the activities of enemies of the people. . . . They urged that prisoners offer testimony about their supposed espionage activity for foreign intelligence, explaining that such invented testimony was necessary for the party and the government in order to discredit foreign states.” The despot circulated the report to the inner circle: they needed to know how to interpret the terror, as the result of the infiltration of “spies in literally every [NKVD] department.”⁸⁰ But for whatever reason, a public trial of the NKVD never took place. “I am very busy with work,” Stalin wrote (January 6, 1939) to Afinogenov, the reprieved writer, who had sent a copy of his latest play to read. “I beg forgiveness.”⁸¹

Beria issued a secret directive calling for NKVD branches to cease recruiting informants for surveillance of party and factory bosses, and to destroy, in their presence, the files compiled against them.⁸² Provincial party bosses were even invited to scrutinize the dossiers of all NKVD personnel in their domains.⁸³ But Stalin had some second thoughts. “The Central Committee has learned,” he wrote in a telegram to all locales (January 10, 1939), “that the secretaries of provinces and territories, checking on the work of the local NKVD, have charged them with using physical means of interrogation against those arrested as if it were a crime.” He informed them that the “physical methods” had been approved by “the Central Committee” and agreed to by “the Communist parties of all the republics” (whose leaders had almost all been shot as foreign agents and wreckers). “It is known that all bourgeois intelligence services apply physical coercion with regard to representatives of the socialist proletariat, and in the ugliest forms,” he stressed. “One might ask why the socialist intelligence service must be more humane with regard to inveterate agents of the bourgeoisie.”⁸⁴

COMPLICATING FACTORS

Stalin exacerbated but did not invent the hostility of his Eastern European neighbors. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland preferred neutrality but, if forced to choose, would opt for Berlin over Moscow.⁸⁵ Romania was openly pro-German. Poland, a nasty regime sandwiched directly between two nastier ones, sought a middle way. Some members of Polish ruling circles latched on to the idea of throwing in their lot with Hitler to deflect him farther eastward, even at the high cost of territorial concessions, and a few high-placed Poles fantasized about a joint Polish-Nazi attack on the USSR, an aggression in which they imagined Poland could wrest Ukraine from the Soviets, a delusion that Nazi officials cynically encouraged.⁸⁶ But Polish foreign minister Beck, who spoke good German, had met several times with Hitler, trying to reach an accommodation without sacrificing Poland’s independence. In early 1939, Hitler summoned him to Berlin for one last effort to bully Poland into joining the Anti-Comintern Pact, which would have required that Poland allow the Wehrmacht to march across its territory and “return” to Germany the Free City of Danzig and the surrounding Polish Corridor (a chunk of territory that had belonged to Frederick the Great’s East Prussia but, thanks to the Versailles Treaty, now belonged to Poland and lay between German East Prussia and the rest of Germany). Poland would have become economically dependent on (nonexistent) Nazi goodwill.⁸⁷

Soviet intelligence, thanks to its penetration of the German embassy in Poland, reported (February 10, 1939) that Hitler had allegedly told Beck there was no need to seize Ukraine, for “the Soviet Union in two to three years would perish of its own internal contradictions and clear the path for Germany and Poland to reach a friendly resolution of the Ukrainian question.” The Soviet report further observed that Hitler had bent over backward to ingratiate himself, which German diplomatic personnel in Poland interpreted as merely tactical, and that “Beck, it seems, had been left unsatisfied by the conversation and as before thinks the fundamental aim of German expansion remains the East, and in this connection Hitler does not plan on making any concessions to Poland.”⁸⁸

Nonetheless, Soviet military intelligence reported to Moscow that the German ambassador in Warsaw, Hans-Adolf von Moltke, had boasted to a German journalist on February 13 that “the situation is utterly clear. We know that in the event of a German-Soviet conflict, Poland would take our side.”⁸⁹ The Western powers, too, suspected illiberal Poland of being pro-German and territorially revisionist. But Beck had refused to make any firm commitments regarding Hitler’s entreaties. He knew Western support for Poland was fragile—as did everyone, after Munich—and he feared a Western diktat over Danzig and the Corridor. But he nonetheless pinned Poland’s security hopes on Britain and France. The alternative, a security alliance with the Soviet Union, was anathema. The Soviets returned the enmity, and had lacked even an ambassador in Warsaw since November 1937 (through June 1939).

Poland’s best security guarantee was probably a full-scale war by Japan against the Soviet Union, and Polish military intelligence worked extremely closely with its Japanese counterpart, essentially conducting an extended tutorial on their common adversary. Japanese Manchukuo forces continued to engage Soviet and Mongolian troops in border clashes. The Soviet spy Sorge (codenamed “Ramsay”) relayed to Moscow (January 23, 1939) an analysis of infighting among three factions in Japan. One demanded a ramping up of the all-out war with China; a second, the Kwantung Army, demanded a peace settlement with China to shift to all-out war with the Soviet Union; a third, in a variant on the second, urged winding down operations in central and south China and holding on to only northern China and Manchuria, to use as a base of operations for attacking the USSR. Sorge included the prime and war ministers in the third group and added that the only way for Japan to corral domestic radicalism was to turn the radicals’ attention toward the USSR.⁹⁰

Adding to the pressure on Moscow, anti-Soviet émigrés in Harbin, China, were using radio to debunk Soviet propaganda in broadcasts into eastern Soviet territories. Radio stations from German territory were also transmitting in Russian to the westernmost parts of the Soviet Union, whose equipment was not powerful enough to jam these foreign signals.⁹¹

Through it all, Hitler remained Stalin’s most complicating factor. “One thing I should like to say on this day which may be memorable for others as well as for us Germans: In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it,” Hitler raved, deep into a speech on January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of his becoming chancellor. “Above all the Jewish people only laughed at my prophecies. I believe that such gales of laughter now stick in the throats of Jewry in Germany. ” He continued: “Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”⁹² This revealing resentment-cum-threat was partly a belated response to Roosevelt and U.S. criticisms of the anti-Jewish pogrom Kristallnacht, as well as to bogged-down negotiations over restrictions for Jewish immigrants from Germany and Austria, and an equation of the United States with “the headquarters of world Jewry.”⁹³ The Reichstag erupted in acclamation.

Hitler had achieved more than anyone—perhaps even he himself—had imagined, and he wielded his increasing power and confidence to raise the stakes. On February 13, 1939, he placed a laurel on the grave of Otto von Bismarck, and the next day he presided over the launching of the Bismarck, Germany’s grandest new battleship. “As Führer of the German people and Chancellor of the Reich,” he told the assembled crowd, “I can give this ship no finer name.”⁹⁴ Of course, Bismarck, unifier of Germany, had proceeded from a sense of limits and a need for balance, not unlimited expansion, and had refrained from swallowing the Habsburg empire, while Hitler had already annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. At the same time, the prohibitive costs of Hitler’s ongoing rearmament and military actions, as well as anxiety over raw material supply, were mounting. The national debt had tripled since his takeover.⁹⁵ Hitler ordered a reduction in the Wehrmacht budget for the first quarter of 1939. But the army, knowing the Führer, ignored the limit. Hitler did not make strategic decisions on the basis of economic considerations.⁹⁶ Still, more affordable supplies of raw materials for the war machine had to be found.⁹⁷ Germany had submitted to Moscow a request for formal trade talks, and Mikoyan handed the German ambassador two new shopping lists for industrial goods in February 1939.⁹⁸ The USSR and the Capitalist Encirclement, a book published that same month, asserted that the “ruling class” in Britain and France desired not an alliance with the USSR against “fascism,” but a war between the Soviet Union and Germany.⁹⁹

PURSUING REWARDS

Soviet prisons now held an estimated 350,000 inmates, while Gulag labor camps and colonies held 1.665 million. But the recorded proportion of prisoners who did not work in the period 1937–39 ranged from 16.6 percent to 27.1 percent. The camp complexes had accumulated ill, invalid, and idle “laborers.”¹⁰⁰ The slave labor productivity exception had always been the gold-mining trust in the Kolyma River region of the far northeast. Stalin sent a telegram (January 24, 1939) praising Karp Pavlov, Dalstroi’s head: “Let us reward all, starting with Pavlov, without embarrassment or false modesty.” A two-decade veteran of the secret police, with service from Crimea to Krasnoyarsk, Pavlov had arrived two years before to replace the long-serving head of Dalstroi, who was executed as the head of a counterrevolutionary spy-diversionist Trotskyist organization.¹⁰¹ On February 2, 1939, Pavlov received the Order of Lenin. That winter, thousands of gold diggers would again perish.

New influxes would double the Dalstroi population to 160,000 by the end of the year. (Soon Pavlov would be promoted to chief of mining and metallurgy for the entire Gulag.)¹⁰² Dalstroi had acquired enough performers to form a local symphony and a musical comedy troupe, both of which entertained the bosses in the local “capital” of Magadan, a jumble of log cabins and transit prisons known as the Athens of Okhotsk.¹⁰³ Magadan could claim a higher concentration not just of musicians and actors, but of doctors, scholars, poets, novelists, photographers, and painters, than any urban center east of the Urals, and many to the west, but the terror had killed off the trust’s technical specialists and lowered productivity.¹⁰⁴ Magadan officials begged to see Union-wide arrest lists so they could scour them for geologists, hydrologists, and other desperately needed “wreckers” and “Trotskyites.”

Beria’s NKVD discovered a self-styled “fascist organization” in Moscow, whose handful of members had evidently fashioned a flag, put up seventy posters on the eve of Red Army Day (February 23), drew some graffiti, and wrote poems. They seem to have discussed Nazism, anti-Semitism, and Russian nationalism. At least one turned informant, leading to four arrests. Three of the members turned out to have been nineteen when they joined the group; the organizer was seventeen. The NKVD produced five volumes on the case.¹⁰⁵

ABSENT FATHER

Stalin received a troubling report in February 1939 from his son Vasily’s military aviation school. Now almost eighteen, he had become a candidate member of the party, but not long before, Stalin had written to one of Vasily’s teachers at his previous school that he was “a spoiled youth of middling capabilities, a wild beast (like the Scythians), not always truthful, loves to blackmail weak ‘bosses,’ not infrequently impudent, with a weak—more accurately—unorganized will. . . . He was spoiled by sundry ‘godfathers’ and ‘godmothers,’ who reinforced the circumstance that he is ‘Stalin’s son.’”¹⁰⁶ With Vasily’s transfer to the military school in Crimea, Beria had reported to Stalin that the school’s bosses had met him with pomp at the train station. Stalin had ordered that Vasily be moved to a regular barracks.¹⁰⁷ The latest report, cleverly worded, was framed in praise: “Politically literate. Dedicated to the cause of the party of Lenin-Stalin and our motherland. Actively interested and well versed in questions of the international and domestic situation.” But it also noted that Vasily was given to cramming, occasionally reported unshaven for duty, and “reacts badly to snafus in flight.”¹⁰⁸ His friends found him generous—and a target. “Despite a nondescript appearance (small stature, scrawny, redheaded, chalky),” one acquaintance recalled of him that “all kinds of sycophants and especially girls clung to him like flies to honey.”¹⁰⁹

Stalin continued to shower tenderness on his daughter, Svetlana—when he saw her. Now thirteen and without her brother or longtime housekeeper, Karolina Til, she continued to live in the Kremlin apartment, where her father appeared only for late-evening “lunches.” The dining room “had a large, carved sideboard with my mother’s cups on it and a table with the latest newspapers and magazines,” she recalled. “Above it was a large portrait of my mother, a blown-up print of one of the photographs taken at our house.” After the meal, Stalin would go back upstairs to the office or head out to the Near Dacha for the night. Svetlana spent summers partly at the old Zubalovo dacha, partly either in Sochi or Mukhalatka, Crimea. “Sometimes after school was out in the summer, he’d take me to Kuntsevo for three days or so,” she would recall of the Near Dacha. “He enjoyed having me around. But it didn’t work out, because it was impossible for anybody to fit in with his way of life. He’d have his first meal at two or three in the afternoon and lunch at eight in the evening. Then he’d sit up late at the table. . . . It was too much for me.” They did go for walks in the Kuntsevo woods, and, thanks to her nurse’s lessons, Svetlana would ace her father’s oral quizzes on the names of flowers, grasses, and singing birds. But soon he would have to return to his paperwork. “At that point he didn’t need me anymore,” Svetlana continued. “I’d get restless and bored and long to leave as quickly as possible for Zubalovo, where I could take one of my friends with me and there were so many things I enjoyed. Meantime, my father thought it was being with him that bored me, and that hurt his feelings.” Svetlana’s nanny would advise her to ask forgiveness, and he would talk to her again. “I heard him mutter angrily, ‘She went away! Imagine leaving her old father like that! Says she’s bored!’ But he was kissing me and had already forgiven me, for without me he had been lonelier than ever.”¹¹⁰

18TH PARTY CONGRESS

Great powers, when menaced by a rising or aggressive power, usually build up their militaries and seek strategic alliances, but leadership in the international arena has always been costly, and each power had drawn the lesson from the Great War experience that defense trumped offense, such that any new war could not be won easily. The benefits of getting someone else to do the fighting appeared to be very high, while the risks of that other side succumbing quickly appeared to be low.¹¹¹ And so, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union were each keen to afford the others the “honor” of standing up to Germany. Stalin worried about a linkup of the others behind his back (“a united imperialist front against the USSR”). His energetic feelers for political rapprochement with Germany and, less energetically, for a binding military dimension to his mutual assistance pact with France had failed to make headway. Facing two blind alleys—Paris/London and Berlin—he opened the 18th Party Congress on March 10, in the combined Andreyev-Alexander hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace.

Stalin had not been compelled to convoke a congress. This was the first since the January 1934 “Congress of Victors,” and thus the first to take place in the wake of his terror (a “congress of survivors,” as it were). Back when admission to the party had been closed, in January 1933, membership had stood at 2.2 million, and although it had been reopened in November 1936, the ranks were still thinner by 700,000.¹¹² The congress was attended by 1,569 delegates with voting rights and another 466 without, who had been “elected” (without alternatives) in primary party organizations. Once in Moscow, as per custom, they sat with their province or republic delegations for formal photographs with Stalin and others in his inner circle. Their local newspapers, in turn, featured their presence at the congress. Factories and collective farms had sent greetings to Stalin and affirmations of the congress agenda. All this was captured in newsreels.¹¹³ Identification of congress delegates by social origin (worker, peasant, white collar) ceased—the class question having supposedly been resolved—but markers for occupation, age, and education remained. Only 63 voting delegates worked in agriculture, 230 in industry, and 110 in transport. Military and NKVD made up the second-largest group, at 283 (18 percent), while the largest comprised apparatchiks—those for whom their sole occupation was party work—with 659 voting delegates (42 percent). Another 162 (10 percent) served as functionaries in trade unions and soviets. Nearly half the delegates were thirty-five years of age or under; four fifths were no older than forty. Just under half (46 percent) had not graduated from high school.¹¹⁴

Krupskaya missed the congress, having died in agony on February 27, 1939, one day after her seventieth birthday. She had been suffering from acute appendicitis, peritonitis, thrombosis, and arteriosclerosis and appears to have had an abdominal embolism, though the precise cause of death remains uncertain.¹¹⁵ She was the only former avowed member of an opposition group in the party (in her case, from fall 1925 to fall 1926) to die naturally.¹¹⁶ Olga Ulyanova (b. 1922), the daughter of Lenin’s brother Dmitry, who lived in the Kremlin Cavalry Building, recalled that upon coming home from school, she would look up across the way to the apartment of her aunts, Krupskaya and Ulyanova, in the nearby Imperial Senate. If a light was on in the second window, it meant Krupskaya was in; if in the fifth, then Maria; if in the fourth, they were in the dining room. “I came home in the evening and looked at the window of their apartment,” Olga recalled of late February 1939. “The windows were dark. They had no light, and no longer ever would.”¹¹⁷

Krupskaya’s hand in helping create a Lenin Testament had failed to slow Stalin’s succession. He was among those who carried the urn of her ashes for burial in the Kremlin Wall on March 1. He allowed the newspapers to be filled with eulogies for a few days, but the highest-level official called upon to publish an obituary was the chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet.¹¹⁸ Trotsky, in exile, rendered his own. “In addition to being Lenin’s wife—which, by the way, was not accidental—Krupskaya was an outstanding personality in her devotion to the cause, her energy and her purity of character,” he wrote (March 4). “Lenin’s illness and death—and this again was not accidental—coincided with the breaking point of the revolution and the beginning of Thermidor. Krupskaya became confused. . . . She made an attempt to oppose the Stalinist clique, and in 1926 she found herself for a brief interval in the ranks of the opposition. Frightened by the prospect of split, she broke away.” As a member of the Central Committee, Krupskaya had approved the expulsions and death sentences of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin.¹¹⁹ With her death, Stalin had a chocolate factory named after her. Orders went out to the Soviet press: “Do not print another word about Krupskaya.”¹²⁰ For the proposed ribbon on the official wreath, Stalin altered the text (with his red pencil) from “closest friend of Lenin” to “closest helpmate of Lenin.”¹²¹ Stalin was Lenin’s “closest friend.”

THE TERROR’S PROMOTIONS

At the party congress, Stalin received public credit for the mass arrests. “Comrade Stalin has directed the work of purging enemies who have wormed their way into the party,” Matvei Shkiryatov, deputy head of the party Control Commission, noted in an understatement. “Comrade Stalin taught us how to fight wreckers in a new way; he taught us how to get rid of these hostile elements quickly and decisively.” One female party member told a story of how she had mailed to Stalin a denunciation of “the gang” in the Communist Youth League leadership and how he moved to eradicate them, “although he was very busy.”¹²²

The full scope of the bloodletting was not revealed, but it was secretly recorded: 15,485 of the 32,899 positions in 1939 on the Central Committee nomenklatura—the highest officials—had been appointed in the years 1937–38, a turnover of nearly half.¹²³ Of the 10,902 party secretaries of counties, cities, and districts, 6,909 had been appointed in 1937–38. Of the 333 regional party bosses, 293 had assumed their posts since the 17th Congress, most since 1937–38; only six heads of regional machines were older than forty-six; 91 percent were between twenty-six and forty years of age. Forty-four of the 71 Central Committee members were new (by contrast, at the 17th Congress in 1934, 10 of the 71 had been new). The same picture obtained throughout industry: on the railways, 2,245 of 2,968 senior posts as of November 1938 had been at their positions just one year. In the NKVD, the average age of the upper ranks fell between 1937 and 1939, from around forty-three to thirty-five. Fully 85 percent of Red Army officers were under thirty-five years of age.¹²⁴ These people, inexperienced and young, were by and large graduates of technical education.¹²⁵ A mass of graduates (even greater numbers would now follow) helped make possible extermination of their predecessors.

Pravda deemed these new cadres “healthy young representatives of a healthy young people,” one of Stalin’s core tenets. They were manifestly one of his reasons for summoning the congress: to demonstrate that the purged party was alive and well. Alexei Kosygin (b. 1904), who had graduated from the Leningrad Textile Institute just four years earlier, would become commissar of textile production. Vyacheslav Malyshev (b. 1902), who had finished technical school in 1937, would become commissar of heavy machine building. The dashing Leonid Brezhnev (b. 1906), who had graduated from a metallurgical technicum in 1935, was promoted to party boss of his home region, Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine). The village-born Mikhail Suslov (b. 1902), who had joined the party in 1921 and taken a few training courses, had been sent in 1936 to Rostov province, where, in October 1937, after the arrest of the entire provincial leadership, he was named third and then second secretary. In February 1939, after the arrest of everyone in neighboring Orjonikidze (Stavropol) province, Suslov had been named first secretary there. “Understand it is only thanks to Stalin that we have all risen so high,” he would later explain. “Everything we have is thanks to Stalin.”¹²⁶

No less striking was the expansionism. The number of officially designated “leading personnel” hit 1.6 million in 1939, a leap from 600,000 in 1928. Overall, there were now 7.5 million administrative personnel, as compared with 1.45 million in 1928.¹²⁷ These white-collar employees and their offspring had come to dominate the spaces in higher education.¹²⁸ They were also well fed: between 1937 and 1939, when overall employment rose 10 percent, the Soviet salary fund jumped 41 percent, largely because the salary fund for administrative positions rose 66.5 percent. Especially pronounced increases were observed in supply, procurement, and, inevitably, departments introduced to control costs.¹²⁹ Despotism, too, cannot function without functionaries.¹³⁰ The terror that murdered officials en masse accentuated the ascendancy of the functionary class.

When Stalin made his way to the rostrum to deliver the main political report, the 2,000-odd attendees stood in an ovation. Making eye contact with the many delegations, the despot motioned for silence, but the applause only intensified. People desisted only when he rang the cowbell. Under a spotlight, Stalin received a new model rifle, a gift from the “proletarians of Tula” (Russia’s ancient armaments center), and he aimed it at the hall. Speaking softly, slowly, as usual, he conceded that there had been “more mistakes than might have been expected” in the cleansing of the ranks. But he pronounced the terror “unavoidable” and “beneficial.” “Our party is now smaller in membership, but, on the other side, its quality is better,” he told the beneficiaries.¹³¹

Stalin praised his creation. “As a result of the colossal cultural work conducted by the party and the Government, a burgeoning new Soviet intelligentsia was born and took shape, an intelligentsia that emerged from the ranks of the working class, peasantry, Soviet white-collar, the sweat and blood of our people, an intelligentsia that does not know the yoke of exploitation and despises exploiters and stands ready to serve the peoples of the USSR with belief and truth,” he rhapsodized, underscoring that these “young healthy people” would be genuinely Marxist cadres. “There is scarcely any necessity to dwell on the serious importance of party propaganda, of the Marxist-Leninist rearing of our laboring employees,” he told the delegates, adding, in the wake of the Short Course, that without a developed Marxist-Leninist consciousness, functionaries “will degenerate into pragmatist-pedants.”¹³²

NEW INNER CIRCLE

Stalin removed Petrovsky from candidate member of the politburo, but, uniquely, did not have him arrested.¹³³ He promoted Zhdanov and Khrushchev to full (voting) membership of the politburo, where they joined Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Andreyev, Kalinin, and the despot. Malenkov, in charge of personnel for years, finally became a member of the Central Committee, but, among party apparatchiks, Zhdanov alone enjoyed inner-circle status. In his speech to the congress on party affairs, he noted that masked enemies had infiltrated the ranks, slandered, and expelled honest Communists en masse, and singled out the new “Soviet” intelligentsia as the regime’s political base.¹³⁴ Zhdanov traveled often from Leningrad to take part in the ad hoc sessions in the Little Corner. He had become a personal favorite of the despot, as much as if not more than “Mykita” (the Ukrainianized version of Khrushchev’s name that Stalin used for his Ukraine party boss). “Only Zhdanov received from Stalin the same kind of treatment that Kirov enjoyed,” Molotov would recall. “After Kirov, Stalin liked Zhdanov best.”¹³⁵

The party would continue to serve as the regime’s indispensable ideological, personnel, and disciplinary instrument and charismatic symbol, but the state (government, military, secret police) gained more and more operational power, thanks to Molotov (government), the consigliere and longest-serving full politburo member after Stalin, Voroshilov (military), and Beria (secret police), nemesis of both Voroshilov and Molotov. Beria was elevated to one of two candidate member positions in the politburo, along with Shvernik, head of the trade unions (since 1930).¹³⁶ Stalin was uncommonly solicitous toward Beria, ordering, for example, that his household be given better accommodations after inspecting their first Moscow flat, with its shared kitchen. Beria ended up not at the Kremlin but in a two-story detached mansion, the former residence of General Alexei Kuropatkin, war minister during the Russo-Japanese War fiasco, at Little Nikitskaya Street, 28.¹³⁷ The Beria household also obtained use of a wooden dacha in the pine forest near Arkhangelskoe, but, the story goes, Stalin saw it, judged it a hovel, and moved them into the arrested Postyshev’s newer, palatial country estate.¹³⁸ “Beria’s dacha was sumptuous, immense,” recalled Svetlana, who played there with Sergo Beria (fifteen months her senior). Beria’s deputy Merkulov would later testify that “in Moscow, practically every evening, comrade Stalin summoned Beria” to the Near Dacha.¹³⁹

SOCIALIST REALISM

Nearly 19 million peasant households belonged to collective farms. Investment in mechanization and infrastructure had increased from 1.5 billion rubles in the first Five-Year Plan to 6.3 billion in the second (the third, which had commenced in 1938, would see another 5 billion). But output of tractors and combines, after having risen exponentially, was declining as the number of tanks, made at the same factories, soared.¹⁴⁰ Official harvest figures for 1937 (120.2 million tons), 1938 (94.9 million), and 1939 (105.4 million) were exaggerated. Even these numbers signified output per head below the 1913 level.¹⁴¹ Still, the state procured 36 million tons of the 1939 harvest (as compared with 10.8 million in 1928). The regime had reacted with assistance, rather than secret police barricades, to the regions that had suffered a major drought in 1936 and a lesser one in 1938, avoiding even a partial repeat of the famine of 1931–33.¹⁴² The continued underperformance of the livestock and dairy sectors, still not recovered from dekulakization-denomadization, was publicly acknowledged.

In his congress report, Andreyev, now the Central Committee secretary responsible for agriculture, called for a reduction in the size of the farmers’ household plots, which he claimed had been allowed to become their main occupation. To an extent, he was correct, although, according to official statistics, 77 percent of household plots conformed to size limits imposed by the February 1935 statute, 12 percent were below, and only 10 percent above.¹⁴³

Molotov gave the congress report on industry and the third Five-Year Plan. The heavy industry commissariat had been further divided in early 1939 into many smaller ones, reducing the power of their commissars.¹⁴⁴ Industry remained a wreck as a result of Stalin’s massacres. “If last year and today the majority of industries has not fulfilled their plan, the cause of this is our weak cadres, who were promoted to leading work during the past year,” one brave official wrote to the despot in March 1939, adding that “the atmosphere of lack of confidence and oversuspiciousness . . . blunts the initiative and energy of the personnel, and has an extremely harmful effect on all the work.”¹⁴⁵ Molotov, however, regaled the delegates with fantastic projections of annual growth in the third Five-Year Plan, of between 13.5 and 15.2 percent. Production of locomotives was supposed to reach 225 percent of the 1937 figure, coal 206 percent, electric power 200 percent. Nearly simultaneous with Molotov’s congress speech, Krokodil—the Soviet satirical journal, printed a caricature of the Third Reich. “What are you doing to propagandize the Four-Year Plan?” Göring asks Goebbels. Answer: “Prohibit the population from laughing.”¹⁴⁶

During the Soviet party congress, Industry of Socialism, a monumental art exhibition, was mounted near the Park of Culture metro station. Artists working in photography, industrial design, and even graphic and poster art had been excluded in favor of oil painters. Originally slated to open on the revolution’s twentieth anniversary, it had been mounted in an earlier form by November 1937 in a hard-to-reach hall on the Frunze Embankment, but it had not been open to the public—many of the figures depicted in the paintings had been (or were soon to be) arrested. Artists, too, were arrested, and even some of those not arrested had failed to produce their contracted works. (Soviet paints were known to be of miserable quality, and funds for purchasing foreign paints and canvases were unavailable, a fact that the artists wrote denunciations about.) Most of the works on exhibit in 1939 depicted railroads, canals, coal pits, and gold mines, as well as a Tajik weather station, Arctic exploration, and the good life of workers who enjoyed rewards like motorcycles for their labor exploits. Visitors encountered a gigantic mosaic of precious stones and metals that traced the infrastructure and natural resources of the USSR, Stalin’s epic canvas. Newsreels gave a narrated tour of the works.¹⁴⁷ First prize went to Boris Yoganson’s disconsolate In an Old Urals Factory (1937), which showed a muscular worker staring down the fat-cat owner. More innovative was Yuri Pimenov’s New Moscow (1937), which depicted a new boulevard and a prosperous Soviet way of life, symbolized by automobiles and stylish attire, in a decidedly modern look reminiscent of a Cézanne. The painting’s central figure was a woman in an open-top car—and in the driver’s seat.¹⁴⁸

HITLER INTRUDES

Stalin, in his congress report, had boasted that “it is necessary to recognize that the most important achievement in the sphere of public-political life during the reporting period . . . is the complete democratization of the country’s public life.”¹⁴⁹ He mispronounced the name of the commissariat of agriculture—calling it the Narkomzyom, accenting the last syllable, instead of Narkomzyem—and every speaker who followed copied his mistake.¹⁵⁰ Occasionally raising his right index finger for emphasis, he pointed out that the country had to have “at its disposal a well-trained army, well-organized penal organs, and a strong intelligence service.” He also underscored the system’s political fastness. “In the event of a war, the rear and the front, in view of their homogeneity and internal unity, will be stronger than in any other country, which foreign lovers of military confrontation would do well to keep in mind,” he observed, lauding himself for collectivization. “Some people in the Western press are claiming that the purge of spies, murderers, and wreckers from Soviet institutions—the likes of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Rosenholz, Bukharin, and other scum—has ‘shaken’ the Soviet system and brought disintegration,” the despot added. “Such cheap gossip merits only our contempt.”¹⁵¹

Foreign affairs took up about one quarter of Stalin’s speech, and on this score he had thoroughly reworked the text from the draft supplied by aides. He noted that the League of Nations had proved useless but argued that, given the dangerous times, it “should not be ignored.” He stressed the fact of a “new imperialist war,” now in its second year, and named Germany, Italy, and Japan as aggressors, but warned that efforts at collective security were “in disarray” because “the “non-aggressor states,” Britain and France, were playing a dangerous game. They were stronger than the fascist powers but shrank from meeting the threat, refusing to intervene in Spain, China, or Czechoslovakia “to save their own skins.” Remarking on the hysteria in the Western press over supposed German designs on Soviet Ukraine, Stalin warned countries “accustomed to having others pull chestnuts out of the fire for them”—a reference to Britain and France—that they would not succeed in pushing the Soviet Union into war. “We stand for peace and strengthening of businesslike ties with all countries,” he noted, but only “as long as these countries maintain similar relations with the Soviet Union and do not try to damage our country’s interests.”¹⁵²

When Stalin finished—congratulating the victorious working class, the victorious collective farm peasantry, the Soviet intelligentsia—the entire Andreyev-Alexandrov hall stood in thunderous applause. Editorials in Izvestiya, the government newspaper, did not elaborate Stalin’s statement that “collective security” was effectively dead or his hints that Moscow might even turn to Nazi Germany, as if that were an option.¹⁵³ Goebbels’s propaganda ministry had instructed the German press (March 13, 1939) that “you can comment on the congress of Communists in Moscow as a still greater strengthening of the Stalin-Kaganovich clique.” (Kaganovich was Jewish.)¹⁵⁴

The German ambassador, Schulenburg, was the son of a Prussian officer, tall, elegant, pious, an aristocrat of long pedigree, with a balding pate, white mustache, and impeccable manners. The childless, genial count had developed exceptionally good relations with the Soviets, as with his own staff.¹⁵⁵ He had also developed a rivalry with his predecessor in Moscow, Dirksen, now in London. They engaged in a parallel competition to normalize Soviet-German and Anglo-German relations, respectively.¹⁵⁶ Still, Schulenburg doubted that Stalin’s speech signaled a policy shift, although he did note the absence of the customary denunciations of the fascist states.¹⁵⁷ Hitler’s foreign minister showed the Führer a German translation of Stalin’s speech, but the Nazi leader remained skeptical, and, in any case, he was preoccupied: right in the middle of Stalin’s party congress, on March 15, 1939, the Wehrmacht seized the rest of truncated Czechoslovakia, making a mockery of the Munich Pact and Hitler’s pretense of merely wanting to incorporate ethnic Germans. Among the prizes were the Czechoslovak army’s advanced mechanized divisions and the famous Škoda Works, in the city of Plzeň (Pilsen), one of Europe’s premier military factories. “Give me a kiss, girls!” Hitler told his secretaries. “This is the greatest day of my life. I shall enter history as the greatest German of them all.”¹⁵⁸ The Führer annexed the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia) as a Third Reich “protectorate”; Slovakia became nominally independent, under a Nazi puppet. Czechoslovakia’s eastern Subcarpathian Rusyn (Ruthene) province became an independent state—for thirty hours, until March 16, when Hungarian troops invaded and annexed the southern part; Polish troops seized the northern part and established a common border with Hungary.¹⁵⁹

Hitler had intruded on Stalin’s affirmation of Soviet unity and might. The despot had Litvinov convey to Schulenburg that “the Soviet government cannot recognize the inclusion of the Czech lands in the German empire, or that of Slovakia in any form.”¹⁶⁰ An aide to the Soviet military attaché in Berlin reported, rightly, that Hitler had already achieved a windfall: advanced Czech weapons plants, advanced Czech mechanized divisions, storehouses of grain. Less positively for Germany, the attaché noted that the Nazis had absorbed a large non-German population that could create risks in Germany’s rear if the Führer pushed still farther out. On that latter score, the Soviet military aide was unequivocal: Germany was gearing up for further expansion. The question was: in which direction, “east or west?”¹⁶¹

FIXATION

Trotsky had been writing about the creation of a Fourth International since at least 1933, but the founding congress had only taken place on September 3, 1938, and was attended by fewer than two dozen delegates, at a private home outside Paris. In October 1938, he had fantasized, in a speech in Mexico he recorded on a gramophone, that “in the course of the next ten years, the program of the Fourth International will become the program of millions, and these revolutionary millions will be able to take heaven and earth by storm.”¹⁶² However absurd his “movement,” Trotsky’s pen was another matter. Commenting the day after Stalin’s political report to the 18th Party Congress, Trotsky scandalously surmised, like Krivitsky before him, that “Stalin is preparing to play with Hitler.”¹⁶³ Around the time of the party congress, Stalin ordered renewed efforts to assassinate Trotsky.¹⁶⁴

That Trotsky was still alive was almost inexplicable. He had been sentenced to execution in absentia at the first Moscow public trial (August 1936), but the attempts to have him killed probably dated to 1929 in Turkey. He had been hunted all the while he had been in Paris (1933–35) and after his relocation to Norway. The most recent effort, in 1938, led by veterans of the Spanish civil war dispatched to the United States and then Mexico, had petered out after their NKVD espionage overseers in Moscow (Sergei Spigelglas) and New York (Pyotr Guttsait) were arrested as supposed foreign spies.¹⁶⁵ A new plan would expressly forbid everyone previously involved in such efforts to take part, and would be put together by Pavel Sudoplatov (b. 1907) and Naum “Leonid” Eitingon (b. 1899), until recently the NKVD station chief in Republic Spain.¹⁶⁶

Sudoplatov was a celebrated assassin, having liquidated Yevhen Konovalets, the leader of the fascistic émigré Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Sudoplatov hailed from Ukraine and spoke the language. The NKVD had penetrated the OUN and even ran its branches, but Konovalets, who had been born in Habsburg Galicia and studied in Lemberg (now Lwów), was viewed as a possible figurehead who could be used by foreign powers and had working ties to intelligence officers from Nazi Germany, as well as fascist Italy, Lithuania, and Poland.¹⁶⁷ On May 23, 1938, Sudoplatov had managed to blow Konovalets up in a Rotterdam restaurant with a box of chocolates that concealed a time bomb, escaping undetected. It was bravura wet work. In November 1938, after yet another NKVD foreign intelligence chief was arrested, the thirty-one-year-old Sudoplatov had briefly shot up to acting chief. But when Beria took over the NKVD, he installed as foreign intelligence chief his Caucasus crony Vladimir Dekanozov, whose principal experience was in food processing and supply, including self-supply.

Sudoplatov was moved back down to section director. Someone in Beria’s entourage, perhaps Dekanozov, placed Sudoplatov under investigation for ties to “enemies” (i.e., the now-arrested NKVD bosses under whom Sudoplatov had worked). The assassin spent months fearing he was about to be liquidated. Damaging rumors were being spread about him, and he was not being shown documents or allowed to carry out assignments, even those Beria had expressly directed he be given. It appears that Beria contrived to firm up Sudoplatov’s position using Kremlinology: he invited him to a soccer match between Spartacus (the trade union team) and Dynamo (the NKVD team) and had him sit in the government loge; Malenkov was there, along with the full canopy of Beria cronies. “I didn’t utter a word,” Sudoplatov explained, “but my mere presence in that elevated place signaled Kruglov, Serov, Tsanava, and others to stop spreading rumors about evidence against me in the archives.”¹⁶⁸

In March 1939, as Sudoplatov tells the story, Beria took him to the Little Corner to see Stalin and proposed that Sudoplatov be named deputy chief of NKVD foreign intelligence, in order to oversee global anti-Trotskyite operations. In this telling, as Stalin lit his pipe with a match and got up and paced, the assassin took note of “the simplicity of Stalin’s reactions. It was hard to imagine that such a man could deceive you, his reactions were so natural, without the slightest sense of him posing.” Stalin was indeed an actor, especially in the Little Corner. “There are no important political figures in the Trotskyite movement except Trotsky himself,” he was said to have advised. “If Trotsky is finished, the threat will be eliminated.” Obviously, the Nazis would never resort to using a Jew even as a figurehead. Nonetheless, Stalin supposedly added, “Without the elimination of Trotsky, as the Spanish experience shows, when the imperialists attack the Soviet Union, we cannot rely on our allies in the international Communist movement.”¹⁶⁹

According to Sudoplatov, he and Beria debated innumerable scenarios for what Stalin had called the “action.” The chosen plan derived from events in civil war Spain, where, after murdering Konovalets, Sudoplatov had taken refuge and met up with Eitingon (the two knew each other from five years earlier, when they were “illegals,” operating without diplomatic cover, in Soviet foreign intelligence). The Spanish- and English-speaking Eitingon had in his circle the twenty-year-old Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born revolutionary who carried out sabotage missions behind Franco’s lines. Back in Moscow, Eitingon did not know that he had been denounced as a British spy by arrested officials, but, thanks to his acquaintance with Sudoplatov, he was chosen to lead the latest field unit, with Mercader as its centerpiece, to penetrate the Blue House, in Coyoacán, Mexico, where Trotsky lived.¹⁷⁰

A “GUARANTEE” FOR POLAND

Alliances are often about imposing brakes, not empowerment. The Anglo-French “entente” was unwritten, which caused tremendous anxiety in France, but this was essentially a way for Britain to restrain its partner without committing itself formally to continental war. French alliances with Poland and Czechoslovakia had been meant the same way (a means to limit the smaller countries’ behavior while not fully committing France), but that arrangement had suited neither Poland nor Czechoslovakia. The Franco-Soviet-Czechoslovak alliance had afforded no such intra-alliance control and fooled no one, paving the way for the collective failure to prevent Germany’s forbidden annexation of Austria and the dismemberment of the third partner, Czechoslovakia.¹⁷¹ Germany’s military had consumed 17 percent of national production in 1938, about the same as in the USSR but double the level in Britain or France; in 1939, the German percentage would rise to 20 percent. Militarily, Britain and France were still holding to a mostly defensive posture, leaving all the initiative in the hands of the aggressor.¹⁷²

Even into 1939, Hitler’s references to the injustices of Versailles and to his desire merely to “unite” all ethnic Germans had still been eliciting sympathy in Britain.¹⁷³ But his seizure of all the Czech lands, on March 15, 1939, and recognition of an independent Slovakia blew up British domestic politics. Rumors flew that Germany was preparing similar conquests of Romania, Hungary, and Ukraine.¹⁷⁴ A Soviet military intelligence assessment (March 17) concluded that “the seizure of Czechoslovakia is the first act, the threshold to further, larger happenings,” and that even if, as some experts claimed, Germany’s next moves would be westward, it would still need raw materials for its military from the east.¹⁷⁵ That same day, British ambassador Sir William Seeds asked Litvinov what the Soviet position would be in the event of a Nazi invasion of Romania. That same evening, after consulting Stalin, the foreign affairs commissar proposed a multipower diplomatic conference involving Britain, the USSR, Romania, Poland, and others. On March 18, a Saturday, the British cabinet met. “The Prime Minister said that until a week ago we had proceeded on the assumption that we should be able to continue with our policy of getting onto better terms with the Dictator Powers, and that although those powers had aims, those aims were limited,” the minutes recorded, indicating a possible policy shift. But Chamberlain, who celebrated his seventieth birthday that day, insisted that they continue seeking to negotiate, although he did become far more willing to warn Hitler against future aggression.¹⁷⁶

German war preparations became blatant. On March 20, Ribbentrop issued an ultimatum to Lithuania to transfer the Baltic Sea deepwater port of Memel (Klaipeda), which had been awarded to independent Lithuania at Versailles, or risk military occupation. Lithuania capitulated, and the leaders of the 40,000 ethnic Germans in that country stepped up their agitation for subordination of Lithuanian foreign policy to Germany. This magnified the Kremlin’s high anxiety that the Baltic states would become staging grounds for an attack on the Soviet Union.¹⁷⁷ On March 21, Ribbentrop informed the Polish ambassador, Jan Lipski, that Poland’s territorial desires vis-à-vis now nominally independent Slovakia might be satisfied if Poland handed Germany Danzig and allowed a German-controlled special transit route through Poland to and from East Prussia. Lipski was noncommittal. So as not to drive Poland into Britain’s arms, Hitler informed his brass that no seizure of Danzig would be carried out and ordered Nazi ruffians in Danzig to desist from provocations for now. Germany would instead wear Poland down. On March 23, King Carol II, from whom no territory was sought, agreed to closely align Romania’s economy with Germany’s, creating joint-stock companies for Romanian oil, manganese, copper, and bauxite, as well as grain, corn, fodder, and pigs, to be exchanged for German armaments, machines, and investments in Romanian transport and communications. A secret protocol obliged Bucharest to expand oil production.¹⁷⁸

An alarmed Moscow sought details. Soviet tensions with Romania had only intensified, but in 1939 the NKVD would arrest a mere fifty-nine Romanian “spies,” as compared with 7,810 in 1937–38.¹⁷⁹ (Total NKVD arrests in 1939 would amount to 63,889, not only the fewest in the decade but a mere half of the next lowest year.) These statistics—compiled by the Soviet regime—give the lie to avowals that the terror constituted a campaign to root out a potential fifth column. More broadly, as Stalin also knew, the vast majority of former kulaks, national minorities, and recidivist criminals remained at large, meaning that the supposed potential fifth column of the wronged and resentful was still there, when the prospect of war surpassed that of the previous two years.

Back and forth the diplomatic volleys went. On March 25, 1939, the Polish government formally rejected Germany’s demands. Hitler secretly began to contemplate attacking Poland, to reestablish the pre-1914 frontiers in East Prussia and evict the ethnic Polish population.¹⁸⁰ On March 28, Litvinov delivered official notes to Estonia and Latvia, warning that the Soviet Union would view any state agreement—made voluntarily or under duress—that diminished the Baltic states’ independence or led to the political and economic hegemony of a third state over their territory and infrastructure as unacceptable, “with all the ensuing consequences.”¹⁸¹

Then came the sensation: on March 31, Chamberlain, who had not stood up for democratic Czechoslovakia, announced a unilateral “guarantee” of Poland’s independence in the House of Commons. His act was hardly sentimental: Poland was a dictatorship, albeit one without a dictator (since Piłsudski’s death, in 1935). But British intelligence warned Chamberlain—wrongly, as it turned out—of an imminent coup in Danzig to turn the city over to Hitler. (Vernon Kell, head of MI5, also passed on a report that Hitler had mocked the Tory PM as an “asshole.”)¹⁸² Chamberlain had noted that the French government knew of the guarantee in advance and supported it, but the way he had made it public—in response to a parliamentary question about what the government would do in the event of a German attack on Poland—gave it the appearance of an improvisation.¹⁸³ Maisky reported to Moscow that David Lloyd George, the former PM, had been told by Chamberlain on March 31, when asked why he had given a guarantee to Poland, that, “according to the information at his disposal, neither the German general staff nor Hitler would ever risk war if they knew that they would have to fight simultaneously on two fronts—the West and the East.”¹⁸⁴ That said, the British offered no specific military commitments to Poland (or, over time, to any country in Eastern Europe).¹⁸⁵

Trotsky, who had been allowed to visit London in March 1939, bitingly observed that “Chamberlain would give away all the democracies of the world (there are not many left) for one tenth of India.” Beyond personal foibles, Trotsky noted that “the fear of Great Britain and France before Hitler and Mussolini explains itself by the fact that the world position of these two colony-holding countries . . . no longer corresponds with their specific economic weight. The war can bring nothing to them, but can take a great deal from them.”¹⁸⁶

Even the appeasement-inclined governments in the British empire’s dominions denounced Hitler’s action. Britain’s lively press had a field day with Chamberlain—the beak nose, the shiny top hat, the impeccably tailored overcoat, the umbrella. The prime minister had made a career in municipal politics in his native Birmingham, following an up-and-down business career, and had only become a member of Parliament at age forty-nine, rising to minister of health (twice) and chancellor of the exchequer (twice). He had become PM, in late May 1937, only when Baldwin had decided to resign (the Tories still commanded a majority in the House of Commons). Then sixty-eight, Chamberlain was the second-oldest person to become PM, and he was widely perceived as a caretaker until the next election. He saw himself as a reformer of domestic affairs, but he got entangled in trying to resolve international issues in order to pursue his domestic goals.¹⁸⁷

Chamberlain’s guarantee of Poland’s independence, not its borders, presupposed further territorial revision, provided this was not achieved by force. The PM appears to have imagined that the British guarantee would strengthen Poland’s hand in “negotiations” with Nazi Germany over Danzig and the Corridor. Chamberlain’s idea was that London would be able to exert control in any possible Anglo-Polish alliance.¹⁸⁸ He warned Warsaw not to do anything rash to precipitate German military action—which, however, showed that, despite his assurances to the contrary at a cabinet meeting, the guarantee had, to an extent, placed the question of war or peace with Germany in the hands of a third country.¹⁸⁹ The dominant player in Poland’s ruling triumvirate, Foreign Minister Beck, was not fully trusted in London (or in Paris), and his idea of what was “reasonable” in negotiations with Germany differed from Chamberlain’s.

Chamberlain’s announcement of a British guarantee for Poland, which was soon publicly joined by France, happened to occur the same day (April 1, 1939) that Madrid, the last Republic holdout in Spain, fell to Franco’s forces.¹⁹⁰ Britain and France had already recognized his regime on February 27. On March 26, the caudillo had declared Spain’s adherence to the Anti-Comintern Pact. Although he had forged a politically and militarily unified Nationalist cause, a successful Popular Front on the right, he had still required thirty-two months, some 100,000 combined Italian and German troops, immense quantities of foreign weaponry, disorganization and mini civil war in the Republic camp, the timidity of France, and the active collusion of Britain to triumph. Altogether, probably half a million perished on both sides combined, including civilians, but after his victory, Franco would put to death more people than had all the kings of Spain combined; he offered no amnesty, instead forcing still more Spaniards into labor battalions or exile (Stalin refused to take them in). The victorious Nationalists in the locales, too, exacted vengeance, mostly on the Republic’s former rank-and-file officialdom (top leaders escaped).¹⁹¹ Franco was a criminal. The putsch he helped launch and the methods he used to prosecute the ensuing civil war constituted massive crimes against humanity. But his illegal action had galvanized the very leftist threat he had wanted to preempt. Stalin had chosen to hold back the Spanish Communist party, for the time being, but because of the inexorable ascendancy of the Communists in just about any extreme situation in which they are present in force, a Franco victory had become the lesser evil (as the fullness of Spain’s history would demonstrate). History rarely delivers moral clarities.

The British government and establishment were more or less pleased. But Britain’s reputation had suffered, France had been weakened, and Italy had become alienated from France and Britain, which had opened the path to Germany’s Anschluss with Austria. While the Spanish experience had further encouraged Chamberlain in his hopes that Britain could avoid war regardless of what happened on the continent, it had further convinced Hitler that Britain and France were afraid. Stalin had drawn the same conclusion.

Two weeks after Chamberlain’s gesture toward Poland, he issued, under French pressure, a similar guarantee for Romania, also a dictatorship. But the PM resisted calls in Britain for a “grand alliance” against Hitler, meaning one that involved the Soviet Union. He argued that such a bloc too closely resembled the old alliances that catastrophically had spawned the Great War.¹⁹² His domestic critics, numerous and vociferous, were neither consistent nor unified—not even just the conservatives—over a viable alternative policy.¹⁹³ In May 1939, the Bank of England would transfer to Nazi Germany gold valued at ₤6 million, held in London accounts by the erstwhile Czechoslovak National Bank.¹⁹⁴ Inside Whitehall, appeasement was far from dead, even after the debacle of Czechoslovakia: when the British cabinet discussed the guarantee for Poland, its members agreed that it would be operative only if the Poles did not demonstrate “provocative or stupid obstinacy” regarding Danzig and the Corridor.¹⁹⁵ The guarantee further required that the Poles themselves mobilize to fight the Germans, an action that London kept warning the Poles not to take. For all that, however, the guarantee had been publicly proclaimed. The nightmare Chamberlain had strenuously tried to avoid was now upon him: a possible second Europe-wide war.

Stalin was well informed about the brouhaha that had erupted in Britain over Hitler’s seizure of all of Czechoslovakia. The despot also likely knew that the British cabinet had discussed the possibility of asking the Soviet Union to join a coalition against Hitler but that the Poles were refusing to countenance such a move. With the guarantee, Chamberlain had effectively chosen Poland over the Soviet Union.¹⁹⁶ But to make his guarantee credible, he needed a military commitment to the defense of Poland from the Soviet Union.¹⁹⁷ Suddenly, unintentionally, Chamberlain, who left day-to-day management of Soviet affairs largely to his foreign secretaries, had placed Stalin and the USSR at the center of European power politics.¹⁹⁸ Some British foreign policy officials ignorantly predicted that Stalin would now “stand aloof,” failing to grasp the despot’s fear of a Western-German alliance behind his back.¹⁹⁹ At the same time, Chamberlain’s guarantee to Poland had given Hitler a powerful incentive to seek some sort of deal with the USSR, to secure his rear. London’s turn to Poland, in other words, unintentionally heightened the British need to talk to Stalin—lest Hitler do so.²⁰⁰

A BELATED DEMISE

Beria’s extreme urgency notwithstanding, the operation to murder Trotsky took time, and success was hardly assured. In the meantime, the NKVD commissar had ways of ingratiating himself: in the wee hours of April 6, 1939, Mikhail Frinovsky, Yezhov’s former first deputy of the NKVD, was arrested, just after he had requested to be relieved as naval commissar, “in view of my ignorance of sea matters.”²⁰¹ The regime sailed on. Friendship of Peoples, the first issue of an annual almanac, was issued in a print run of 10,000, for translations of the belles lettres of the Union republics into Russian. “The Soviet people sing,” the editor’s note observed. “Their songs speak of the joy of labor and victories, the successes of socialist construction. They do not know borders and are heard round the world. They talk of the miraculous flowering of the great constellation of eleven Union republics, each of which has become a bright, shining pearl. . . . The Soviet people have something to sing.”²⁰²

Stalin’s reading now extended to biographies of Ivan the Terrible and foreign affairs, including Yevgeny Tarle’s Talleyrand (1939), published in the series Lives of Remarkable People.²⁰³ In April 1939, not long after the Nazi occupation of rump Czechoslovakia, Stalin read an intercepted ciphered communication from the Japanese representative in Buenos Aires to Tokyo: “Taking into account that in a European war some 75 submarines of Germany would temporarily seek to paralyze England, what would happen if such powers as Japan, Germany, Italy, and Spain united?” Stalin underlined every word in this fantasy and wrote on it a quick count of the combined divisions (250) such an alliance would yield.²⁰⁴

On April 7, Lenin in 1918, Mikhail Romm’s sequel to his Lenin in October (1937), premiered to acclaim in Moscow.²⁰⁵ The film would be shown at Cannes and nominated for the Palme d’Or. The celebrated Shchukin again played Lenin, with what was regarded as even greater fidelity to his life.²⁰⁶ Gelovani again successfully played Stalin, who despite the title was the central man of action, sent in 1918 to obtain grain in Tsaritsyn, where he shows himself to be a great military commander who feeds the two capitals in the north and saves the Soviet republic. Stalin had dictated changes to the original cut. Originally entitled Assassination, for the near-fatal attempt on Lenin’s life that year, the film opens with Lenin asking Gorky, “What should we do with our enemies?” Gorky worries about “excessive severity,” but Lenin retorts, “Severity nowadays is an essential condition of battle. Such severity will be understood.”²⁰⁷

Many people who had been arrested under Yezhov were being released as victims of “enemies” who had infiltrated the NKVD. Also on April 7, the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky noted in his diary that “Yezhov’s portrait in the Lomonosov Institute was taken down.” He added: “They say [it has happened] everywhere. This is a person who destroyed thousands, if not tens of thousands, of innocents.”²⁰⁸ The interrogator-torturers, who before had followed orders from Frinovsky, had set to beating out of him testimony against Yezhov, including how the latter had ordered that suspects be beaten to provide false testimony. Within a week Beria would send Stalin a forty-three-page confession written by Frinovsky; Stalin made notes on it.²⁰⁹ On April 10, Yezhov himself finally was arrested, evidently in Malenkov’s office on Old Square, where Yezhov had been summoned as a precaution, perhaps so that he would not commit suicide. Stalin was eating supper in his Kremlin apartment, below the Little Corner, with Khrushchev, among others, when Beria’s call about the apprehension came through. Yezhov’s arrest went unmentioned in the Soviet press.²¹⁰ “Despite all the major shortcomings and failures in my work,” Yezhov would boast, in a letter to Stalin, “I must say that, with the daily guidance of the Central Committee, the NKVD really trounced the enemy.”²¹¹ Beria wanted Yezhov to confess to failing to cleanse the bodyguards of the enemy Karl Pauker’s people, thereby putting Stalin at risk, a convenient pretext for Beria to try to stuff the Kremlin guards, now led by Vlasik, with his own people, but Stalin mostly thwarted this power grab.²¹²

Beria personally oversaw Yezhov’s interrogation at night at Sukhanovka, the most feared prison in the system, where Beria kept an office.²¹³ Almost no light ever penetrated the darkness of the five-by-seven-foot cells, some of which were located far underground. Prisoners were often not permitted to sleep or sit, but instead forced to stand all night. In the worst and tiniest cells, it was, in any case, impossible to stand, and freezing water was run through constantly. Executions took place in the site’s former cathedral, where a crematorium had been set up. The Yagodaites and many thousands of others had been buried at Yagoda’s former dacha complex, near the Kommunarka state farm, but the Yezhovites would meet their deaths at Sukhanovka cathedral, as well as at the nearby Butovo killing field. Altogether, more than 100 of the highest-ranking Yezhovites were massacred—all of his deputies, almost all department heads in the center, almost all NKVD heads in Union republics and provinces.²¹⁴

Sukhanovka lay not far from Yezhov’s luxurious dacha at Meshcherino (which now went to the Comintern chief Dimitrov). A search of the dacha, Yezhov’s Lubyanka office, and his Kremlin apartment turned up juicy finds: an arsenal of guns, 115 books written by counterrevolutionaries and anti-Soviet émigrés—the kind of literature Stalin collected in abundance. “Behind the books in various places,” the investigator noted, “were discovered three half-bottles (full) of wheat vodka, one half-bottle of vodka, half emptied, and two empty half-bottles of vodka.” In the desk the NKVD investigator found four bullet casings, marked ZINOVIEV, KAMENEV, and SMIRNOV (two). Perhaps the greatest discovery was that in Yezhov’s apartment—and not in his Lubyanka safe—he had kept a cache of documents from the tsarist-era Tiflis gendarmerie on “Koba.” Whispers of a “file on Stalin” circulated throughout the upper ranks of the regime.²¹⁵ The nature of this file in Yezhov’s possession remains unknown. For Beria, it was unclear which was more dangerous: to turn the material over to Stalin, and thus indicate that he had seen it, or to not turn it over.²¹⁶ Stalin supposedly flashed the material Yezhov had gathered on him at a politburo meeting, as if Yezhov had been acting on his own in the terror’s excesses.²¹⁷

Beria also obtained twenty pages of testimony from Yezhov that compromised his former party deputy Malenkov, which Beria evidently passed on to Stalin, but the despot chose not to allow Malenkov’s destruction.²¹⁸ Still, Beria delivered still more pleasing news: on April 13, 1939, Merkulov, his first deputy, finally managed to produce testimony with the signature of the stout Yefim Yevdokimov. Beria had personally gone to arrest him at his apartment on Grand Kisel Lane, 5, off Great Lubyanka, but Yevdokimov had held out for seven months, through broken legs and unceasing torture, which had continued in the prison hospital.²¹⁹ When confronted by former colleagues, he shouted them down for confessing to fabricated crimes; investigators were compelled to cease such confrontations, for Yevdokimov sometimes convinced others to retract their statements. When the NKVD put one former colleague in his cell to cajole him into confessing, Yevdokimov cursed him as a lowlife and the supposed plot inside the NKVD as “fabrication.” Another coaxer-informant reported that “during my stay together with Yevdokimov . . . he said that all he wanted was a bomb to blow up the investigative unit of the NKVD and fly with it up in the air, and that an apparatus that so cripples and destroys innocent people can only be called fascist.”²²⁰

But after the arrests of Frinovsky and Yezhov, Yevdokimov evidently agreed to incriminate himself, along with them. Beria was on a roll: on April 16, his minions managed to track down former Ukrainian NKVD chief Alexander Uspensky, who, after having staged his own suicide, had evaded an all-Union manhunt for five months (in Arkhangelsk, Moscow, Kaluga, Kazan, Sverdlovsk). He was apprehended outside the luggage area of the train station at Miass, in the Urals.²²¹ The interrogation of Yezhov, meanwhile, would result in twenty fat volumes. He was charged with heading a “counterrevolutionary organization”—while heading the NKVD.

Stalin’s former NKVD chief confessed to working for a veritable world gazetteer of enemy intelligence services: Germany, Britain, France, Japan, Poland. (Yezhov had in fact liquidated the Polish Communist party, on Stalin’s orders.) On April 24, 1939, Yezhov “testified” about his “pederasty,” meaning homosexual relations. As recorded in the protocols, he recounted that his first such experience dated to age fifteen or sixteen, when, along with other male youths, he was a tailor’s apprentice. Yezhov named various Soviet officials, from the army and elsewhere, with whom he claimed to have cohabitated for months; many of his male partners were married but, conveniently, for service reasons, happened to be without their wives. Among the latter category, Yezhov named Filipp Goloshchokin, at the time party secretary in Kazakhstan. More recently, Yezhov had been on a long, alcohol-soaked debauch with Vladimir Konstantinov, one of his longtime lovers (along with Ivan Dementyev). Yezhov characterized his homosexual liaisons as “mutually active.”²²² How much of this Beria embellished cannot be known. History does not record the prudish Stalin’s reaction.

TRIPLE ALLIANCE PROPOSAL

Back on April 3, 1939, Poland’s Beck had arrived in London, seeking recourse. That same day, Hitler ordered plans developed for a military attack on Poland that could begin no later than the early fall. On April 11, the Wehrmacht issued clarifying instructions that a war against Poland was to be avoided, if possible, but preparations would go forward.²²³ On April 14, the British and French governments—separately—approached the Soviets. Foreign secretary Halifax asked Maisky whether the Soviet Union would make a public declaration to the effect that it would support countries that were “victims of aggression” if they resisted such an act, by providing aid “if desired . . . and in such a manner as would be found most convenient.”²²⁴ It was a small move in the direction of the Soviets by the British government.

Also on April 14, 1939, TASS sent a secret internal report, which reached Stalin, containing a Russian translation of an article in the New York World-Telegram by its editor, Roy Howard, who had achieved renown by attaining the interview with Stalin some years back. Howard’s latest article, dispatched from Paris—beyond Soviet censors—called the Soviet Union a false “shop-window country” with ubiquitous surveillance, propaganda that covered over everything with lies, thousands of internally deported or executed political prisoners, and, as a result, a military and industry in disarray. Howard wrote that Communism had failed to find an alternative to capitalism’s stimulation, and that the standard of living remained below that of Italy. He called the Soviet system—in passages underlined by Stalin—“oriental military despotism, the iron hand, and mercilessness” and concluded, in a paragraph crossed out by Stalin, that “at the present time, despite the gigantic army and air force, in the opinion of foreign military observers, including French and British officials, the USSR has lost hope as a factor in the pending combination of forces against fascism.”²²⁵

The Soviets, in this context, upped the British ante; Litvinov (April 15) sent Stalin and Molotov a draft proposal for a formal alliance with Britain and France. Stalin edited the text, transforming it into a specific eight-point plan for an unequivocal anti-Nazi Triple Alliance.²²⁶ Litvinov was received in the Little Corner on April 16, and the next day he conveyed the final text to the British, summoning Seeds from the theater in the middle of a play; the day after that, Litvinov passed it to the French. Scholars who continue to deny that Stalin ever wanted a military alliance with the West have to explain why he offered one, in written form. British officials, internally, judged the Soviet proposal “extremely inconvenient” and hurriedly worked to douse French interest in it; the French contemplated an independent policy vis-à-vis Moscow, but only briefly.²²⁷

Also on April 17, the newly appointed Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Aleksei Merekalov, called on Ernst von Weizsäcker, state secretary at the German foreign ministry, to complain about violations of Soviet trade contracts with the Škoda Works since the Germans had taken it over. Merekalov, a former deputy commissar for trade (who spoke no German), observed that fulfillment of the contracts would indicate whether the German government was willing to “cultivate and expand economic relations with Russia.” Weizsäcker shot back that, given reports of a possible British-French-Soviet military alliance, the atmosphere for delivering war matériel to Russia was not favorable. This prompted Merekalov to inquire about current events in Europe and Soviet-German relations. Weizsäcker, sticking to his brief, stated that Germany desired “mutually satisfactory commercial relations with Russia,” to which Merekalov replied, “Russian policy has always moved in a straight line.” The envoy further pointed out that ideological differences had scarcely affected Soviet-Italian relations and did not have to “prove a stumbling block” with Berlin, especially since the USSR had refrained from exploiting the tensions between Germany and the West. Merekalov concluded that normalizing bilateral relations was possible, the refrain of Soviet trade and diplomatic officials going on six years.²²⁸

Škoda was selling the Soviets antiaircraft guns, howitzers, and naval weapons, in exchange for iron and manganese ores, nickel, tungsten, copper, tin, and foodstuffs. Stalin viewed fulfillment of the orders as important in themselves, and as a revealing test of German intentions, which remained unclear. Hitler, during a long, rambling audience granted to Grigore Gafencu, the Romanian foreign minister, in the Chancellery (April 19, 1939), raved about the British, Danzig, and being forced into war. “In the end, victor or vanquished, we shall all be buried in the same ruins,” he was said to have told Gafencu. “And the only one who will profit is that man in Moscow.”²²⁹

Romania, like Poland, expressed concerns to London that any formal security treaty involving the USSR would provoke Hitler’s wrath against them. Viscount Halifax, according to the well-informed Maisky, told Polish ambassador Raczyński that “the Soviet proposal, though serious, went further than the British government was prepared to go.” Indeed, already on April 19, according to notes of a meeting of the British government’s foreign policy committee taken by Sir Alexander Cadogan (who had replaced Robert Vansittart as the top foreign office bureaucrat), London had decided to reject the Soviet proposal without directly conveying as much. British officials reasoned that the Soviet military was in no position to extend support beyond its borders, and that friends of Britain would erupt in fury at an alliance with the bloody Communist menace. Cadogan, however, did note the risk, albeit “remote,” that an outright British rejection of the Soviet proposal might provoke a Soviet-German agreement. He also deemed the Soviet proposal politically awkward. “We have taken the attitude that the Soviets preach us sermons on ‘collective security’ but make no practical proposals,” Cadogan observed. “They have now made such, and they will rail at us for turning them down. And the Left in this country may be counted on to make the most of this.”²³⁰

The British stalled any formal response, cloaking rejection in the form of “comments” (as a German official in London noted).²³¹ Litvinov had written to Merekalov in early April 1939, regarding Britain and France, that “later, our help will be sought, which will cost them more dearly, and they will have to recompense us.”²³² But on April 19 and 21, Stalin convoked angry meetings in the Little Corner, having had the envoys to Britain (Maisky), Germany (Merekalov), and France (Surits) recalled. (Potyomkin, evidently protecting Surits, had him send a subordinate.)²³³ Especially at the second session, on April 21, “collective security” was eviscerated.²³⁴ “The atmosphere was strained to an extreme,” recalled Maisky. “Although outwardly Stalin appeared calm, puffing on his pipe, it was evident he was extremely ill-disposed toward Litvinov.” After almost six years, “collective security” had gotten nowhere. Litvinov evidently had written a resignation letter, though he did not submit it. “Molotov became vicious,” Maisky added, “attacking Litvinov unremittingly, accusing him of every mortal sin.”²³⁵ Merekalov had been summoned to the April 21 meeting only for the last of the four hours. Fresh from meeting in Berlin with Weizsäcker, he insisted that Soviet-German rapprochement was possible; after all, Hitler needed Soviet neutrality. The British had still not replied to the Soviet offer of a Triple Alliance, but on April 26 they informed Berlin that they would not accept Moscow’s proposal.²³⁶ Stalin decided to bring in the Hammer.

SEIZING FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Ten years younger than the despot, Molotov was the second-most-senior member of the inner circle. He could play violin and took tango lessons (with Voroshilov), though he stammered and was infamous for being mulish. But he had never belonged to a party opposition or the Mensheviks, let alone fought for the Whites or worked in bourgeois counterintelligence (like Beria) and, almost uniquely, was completely untainted. There had been, essentially, just that March 1936 botched Le Temps interview, after which Molotov’s name disappeared from the targets of “enemy” assassination attempts for a time.²³⁷ (Trotsky closely followed the absence, then reappearance, of Molotov’s name, speculating on its significance; Molotov followed Trotsky’s Kremlinological writings.)²³⁸ All during the terror, when Stalin had sent Molotov “materials” on someone and asked what should be done, he had invariably leapt at the cue: “Arrest.” Molotov sometimes crossed out “exile” and wrote “shoot.” When Stalin murdered Molotov’s aides, he acquiesced, and was not known to have tried to protect anyone except his wife.²³⁹ One subordinate recalled that “Molotov was often agitated, and lost his temper over nothing.”²⁴⁰ That was especially the case after Stalin had read him the riot act. At the 18th Party Congress, Stalin had publicly humiliated his number two, approving the draft of Molotov’s report beforehand but then, after he had delivered it, convening the politburo to criticize it, which Molotov then had to acknowledge to the ongoing congress.²⁴¹ Still, the indispensable Molotov proved unfailingly reliable, and possessed phenomenal grit.

Molotov had been present every single time Litvinov was summoned to the Little Corner between 1935 and 1939, with a mere two exceptions.²⁴² The chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars did not hide his antipathy for the foreign affairs commissar. Zhdanov, whom Stalin had made head of the Supreme Soviet commission for foreign affairs, a platform for spewing additional venom about dens of foreign spies, was perhaps even more rabid in his dislike. A Russian nationalist whose virulently anticapitalist, anti-imperialist speeches appeared frequently in the press, Zhdanov came to be seen as the public antipode to the cosmopolitan, multilingual Litvinov. He publicly condemned the mutual assistance pact with France—the linchpin of Litvinov’s foreign policy.²⁴³ Still, Zhdanov worked in Leningrad, and Molotov was by far the most frequent presence in Stalin’s Little Corner—logging three times the total hours of the next closest visitors (Voroshilov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Beria, Mikoyan). In fact, Molotov not only met Stalin alone often but was present at three quarters of all recorded gatherings in the Little Corner. Few others in that regime, if any, could have borne the weight of such proximity to Stalin.

Stalin had long been directing foreign policy himself from his Little Corner, relying upon the NKVD, military intelligence, the Comintern, special envoys, and Molotov as head of government and member of the politburo commission on foreign policy.²⁴⁴ The despot summoned foreign affairs commissariat staff and ambassadors from abroad without Litvinov being present, and he had ignored Litvinov’s warnings about intervening in Spain and much else. Litvinov must have feared for his own life.²⁴⁵ Two terror waves had pulverized his commissariat, the first in spring 1937, the second in spring 1938 (which targeted those who had worked with him yet remained at large).²⁴⁶ Foreigners looked to Litvinov’s fortunes as a key to unlocking the enigma of Soviet foreign policy.²⁴⁷ During the 1939 May Day parade, Stalin allowed him to appear atop the Lenin Mausoleum for all to see.²⁴⁸ The next day, Maisky, in London, ruminating on the Soviet proposal for a grand alliance with Britain and France, concluded that “acceptance by the British Government can scarcely be doubted.”²⁴⁹ But that very night, Beria and Dekanozov, along with Molotov and Malenkov, arrived at the foreign affairs commissariat, in the form of a “Central committee commission,” to interrogate the staff. Litvinov was forced to observe the humiliation.²⁵⁰ On May 3, Litvinov received the British ambassador calmly, and Seeds, belatedly, answered the Soviet alliance proposal by reporting that Whitehall had still not come to a decision—after a fortnight.²⁵¹ That same evening, in Stalin’s Little Corner, yet another flaying of collective security took place. As Litvinov sat there impassively, Molotov lost his composure, shouting as Litvinov departed, “You think we are all fools.”²⁵²

During the Little Corner gathering, Beria had slipped out at 5:05 p.m., ten minutes before Litvinov was admitted. NKVD troops proceeded to surround the foreign affairs commissariat building on Blacksmith Bridge, diagonally across from the back side of Lubyanka. At 11:00 that night, Kremlin staff dispatched a coded message to Soviet ambassadors—which, unusually, was signed by Stalin himself—noting Litvinov’s “disloyal attitude to the Council of People’s Commissars” and the acceptance of his “request” to be relieved of his duties.²⁵³ On the morning of May 4, at the foreign affairs commissariat, Molotov announced that he was taking over. In Litvinov’s old office, he had to sort through his state papers, which lay in a disorganized pile, many unread, some smeared in butter from sandwiches—the kind of disarray the fastidious Molotov found especially distasteful.

Litvinov’s 1939 dismissal marked Stalin’s full emancipation from the foreign policy “specialists.”²⁵⁴ Unlike many Bolsheviks of his vintage, such as Litvinov, Molotov had never been part of the foreign emigration in Europe.²⁵⁵ Also unlike Litvinov, Molotov enjoyed direct access to Soviet intelligence agencies, which he would employ alongside regular channels of diplomacy.²⁵⁶ Among the cast of top minions, Molotov, further, was uniquely self-assured. “I would say,” Khrushchev later recalled, “that he was the only person in the politburo who opposed Stalin on this or that question for the second time.”²⁵⁷ Georgy Zhukov, the military commander, later recalled that “at times it reached the point where Stalin raised his voice and even lost all self-control, and Molotov, smiling, rose from behind the table and held firm to his point of view.” Zhukov added that Molotov “exerted a serious influence on Stalin, especially in foreign policy questions, in which Stalin at that time, before the war, considered him [Molotov] as competent.”²⁵⁸

A ROUTED, TRANSFORMED COMMISSARIAT

Litvinov was put under investigation for high treason, partly based upon “testimony” from Yezhov, delivered to Stalin on April 27, to the effect that, while on holiday at Merano, Italy, Litvinov, while dancing a foxtrot, had told Yezhov that “our statesmen have absolutely no culture at all.” Litvinov lost his Moscow apartment but kept his state dacha outside the city, which Beria had surrounded with NKVD troops. The story goes that Litvinov, finding his government phone disconnected, used a city line to call Beria, who “joked” that the goons were stationed there for his “protection.”²⁵⁹ Litvinov’s house arrest reverberated throughout the foreign affairs commissariat as his closest associates still at large were arrested and tortured to build a “case” against their boss. “Beria and Kobulov put me on a chair and sat on either side and punched me in the head, playing ‘swings,’” recalled Yevgeny Gnedin, the press officer of the foreign affairs commissariat. “They beat me horribly, with the full force of their arms, demanding I give testimony against Litvinov.”²⁶⁰ One foreign affairs commissariat insider who might not have been displeased at Litvinov’s removal was Vasily Korzhenko. When he heard of Molotov’s appointment as commissar, he anticipated a promotion; after all, Korzhenko had been helping direct carnage from the inside. But the Korzhenko family driver had been arrested as a Polish spy; his replacement, too, was arrested as a trumped-up spy.²⁶¹ The loyal hatchet man himself, rather than being given the expected promotion, was asked for his keys, and, back out in the corridor, NKVD operatives arrested him. He disappeared, now a victim as well as perpetrator.

Soviet diplomacy’s image abroad was being devastated by the widely discussed disappearances. As in the case of the NKVD, however, a planned separate trial of foreign commissariat personnel would never take place.²⁶² The wet work of mopping up the remaining Litvinovites fell to the Beriaite Dekanozov, who had only recently been named head of NKVD foreign espionage but now became first deputy commissar of foreign affairs. Dekanozov’s place was taken by Pavel Fitin (b. 1907), the son of Russian peasants in Siberia, who had attended a village middle school, then graduated as an agricultural engineer from the Tirmiryazev Academy, in Moscow, and became an editor at the state agricultural publisher. In March 1938, the party had him mobilized to the NKVD Central School, in Moscow, but not the newly opened NKVD School of Special Designation for training spies, outside the capital in the woods (he lacked knowledge of a foreign language). Nonethless, by August 1938 he was an intern in the NKVD’s espionage directorate, in the department for Trotskyites and rightists abroad. In January 1939, Fitin was named deputy head of Soviet civilian espionage, and on May 13, 1939, he would be promoted to the top position (while holding the rank of major).²⁶³ Sudoplatov would be advanced to deputy chief under Fitin and given a grand office at Lubyanka HQ, on the seventh floor—the old office of Abram Slutsky, the former NKVD foreign intelligence chief who had been killed with poison by his own agency.²⁶⁴

Not everyone in foreign affairs was arrested. Alexandra Kollontai, a former member of the old Workers’ Opposition and one of the world’s first female ambassadors, survived. Why remains mysterious, though she did constantly seek out Stalin’s guidance, allowing him to explain geopolitics to her, flattering his self-conception as the Lenin of our day, while also sucking up to Voroshilov, playing on his infamous sentimentality.²⁶⁵ Equally remarkable, the Litvinovite Maisky, a former Menshevik who during the civil war had been a member of the anti-Bolshevik government in Samara, was not recalled. A few diplomatic personnel, when summoned home, escaped. Raskolnikov, Soviet envoy to Bulgaria, had received a telegram from Litvinov ordering him to Moscow in connection with an unspecified new appointment, but he dragged out his departure from Sofia and, en route to the Soviet Union, managed to switch trains and abscond to Paris. (In summer 1939, Raskolnikov would be convicted in absentia.) How often Litvinov had tried to protect people, versus how often he became complicit in their destruction, remains unclear.²⁶⁶ He had written to Stalin that he was worried about nine ambassadorial vacancies (including Warsaw, Bucharest, Tokyo, and Washington), with more vacancies looming, and he underscored that “in some of these capitals there has not been an ambassador for a year.”²⁶⁷ NKVD station chiefs had been assigned to the ambassadorial positions in China and Mongolia—and they asked Lubyanka headquarters if they could inform the foreign affairs commissariat of their diplomatic activities.

A number of those now arrested in foreign affairs were Jewish. Their deliberate removal in 1937–39 did not signify a special anti-Semitism, any more than their original mass promotion into the foreign affairs commissariat, or into the Cheka, had signaled a special Judeophilia.²⁶⁸ The removal of Jews was aimed at altering the image of the regime and making way for promotion of the young, the humble, and the Slavic, as in the NKVD. Typical of the new men was twenty-four-year-old Vladimir Pavlov, an ethnic Russian who had graduated in spring 1939 from the Moscow Energy Institute and, already a candidate member of the party, found himself a top aide to Molotov. Pavlov soon became one of Stalin’s interpreters.²⁶⁹ Another example was Andrei Gromyko (b. 1909), a working-class militant from Belarus who had been trained as a Marxist economist and suddenly entered diplomatic service in spring 1939 as the new head of the foreign affairs commissariat’s American department. (He had “virtually no knowledge of foreign affairs,” American diplomats in Moscow surmised after a luncheon.)²⁷⁰ Molotov would recall that Litvinov “was an intelligent man, an outstanding personality, but one did not trust him.” By contrast, Molotov viewed Gromyko as “still young and inexperienced, but loyal.”²⁷¹

When Hitler had asserted control over his foreign ministry, which he had called an “intellectual garbage dump,” by appointing the Nazi parvenu Ribbentrop to replace the old-line aristocrat Baron Konstantin von Neurath, the takeover was said to resemble a fight of the jackboots against the striped trousers.²⁷² The Soviet foreign affairs commissariat was rocked not just by the brawling over political orientation—Britain/France versus Germany—but by class and cultural antagonisms. Litvinov had once been a young firebrand, the man Lenin had called upon to fence the money that Kamo and Stalin had heisted from the mail coach on Yerevan Square in 1907. But Victor Serge, in France, characterized the dismissed sixty-three-year-old Litvinov as “a large diplomat with a lined face resembling a very wealthy diamond merchant from Antwerp or a City banker related to the Rothschilds.”²⁷³ No love was lost between the Litvinov caste of “bourgeois” Soviet diplomats of Western three-piece suits and clubby gestures—the very features that made him acceptable in the Western world—and the latest young appointees, who often came from the workbench or the plow, such as Pavlov and Gromyko. But Pavlov aside, the newly promoted were often monolingual (as Litvinov had complained to Stalin) and out of their depth.²⁷⁴ A former textile plant manager would soon be appointed Soviet envoy to Berlin.

A POLISH HINGE?

On April 20, 1939, when Hitler celebrated his fiftieth birthday, he playfully wrote to Ribbentrop, “Please invite a series of foreign guests, among them as many cowardly civilians and democrats as possible,” adding that he wanted these foreigners to see “a parade of the most modern of armies.”²⁷⁵ Some 20,000 guests were accommodated in the grandstand alone. Celebrations were also held in other German cities, and the Free City of Danzig. The birthday festivities had actually begun the day before, when Hitler rode at the head of a fifty-white-limousine cavalcade along Speer’s newly constructed East-West Axis, the central boulevard of what was to be the transformed capital, decorated with Nazi banners and lit by torches. For the military parade, the Führer stood on the reviewing stand, flanked by generals, admirals, field marshals, and bodyguards. Arm extended in Nazi salute, he took in the largest display in Nazi Germany to date of goose-stepping columns—nearly 50,000 uniformed troops—along with tanks, artillery, antiaircraft guns, and Messerschmitt fighters and Heinkel bombers roaring overhead. According to one foreign eyewitness, Hitler “never took his eyes from the immense army on the march.”²⁷⁶

All surrounding streets and other approaches had been sealed, of course, but the British military attaché in Berlin, Colonel Noel Mason-MacFarlane, had an apartment overlooking the reviewing stand. “Easy rifle shot,” he had said to a colleague in the run-up to the Munich Pact. “I could pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking, and what’s more I’m thinking of doing it. . . . There’d be all hell to pay, of course, and I’d be finished in every sense of the word. Still . . . with that lunatic out of the way . . .”²⁷⁷ His superiors at the war office would have none of it. Again in March 1939, at the time of the invasion of rump Czechoslovakia, Mason-MacFarlane had urged headquarters in London to take energetic action, warning of catastrophe if Hitler was not “unexpectedly wafted to Valhalla.” Now, during preparations for Hitler’s birthday, he had been able to observe the swastika banners and other decorations going up. Assassination by a high-velocity rifle from his apartment remained feasible: his drawing-room window was no more than 100 yards from the reviewing stand. The noise of the crowds, not to mention the blare of the military band, could drown out any shots and allow an assassin a decent chance to escape. Again, however, the war office demurred.²⁷⁸

Following the parade, safely inside the Chancellery hall where Bismarck had presided over the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Hitler’s inner circle presented him with bronze casts, Meissen porcelains, oil paintings (including a Titian), tapestries, antique weapons, rare coins, and kitschy Nazi memorabilia.²⁷⁹ “The Führer is fêted as no other mortal has ever been,” gushed Goebbels, the instigator of the grandiosity. A collector’s luxury anniversary edition of Mein Kampf was published in both dark blue and red cases with stamped gold sword. Hitler, as state propaganda noted, had arisen from the lower ranks, and for his birthday, low-income Germans received 15 reichsmarks, plus 5 more for each dependent, as a onetime gift. Whatever the daily life hardships, Germans could be proud again. “A great man,” one seventeen-year-old girl observed, speaking for millions, “a genius, a person sent to us from heaven.”²⁸⁰

On April 28, 1939—two days after the British government had informed Berlin that it would not accept Soviet proposals for an alliance—the Führer denounced his nonaggression declaration with Poland as well as the Anglo-German naval accord, blaming the two countries, in a blistering two-hour speech at one of the fewer than a dozen Reichstag sessions since he had claimed power.

Hitler was furious over another letter from U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt pleading for assurances from the Nazi leader that he would not commit aggression against a long list of specified countries, promising him access to raw materials in return. The message had been disclosed to the New York Times before reaching Hitler, and he had summoned the 855 Reichstag deputies to the Kroll Opera House. “For the past six and a half years, I have lived day and night for the single task of awakening the powers of my people in the face of our desertion by the rest of the world,” he gloated, in front of an immense Nazi eagle. “I have conquered chaos in Germany, reestablished order, immensely increased production in all branches of our national economy, produced, by strenuous efforts, substitutes for numerous materials which we lack, prepared the way for new inventions, . . . caused magnificent roads to be built and canals to be dug, created gigantic new factories.” He congratulated himself for overcoming Versailles and reunifying Germany as well: “I have likewise endeavored to rid them of that treaty, page by page, which in its 448 articles contains the vilest oppression which has ever been inflicted on men and nations. I have brought back to the Reich the provinces stolen from us in 1919. . . . I have reunited the territories that have been German throughout a thousand years of history—and, Mr. Roosevelt, I have endeavored to attain all this without bloodshed and without bringing to my people, and so to others, the misery of war.”²⁸¹

Hitler’s speech drew hearty applause and laughs, including when he implied that he would refrain from attacking the many countries that remained under the British colonial yoke or had already been invaded by the United States over the course of its existence. His twisted thinking—calling dictatorship “order” and the Weimar Constitution “chaos”—did not vitiate the fact that Germany’s vast pool of 6 million unemployed had been returned to the dignity of work, with an economic boom absent inflation (or strikes, which were outlawed), and that Germany had incorporated Austria, the Sudetenland, the Saarland, and Memel. A once great but prostrate country had in Nazi fashion become great again, in a single generation; a lifelong nonentity had become the world’s central figure.²⁸²

Denunciation of the nonaggression declaration seemed to indicate a likely intention to attack Poland, for which Hitler might want to secure Soviet neutrality. His speech had conspicuously omitted the usual denunciations of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” which Western observers duly noted. German press attacks against the USSR ceased, as the Soviets duly noted.²⁸³ On May 3, 1939, General Karl Bodenschatz, Göring’s adjutant, warned the French military attaché in Berlin that “something is up in the East.” He repeated his warning to the Polish military attaché. (The next day was Litvinov’s dismissal.) Four days later, Bodenschatz informed the French ambassador in Berlin, Robert Coulondre, that Hitler wanted an agreement with the Soviet Union.²⁸⁴

VISIONS OF A DEAL

On the evening of May 5, the delayed Kremlin banquet for May Day parade participants took place in the St. George’s Hall, and among the artists summoned for the first time was Igor Ilinsky, the stage and film actor (of Volga-Volga fame), who read from Chekhov’s comic writing. “Everyone ate, drank, conversed,” Ilinsky complained, “and, it seemed, no one was listening to me.”²⁸⁵ Earlier that day, Merekalov had been recalled from Berlin, which left the embassy to Georgy Astakhov, the chargé d’affaires (rumored to be an NKVD intelligence operative). That same day, Karl Schnurre, head of the East European and Baltic section of the commercial policy department in the German foreign ministry, informed Astakhov, in a response to Merekalov’s inquiry regarding the Škoda Works, that its new German director would fulfill Soviet orders.²⁸⁶ Astakhov, according to the German notetaker, “was visibly gratified at the declaration and stressed the fact that for the Soviet Government the material side of the question was not of as great importance as the question of principle.” Astakhov then asked whether negotiations might be resumed. When Schnurre was noncommittal, Astakhov stressed the significance of Molotov’s replacement of Litvinov.²⁸⁷ Astakhov reported to Moscow in detail on the reaction in Germany to Litvinov’s dismissal, but he did not have access to Hitler.²⁸⁸

While Stalin’s embassy in Berlin also sought to drive home the significance of the personnel change, Germany’s embassy in Moscow buzzed with the implications of the dismissal of Litvinov (known on Nazi radio as “Litvinov-Finkelstein”). Each side’s functionaries reported that the other side looked eager for rapprochement.²⁸⁹ The timing was propitious: German economic planners were warning that Germany’s war machine might fall critically short of oil, rubber, and manganese, all of which Stalin could supply.²⁹⁰ But was Hitler interested? Internally, Göring had broached the idea of approaching Moscow, if only to frighten Warsaw into concessions.²⁹¹ Stalin had long suspected that Hitler might be simulating talks with Moscow in order to frighten London into cutting a deal with Berlin.

Britain’s stance vis-à-vis the Soviet Union offered no greater clarity, given the nonanswer to Moscow’s alliance proposal that Seeds had delivered to Litvinov (the day before the latter’s ouster was announced in the press). Litvinov vanished from public view. He was said to be playing bridge, reading poetry, taking walks at his state dacha, and learning to type. But Stalin did not authorize an arrest.²⁹² No sentimentality was involved. Litvinov’s destruction would have delivered an unequivocal signal abroad. Had the despot wanted to consign Britain and France to hell for good—and he did seem to want just that—he would be doing so with no security alternative at hand.²⁹³ Most worrisome, if he abandoned Britain and France definitively, they might cut a nightmare deal with Hitler behind his back.

A German-Japanese anti-Soviet coalition remained a possibility as well. Japan posed a significant threat to the Western powers’ colonies, and Germany sought to convert the Anti-Comintern Pact into a real military alliance with Japan in order to raise the cost of any British and French declaration of war against Germany on behalf of Poland. Sorge reported from Tokyo (May 5, 1939) that the Japanese side was divided: its navy sought to include as mutual enemies the United States and Britain, not just the Soviet Union, while Japan’s army dreamed about a joint war with Nazi Germany against the USSR.²⁹⁴ Germany was also hoping to sign binding military obligations with its Italian partner in the Axis. In Milan on May 6–7, Ribbentrop met Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and the foreign minister, to iron out final details for a bilateral “Pact of Steel” (Mussolini had wanted to call it the Pact of Blood). Japan had been given no advance notice, but Ribbentrop informed a skeptical Ciano that Germany wanted to include Japan.²⁹⁵ For Stalin, getting some sort of deal with Hitler also promised to drive a crucial wedge between Tokyo and Berlin, and possibly with Italy, too.

NEGOTIATIONS, OF A SORT

On May 8, Molotov received British ambassador Seeds, a lifelong Russophile, as well as French ambassador Paul-Émile Naggiar, in his Kremlin office and assured them that the Soviet offer of an alliance conveyed by Litvinov still stood and that “collective security” negotiations would continue. The government chairman/foreign affairs commissar also bluntly accused the Western governments of wanting to talk “ad infinitum” and insisted that any political agreement had to be coupled with a formal military alliance. Seeds requested a public declaration of support for Britain and France in their guarantees to Poland and Romania, in a form agreeable to them, but said nothing of British and French military aid if the Soviet Union were attacked. “As you see,” Molotov wrote in a telegram to Surits (Paris) and Maisky (London), “the English and French are demanding of us unilateral and gratuitous assistance with no intention of rendering us equivalent assistance.” Maisky responded that a “relapse to the Munich policy” of capitulation to Hitler was evident in London. On May 11, as Molotov again received Seeds and Naggiar, Halifax told the Soviet ambassador in London that no three-way “guarantees” could be offered to the three Baltic states against an aggression, a central Soviet demand to remove these potential attack platforms.²⁹⁶

On May 10 at the Berghof, Hitler, with Ribbentrop in tow, received Gustav Hilger, from the Moscow embassy staff (resident in Moscow since June 1920), and Schnurre, the Soviet trade expert in the German foreign ministry, posing many questions and listening. “Will Stalin be prepared under well-known circumstances to come to an agreement with Germany?” Hitler asked, according to Schnurre.²⁹⁷ Within a week, on the initiative of General Keitel, Hitler would also meet with his German military attaché to Moscow, General Ernst Köstring, who, like Hilger, had been born in Russia (1876) and knew the language, and who, no softy on Bolshevism, confirmed the positive interpretations of German-Soviet relations that Hilger and German ambassador Schulenburg had presented.²⁹⁸ Perhaps Hitler relished an approach to Moscow as a way to upset and apply pressure against Poland and Britain, but he loathed the idea of sacrificing any war production to Stalin, which was what a deal with Moscow would have to entail. Ribbentrop was assiduously seeking Japan’s signature to the military Pact of Steel, offering to allow the Japanese to publicly portray the expansive agreement as if it were directed only at the USSR.²⁹⁹

Poland’s tensions with Germany had even pushed the Warsaw leadership into wary discussions with the USSR. Also on May 10, deputy foreign affairs commissar Potyomkin met in Warsaw with Beck, at the latter’s request. Haughty and deceitful as he might be, Beck had turned out not to be the Nazi stooge that Soviet stooges had portrayed him to be. “Peace is a thing precious and desirable,” he had declared in a speech in the Polish parliament on May 5, carried live on radio, explaining his rejection of Hitler’s demands. “Our generation, bloodied in wars, certainly deserves peace. But peace, like almost all things of this world, has its price, a high but a measurable one. We in Poland do not know the concept of peace at any price. There is only one thing in the lives of men, nations, and states that is without price—honor.” An eyewitness recalled, in relation to the otherwise deeply unpopular foreign minister, “I saw women throwing flowers into Beck’s car as he was returning from parliament”—testimony, perhaps, to the limits of Poland’s room to have cut a deal.³⁰⁰ Now, five days later, when Potyomkin hinted that Moscow would support Poland against Germany if the Poles so desired, Beck, in a rambling discourse on the “correlation of forces” in Europe and the lack of Anglo-French resolve, was said to have conceded that “Poland could not stand up to Germany without Soviet support.”³⁰¹

But the Poles backtracked immediately. On May 11, Molotov received the Polish ambassador, Wacław Grzybowski, who “clarified” his government’s official response: Poland could not accept even a guarantee of its borders by Moscow, let alone a possible alliance treaty.³⁰² The next day, Poland signed a mutual assistance pact with France that, within a mere week, would produce written pledges of mutual military aid in the event of war.

Molotov demanded nothing less from Britain and France. On May 14, he responded to the British by reiterating the Soviet insistence on reciprocal security obligations, and on including trilateral guarantees for the territorial integrity of the Baltic states, too. But Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia did not seek “guarantees” of their sovereignty, least of all from the Soviet Union, which they feared as much as or more than Nazi Germany, and Britain did not want to force them. At the same time, it remained highly uncertain whether Britain or France could persuade Poland and Romania to add the USSR to the British and French guarantees of their sovereignty or even grant unequivocal transit rights to the Red Army.³⁰³ In this context, a secret Soviet memorandum of May 15, “English Diplomacy’s Dark Maneuver in August 1914,” recounted how London had promised Berlin it would stand aside, and even secure France’s neutrality, if Germany attacked Russia but not France. Molotov underlined several passages, as if the British were engaged in the same maneuver now.³⁰⁴

ULTIMATUM

Stalin’s regime remained an exceedingly awkward potential partner for the Western powers. Mikhail Bulgakov, who had once again requested permission to leave the country and once again been refused, organized a private reading of his secret manuscript, The Master and Margarita, to his close circle of friends. “When he finally finished reading that night, he said: ‘Well, tomorrow I am taking the novel to the publisher!’ and everyone was silent. . . . Everyone sat paralyzed,” Yelena Bulgakova wrote in her diary (May 14, 1939). “Everything scared them.”³⁰⁵ On May 15, in the middle of the night, Isaac Babel was arrested at his dacha in Peredelkino. His most recent short story collection had been published in fall 1936; now the NKVD confiscated some two dozen folders and notebooks of his unpublished manuscripts, translations, and other materials. Babel suffered from his association with Yezhov, who, under interrogation, had named him as a spy. According to the interrogation protocols, Babel implicated Eisenstein (“The organizers of the Soviet film industry were preventing gifted individuals from revealing their talents to the full”), Solomon Mikhoels (“constantly dissatisfied that the Soviet repertoire gave him no chance to demonstrate his talents”), and Ehrenburg (“In Ehrenburg’s view, the continued wave of arrests forced all Soviet citizens to break off any relations with foreigners”).³⁰⁶ Babel would also sign a bloodstained protocol confessing to membership in a Trotskyite espionage organization on behalf of France, linked to Malraux.³⁰⁷

Babel’s association with the Cheka had extended beyond bedding Yezhov’s wife, Yevgeniya Gladun, the hostess of a literary salon, whom Babel called a “featherhead,” an allusion to Chekhov.³⁰⁸ “He told us how he spent all his time meeting militiamen and drinking with them,” Nadezhda Mandelstam would recall. “The word ‘militia’ was of course a euphemism. . . . M. asked him why he was so drawn to ‘militiamen’; was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers?” Babel replied that he just wanted to have a sniff.³⁰⁹ Now he was in Lubyanka’s inner courtyard, for good.

Stalin made some moves to indicate that terror against his own people would not govern all decision making.³¹⁰ That spring of 1939, after two years of short-lived acting directors, he had finally named a new chief of Soviet military intelligence: air force commander Ivan Proskurov, a decorated veteran of the Spanish civil war and the son of a railroad worker. Proskurov’s first deputy held the lowly rank of major, as did almost all the heads of the departments and subdepartments, and he himself was a mere thirty-two years old. They had to find and reengage the many foreign agents, who remained willing to risk their lives to serve the cause against fascism.³¹¹ NKVD foreign espionage, too, was working to reestablish its networks, straining every nerve to ascertain the intentions of Britain as well as France. Donald Maclean (code-named “Homer”), one of Moscow’s Cambridge Five spies, had been promoted to the British foreign office; another Soviet spy in the foreign office, John Herbert King, a walk-in, delivered cipher books to the NKVD. Yet another Soviet spy worked inside the French general staff, and another in the Czechoslovak foreign ministry.³¹² All these high-placed clandestine sources provided information that reinforced Stalin’s preexisting doubts about the intentions of the Western powers ever to align with the Soviets, or stand up to Hitler.

They also detailed Hitler’s plans. On May 17, 1939, Proskurov sent Stalin a six-page memorandum, “The Future Plans of Aggression by Fascist Germany,” comprising clandestine notes from a briefing fifteen days earlier at the German embassy in Warsaw by Dr. Peter Kleist, the key person for Eastern Europe in Ribbentrop’s foreign ministry. “Hitler,” Kleist was said to have remarked, based on a conversation between the Führer and Ribbentrop, “has decided to bring Poland to her knees.” According to Kleist’s account, as reported by a Soviet agent in the Warsaw embassy, German destruction of Poland’s army was expected to take a mere eight to fourteen days. Furthermore, any conflict between Germany and Poland was expected to be localized; Britain and France, notwithstanding their public “guarantees” of Poland’s territorial integrity, were expected to do essentially nothing if Poland’s demise proceeded rapidly. “The whole project arouses in Germany only one fear: the possible reaction of the Soviet Union,” Kleist was said to have stated. “In the event of a conflict, we hope, no matter the circumstances, to attain the USSR’s neutrality.” Poland might yet prove Stalin’s opportunity: the despot wrote on his copy of the secret report, “Talk to Proskurov. Who is the ‘source.’”³¹³

Proskurov was summoned to the Little Corner on May 19, along with Molotov and the Soviet military attaché to Poland. Stalin evidently heard firsthand of Hitler’s intention to instigate a pretext for an attack on Poland in the coming summer, then pivot westward against France and Britain, after which it would be the turn of the Soviet Union.³¹⁴ So it looked as though a war in the west would come first? The last major war had lasted four years. In such a scenario, Stalin perhaps could wait to see who emerged the likely winner, and reap the gains without the costs—provided, of course, that Britain did not manage to strike another deal with Hitler.

Also on May 19, Beria had executed a confidential task: Radek had his head fatally smashed on the floor of the Verkhne-Uralsk prison, where he was serving a ten-year term. Rumors were loosed that Radek had been killed in a fight with a fellow inmate. In fact, the murder was instigated by a specially dispatched NKVD team—so much for the promise Stalin had made to not execute Radek, in exchange for testimony that Radek had duly delivered against Trotsky and Trotskyites.³¹⁵ (Sokolnikov, another defendant in the January 1937 Trotskyite trial who had been spared death in exchange for his testimony, would also be murdered in prison, in Tobolsk on May 21.) The ironies, as ever, were rich: Radek had once been one of Stalin’s top advisers on German affairs.

Molotov, too, executed his own confidential task at this time. Stalin, having tried to force the issue with an offer of alliance to Britain and France, now sought to force the issue with Hitler: on May 20, the reliably blunt Molotov summoned Schulenburg and informed him that “economic negotiations with Germany have recently been started more than once but have not led to anything. . . . We have the impression that instead of economic negotiations, the German government is conducting some kind of game.” Schulenburg tried to counter Molotov’s charges, but the Hammer then struck an even bigger blow: resumption of talks for an economic agreement would now require “a political basis.” It was a Soviet invitation, delivered as an ultimatum.³¹⁶

STALEMATE

Soviet economic relations with Britain and France remained dogged by the bitterness over tsarist and Provisional Government debts, but even if the debt issues had somehow been resolved, neither Britain nor France promised nearly as much economically to the Soviets as did Germany.³¹⁷ Some sort of a political deal with Nazi Germany also presented the best chance to avoid and perhaps profit from what Stalin saw as the inevitable intracapitalist war.³¹⁸ At the same time, however, an iron-clad British-French-Soviet military alliance encircling Germany did hold appeal: it could, at a minimum, prevent an aggression by either of France’s formal allies, Poland and Romania.³¹⁹ More than that, it could potentially deter Hitler. And even if it failed to prevent him from attacking, a Western alliance, because of geography, promised to shift any fighting from Soviet onto Polish, Romanian, and French soil.

But progress in the formal talks Molotov had opened with the two Western powers in May 1939—a dozen sessions would be held altogether—was halting. Even British officials not adamantly averse to exploring a security deal with the Soviets were hard pressed to overcome the severe practical obstacles. On May 21, Halifax told Maisky again that the Baltic states outright refused a tripartite security guarantee and that the British government “cannot impose guarantees on others by force.” The foreign secretary added that “many in Britain think that a tripartite pact may push Hitler to unleash a war straight away, and therefore, rather than preventing war, the pact would hasten it.” Maisky countered by evoking “Al Capone as a model,” in the sense that “only force will make (Hitler or Mussolini) doff their cap!”³²⁰

France’s ambassador to Berlin, Coulondre, sounded a more alarming note than his British counterparts, warning Paris on May 22 that Ribbentrop was apoplectic over Polish minister Beck’s rejection of Hitler’s “generous” offer and had come around to favoring a rapprochement with Moscow as “indispensable and inevitable.” Among Germany’s objectives, Coulondre listed “the possibility of persuading Russia to play the same role in the dismemberment of Poland that the latter country had played with regard to Czechoslovakia. The ultimate object appeared to be to make use of the material resources and manpower of the USSR as a means to destroy the British empire.” He noted that “it is possible that up to the present the Führer has resisted these appeals or at any rate hesitated to commit himself to such a policy, for ideological reasons. But, even admitting that such is his present attitude, there is nothing to indicate that he will not change his mind.” Coulondre advised that “at this moment, when the Anglo-Franco-Russian negotiations seem to have entered upon a decisive phase, we should . . . bear in mind that the Reich would do its best to take advantage, to the detriment of France and Great Britain, of any failure . . . in the conversations now taking place with Moscow.”³²¹

Also on May 22, 1939, Stalin addressed a Central Committee plenum on its second day, reiterating his conviction that if it had not been for forced collectivization, “there would be no new major industry, no army and culture,” and complaining, apropos of his own concession of small household plots seven years earlier, that “the peasant on his own plot will always scheme to enlarge his interests.” He added, “If we are going to lag behind events this way in future instead of leading, then . . . we shall obtain the result of collective farms falling apart and hamlets and new individual farms being formed.” A decree followed (May 27) that circumscribed household plots, to combat the “bazaar-ification of collective farm lands,” the only document of the plenum made public.³²² Here was an empire of enslavement and political murder, founded on hostility toward private initiative and markets. That same day, the British and the French nominally acceded to Soviet demands and submitted a draft for reciprocal guarantees of security, but their response still excluded the Baltic states. Still more fundamentally, in the event of an attack on the USSR, the French and the British were promising only consultations—and through the League of Nations, to boot—not immediate military action. Molotov would angrily reject their proposal as betraying a lack of seriousness.³²³

• • •

ON MAY 22 IN BERLIN, Italy and Germany formally signed their Pact of Steel, which contained an open declaration of cooperation and binding consultation, and a secret protocol of military and economic union, directed against Britain and France.³²⁴ Japan declined to sign but continued negotiating with Germany. To Molotov’s blunt maneuver with Schulenburg, Germany offered no immediate response. Some German officials indulged a guarded optimism. “It seems that there still remains fairly wide scope for action in Russo-German relations,” observed Weizsäcker, the number two in the foreign ministry, in a memorandum (May 25, 1939). He added, “It should be our aim to prevent Anglo-Franco-Russian relations from assuming a still more binding character.”³²⁵ But Schulenburg warned that Soviet-German negotiations could be a mere pretext to assist Moscow in the negotiations with London and Paris. Ribbentrop, unsure of Hitler’s thinking, accentuated this caution.³²⁶ For once, though, the Führer seemed ahead of his foreign minister. Secretly, on May 23, Hitler had gathered a small coterie of military men in the Chancellery to convey his resolve for war against Poland, as a step in a looming showdown with Britain. He stressed the imperative to meet the economic challenges of military requirements but indicated that German-Soviet economic relations would be possible only if political relations improved, an unacknowledged reference to Molotov’s ultimatum/invitation. Hitler hinted that Moscow would accede to Poland’s annihilation.³²⁷

In parallel, Hitler wanted to use Japan against the Western powers. The Japanese were insisting on firm mutual obligations for a war against the Soviet Union and only loose ones for a war against Britain and France, exactly the opposite of what the Germans sought.³²⁸ Ribbentrop had tried to force the issue by telling Lieutenant General Hiroshi Ōshima, now the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, that if he could not bring about a German-Japanese alliance, Germany would have to conclude a nonaggression pact with the USSR. Ōshima spoke fluent German and had been accorded private audiences with Hitler; he fantasized with Russian émigrés about Stalin’s assassination. But the diplomatically inexperienced ultranationalist, a staunch advocate for a German-Japanese military pact, would later claim he had not relayed Ribbentrop’s threat to Tokyo.³²⁹ Be that as it may, the Tokyo establishment was divided over whether to take up the German proposal.³³⁰ On May 27, Weizsäcker wrote to Schulenburg that “one link in the whole chain, namely a gradual conciliation between Moscow and Tokyo, was said by the Japanese to be extremely problematical. Rome was also somewhat hesitant, so that eventually the disadvantages of the far-reaching step envisaged were regarded as decisive.” He added, “With the approval of the Führer, an approach is nonetheless now to be made to the Russians, though a very much modified one.”³³¹

Ribbentrop, exasperated, wrote to the German ambassador in Tokyo, Eugen Ott (May 28, 1939), that “we can no longer understand what is actually happening in Tokyo and why the Japanese government, at this advanced stage of the negotiations, are still continuing to avoid making their decision clear.” The next day, German foreign ministry officials somehow discerned that the USSR inclined toward signing an accord with Britain.³³² Soviet military intelligence spies, meanwhile, delivered copies of Ribbentrop’s internal summary of a conversation with the Polish ambassador in Berlin, supplemented by reports of conversations of the German military attaché in Poland, who expected the Poles to capitulate rather than fight. Stalin’s agents supplied him with reports leaked by the British foreign office to the German ambassador in London regarding Soviet negotiations with Britain and France. These leaks contained accurate information and reconfirmed for Stalin where British preferences lay: Berlin, not Moscow.³³³

Round and round the carousel went. German-Japanese, Western-Soviet, Western-German, and German-Italian negotiations all proceeded simultaneously. German officials, far more than British ones, had come to understand the importance of the Japanese question for the Soviet Union, and the difficulty of reconciling Tokyo and Moscow. But nothing was certain, except more intrigue. If diplomacy is the art of managing competing state interests by recognizing other states’ vital interests and keeping communication open, then finding one another’s bottom line, the principals here could barely comprehend how the other states’ systems worked, let alone their aims. Hitler now seemed at loggerheads with Britain, nearing a war over Poland, but his propaganda portrayed history since 1789 as one long march toward “Judeo-Bolshevism,” nihilism, and anarchy, which Nazism alone could halt.³³⁴ Hitler claimed a self-assigned burden to fight on behalf of “civilization” against Jews and other purveyors of international-revolutionary inequity—such as Stalin. Could the Führer really be stopped or even deflected?