Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

CHAPTER 11 PACT

In his present mood, PM [Neville Chamberlain] says he will resign rather than sign alliance with Soviet.

SIR ALEXANDER CADOGAN,

British permanent undersecretary for foreign affairs, private diary entry, May 20, 1939 ¹

HITLER: “The scum of the earth, I believe?”

STALIN: “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?”

DAVID LOW, “Rendezvous,” Evening Standard, September 20, 1939

ALMOST THE ENTIRE SUMMER OF 1939, Hitler would be absent from Berlin, ensconced at the Berghof, in the Obersalzberg, with Eva Braun, his longtime companion, leaving little central government to speak of. The Führer made strategic decisions, but their shape and timing depended to an extent on who might, or might not, enjoy access to him. Foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop—or his liaison—was contriving to show up at the Berghof to cajole Hitler into taking the plunge of rapprochement with the “Judeo-Bolsheviks.” For such a coup de main, the insecure Ribbentrop might seem an unlikely personage. Growing up, he had been middle class, then married the heiress to a champagne fortune, acquired knowledge of French and English, traveled Europe as a wine salesman, and cajoled an aunt into legally adopting him so that he could obtain her (recently acquired) aristocratic title. “Von” Ribbentrop had joined the Nazis late (1932), and, some said, only at his wife’s urging.² Goebbels said of him, “He bought his name, he married his money, and he swindled his way into office.” For Hitler’s interpreter, Paul-Otto Schmidt, Ribbentrop called to mind the dog on the label of the gramophone company His Master’s Voice. “If Hitler was displeased with him,” Schmidt noted, “Ribbentrop went sick and took to his bed like an hysterical woman.”³ Göring mocked Ribbentrop as “Germany’s No. 1 parrot” and badmouthed him to the Führer. “But,” the Führer would respond, Ribbentrop “knows a lot of important people in England.” Göring was scathing: “Mein Führer, that may be right, but the bad thing is, they know him.”⁴

Ribbentrop was a tool. But he was not only a tool. When serving as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—a posting he had gotten only as a consolation for originally being passed over for state secretary—he had rarely been at his post, for he was courting Hitler or negotiating with Japan and Italy for an alliance against Britain. When in London, he was mocked in British circles as “von Brickendrop,” infamous for mistreating all and sundry, including the tailors who served the British aristocracy and related stories of his imperiousness to their clientele. In Ribbentrop’s mind, however, the British had maltreated him.⁵ Now, for such a staunch Anglophobe, a deal with Moscow could be his revenge, and a stunning feather in his foreign minister’s cap.⁶ Otto von Bismarck—ostensibly a lodestar for Ribbentrop—had famously established good relations with Russia as a key to Germany’s aggrandizement. In truth, Ribbentrop could not even abide working in Bismarck’s modest old office at 76 Wilhemstrasse. (Back in the day, the Iron Chancellor had also been his own foreign minister.) Instead, the Nazi foreign minister moved his office to the former presidential palace next door, which was his official residence.⁷ But Ribbentrop operated by intuition and strove to be “radical,” rarely invoking limits (or consequences), which pleased Hitler no end. And what could be more radical, in its way, than a deal with Communist Moscow?

Molotov, too, was an Anglophobe. He was also a Germanophile, who had publicly differentiated between the “ideologues of National Socialism” and “the German nation, as one of the great nations of our times.”⁸ He doggedly insisted that a deal could be done with that swine Hitler. This view was, or had become, Stalin’s inclination, as Molotov knew. He would seem to be a fitting partner for Ribbentrop, and the two together, in turn, fitting representatives for their respective masters in the complicated game of finding the elusive rapprochement. But Molotov was negotiating with the British and the French; there were no political negotiations per se with Germany, other than the on-again, off-again trade talks. And the Far East seized center stage in the late spring and summer of 1939. There, against Japan, the Soviet Union had not even a whiff of possible “collective security” with the British or the United States (which was a supplier of strategic materials to Japan). On the contrary, with Japan armed in the east and Hitler armed to the teeth in the west, Stalin worried not only about a two-front war against the two powers that had defeated Russia in separate major wars earlier in the century, but about how Britain, opportunistically, might join one or even both.⁹

FAR EASTERN SKIRMISH

Back on May 10–11, 1939, as some twenty Mongol cavalry were grazing horses on the banks of the Halha River (Halhin Gol in Mongolian), near a cluster of huts (the village of Nomonhan, in Japanese), a Manchukuo force drove them off; the next day, the Mongols returned in numbers. Unlike the bloody clash over uninhabited hills at Lake Khasan near the Soviet-Korean-Manchukuo frontier the year before, this one concerned valuable pastures along the river, which served as a boundary.¹⁰ The Tokyo high command’s failure to impose unambiguous directives on Japan’s Kwantung Army, despite the latter’s record of high-handedness, reflected a multicenteredness in the Japanese political system that frustrated the Germans and the Soviets alike. It also allowed hotheads inside Japanese institutions to seize the initiative. The Kwantung Army had devised a new contingency war plan against the Soviet Union involving an all-out offensive toward Chita and Lake Baikal, to cut off the entire Soviet Far East. This bold design to seize a spectacular victory would expose the Kwantung Army to possibly devastating Soviet counterattack from the Mongolian salient, a vulnerability that argued for evicting the Red Army from Mongolia.

The Kwantung command, in this context, had recently issued inflammatory new guidelines, which Tokyo headquarters had rubber-stamped, for border skirmishes. “If the enemy crosses the frontier, . . . annihilate them without delay,” the new rules stated. “It is permissible to enter Soviet territory, or to trap or lure Soviet troops into Manchukuoan territory.”¹¹ The new rules even allowed local commanders to establish boundaries “on their own initiative” where ambiguity reigned (in effect, everywhere). When, during a briefing on the new rules of engagement, the latest grazing incident was reported to the Kwantung Army division commander responsible for the border, he decided, on May 13, to implement them.¹² Japanese reconnaissance discovered a pontoon bridge across the Halha to the right bank and decided to cut off this escape, entrap the “intruders,” and annihilate them. On May 19, Stalin had Molotov warn Japanese ambassador Tōgō that the Soviets possessed information concerning Japanese and Manchukuo forces violating the Mongolian frontier at the Halha River, and that “there is a limit to all patience, and I ask the ambassador to relay this to the Japanese government: that there will be no more of this.”¹³

Voroshilov, meanwhile, was receiving reports of Soviet indecisiveness from the area near the Halha River, and, on the recommendation of chief of staff Shaposhnikov, summoned a more decisive person. On May 24, in Voroshilov’s office, the deputy commander of the Belorussian military district, a cavalry specialist, received a briefing on developments along Mongolia’s borders, to which he was instructed to fly immediately. His mission was to investigate the military situation, then recommend and, if necessary, take corrective measures.¹⁴ That commander was Georgy Zhukov. Like Beria, he would prove to be another missing piece. A peasant’s son (b. 1896), he had worked the fields like all the village children (in his case from age seven), attended the local church school for three years, and, at age eleven, departed for Moscow to apprentice in a furrier’s shop (where he slept on the floor). Zhukov had been conscripted in the Great War and, despite his lowly origins, awarded two St. George’s Crosses before joining the Reds in summer 1918 and fighting in the famed First Cavalry Army. Twenty years later, the NKVD had wiped out almost all the commanders under whom he had served, making him an associate of “enemies of the people.” Zhukov would later claim that his summons by Voroshilov, without explanation, had given him pause, and that his unexpected posting to the Mongolia-Manchukuo frontier had saved his life.¹⁵

It did not take Zhukov long to see that Soviet forces facing the Japanese were a mess.¹⁶ But, incredibly, Kwantung Army intelligence had failed to notice that the bridgehead on the Halha was held by Soviet forces. On the morning of May 28, when 2,500 troops of the Japanese Kwantung Army followed through on the plan to cut off the pontoon escape route of the Mongol cavalry, then launch a frontal assault to drive them backward into waiting Japanese units, they met barrages of Soviet artillery and armor. Japan maintained air superiority, so, over just two days, the Red Air Force lost 15 fighter planes in combat, while the Japanese lost a single plane. (Voroshilov called the front and exploded.)¹⁷ But the Japanese rear unit sent to cut off the Mongol escape route was wiped out nearly to a man, and the battered Japanese troops in the frontal assault retreated.¹⁸ On May 31 at the Supreme Soviet, Molotov, in a speech almost entirely devoted to relations with the Western powers, publicly repeated the patience-running-out warning to Japan, noting that “we will defend the borders of the Mongolian People’s Republic as decisively as our own, in line with our mutual assistance pact with them.”¹⁹ But the Kwantung Army was not likely to walk away.

GERMAN CUL-DE-SAC

The Germans feared success in the Soviet-British talks, and on May 30, 1939, the German foreign ministry had suddenly been ordered to undertake “definite negotiations” with the Soviets and not to be limited to economic issues—an apparent affirmative response to Molotov’s ultimatum, a point conveyed by Weizsäcker to Astakhov, the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Berlin.²⁰ The next day in Tokyo, however, Ott suddenly became confident about German negotiations with Japan, reporting that the private secretary of Japan’s prime minister had told him that “the latter was firmly resolved to put through the [Germany-Japan] alliance,” and that the deputy war minister had told him the Japanese army would overcome the opposition of the Japanese navy.²¹ If so, this could scuttle any German talks with Moscow. On June 5, the Japanese cabinet approved a compromise vis-à-vis Germany’s demands whereby Japan assented to automatic involvement in any German-Soviet conflict and freedom to choose the appropriate moment to enter any other conflicts (such as a German-British one). This compromise represented a major policy victory for the Japanese army. But Japan’s unsophisticated representative in Berlin, Lieutenant General Ōshima, seems not to have conveyed the decision to Germany.²² Stalin, in any case, knew the real Japanese position—policy paralysis—thanks to Sorge, who had high contacts among Japanese ruling circles.

On June 4, further solid information on German plans for an invasion of Poland came from Rudolf von Scheliha, the Soviet spy in the German embassy in Warsaw, via Kleist, Ribbentrop’s aide for the east, who had recently visited the Polish capital. The German ambassador there (von Moltke) and the air force attaché had been recalled to Berlin for consultations.²³ The combination of Hitler’s designs on Poland and inconclusive German-Japanese talks could potentially push the Führer to cut a deal with the Soviet devil.²⁴ At long last, it appeared that Stalin’s long-standing use of economic talks as a pathway to political talks might bear fruit. But distrust ran deep.²⁵ And Hitler might be bluffing.

Soviet-German “talks” were not formal and not always direct. On June 14, as the German foreign ministry learned the next day, Astakhov told the Bulgarian envoy in Berlin, Parvan Draganov, that “if Germany would declare that she would not attack the Soviet Union or that she would conclude a nonaggression pact with her, the Soviet Union would probably refrain from concluding a pact with England. However, the Soviet Union did not know what Germany really wanted.”²⁶ Schulenburg had left Moscow for consultations in Berlin. On June 21, Köstring, also in Berlin for consultations, had an audience with Hitler.²⁷ Back in Moscow, on June 28, Schulenburg informed the Soviet foreign ministry that Germany sought “not just normalization but improvement in its relations with the USSR,” a stance he said had been conveyed to him by Ribbentrop and approved by Hitler.²⁸ Around this time, Ribbentrop’s Italian counterpart and confidant, Ciano, evidently “leaked” to the Soviet chargé in Rome the possibility of a German-Soviet nonaggression pact, economic agreement, joint guarantee of the Baltic states, and mediation in the relations with Japan.²⁹ But on June 30, Ribbentrop, on Hitler’s orders, suddenly directed that the haphazard political contacts be broken off and that any resumption of talks for a trade agreement be delayed.³⁰

NO ANSWERS

Soviet-Western talks were formal and direct, but fraught as well. Besides Polish acquiescence in possible Red Army transit, a second major sticking point proved to be Soviet insistence on “guarantees” for the Baltic states’ territorial integrity, to prevent Germany from using them as springboards for an attack. But the Western powers—citing the circumstance that these countries themselves were not asking for such guarantees—balked. As the Soviet ambassador would report from Paris, the Western powers viewed such a guarantee as offering Moscow “a free hand in the Baltics.”³¹ Stalin, for his part, viewed the Balts’ professed “strict neutrality” as a pretense.³² Top political figures in authoritarian Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as in democratic Finland, were publicly cozying up to the Nazis. On June 7, 1939, Estonia and Latvia had signed nonaggression pacts with Germany in Berlin; this was soon followed by visits to Estonia by chief of staff Lieutenant General Franz Halder, commander of German land forces, and Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr. Molotov demanded that Estonia reverse course and place itself under Soviet protection. But Estonia considered a Soviet “guarantee” of its territorial integrity the worst of both worlds: it would anger Nazi Germany and invite Soviet occupation.³³

On June 10, Molotov, through Maisky in London, communicated an unambiguous Soviet demand for British assent in preventing the three Baltic states from being used in an aggression against the USSR. Pravda (June 13) publicly dismissed possible objections.³⁴ On June 15, one month into the negotiations with the Western powers, Molotov, in a telegram to the Soviet envoys in London and Paris, wrote that the British and the French “do not want a serious agreement based on the principle of reciprocity and equality of conditions.”³⁵ Some British officials internally urged that London accede to Soviet security demands for “guarantees” for the Baltics, even while conceding that Stalin might then have a pretext to seize them. But Chamberlain—who had handed Hitler Czechoslovakia—refused.

Stalin was stupefied. The British imperialists had seized one quarter of the earth, across oceans, and yet they kept invoking “principle” in a refusal to allow him to protect himself in connection with microscopic territories, contiguous with the Soviet homeland, that until recently had belonged to Russia and that represented a threat? Around this time, at a Grand Kremlin Palace reception, the dancer Igor Moiseyev, whose folk ensemble had become among the most popular acts, was talking to Voroshilov. Stalin cherished their number “Moscow-Region Lyrical,” from the dance cycle Pictures from the Past, and, as the defense commissar asked what Moiseyev planned to stage next, Stalin approached. Apprised of the conversation, he said, “All the same, they will never stage what Stalin needs.” Moiseyev: “Iosif Vissarionovich, do you have a bad opinion of us?” Stalin: “Not at all, but what Stalin needs (he spoke of himself in the third person) you will not stage. . . . For example, will you stage the rout of England and France?” Silence ensued. Faces froze. Stalin moved on.³⁶

Domestic political pressures did compel Chamberlain to send someone to Moscow to “accelerate the negotiations.” Maisky, the Soviet envoy, had suggested on June 12 that the British send Foreign Secretary Halifax, who seemed favorably disposed to a deal, but nothing had come of it. Nor would Chamberlain consent to sending Anthony Eden, the former foreign secretary, who had met Stalin and offered to go. Instead the PM dispatched William Strang, who, during Eden’s Moscow visit, had also met Stalin. “Of all the dictators, Stalin was, in personal intercourse, seemingly most like a normal human being,” Strang would write. “In conference as we saw him, . . . his voice was low and even, his manner serene, his delivery unemphatic, his sense of humour quietly playful, his exposition concise in form, conciliatory in tone but unbending in substance. He had a rock-like quality which made him appear to be more securely founded than his rival dictators.”³⁷ But Strang was a mere foreign office functionary, and he was sent not as a special plenipotentiary, but only “to assist” Ambassador Seeds. Zhdanov, on June 29, published an essay in Pravda titled “The British and the French Do Not Want an Equal Agreement with the USSR.”

Molotov, for his part, referred to his capitalist counterparts as “crooks and cheats” internally, and to their faces he demanded that any obligations be spelled out in detail, telling Seeds that the 1935 Franco-Soviet pact “had turned out to be merely a paper delusion.” The Soviet Union’s top “diplomat” also made a point of sitting at his desk while raised on a proscenium, forcing his Western interlocutors to remain below in deskless chairs, their notepads uncomfortably perched on their laps. (Neither Molotov nor his deputy Potyomkin, who did the interpreting, took notes, according to the British side, but Molotov seemed to them to be pressing a button on his desk, perhaps to record the conversation.)³⁸ Seeds and French envoy Naggiar were also unnerved by the door behind Molotov that always seemed to be open, suspecting that Stalin was eavesdropping. (Kremlin logbooks record no meetings in the Little Corner during the time Molotov was negotiating.) Molotov introduced new demands at will, and he failed to perceive the differences in French and British proposals. Such incomprehension of nuance, on top of the disdain for diplomatic convention, might have mattered had the British government been interested in a deal. “I am so skeptical of the value of Russian help,” Chamberlain wrote privately to his sister (July 2, 1939), “that I should not feel our position was greatly worsened if we had to do without them.”³⁹

WAR

Vsevolod Meyerhold, the USSR’s most renowned theater director, who had traveled to Leningrad to finalize the choreography of a mass spectacle of physical culture involving 30,000 young athletes moving in unison to glorify the regime, was rewarded by being arrested. At Moscow’s infamous Butyrka prison, he would be tortured into confessing to espionage for Britain as well as Japan. “The investigators began to use force on me, a sick, 65-year-old man,” he wrote in a letter to Molotov. “I was made to lie facedown and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap. . . . When those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again began to beat the red-blue-yellow bruises with the strap, and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling hot water was being poured on those sensitive areas. . . . I began to incriminate myself in the hope that this, at least, would lead quickly to the scaffold.” Meyerhold’s interrogators had urinated into his mouth and smashed his right (writing) hand to bits.⁴⁰ Right around the same time, his second wife and lead actress, the Russified ethnic German Zinaida Reich, was brutally stabbed to death, including through the eyes, in their home.⁴¹ None of her valuables were taken.⁴² Meyerhold knew nothing of his wife’s murder; his colleagues knew nothing of his fate, only that his photographs had been taken down or cut out.

Molotov was stressing to the German ambassador that Berlin’s stance toward Soviet-Japanese relations was a key consideration in any possible German-Soviet rapprochement.⁴³ But Berlin was still looking for a deal with Tokyo, as Sorge had secretly reported on June 27.⁴⁴ On July 1, Ott conveyed to Berlin that he had still “not been able to obtain complete clarity regarding Japanese reservations.”⁴⁵ On July 2, Hitler, in Hamburg for the funeral of a military general, mentioned the possibility of an agreement with the Soviet Union in a speech to Nazi party officials.⁴⁶ On July 5, Ott wrote again to Weizsäcker: “As to the negotiations for an alliance, these arguments confirm once again that the Navy has been fighting tenaciously for a policy of waiting and seeing what America would do, and of entering the war only at a later stage.” Ribbentrop wrote on the document: “Führer.”⁴⁷ It had become evident that Germany would not be able to conclude a substantive military alliance with Japan, let alone intercede with Tokyo on behalf of Moscow.⁴⁸

Near Mongolia, as Japan’s Kwantung Army readied its counterstrike, Voroshilov was receiving denunciations of Soviet commanders in the Far East, Beria playing his part.⁴⁹ Zhukov, with the support of Grigory Stern, head of the Transbaikal military district in Chita (and the victor in the Lake Khasan border skirmish), had sacked the Soviet frontline commander in Mongolia. He also set up a belated intelligence network on the enemy and began massing troops, artillery, tanks, and planes with experienced airmen (many of them Spanish civil war veterans).⁵⁰ Colonel Akio Doi, Japanese military attaché in Moscow, who happened to be returning to Japan, warned Kwantung Army headquarters in person on his way home that although the Soviets had often shown passivity during previous border incidents, this time a firm reply could be expected. The Kwantung Army’s own intelligence warned that the Soviets had two rifle divisions, not the anticipated small subdivisional unit, poised for action near Nomonhan. Nonetheless, Major Tsuji Masanobu, the author of the new border guidelines at Kwantung Army headquarters, was determined to avenge the earlier failures. The Kwantung Army head ordered an offensive without the approval of his superiors in Tokyo, avoiding sending his directives by telegraph, lest HQ get wind and cancel them.⁵¹

The Japanese counterattack had commenced on June 26–27, 1939, with a 130-airplane raid deep behind the Soviet-Mongolian positions. Tokyo, which wanted to localize the skirmish, reacted angrily to this “defense” of Manchukuo, but the bombing proved successful. On July 1, at sunrise (4:00 a.m.), the Kwantung Army launched a ground offensive with 15,000 troops. By July 2–3 they had achieved tactical success, crossing the Halha River in force to the western bank, thanks to Tsuji’s boldness. By July 4 Zhukov was pounding the Japanese positions with Soviet-made heavy guns as well as German-made 152-millimeter Rheinmetall artillery. The latter, acquired during the cooperation with Germany, had a range (20,000 yards) double that of the Japanese guns. Japanese casualties mounted, and they retreated back across the Halha (the rest of the fighting would take place on the eastern bank). But the Soviets lost huge amounts of armor. Adding to the difficulties, Marshal Kulik, deputy defense commissar and chief of Soviet artillery, had gotten himself posted to the theater and on July 13 ordered Zhukov to withdraw Soviet artillery from the Halha’s eastern banks to the western, so as not to lose it. When Shaposhnikov, chief of staff in Moscow, heard of this the next day, he ordered Zhukov to disobey Kulik. Voroshilov, white hot, dressed Kulik down on the high-frequency phone (“Babble less about all kinds of nonsense”). On July 19, the Soviet forces at the frontier were reorganized into a unified First Army Group, to ensure Zhukov’s uncontested authority.⁵²

SUMMER OF INDETERMINACY

Besides Japan, the Baltic states presented another key to any Nazi-Soviet deal, which Ribbentrop understood, but his deputy, Weizsäcker, opposed any Baltic partition.⁵³ An internal German decision to renew bilateral economic negotiations with the Soviet Union, offering a 200-million-reichsmark credit for Soviet purchases in Germany, emerged on July 7, 1939, and was conveyed to Mikoyan three days later.⁵⁴ On July 9, Proskurov, Soviet military intelligence head, reported to Stalin on the basis of information from the Warsaw-based Soviet spy Kurt Welkisch (“ABC”), who had visited Berlin in June, that Kleist had reconfirmed Nazi plans to annihilate Poland, with a target date of late August or early September (Scheliha’s earlier report had it for July). Kleist noted that Hitler was set upon a “radical solution of the Polish question” regardless of the military position of France and Britain. “Neither the Führer nor Ribbentrop,” Kleist was quoted as saying, “believe that the Soviet Union would take part in Anglo-French military actions against Germany.” That conclusion was based upon the inconclusive state of Western negotiations in Moscow and “the recent behavior of Moscow toward Berlin. Moscow gave us to understand that it is ready to conduct negotiations with us, that it is utterly uninterested in a conflict with Germany, and that it is also uninterested in fighting for England and France.” Kleist added that Germany would keep its hands off the Baltic states, in deference to the Soviet Union, and that “peace-loving relations between Germany and Russia over the next two years, in the Führer’s opinion, are the prerequisite for resolving the problems of Western Europe.”⁵⁵

But Stalin further learned that, with Chamberlain’s approval, on July 18, 1939, Horace Wilson, an adviser to the PM, had met secretly with a “special assistant” to Göring, Dr. Helmuth Wohlthat. The full range of what they discussed cannot be gleaned from Wilson’s account.⁵⁶ Still, Germany’s ambassador to London, Herbert von Dirksen, informed Berlin that Wilson had stated that a nonaggression pact with Germany “would allow England to free itself from its obligations vis-à-vis Poland.”⁵⁷ On July 19, reinforcing the renewed push to cut a deal with Hitler, Chamberlain and Halifax, at a British cabinet meeting, carried the argument not to accede to Soviet demands to open military talks immediately and earnestly for a full alliance with ironclad commitments. But Britain conveyed its agreement to launch the military talks with Moscow, in parallel with the political ones. Maisky was fooled.⁵⁸ On July 20–21, as Stalin took in a physical culture parade on Red Square, the secretary of the British department of overseas trade, Robert Hudson, a scion of a soap king, met with Wohlthat, too, and, as if representing the British government, seems to have offered Hitler not just Danzig and the Polish Corridor but also a large British loan and the settlement of all of Germany’s colonial claims—if only the Führer would refrain from taking all of Poland by force.⁵⁹

“The Biggest Bribe in History,” ran the scandalous headline in the British Daily Express (July 22), which published leaks, evidently from Hudson, of Chamberlain’s back-channel efforts to negotiate with Hitler. Forty-eight hours later, Pravda carried word of the British offer to Germany, with details that were wildly inaccurate but repeated from the British press.⁶⁰

British intelligence had come to understand that “Germany’s future policy is in the keeping of a single man: a visionary, fanatic, and megalomaniac, a being of violent complexes,” who aimed for European domination. But they surmised that Hitler’s rearmament had resulted in a supposedly fragile German economy starved of resources, as well as a supposedly disaffected German populace. Therefore, British intelligence reasoned, Hitler could fight only short wars, and only in places like Poland and Ukraine, where he could not just expend but also grab resources. Halifax, however, wondered whether the limitations on Germany spotlighted by British intelligence might push “the mad dictator to insane adventures.”⁶¹ Chamberlain, for his part, believed that if Britain applied pressure, Germany’s strategic weaknesses would compel Hitler to back down from his domination schemes. After all, what government could avoid accommodating social and economic pressures at home? If he became too headstrong, Hitler might even be overthrown by “moderates.”⁶² “Hitler has concluded that we mean business and the time is not ripe for a major war,” the PM wrote to his sister Ida (July 23, 1939). “Unlike some of my critics I go further and say that the longer the war is put off the less likely it is to come at all.”⁶³

That same day, just as Stalin had learned of Chamberlain’s attempts once more to “bribe” Hitler, the despot further learned of Chamberlain’s pending acquiescence to Japanese pressure. Britain faced a strategic dilemma in Asia, not just Europe, and it was linked to any British policy options for the USSR. Japanese forces were blockading the British—as well as the French—concession in Tientsin (near Peking). The British Royal Navy was far away, and the United States had no intention of risking war with Japan by coming to the aid of British imperial interests in Asia. With Hitler threatening Poland, for which Britain had issued the “guarantee,” London felt constrained to sign the Anglo-Japanese Tientsin Agreement (July 24) to protect its exposed positions. London refused Tokyo’s demands to turn over the Chinese silver in British banks, but it handed over four Chinese nationals accused of assassinating Japanese nationals and then hiding out in the British concession. (The four Chinese were soon executed.) Some contemporaries dubbed the Tientsin deal a Far Eastern Munich. For Stalin, Tientsin underscored the absence of serious Western opposition to Japan’s aggression in China and its imperial ambitions, including vis-à-vis Soviet territory in the east.⁶⁴

The Japanese war minister had resumed his drive against internal opposition from the navy and the civilian government for a binding alliance with Germany against the USSR; Sorge continued to report on the talks.⁶⁵ The Kwantung Army, at the same time, was planning a renewed offensive near Mongolia. In late July, the Red Army began bringing massive reinforcements into the battle zone. Colonel Doi, back in Moscow, warned Tokyo that something very major was afoot.⁶⁶

Also on July 23, 1939, Molotov demanded of Britain and France that, before the conclusion of a political agreement, tripartite military plans against Germany be coordinated in detail. Two days later, the Western ambassadors conveyed their governments’ willingness to open military-to-military talks.

BALTIC FLIP

In Berlin, rumors had begun to circulate that Ribbentrop had fallen out of favor, because he had failed to anticipate the British guarantee to Poland and its generally hard-line position after the Nazis’ destruction of all of Czechoslovakia.⁶⁷ In fact, Ribbentrop had maneuvered himself into the catbird seat. “He asked the liaison man he kept around Hitler to tell him what the Führer had said in the circle of his closest confidants,” recalled Gustav Hilger, of the Moscow embassy. “From statements of this kind he drew conclusions about Hitler’s intentions and ideas and, at suitable opportunities, would present them to him as his own thoughts.”⁶⁸ The Wehrmacht’s insatiable supply needs, seen against the uncanny complementarity of the Soviet and German economies, and the circumstance that the Soviets could enable Germany to overcome an anticipated British blockade, had provided the foundation for a rapprochement. But the key to everything was Hitler’s planning for war against Poland, in the face of the publicly voiced guarantees to Poland by Britain and France.⁶⁹ Once Ribbentrop had learned that Hitler wanted to “isolate Poland”—that is, to remove or undercut the Anglo-French “guarantees”—the foreign minister had his opening to encourage Hitler to “seize Russia” from the British and the French.⁷⁰

Suddenly, on July 26, 1939, Schnurre, the trade official in the German foreign ministry, invited Astakhov and a Soviet trade official to a private room at a Berlin restaurant and told them that—in fulfillment of Molotov’s prior condition for a commercial treaty—a political agreement was possible, and that the fate of the Baltic states and any other Soviet desiderata would be open for discussion.⁷¹ Astakhov had no instructions for a response. “After the statement of the Russians, I had the impression that Moscow had not decided what they wanted to do,” Schnurre observed in a long memorandum the next day. “The Russians were silent about the status and chances of the English pact negotiations. . . . As a further handicap, there is the excessive distrust not only toward us but toward England as well. From our point of view it may be regarded as a noteworthy success that Moscow, after months of negotiations with England, still remains uncertain as to what she ought to do eventually.”⁷²

On July 29, Nevile Henderson, British ambassador to Germany, drove to Bayreuth to contrive a meeting with Hitler. (“Though absolutely unmusical,” Henderson would observe, “I like Wagner.”) His car broke down en route. Once finally there, during Die Walküre, he managed only to glimpse the Führer from afar. “If he had wanted to speak to me,” Henderson noted, “Hitler could have done so; for he must have been informed that I was there.”⁷³ But the envoy did not lose faith. “As I pointed out at the time to His Majesty’s Government, the Polish question was not one of Hitler’s making,” Henderson would write. “The Corridor and Danzig were a real German national grievance, and some equitable settlement had to be found.”⁷⁴

Britain had also been consulting in Baltic capitals, posing as the defender of small countries, but the Balts, perceiving fecklessness, more and more looked to Germany as the only realistic counterbalance to the USSR. Germany’s position, however, had shifted precipitously. On August 2, Ribbentrop invited in Astakhov and told him that, “from the Baltic to the Black Sea, there was no problem which could not be solved to our mutual satisfaction.”⁷⁵ The Soviet envoy, in his report to Molotov, surmised that the Germans were declaring their disinterest in the fate of former Russian Poland, the Baltic states (Lithuania excepted), and Bessarabia and repudiating any designs on Ukraine. In exchange, Germany sought Soviet disinterest in the fate of Danzig and the provinces of former German Poland, with former Austrian Poland a matter for further clarification. Germany’s ultimate aim, Astakhov concluded, was “to neutralize us in the case of war with Poland,” although, he added, any long-term acquiescence by Germany to the above arrangements was doubtful.⁷⁶

Schulenburg enjoyed more frequent access to Molotov than other ambassadors in Moscow, but still he found him largely inscrutable; the pair never developed chemistry. On August 3, Molotov acceded to the German’s request for an audience and heard the recent accommodating news from Ribbentrop firsthand. “Molotov abandoned his habitual reserve and appeared unusually open,” Schulenburg reported to Berlin the next day, but the Soviet government head nonetheless made a point of condemning the Anti-Comintern Pact and stated that “proofs of a changed attitude of the German Government were for the present still lacking.” Schulenburg further noted to Berlin that “my general impression is that the Soviet Government are determined to conclude an agreement with Britain and France, if they fulfill all Soviet wishes.” He added that the “negotiations, to be sure, might last a long time, especially since mistrust of England is also great.”⁷⁷ Hitler had become exceedingly anxious about a British-French-Soviet military convention.⁷⁸ Wittingly or unwittingly, Schulenburg was enhancing Stalin’s bargaining position.

PLAYED FOR A FOOL

To lead the long-awaited military-to-military talks with the two Western powers, Stalin appointed defense commissar Marshal Voroshilov, assisted by chief of staff Marshal Shaposhnikov, the naval commissar, and the air force head—the highest-level military group the Soviet despot could have assembled.⁷⁹ The British, after very long delay, finally indicated that they would send the Honorable Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, commandant of Portsmouth. Beria, as per usual, prepared an NKVD dossier, which was unflattering to the unknown “commandant.”⁸⁰ In London, Maisky noted in his diary, in a tone of considerable optimism about Anglo-Soviet relations, that “a bloc is gradually coming together. . . . The trip of the military missions to Moscow is an historical stage.” And yet he also wrote to Moscow, “I think that, judging from the posts they hold, the delegates will not be able to make any decisions on the spot.”⁸¹ When the Western ambassadors informed Molotov who would be coming, he evidently launched a tirade, then stormed out of his own office.

Stalin received damning reports about British motives from the spy Guy Burgess, who worked at MI6 and divulged crucial information to Anatoly Gorsky (b. 1907), originally a code clerk who had become acting Soviet intelligence chief in London (since late 1938) after the arrests of two superiors in succession. Gorsky was single-handedly responsible for fourteen field agents, including Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, and Kim Philby. He also had to manage cryptography, photography, translation, typing, and communications.⁸² On August 3, Burgess reported to Gorsky that Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s special adviser on foreign affairs, had told him that “the British chiefs of staff are firmly convinced that war with Germany can be won without difficulty and therefore the British government has no need to conclude a defense pact with the Soviet Union. In government circles the opinion expressed is that England never thought about concluding a pact with the USSR. The prime minister’s advisers say openly that Great Britain can do without a Russian pact.” Gorsky also reported that another source, Montagu “Monty” Chidson, had told him that “it is a fundamental policy to work with Germany whatever happens, and, in the end, against the USSR. But it is impossible to conduct this policy openly.” Gorsky added, “Chidson told me that our aim is not to resist German expansion to the east.”⁸³

Drax and his French counterpart traveled to the USSR by sea. The foreign office explained to the British public that no British or French commercial airline flew to the Soviet Union. Of course, the British had the world’s number-one air force. But they had opted not to use their Sunderland “flying boats,” because, it was said, at least eight would have been taken up to accommodate all personnel on the mission. Wellington bombers would have been capacious enough, but these were said to be “uncomfortable.” Water travel, meanwhile, could have been undertaken on fast naval cruisers, but it was said that such vessels lacked sufficient cabins. And so on. What the British and the French would not say was that they worried about the repercussions of crossing Germany, even in the air; the French in particular wanted to avoid too spectacular a method of travel, in order to avoid embarrassment if the Moscow talks failed.⁸⁴ But the Anglo-French decision to travel to Moscow by slow passenger and cargo steamers, and their dubious public explanations, conveyed a stark message to Moscow: this was a charade. On top of everything else, Drax departed the UK only on August 5.

The German foreign ministry official Weizsäcker complained in his diary (August 7) that Berlin was now straining every nerve to achieve a breakthrough, but the Soviets were not responding.⁸⁵ Hitler, with his decision to attack Poland despite British and French guarantees, had effectively backed himself into a corner, and time was running out: also on August 7, Soviet intelligence reported to Stalin that Hitler’s attack on Poland could commence as soon as August 25.⁸⁶ Suddenly, Stalin held all the cards. The despot played it slow. The tension in Berlin reached near hysteria.⁸⁷ Chamberlain, too, had played right into Stalin’s hands, but, unlike Hitler, the British PM appeared to be taking Stalin for a fool. On August 11, the risible Drax mission finally reached Moscow. It carried nine tons of baggage, but just a single person (an aide) who spoke Russian or had some experience of the Soviet Union.⁸⁸ That same day, Stalin convened the politburo and resolved to enter into official talks with Germany.⁸⁹

In the negotiations with the Drax mission, Stalin instructed Voroshilov, mapping out the steps in writing, to take a hard line, but in such a way that the British and the French would be blamed for any failure.⁹⁰ At the opening banquet for the late-arriving, low-level Western delegation, Voroshilov, in dress whites, was in top form, exuding his considerable charm as host at the Spiridonovka Palace, the main reception hall for foreign dignitaries.⁹¹ Treated to a fifty-foot-long table of delicacies, rivers of drink, musicians, and acrobats, the British and the French staggered back to their quarters in the wee hours. The next morning, first thing, Voroshilov pointedly requested their credentials. The French had balanced the British admiral with a general, Joseph Doumenc, who at least had a piece of paper signed by Prime Minister Daladier: it allowed Doumenc to negotiate but not to sign anything. Drax—tall, silver hair, blue eyes—had to admit, as the Soviets already knew, that he had no written authority even to negotiate, let alone sign, a military convention.⁹² When Voroshilov pointedly asked whether the Anglo-French mission had secured permission from their Polish ally for Soviet transit across Poland in the event of war with Germany, Drax gave no answer.

The defense commissar insisted on direct confirmation from the Poles and the Romanians. At a break in the talks, Doumenc took it upon himself to send his own envoy to Warsaw to arrange Polish agreement for Soviet passage through its territory.⁹³ On August 13, with the Nazis openly threatening Danzig, Poland had ordered a partial mobilization of its army. Two days later, the Poles publicly celebrated the nineteenth anniversary of the “miracle on the Vistula,” in which they had driven back the Red Army. In response to French inquiries about granting Red Army transit, Warsaw refused again. Soviet “assistance,” many Poles felt, would be worse than facing the Nazis. “An intelligent rabbit,” Halifax had written of the Poles, “would hardly be expected to welcome the protection of an animal ten times its size, whom it credited with the habits of a boa constrictor.”⁹⁴ But Halifax, just like the Polish government, failed to grasp that refusing the Soviets would mean facing both predators.

Voroshilov initiated a pointed discussion of each side’s common-defense contributions to a prospective anti-German military alliance. Shaposhnikov outlined a massive Soviet commitment of up to 120 infantry divisions, as well as 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy artillery pieces, 9,500 tanks, and as many as 5,500 fighter aircraft and bombers. This amounted to more than a million-man force, to be fielded immediately if necessary. The French claimed to have 110 available combat divisions. The British, reluctant to divulge “military secrets,” finally stated that they could commit 16 army divisions. So few? Pressed, the British admitted that the real number was perhaps 5.⁹⁵ (In fact, it was probably 2.) The Soviets, as a land power, had difficulty grasping the full measure of British strength, which was in the air and, especially, on the sea.⁹⁶ Be that as it may, by forcing such a conversation, one of Voroshilov’s interpreters surmised, the defense commissar had deliberately been seeking to humiliate the Anglo-French military men.⁹⁷ Fair enough. But could Stalin be faulted? As far as London was concerned, the real action was in Berlin, where the British had even let on that they did not take seriously their own negotiations with Moscow.⁹⁸

THE HITLER CARD

The Soviets, on August 12, 1939, agreed to the German foreign ministry’s proposal for political talks, requesting, however, that they take place in Moscow. Hitler contemplated dispatching his personal lawyer and minister without portfolio Hans Frank (who had previously gone to Rome to finalize the Axis accord), but on August 14 he opted to send Ribbentrop, a move that Schulenburg formally proposed to Molotov the next day.⁹⁹ That night, at around 8:00 p.m., with Drax in Moscow, Molotov received Schulenburg, who read out a statement received that morning from Ribbentrop. “Germany has no aggressive intentions against the USSR,” Schulenburg stated. “The Reich government is of the opinion that there is no question between the Baltic and the Black Sea which cannot be settled to the complete satisfaction of both countries. Among these are such questions as: the Baltic Sea, the Baltic area, Poland, Southeast questions, etc.” The ambassador proposed a lightning visit by Ribbentrop to Moscow to “set forth the Führer’s views to M. Stalin.” Molotov inquired about a possible bilateral nonaggression pact and German mediation of Soviet-Japanese relations, but said that “such a trip required adequate preparation.”¹⁰⁰ To increase the pressure on Berlin, the day before (and again two days after), Stalin had the German embassy in London informed that the Anglo-Soviet talks were proceeding smoothly and that the Poles would open staff talks with the Soviets.¹⁰¹

On August 16, Rudolf Herrnstadt, a Soviet spy handler in Warsaw, reported to military intelligence HQ in Moscow that the embassy spy Scheliha had revealed that the German invasion of Poland would commence very soon.¹⁰² On August 17, Molotov again received Schulenburg and reported a favorable reaction on the part of “the Soviet government,” but insisted first on the signing of an economic agreement, after which the Soviets wanted to see a written proposal for a nonaggression pact, and only then, about a week after the conclusion of an economic agreement, could Ribbentrop’s visit take place. The Nazi foreign minister, once apprised, on August 18–19 sent Schulenburg a brief two-article text of a nonaggression pact of twenty-five years’ duration, with details to be ironed out in person, promising a special protocol on the Baltic area. “You must keep in mind the decisive fact that an early outbreak of open German-Polish conflict is probable,” Ribbentrop instructed Schulenburg, “and that we therefore have the greatest interest in having my visit to Moscow take place immediately.”¹⁰³

With Pravda (August 19) accusing the British and the French of preparing a “new Munich” with Germany, Stalin received an intelligence report to the effect that Hitler was determined to tackle the Polish question come what may, and that he thought Moscow would “conduct negotiations with us, as she has no interest whatever in a conflict with Germany, nor was she anxious to be defeated for the sake of England and France.” Such information dovetailed with the intercepts of Schulenburg’s telegrams to Berlin.¹⁰⁴ On the evening of August 19, Schulenburg reported to Berlin that he had been received twice that day by Molotov—at 2:00 p.m., for one hour, and again at 5:00 p.m.—and that the Soviet government had presented him with a Soviet text for a nonaggression pact consisting of five articles and a postscript, to last five years, and had agreed to receive the Nazi foreign minister in Moscow on August 26 or 27.¹⁰⁵ That was the proposed date for Germany’s invasion of Poland. A German-Soviet economic agreement had been finalized in Berlin around noon on August 19, but at 4:00 p.m. local time, Soviet negotiators had informed their German counterparts that they could not sign it.

Finally, the Soviets in Berlin consented to sign the economic agreement at 2:00 a.m. on August 20, dating it the previous day. It stipulated that the Reich would export “industrial goods” totaling about 60 million reichsmarks of “current business” (trade covered by earlier clearing agreements) and 180 million reichsmarks of “new business.” The Soviets would export the same in raw materials and repay old credits. The Reich, in turn, would finance 200 million reichsmarks’ worth of the new Soviet orders. Schnurre, the lead German negotiator, noted that “the framework now set up represents a minimum,” and predicted that bilateral trade could leap to nearly 1 billion reichsmarks. The German government agreed to guarantee the loan nearly fully, at a publicly stated interest rate of 5 percent, but with a secret protocol refund of 0.5 percent, reducing the actual interest while allowing a seven-year term of payback, and not requiring an itemized list of goods. The Germans had wanted to grant a larger Soviet credit, 500 million reichsmarks or more, at a higher interest rate, with lower German government loan guarantees, shorter terms of payback (five years maximum), and a specific list of goods to contain Soviet appetites.¹⁰⁶

Later that afternoon of August 20, 1939, Hitler dispatched a personal telegram to Stalin via the German embassy in Moscow. “The conclusion of a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union means to me the establishment of a long-range Germany policy,” Hitler wrote. “I accept the draft pact that your foreign minister, Herr Molotov, delivered, but consider it urgently necessary to clarify questions connected with it as soon as possible.” He referred to “intolerable” tension between Germany and Poland and, noting that Ribbentrop would have full powers to sign a state accord, asked that he be received on August 22, or August 23 latest. Also on August 20, nine days after his arrival in Moscow, Drax finally produced written credentials allowing him to negotiate on behalf of the British government, but Voroshilov adjourned the negotiations indefinitely. Stalin, who was micromanaging the process, sent Voroshilov duck hunting.¹⁰⁷

Pravda, on the morning of August 21, carried the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet economic agreement, calling it “a serious step in the cause of improving not only economic, but also political relations between the USSR and Germany.” Stalin effectively would supply the Germans with grain harvested by his enslaved collective farmers and oil and strategic raw materials extracted partly by his Gulag inmates, for the right to engage in a shopping spree through one of the world’s most modern economies for machines and models of modern weaponry.¹⁰⁸ That day at 3:00 p.m., Schulenburg was able to hand Hitler’s telegram for Stalin to Molotov.¹⁰⁹ Stalin underlined in blue pencil Hitler’s phrase regarding Poland (“A crisis may break out any day”), as well as the Führer’s urgent appeal (“I would be pleased to receive your immediate reply”).¹¹⁰ Stalin had Molotov summon Schulenburg back already at 5:00 p.m. Moscow time to reveal that Ribbentrop would be welcome on the 23rd. “The people of our countries,” Stalin wrote in his response to Hitler, “need peaceful relations.”¹¹¹

Stalin’s response, transmitted via the German embassy, arrived in Berlin at 8:30 p.m. local time on August 21. At the Berghof, champagne was ordered. Hitler, a teetotaler, did not imbibe, but he drummed both fists on the wall.¹¹² Just before midnight, the Nazi regime released the sensational news of its foreign minister’s upcoming Moscow visit. In Paris, the government pondered pressing the Poles into “compromise” with Hitler, to buy time. In London, the assembled cabinet sought to appear nonchalant, but MPs were asking about the apparent failure of British intelligence to anticipate such a shocking turn of events.¹¹³ Burgess informed Gorsky of a telegram from Ambassador Henderson, also on August 21: “All measures have been taken for Hermann Göring to arrive under secret cover in London on Wednesday 23rd. This will amount to a historic event and we are just waiting for confirmation of this from the German side.”¹¹⁴

At the Berghof, very early on the morning of Saturday, August 22, the Führer addressed his top brass. He had summoned them to discuss his plans for Poland even before the news had come from Moscow, with instructions to arrive in civilian attire so as not to give anything away. “It was clear to me that a conflict with Poland had to come sooner or later,” he began, according to notes taken by Wilhelm Canaris, the head of military intelligence. “I had already made this decision in the spring, but I thought that I would first turn against the West in a few years, and only after that against the East.” But the Polish situation had become “intolerable.” His only fear, he said, was “that at the last minute some Schweinhund will make a proposal for mediation.” He concluded with an injunction about the absolute necessity of taking advantage of his never-to-be-repeated spell over the German people. “Essentially,” Hitler said, leaning on a grand piano, “all depends on me, on my existence, because of my political talents.” He adjourned them for lunch. To allay worries over his precipitating a new world war, he decided to address them a second time, giving some operational details and asserting that England had no real military. Not a single top general voiced objections. Toward the end of his peroration, Hitler briefly broke off, suddenly recognized Ribbentrop from among those assembled, and, melodramatically, sent his foreign minister with a Nazi salute right from the Berghof to fly to Stalin.¹¹⁵

That same Saturday, August 22, following the emergency cabinet meeting, Henderson set out to hand-deliver Chamberlain’s latest telegram to Hitler. Received at the Berghof on August 23 at 1:00 p.m., he stated that any German-Soviet pact would not alter Britain’s obligations to Poland, but hinted again that Britain could trade Poland away, and suggested again that the very next day, Field Marshal Göring should fly to Britain surreptitiously to meet Chamberlain at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, to hammer out an Anglo-German accord. Ever the ingrate, Hitler berated Henderson, shouting that London’s “blank check” guarantee to Poland had ruled out negotiations. Henderson departed, then was called back, but Hitler, although calmer, blamed Britain for being “determined to destroy and exterminate Germany.” The Führer evidently felt that his theatrics, on top of any pact with Stalin, would induce the British and, in their train, the French to back down from their pledges to Poland. After Henderson departed a second time, Hitler slapped his thigh in self-congratulation at his performance. “Chamberlain won’t survive this discussion,” he said. “His cabinet will fall this evening.”¹¹⁶

Chamberlain had done more for the Nazi leader than any other foreign politician, and the British PM appeared ready to do even more, in order to avoid war over Poland—but the game was up. In the extended diplomatic three-card monte, after all the dealing and double-dealing, Stalin, not Chamberlain, had turned up the “Hitler” card.

Even as Henderson was en route to the Berghof, Nikita Khrushchev arrived at the Near Dacha, having flown in from Kiev, where he was party boss. Few Moscow party officials, let alone “provincials,” enjoyed such access to the despot’s residence. Stalin let on that Ribbentrop was flying in to Moscow the next day, then looked at his protégé and smiled. Assuming that Stalin’s twisted sense of humor was at work yet again, Khrushchev played along, asking if Ribbentrop was going to defect. Stalin replied that he had gotten a telegram from Hitler.¹¹⁷

WINDFALL

The British press phoned Ivan Maisky at home to ask if it was true that Nazi foreign minister Ribbentrop was flying to Moscow; the Soviet ambassador, out of the loop, went with his wife, Agniya, to see Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.¹¹⁸ Göring’s proposed secret mission to London was canceled.¹¹⁹ Ribbentrop, flying on Hitler’s personal Condor, landed for a night stopover at Königsberg (August 22) and resumed his flight the next morning. His retinue was large, nearly forty persons, requiring two Focke-Wulf Condors. Genuine drama awaited on the German-Soviet frontier, at Velikie Luki. Markings on aircraft, unless they flew at very low altitudes, were generally not discernible. Stalin, ever hyperconspiratorial, had evidently not informed the Soviet border guard of his diplomatic conspiracy and, as a result, he almost destroyed his foreign policy coup. Soviet antiaircraft units fired on the Führer’s personal Condor, swastika on the tail, with Ribbentrop aboard. They missed.¹²⁰

The Nazi foreign minister reached Moscow with alacrity at around 1:00 p.m. on August 23, landing at Moscow’s main civilian airfield (near the Dynamo Stadium), a site that had been used for the coronation of Nicholas II, when a stampede over souvenir mugs had resulted in more than 1,000 deaths.¹²¹ There to greet Ribbentrop was deputy foreign affairs commissar Potyomkin, a name historically synonymous with false fronts and Russian deception. Escorted by Stalin’s personal bodyguard, General Vlasik, Ribbentrop rode in one of Stalin’s personal bulletproof ZIS limousines, outfitted with a Nazi flag. This was his first trip to Moscow and, in the words of German military attaché Köstring, the Nazi foreign minister was “nervous and agitated.”¹²² Their first destination was the freshly painted neoclassical former Austrian legation, now belonging to Nazi Germany, in the heart of old Moscow. After a short repast, Ribbentrop, accompanied by Schulenburg and Hilger, passed through the gates of the Kremlin, less than three hours after landing. They were greeted by the indispensable, physically unseemly Poskryobyshev, in colonel’s uniform, who escorted them upstairs to Molotov’s suite. In a surprise for the Germans, Stalin was present, too.¹²³

Schulenburg, by now in Moscow almost five years, had never even spoken to Stalin.¹²⁴ Schulenburg had previously served in Tehran, and his Moscow residence on Clean (Chisty) Lane “presented a lavish display of marvelous Isfahan carpets covering the walls, old weapons, shields with intricate inlaid designs, sabers, and swords,” a Soviet foreign affairs functionary observed, adding that “Persian miniatures hung all over the place, many of them erotic, which was quite shocking in those days.”¹²⁵ In Molotov’s office, Stalin’s medium height, military-style tunic, and baggy khaki trousers contrasted vividly with the tall Ribbentrop, in his European-cut suit.¹²⁶ A few aides and interpreters were present (neither Stalin nor Molotov could understand German).¹²⁷ Shaposhnikov, the elderly Soviet chief of staff, was the only military figure whom Stalin had included in both the diversionary action (the final talks with Drax) and the main battlefield (Ribbentrop). (Shaposhnikov shook in Stalin’s presence, not because he had difficulty composing himself but because he suffered from Parkinson’s disease.)¹²⁸ Ribbentrop brought a document signed by Hitler that accorded him “full power” to sign a state treaty.¹²⁹ The Nazi foreign minister’s great worry—besides contracting diarrhea from Soviet unsanitariness—was that he would be confronted by the fait accompli of an Anglo-French-Soviet military accord. Ribbentrop further worried that the wily Bolsheviks would drag out negotiations with him.

At the Berghof, having dismissed Henderson, Hitler nervously paced the terrace and sought omens over the majestic Salzburg mountains: the sky was said to go from turquoise to violet to fire red.¹³⁰ For weeks, Stalin had known that a German attack on Poland was imminent, from his intelligence sources, his Berlin chargé d’affaires, Astakhov, and even Schulenburg. Hitler’s recklessness afforded the despot enormous leverage, and he used it. Ribbentrop had sent a formal proposal on spheres of influence on the eve of the French-British military’s arrival in Moscow, but Stalin substituted his own text, which Hitler accepted.¹³¹ The two parties agreed—in the event of an unspecified conflict in Poland—to a mutual demarcation line across the country, right through Warsaw. Germany declared its “disinterest” in Romania’s Bessarabia. Stalin’s sphere of influence also included Finland, Estonia, and Latvia; Hitler was to get Lithuania. But now Stalin wanted Lithuania’s ice-free ports, Liepaja (Libau) and Ventspils (Windau). The talks adjourned so that Ribbentrop could rush to the embassy, where, at 8:05 p.m. Moscow time, he sent a telegram to Hitler, via the German foreign ministry, describing a Soviet request for Libau and Windau as “the decisive point for the final result.” The response came back with Hitler’s assent, and with such rapidity that it shocked his embassy staff.¹³² The Nazi foreign minister had even been authorized, if necessary, to grant a Soviet interest in the Turkish Straits, but Stalin had not thought to make the request.¹³³

By 10:00 p.m. Ribbentrop was back at the Kremlin with Hitler’s latest concession, on Lithuania. In the one alteration to Stalin’s draft that the Führer had been able to introduce, the Pact came into effect immediately upon signing, not ratification. The spheres of influence were written up in a secret protocol: territorially, the Germans got only what they would fight for.

The two sides discussed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which Ribbentrop avowed was not directed against the USSR. He volunteered to bring Berlin’s good graces to bear for improved Soviet-Japanese relations. Stalin replied that there were limits to Soviet patience in the face of Tokyo’s provocations; that the Soviets were ready to go to war if necessary; and that any German approach to Tokyo should not be made to seem a Soviet initiative. On Italy, Stalin inquired whether it might have aspirations beyond small, thinly populated Albania—perhaps for Greek territory. Ribbentrop answered that Albania was not insignificant, and that Mussolini was a strongman who could not be intimidated and welcomed improved German-Soviet relations.¹³⁴ During a break, as the final texts were written up in German and Russian, Stalin, Molotov, and Ribbentrop confirmed their solidarity by trashing the British.¹³⁵

Stalin mentioned that the British foreign office official John Simon, in confidential talks with Germany, had discussed a division of Europe into spheres of influence and had placed Soviet territory into the Nazi sphere. Ribbentrop was taken aback: these conversations were known to only a very narrow circle in Berlin. It was evident that Stalin had spies high up in the German foreign ministry, a problem to be addressed once back home.¹³⁶ For now, shared Anglophobia, undergirded by a shared antiliberalism, like a shared Griff nach der Weltmacht (at British expense), made for a heady cocktail. To the husband of the heiress to the Henkell champagne fortune, Stalin had lifted a glass of Soviet champagne, stating, “I know how much the German people love their Führer, and that is why I have the pleasure of drinking to his health!”¹³⁷ Still, when a giddy Ribbentrop tried to insert an effusive section into the text about German-Soviet friendship, Stalin refused. “Do you not think we should take a little more account of public opinion in both our countries?” he asked Ribbentrop. “For many years now, we have been pouring buckets of shit over each other’s head.”

Signatures were affixed at around 2:00 a.m. on August 24, a mere thirteen hours after Ribbentrop had landed.¹³⁸ He phoned Hitler from Molotov’s office with the news. “Convey my congratulations to Herr Stalin, the Führer of the Soviet people,” Hitler responded.¹³⁹ Stalin did not request the receiver, and Hitler did not ask to speak directly to him. Stalin toasted Hitler (“To the health of the Führer”).¹⁴⁰ Molotov toasted Stalin. “The atmosphere, which had been pleasant, became warmly convivial,” according to a German official present. “The ruler of Russia filled his guests’ glasses himself, offered them cigarettes and even to light them.”¹⁴¹

Photographers had been let in to record the moment for history. Hitler had sent his personal photographer so that the Führer could study Stalin’s surroundings as well as his physiognomy, for Hitler was anxious to ascertain whether Stalin’s earlobes were “ingrown and Jewish, or separate and Aryan”?¹⁴²

Lenin had condemned treaties with secret protocols and spheres of influence as “agreements between robbers behind people’s backs.” Not a mention of the Pact negotiations, even obliquely, was recorded in politburo minutes.¹⁴³ The basic text was published in Pravda (August 24, 1939), with stunning photos of Stalin and Molotov alongside the Nazi foreign minister, but without the secret protocol, of course.¹⁴⁴ The Hitler-Stalin Pact lacked a clause of invalidation in the event that one of the signatories attacked a third country. Litvinov had been trumpeting the inclusion of such a provision in Soviet bilateral nonaggression pacts as evidence of moral superiority, thundering that its absence in capitalist nonaggression pacts “means that a state which has secured by such a pact of nonaggression its rear or flank obtains the facility of attacking with impunity third states.”¹⁴⁵ On the German side, the fourteen members of the embassy in Moscow signed an oath never to reveal the secret protocol’s contents. Hans “Johnnie” Herwarth, the second secretary of the German embassy, on August 24, 1939, divulged to American ambassador Charles Bohlen the full contents of the Secret Additional Protocol signed earlier that morning.¹⁴⁶ On the Soviet side, only Stalin, Molotov, and Shaposhnikov, as well as the twenty-four-year-old interpreter, Pavlov, knew. Molotov, when asked publicly, replied that the imperialists used secret protocols all the time—an evasion that was accurate but placed the Soviets in dubious company from their own point of view.¹⁴⁷

Hitler had secured his eastern flank for his attack on Poland, preempted a possible broad anti-German coalition, and obtained insurance against the anticipated Western blockade. And then there was the sheer shock value. “That will hit like a bombshell,” he remarked to those in the Berghof—for once, an understatement.¹⁴⁸

Immediately after the signing, Molotov had repaired with Stalin back to the Little Corner between 2:15 and 3:35 a.m.¹⁴⁹ From there, in the wee hours of August 24, the two headed out to the Near Dacha. Voroshilov and the other cronies had returned there with their ducks from the military’s exclusive Zavidovo Hunting Preserve, seventy miles outside Moscow. Stalin dropped word that he had signed the Pact with the Nazis, which would allow the Soviets to determine the fate of the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Finland and to obtain a chunk of Poland, a strategic Soviet sphere of influence and a buffer to protect the socialist homeland. Unlike what had been proposed with the Western powers, moreover, the Pact imposed no obligations on the Soviet Union to fight a war; it was not a military alliance. The treaty also drove a wedge between Germany and Japan: not only had Hitler failed to complete the negotiations with Tokyo to convert the Anti-Comintern Pact into an anti-Soviet military alliance, but he had violated the Anti-Comintern Pact’s provision that its signatories would conclude no political agreements with the Soviet Union without first consulting one another. Stalin (as Zhukov later recalled) “was sure that he had twisted Hitler around his finger.”¹⁵⁰

CRUSHING MILITARY DISPLAY

On the Mongolia-Manchukuo border, denouement approached. Grigory Stern, at district headquarters in Chita, Siberia, had drawn up a plan for an offensive involving a double envelopment, encircling the Japanese while pinning them frontally. Zhukov, who would execute the plan on Mongolia’s desert steppes, in a salient forty-five miles wide and twelve miles deep, had prepared meticulously. Logistics were nightmarish in the USSR’s expansive, underpopulated, physically challenging Asian territory, extending into Mongolia, remote from Soviet industrial centers, but 4,000 trucks had bridged the 400-mile gap from the nearest railhead to support what would be the Soviets’ first massive battlefield application of tanks and aircraft. Japan’s full-scale invasion of China had altered the strategic calculus to Soviet advantage, a fact that the Kwantung Army, which was not fighting in China, ignored. China absorbed far more of Japan’s strength—28 of the 36 Japanese divisions on the Asian mainland—than Spain had of Nazi Germany’s (which had supported an indigenous insurgency, not fought a war of conquest).¹⁵¹ That was one reason the Tokyo high command had blocked the Kwantung Army’s plan for a massive offensive, approving operations merely for evicting the Soviets from the Halha, a fact that became known to Soviet military intelligence: Hotsumi Ozaki, the leftist functionary in the Japanese cabinet who belonged to Sorge’s spy ring, had learned that Japan’s leaders, consumed with China, were adamant that the conflict with the Soviets not escalate. Whether this further emboldened Stalin cannot be established, but the despot, and the Red Army, were already thinking big.

Cloud cover interfered with aerial reconnaissance, hindering Japanese efforts to enumerate Soviet forces. The Kwantung Army resorted to observation balloons, the first of which a Soviet fighter plane shredded with a machine gun a few hours after it went aloft. Zhukov, in any case, had camouflaged his buildup of a huge strike force. He and his team installed artificial noise machines to induce the Japanese to react to ghosts, thereby inuring them to loud sounds and enabling the Soviets to move equipment (which sounded just like the artificial noise). Zhukov also had weapons and men transferred to frontline jumping-off points only at night. Knowing that the Japanese were tapping telephone lines and intercepting radio traffic, Zhukov had disinformation spread, in easily broken code, about the Soviets’ purely defensive stance and their preparations for possible military operations in the autumn.¹⁵² The Soviets had detailed intelligence on the location and movement of all Japanese troops in Manchukuo.¹⁵³ True, Zhukov, showing Stalin-like suspicion, deemed much of the intelligence forwarded to him speculative. So he organized his own ground combat reconnaissance, as well as fighter plane photography. Finally, learning that the Japanese allowed officers to take leaves on Sundays, Zhukov unleashed the full force of the First Army Group across the Halha on Sunday, August 20, at 5:45 a.m.¹⁵⁴ The Red Army achieved decisive operational surprise.¹⁵⁵

Japanese intelligence continually, egregiously underestimated Soviet capabilities—because of not only Zhukov’s disinformation but also their own prejudices and the reports, a year before, by the defector Lyushkov, whose revelations reinforced the Japanese’s condescending racism. The biggest oversights concerned precisely what Lyushkov had downplayed: the scale and firepower of mechanized corps and long-range artillery. Indeed, although the Japanese had numerical superiority on the borderland—perhaps 75,000 troops to Zhukov’s 57,000—the Soviets had a colossal advantage in armor: almost 600 tanks, more than 500 artillery pieces, 515 fighter planes.¹⁵⁶ Soviet-built heavy tanks came off assembly lines in numbers, and enjoyed clear superiority to the lighter Japanese models. More prosaically, the Soviets ingeniously used simple piano wires to trap Japanese tanks, immobilizing them long enough that they could be finished off—the kind of resourcefulness used when one does not underestimate one’s foe. Mongolia’s open grassland and low sandy hills, moreover, proved highly conducive to mechanized warfare (the opposite of the lesson the Soviets had learned in Spain’s urbanized areas), and Zhukov managed the feat of coordinating combined tank, motorized infantry, artillery, and aircraft warfare. This sophistication of strategy, tactics, and generalship surprised the Japanese, too. No less extraordinary was Soviet transport of thousands of tons of ammunition, food, and fuel over the primitive roads—more than 1,300 truckloads daily from the Transbaikal military district.¹⁵⁷ The Japanese soldiers, without even water, would take to soaking up the night dew with their towels and chewing.¹⁵⁸

Japan’s cult of fighting “spirit,” its piecemeal commitment of forces, pathetic ground support, inferior ordnance, and poor logistics, combined with its no-surrender doctrine, even in the face of superior firepower, to produce catastrophe.¹⁵⁹ Stalin had always gotten lucky in his nemeses—Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev-Bukharin, and now the Kwantung Army. He also got lucky in Zhukov, whom the despot evidently had never even met, but who showed himself a self-assured corps commander whose operational mastery exposed Japan’s unsophistication in mobile warfare. To be sure, failure for Zhukov at the Halha River could have meant death in NKVD cellars.¹⁶⁰ But then again, that was true for every Soviet commander. He proved to be willing to assume great responsibility and risk. He was decisive, unsentimental, even ruthless—like Stalin. On the third day of the heavily armored offensive, when the Japanese managed to dig in on a strategic hill, causing enormous Soviet casualties, Stern suggested to Zhukov that he halt for a few days to gather forces. Zhukov rudely rejected the idea.¹⁶¹

The very next day, August 24, 1939, as Ribbentrop departed Moscow, the Japanese attempted a desperate broad-daylight frontal assault with no prior scouting or artillery or aerial softening up. This was the beginning of a literal suicide wave. Japanese commanding officers would order their soldiers to take their own lives rather than be captured. Just a week in, on August 28, Zhukov telegrammed Voroshilov: “The Japanese-Manchurian troops that violated the border of the Mongolian People’s Republic . . . have been completely surrounded and annihilated.”¹⁶²

The Japanese suffered 18,000 casualties (8,000 killed, 8,800 wounded, 1,200 sick), but the Red Army, in victory, lost even more—9,703 killed and 15,952 wounded, nearly 40 percent of its deployment.¹⁶³ Still, the entire Halha River had been cleared of Japanese by industrialized brute face, applied with no regard to costs. The thirty-nine-year-old Stern, as the senior-ranking commander and a Central Committee member, headed the list of newly named “Heroes of the Soviet Union.” The forty-three-year-old Zhukov, in his hero citation, was recognized as “a brilliant organizer, a person of unbending willpower and boundless courage.”¹⁶⁴ The text could have added a burning desire to clear his name from the scurrilous denunciations during the terror, and win Stalin’s favor.¹⁶⁵

SHOCK WAVES

Zhukov’s thrashing of the ineptly led Kwantung Army delivered a trove of captured Japanese operational documents and codes, and a blow to its reputation.¹⁶⁶ “We were quite shocked by the results,” the influential Asahi Shimbun would concede.¹⁶⁷ The Japanese, as Stalin heard from his ambassador, as well as from the military intelligence spy Sorge, were also shell-shocked by Hitler’s Pact with their enemy.¹⁶⁸ The disgraced government in Tokyo fell. The outgoing prime minister, who had misinformed the emperor, called the German-Soviet deal “intricate and baffling.”¹⁶⁹

But the Soviet Pact also produced shock waves right at home. Some proletarians wept at news of the agreement.¹⁷⁰ Thanks in large measure to the civil war in Spain, antifascism (understood globally), not just anticapitalism, had become a pillar of the Communist idea, Soviet identity, and domestic and global loyalties. Veterans of the Spanish civil war wondered why they had fought and left so many fallen comrades behind if the USSR was only going to go on to sign a pact with Nazism. Ehrenburg, who was still in Paris as a correspondent for Izvestiya, claimed he had lost his appetite—for eight months.¹⁷¹ Tukhachevsky and other top Soviet military men and intelligence agents had been shot for alleged links to the German military, while the vivid caricatures of Boris Yefimov had memorably depicted Trotsky as dancing arm in arm with Hitler. “Destroying the party and decapitating the army” as alleged agents of Hitler, Trotsky wrote, “Stalin is now openly advancing his candidacy for the role . . . of Hitler’s main agent.”¹⁷²

Stalin did not stage a Central Committee plenum to rubber-stamp the Pact or have the press blare the usual mass affirmations at factories and collective farms. The Comintern absorbed yet another moral and psychological blow. “The publication of photographs of Bolsheviks smiling at Nazis and the announcement that Germany and the USSR had signed a pact stupefied us,” wrote Jesús Hernández, who had joined the Spanish Communist party in 1922, at age fifteen, and spent more than five years in prison for it.¹⁷³ A stunned Georgi Dimitrov had sent Stalin, Zhdanov, and Molotov a summary of Western Communist reactions, cherry-picking anything supportive of Moscow’s position, but pleaded for an audience with Stalin to help him with the “exceptional difficulties” in instructing Communist parties globally.¹⁷⁴ Stalin would receive him in the Little Corner on September 7, in the company of Molotov and Zhdanov. “A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries—(poor and rich as regards colonies, raw materials, and so forth)—for the redivision of the world, for the domination of the world!” the despot gloated. “We see nothing wrong in their having a good fight and weakening each other. It would be fine if at the hands of Germany the position of the richest capitalist countries (especially England) were shaken.”¹⁷⁵

Stalin further stated in the Little Corner that “the division of capitalist states into fascist and democratic no longer makes sense.” Such a division had never held much meaning for him even when, in 1935, he had allowed the Comintern to announce a popular front against fascism, which, in the form of Nazi Germany, had become objectively progressive: “Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system.”¹⁷⁶

Soviet propaganda turned on a dime. Nearly half of all expressly antifascist Soviet films (a mere thirteen in total since 1928) had appeared between late 1938 and early 1939, and all of those depicted Germany as the aggressive country—none better than Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein’s first completed film in more than a decade.¹⁷⁷ With a score by Prokofyev and USSR People’s Artist Nikolai Cherkasov in the main role, the patriotic epic portrayed the Teutonic Knights’ thirteenth-century invasion of Great Novgorod, their capture of Pskov (owing to a traitor), and their eventual defeat by Prince Alexander, who rallies the common people in a decisive “Battle on the Ice,” set to stirring music. Nevsky had premiered on December 1, 1938, and in April 1939 the head of the state cinematography committee reported that 23 million people had seen it.¹⁷⁸ “It came out not bad, it seems,” Stalin had written on the screenplay, but after the Pact was signed, he had the film pulled.¹⁷⁹

Many Communists and foreign fellow travelers who had explained away the monstrous terror, often in the name of antifascism, now broke with the cause. “Everybody else in the world, the Social Democrats, the liberals, the conservatives, had their opinions, but we, the Marxist-Leninists, we had a scientific world outlook,” recalled Wolfgang Leonhard, a German Communist studying in Moscow in the second half of the 1930s. “We knew the fundamental answer to the riddle of the past, present, and future, for all nations and for all countries.”¹⁸⁰ But a deal with the Nazis crystallized Leonhard’s gathering doubts: “The mighty workers’ movement in Central Europe was in ruins; Hitler’s tanks dominated Europe; Lenin’s comrades-in-arms during the Russian Revolution had all been shot as spies; the Spanish Republic had been abandoned by the European democracies, its revolutionary movement stabbed in the back by Soviet agents; and finally Stalin had concluded a pact with Hitler.”¹⁸¹ Even many who wanted to remain loyal struggled to do so. “It was actually shameful, and we weren’t able to overcome this feeling of shame for a long time,” said the German Communist Ruth von Mayenburg, who traveled in secret from Moscow to Nazi Germany on life-risking missions. “One had to mobilize one’s Marxist concept of imperialism, of international struggles, of everything, in order to deceive oneself about this matter of conscience.”¹⁸²

Here, again, we see the core of Communism’s extraordinary power: its rootedness in beliefs and personal biographies, which, however, also made for its extreme vulnerability. To be sure, for those loyalists less preoccupied with Communist dogma, the Pact spurred elaborate great-power fantasies. “Perhaps we have preserved the last word,” Vishnevsky, the playwright who headed the military commission of the writers’ union, wrote in his diary after reading the announcement of the Pact in the newspaper. “In the event of war, we’ll enter last. And—it is utterly possible—we shall strike that very Germany.” Three days later, he wrote, “1) We win time; we shall observe the military prowess of countries in reality; 2) we’ll acquire experience, of much greater value than in Spain and China.” He went on to suggest the possibility of using the Pact to smash Japan for good and obtain advantageous proposals from France and Britain, and he concluded that “Germany could not be trusted: it has violated many agreements.” He foresaw an expansion of Soviet interests in the Carpathians and Balkans and on the Black Sea, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. “It is difficult to guess how the game will turn out,” he wrote in his diary. “But one thing is clear: the world will be reshaped. . . . This is a new chapter in the history of the party and the country. The USSR has begun an activist global policy.”¹⁸³

Beria did his part, imposing a ban on the taunting of Gulag prisoners as “fascists.”¹⁸⁴ Molotov, at the USSR Supreme Soviet on August 31, denounced the “shortsighted people in our country” who were “carried away by simplistic antifascist propaganda.” Still, publicly, if obliquely, he acknowledged the confusion and consternation. “People ask, with an air of innocence, how could the Soviet Union consent to improve political relations with a state of the fascist type?” he allowed. Nonetheless, he could not help gloating. “If these gentlemen have such an irresistible desire to go to war,” Molotov said of the British and the French, “well, then, let them go to war by themselves, without the Soviet Union. (Laughter and cheers.)” He added, “We have never had any equally advantageous economic agreement with Great Britain, France, or any other country.”¹⁸⁵ The Supreme Soviet “ratified” the Pact unanimously. German ambassador Schulenburg was right, however, when he reported to Berlin (September 6) that “the distrust expressed toward Germany over many years cannot be eradicated that quickly, despite the effective counter-propaganda [of late] conducted at party and factory meetings.”¹⁸⁶

Among staunch Nazis, the shock and disgust were no less severe than at the Comintern. “A moral loss of respect in the light of our now twenty-year struggle,” despaired Alfred Rosenberg, one of Hitler’s principal tutors in anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism, who blamed Ribbentrop for the betrayal. Hitler assured his photographer, Hoffmann—who relayed word of dismay among the Nazi faithful—that “my party members know and trust me,” but the front garden at the Brown House, the national headquarters of the Nazi party in Munich, was littered with badges and insignia thrown away by the disillusioned.¹⁸⁷ By contrast, Ernst Köstring, the German military attaché in Moscow, paid a call on the external relations department of the general staff to congratulate the Red Army on the Pact. He had not been part of the Kremlin negotiations, but now he asserted that he had proposed a Soviet-German Pact already five years earlier, and that Ribbentrop—who was getting all the credit—had doubted the possibility of success right up “until he met personally with the great figure of comrade Stalin.”¹⁸⁸

STRATEGIC CHOICES

In the West, the Pact exploded with concussive force. “All the isms,” a British foreign office spokesman soon quipped, “are now wasms.” Chamberlain indignantly wrote to his sister Hilda (August 27) of “Russian treachery.”¹⁸⁹ Admiral Drax, too, would attribute the failure of his negotiations to Soviet bad faith, accusing Moscow of seeking talks with Britain and France merely to scare up a better deal with Hitler, a rich accusation from the British side. Still, Drax was partly correct: Stalin had effectively organized an auction for a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. In the event, the British made no offer. Whatever Stalin’s preferences, Hitler presented not just the better deal, but the only deal. Daladier, known as the Bull of Vaucluse, had instructed General Doumenc to “bring us back an accord—at any price,” but whether a bold French initiative to break with democratic Britain could have produced a binding bilateral military alliance with the undemocratic Soviet Union remains unclear.¹⁹⁰ The French, in any case, remained joined at the hip to the British, and the latter were immovable.¹⁹¹

Chamberlain wanted to prevent further Nazi aggression, but, through thick and thin, he had held fast to his policy of conciliation with Hitler. It is not difficult to condemn the vain, overly self-confident, obdurate British PM.¹⁹² But Chamberlain’s goals of avoiding war and safeguarding the empire were widely shared.¹⁹³ And although Stalin had offered a deal, the despot did not exactly inspire trust. Indeed, unlike many of his critics (then and subsequently), Chamberlain understood that the Soviet Union was a terrifying menace, writing to his sister and sounding board, “I distrust [the Soviet Union’s] motives which seem to me to have little connection with our ideas of liberty.”¹⁹⁴ The PM’s worst nightmare was well founded: that if Britain invited the Soviets to help beat back Hitler, Stalin would take advantage, and Communism would end up occupying the heart of Europe.¹⁹⁵

Of course, had Chamberlain confronted Hitler before the latter’s seizure of Austria or of Czechoslovakia, when the Wehrmacht was weak, the PM would have had far less need to rely on the Red Army (as opposed to merely threatening Germany with a British-Soviet united opposition), but before those armed actions, few people understood who Hitler really was. Chamberlain contributed to but did not create what was a genuine dilemma: whether to work with Hitler’s professed desire not to dominate all Europe or to facilitate Stalin’s suspected desire, if invited, to encroach into Central Europe.

As a traditional conservative, Chamberlain was disgusted by Nazism, and he privately described Hitler as “the blackest devil he had ever met.”¹⁹⁶ But because the PM was unwilling to ally with Stalin, the result was not just the Munich debacle, which had severely narrowed his options, but the two-faced guarantee to Poland, the wishful thinking that Hitler might calm down once all the Germans lived under one roof or be removed by Germans worried about the socioeconomic costs of his adventurism, or, barring all that, that Germany might even serve as a bulwark against the dangerous Communists.¹⁹⁷ Such views seem delusional, but Chamberlain was hardly alone in holding them. George Kennan, the American foreign service officer in Moscow, made precisely the same argument regarding Hitler—he merely wanted to unite all Germans—and precisely the same contrast with the supposedly graver threat of Communism.¹⁹⁸ Kennan, too, was wrong, however. Hitler was at least as great a threat as Stalin. Up until 1939, Stalin had been by far the more murderous, and Communism had a clearly stated global ambition as well as party members and fellow travelers in all the main countries, but Stalin was more susceptible to deterrence than Hitler.

Despite Stalin’s domestic house of horrors, as well as the Comintern’s unscrupulous, albeit often pitiful, machinations abroad, the main armed, expansionist power seeking domination of Europe was Nazi Germany (and in Asia, Japan). Hitler’s Versailles revisionism was limitless; Stalin’s was limited to opportunities others might present. Chamberlain’s final, related error, also self-serving, was his belief that the decapitated Red Army could not really fight anyway.¹⁹⁹ Of course, the Red Army was fighting, showing its mettle against Japan all throughout the 1939 Soviet negotiations with Britain and France.

Figuring out a way to both engage and contain Stalin would not have been simple, but it was the strategic choice among two odious options, if only because Hitler’s rabid revisionism would be vastly empowered should the Nazi leader reach his own understanding with a spurned Stalin. Here, too, Chamberlain and much of the British establishment had been smug.²⁰⁰ The defector Krivitsky, a top intelligence operative for the Soviets in Europe, had in 1938 warned MI5 of Stalin’s strenuous efforts at a Soviet-German rapprochement. Additionally, General Karl Bodenschatz, for a time the military adjutant to Göring and his liaison to Hitler, relayed the fact of secret Nazi-Soviet talks to London. Foreign Secretary Halifax—no friend of Communism—had warned Chamberlain and the cabinet as early as May 3, 1939, that Stalin and Hitler could cut a deal. But at a cabinet meeting on July 19, according to the minutes, “the Prime Minister said that he could not bring himself to believe that a real alliance between Russia and Germany was possible.”²⁰¹ Even at this point, there was time for the British government. Hitler did not begin his definitive move to Stalin until late July/early August, when the war to annihilate Poland—the traditional hinge of German-Russian relations—was just weeks away.²⁰²

MORE SURPRISES

Hitler’s decision making appears linear only in retrospect. He was a gambler, but also a vacillator. He seems to have assumed that the Pact with Stalin would force the British and the French to back down over Poland, an assertion that Ribbentrop parroted, as did almost all the ingratiating German reports out of London and Paris. When Dirksen, the German ambassador to London, changed his tune, his communications stopped reaching Hitler.²⁰³ It is not clear whether anyone brought the Führer information that contradicted what he wanted to hear.²⁰⁴ “The people in the streets,” William Shirer, in Berlin, recorded in his diary on August 24, 1939, “are still confident Hitler will pull it off again without war.”²⁰⁵ But after the Pact was made public, the British and French governments publicly reaffirmed their commitments to Poland, hoping, for their part, that these renewed pledges would force Hitler to back down, averting war.²⁰⁶ In fact, Hitler did now hesitate.

Hitler—still hopeful of averting a pan-European war by scaring or enticing Britain into backing down from defense of Poland—had heeded the advice of Ribbentrop and once more had British ambassador Henderson summoned to the Chancellery. During a meeting on August 25, that commenced at 1:00 p.m. and lasted about an hour, Hitler denounced Chamberlain’s recent restatement in Parliament of the guarantee for Poland, but he also divulged that he was still prepared to make “a large comprehensive offer” to guarantee the continued existence of the British empire with German troops after he had “solved” the urgent Polish problem. Hitler called this “his last offer.” He suggested that Henderson fly immediately to London, putting a plane at his disposal. The Führer had always trained something of a jealous eye on Britain’s empire and power, and remained open to some sort of bargain, but only on the basis of full British acquiescence to his domination of the continent.²⁰⁷ Henderson insisted that any bilateral deal would require that German differences with Poland be settled through negotiations, a concession Hitler refused. “The chancellor,” Henderson would report, “spoke with calm and apparent sincerity.”²⁰⁸

Henderson would fly off to London on the Hitler-supplied plane, carrying his “last offer,” but only on the next day (August 26).²⁰⁹ Already at 3:02 p.m. on August 25, mere minutes after the ambassador’s exit from the Chancellery, Hitler issued the final order to proceed with military action against Poland before dawn the next morning.²¹⁰ But then, only four and a half hours later, Hitler called the invasion off. Frantic desist orders went out to chief of staff Halder, who was already in his command bunker south of Berlin.²¹¹ German soldiers on the front lines, when told to stand down, remarked that “Hitler got cold feet.”²¹²

It was the duce—the sole leader who had once stood up to Hitler.

Mussolini, essentially consulting no one in his own government, had signed the Pact of Steel with Germany, so Italy was on the hook for war. Now he pledged support for a war over Poland but wrote that Italy did not command the resources for a war against France and Britain. He also noted that he had been kept in the dark about the deal with Stalin. Hitler had been sure of a favorable reply from Rome. When the Italian ambassador arrived at the Reich Chancellery bearing Mussolini’s letter, only an hour or so had elapsed since the Führer had given the order for war.²¹³ Italy’s demurral was inconsequential for the German plan of battle, but it did remove a cudgel to induce France and Britain to back down and, no less consequentially, could damage Hitler’s prestige. “The Führer ponders and contemplates,” Goebbels recorded in his diary. “That’s a serious blow for him.”²¹⁴ Mussolini’s was not the only unpleasant news. The French ambassador, Coulondre, had also been summoned to the Chancellery, and he had stated to Hitler that German reports of Polish atrocities against ethnic Germans were exaggerated and that France would honor its commitments to Poland. Additionally, Ribbentrop had reported word out of London of a new mutual assistance treaty, just signed between Britain and Poland.²¹⁵

When Göring, in the Chancellery that day, asked whether the war had been canceled or just postponed, Hitler vowed to continue to break off the Western powers from Poland, in order to fight only a local war.²¹⁶ General Walther von Brauchitsch, Wehrmacht commander in chief, judged that Hitler genuinely did not know what to do.²¹⁷ Could the Führer really back down in front of his military inner circle, the German people, and the world? Would he risk a world war over Polish territories that he likely could obtain via negotiations? Chamberlain continued to relay offers of Polish territory to Germany that the Poles had explicitly rejected. Ribbentrop rightly surmised that the British PM was looking for a way out of his commitment.²¹⁸ Even if Hitler insisted on fighting a war, would it not have made the most strategic sense to accept British offers regarding Danzig and the Polish Corridor, which would have elicited the Polish government’s rejection and thereby given Britain and presumably France a firm pretext to renounce their “guarantees” for Poland’s independence and stand aside?

Germany, not Poland, had ended up nearly isolated. On August 26, 1939, Mussolini conveyed another message to Berlin: he would intervene “immediately”—if Germany supplied Italy with 7 million tons of gasoline, 6 million tons of coal, and 2 million tons of steel, among other greedy, impossible desiderata.²¹⁹ Hitler could expect nothing from his other formal Anti-Comintern ally, Japan, which remained mired in the war with China and now had allowed itself to become enmeshed in a losing border clash with the USSR, too. With neither Italy nor Japan willing or able to lend support and solidarity, suddenly only Stalin and the “Judeo-Bolsheviks” were on the Führer’s side. Grand strategy, stranger than fiction.

At the Pact’s signing, Stalin had mischievously proposed a toast to “the new Anti-Cominternist—Stalin” (then apparently winked at Molotov). But upon parting, in utmost earnestness, the despot had told Ribbentrop, “The Soviet Government takes the new Pact very seriously. It can give its word of honor that the Soviet Union will never betray its partner.”²²⁰ Here was the real “pact of steel.”

Hitler reinstated his battle orders. His thought processes remain opaque. “In my life,” Hitler told Göring on August 29, “I’ve always gone for broke.”²²¹ That same day, a resolute Poland wanted to move its troops into their forward positions and declare a general mobilization. Belgium and the Netherlands, which lay in the Nazi path toward France, had already announced general mobilizations on August 23 and 28, respectively, and no one had requested they reconsider, but the British and the French urged Warsaw to withhold an announcement in order to allow for a possible last-ditch Nazi climbdown, with “negotiations” to follow if conducted without menace. But Goebbels recorded in his diary that “the Führer views England as still taking an uncompromising stance. We must not blink.”²²² On August 31, Hitler ordered a doubling of production of a new long-range “wonder bomber” (the Ju 88) for use against Britain and its empire.

That same evening, a preplanned Nazi provocation created a casus belli against Poland: SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms attacked a German border post and a German radio station, killing seven people (six prisoners brought from Sachsenhausen concentration camp and one pro-Polish German supplied by the Gestapo) and broadcasting briefly in Polish.²²³ On September 1, after an air bombardment before dawn, 62 Wehrmacht divisions—nearly 1.5 million men—ripped into Poland, in Hitler’s biggest yet roll of what Bismarck had called the “iron dice.”

THE DISTRUST

The Führer arrived at the Kroll Opera House at 10:00 a.m. on September 1 to address the Reichstag (which had only been summoned at 3:00 a.m.). He was treated to standing ovations. British and French diplomatic notes delivered that day in Berlin threatened war—if the German government failed to “agree” to withdraw its forces from Poland and “express readiness” to negotiate. When queried whether their notes of September 1 constituted an ultimatum, the British and the French explicitly stated no.²²⁴ Mussolini, partly to save face, had intervened yet again to float the idea of an international conference, which Chamberlain had already suggested to Hitler (London was communicating with Rome).²²⁵ While the French were seeking time to evacuate Paris and the frontier zones and to puzzle out their prospective moves, the two Western powers were also trying to coordinate their military mobilizations, and a certain chaos ensued in Britain’s Parliament. Finally, on September 3, after Hitler had continued to obfuscate on the peace feelers while pressing his military invasion, and the House of Commons exploded in revolt at Chamberlain and Halifax, first Britain and then France (Daladier) declared war on Germany. Hitler was said to be “stunned.”²²⁶ In fact, he was aware that the British and the French would have to declare war. But he could not back down at this point.²²⁷ For Germany and its racial destiny, in any case, he had concluded that a war to vanquish the West was inevitable at some point.²²⁸

Incredibly, the Polish regime had failed to prepare a full-fledged war plan in the event of a German attack, even after the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia had made the path to Warsaw that much easier. Poland’s contingency planning was focused on a war against the Soviet Union. Most of Poland’s military supply bases remained in its western regions, considered the rear.²²⁹ Now, rather than establish a line of defense in depth on the Vistula that could be held, Poland massed its forces forward, in the Poznań salient, troops that were encircled and annihilated. Already on September 3, Wehrmacht units in the north had crossed the entire Corridor and linked up with German East Prussia. On the same day, Ribbentrop cabled Schulenburg in Moscow to gently urge the Soviet Union to occupy its sphere of Poland “at the proper time,” as agreed in the Pact, adding that “this would be a relief to us.”²³⁰ Of course, his goal was not to gain assistance for the Wehrmacht in its war effort, but to fatally poison relations between the USSR and the Western powers. (Heydrich enthused to his subordinates, “Then Britain would be obliged to declare war on Russia, too.”) Molotov was noncommittal. Poland had an army of around 39 divisions and 16 cavalry brigades, plus reserves, while Hitler had mobilized 54 divisions (out of about 80 total at the time). Stalin was waiting to see how well the German offensive went. In the event, the Luftwaffe would end up losing almost as many planes as the small Polish air force; the Luftwaffe would also expend its entire stock of bombs, while fully one quarter of Germany’s tank park would be knocked out of commission or outright destroyed.²³¹

Stalin, no less than the Polish government, was also waiting to see what concrete military actions Britain and France would undertake. As it happened, those actions proved to be minimal (indicating, perhaps, what the USSR, too, would have received from the Western powers in an alliance against Germany). The British instituted a blockade of Germany but shrank from bombing even Germany’s airfields, despite an explicit commitment to Poland to do so. The air attack plans had been quietly abandoned for fear of provoking Luftwaffe retaliation on Britain—but the Poles had not been informed. Similarly, the French government had agreed, in the protocol signed with Poland back on May 19, 1939, to commence military action against Germany within fifteen days of the start of a war, but then, in consultation with Britain, France subsequently decided it would not do so—also without informing Poland. France’s 110 divisions did not storm into Germany, which was protected by fewer than 30 divisions, perhaps 12 of them combat ready. The entire sum of French action consisted of a small attack on the Saarland, even though, privately, Wehrmacht chief of staff Halder admitted that he could not have prevented the French from occupying the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, had they moved expeditiously.²³² As France instead hunkered down against an anticipated German attack, the Poles were left to fight alone.²³³ The Polish government, in a demoralizing move, abandoned Warsaw beginning on September 5, in a chaotic evacuation southeast, by steps, toward the frontier with Romania—planning, if necessary, to try to travel on to the West and return on the backs of Western military might.

Stalin did not know for sure that the French and the British had effectively written Poland off militarily even before the war had been launched. He was also hypercautious not to walk into a Nazi trap. On September 3, the same day Ribbentrop had tasked Schulenburg, in Moscow, with ascertaining Soviet plans for Poland, Stalin’s latest ambassador to Berlin, Alexei Shkvartsev, the former head of the textile institute, was ceremoniously received at the Chancellery. When the envoy presented his credentials to Hitler, in the presence of Göring and Ribbentrop, the Führer remarked, “The German nation is fortunate to have signed the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. This Pact will serve the cause of the commonwealth of these two nations in both the political and economic arenas.” Hitler vowed to uphold all the obligations he had undertaken, but he declined to provide any information on the course of his campaign in Poland.²³⁴ Would the Wehrmacht actually halt at the line agreed upon in the just-signed Pact? Would they even stop at the Polish border?²³⁵

The fact remained that both the Japanese and the German armies—two of the world’s biggest, and both bordering on the Soviet Union—were on the move at the same time.

Ribbentrop’s requests for the USSR to invade Poland became “urgent,” but Stalin needed to be sure of the battlefield and of German intentions, not to mention the need to publicly justify Soviet participation in a new partition.²³⁶ On September 5, the USSR rejected a request from Poland for military supplies and transit of war matériel, citing a desire not to be dragged into war. Two days later, directives for the initial Red Army mobilization in the Belorussian and Ukrainian military districts, bordering Poland, were issued.²³⁷ On the afternoon of September 9, Stalin had Molotov vaguely inform Schulenburg that the Red Army would be moving into Poland in a matter of days. The next day, a vast Soviet mobilization began. It produced a panicked run on shops, which was not altogether unintended: it let the Germans know the Soviets were moving to a war footing. Also on September 10, Molotov told Schulenburg that the rapidity of the German advance had surprised the Soviets, but that the Red Army had more than 3 million soldiers ready. Molotov’s initial draft of a Soviet declaration of a Red Army move into Poland, which he shared with Schulenburg, referred to the supposed disintegration of the Polish state and the resulting urgent need to aid Ukrainian and Belorussian brothers “threatened” by the German advance. Perhaps it was an unintentional slip. Schulenburg reported this calmly (the final joint communiqué would remove the offending implication), but he informed Berlin that the Soviets were in a quandary over the imminent German victory.²³⁸

On September 11, Voroshilov and Shaposhnikov wrote an order for an invasion to commence on the 14th. But this directive did not go into effect.²³⁹

That Stalin somehow trusted Hitler was laughable, as Hitler himself noted.²⁴⁰ Stalin trusted no one (other than perhaps Abram Isayevich Legner, his Jewish tailor and one of the very few people he deferentially addressed by first name and patronymic).²⁴¹ The despot had tasked one of his aides, Boris Dvinsky, with assembling a reading packet. Stalin did not travel among adoring masses in an open-top car, as Hitler did, or issue impulsive decisions. When not receiving personnel for sessions in the Little Corner, he sat there alone and read. Like Hitler, he commented or doodled on whatever he was reading. One of his most frequent marginal scribblings was “teacher.”²⁴² With Hitler, however, he had been reduced to pupil, and he had better get the lesson right. Perusing the Dvinsky-assembled dossier on Nazism that summer of 1939, Stalin examined the Russian translation of a book by the Englishwoman Dorothy Woodman, Hitler Rearms: An Exposure of Germany’s War Plans (London, 1934), which contained a blistering chapter on the sweeping scale of Nazism’s “ideological preparation for war.” She wrote of Hitler’s bathing an entire country in national hysteria and psychological exultation: molding the general will, transcending the individual. The power of those techniques had to be familiar.

Stalin also consulted an internal Russian translation of Mein Kampf.²⁴³ The Soviet population could not read Hitler’s book, which by now had sold more than 10 million copies internationally. (The Japanese public could read it, but the translator had censored many passages so that Japanese readers would not know that in Hitler’s racial hierarchy, the East Asians were subhumans, too.)²⁴⁴ Stalin directed his inner circle to read Hitler’s text as well.²⁴⁵ Whether they made it through remains unknown, but some at least grasped the existential threat Nazism posed beyond traditional German imperialism. “I forget how many pages I read, but I was unable, morally, to get through the whole thing,” Khrushchev would later recall. “I could not read it because it literally wrenched my gut; I could not look calmly at such delirium; it disgusted me, I did not have the patience, and I put it down without having finished it.”²⁴⁶ Members of the general staff and the foreign affairs commissariat evidently could not manage to finish the text, either, and some did not take Hitler’s ravings at face value.²⁴⁷

Stalin took one of his thick colored pencils and underlined frothy passages in Hitler’s tract about the Nazi Drang nach Osten (“drive toward the east”). For example: “And when we speak of new lands in Europe, we can think only of Russia and her borderlands. . . . The future goal of our foreign policy must be . . . acquiring the territory we need for our German nation.” Stalin further underlined passages in the Russian translation (1935) of Konrad Heiden’s exposé A History of National Socialism (Zurich, 1934). To wit: “Hitler, unable to control himself, simply does not know what he promises; his promises cannot be considered the promises of a solid partner. He breaks his promises as soon as it is in his interest to do so, and all the while continues to view himself as an honest person.”²⁴⁸ Heiden’s singular point was that Hitler’s opponents, as well as his (temporary) allies, dangerously underestimated him. Dvinsky also delivered to Stalin Soviet military intelligence estimates of Nazi German strength: a land army of 3.7 million men, almost half mechanized, 400,000 air force personnel, 60,000 naval personnel, more than 3,000 tanks, 26,000 guns and mortars, 4,000 planes, and 107 warships.²⁴⁹

The Wehrmacht, taking advantage of the Polish army’s lack of mobility and weak communications and control, reached Warsaw’s outskirts in just the second week of fighting. “The operation was carried out like a theatrical performance,” recalled Khrushchev. “The Germans had set up movie cameras ahead of time. The battles were filmed from both land and sea, and they sought to distribute this film as widely as possible in all countries of the world.” Hitler “proposed that Stalin take this film and have it shown through our network of motion picture theaters, to show our audiences how the Germans dealt with Danzig, with Poland, with all of Europe.” Stalin agreed to do so, provided Hitler promised to show an equivalent Soviet film to a mass audience in Germany; Hitler refused. “Nevertheless,” Khrushchev concluded, “this film was sent to us by the Germans, and we took a look at it together with Stalin. It really did have a depressing effect.”²⁵⁰ Although Pravda (September 11, 1939) contrasted Germany’s organizational and technological prowess with the “laughable mouse-like fuss” of Britain and France, scenes of Germany’s military romp in Poland were kept out of Soviet newsreels. Stalin got his own firsthand taste. On September 15, an unidentified airplane crossed into Soviet territory above Olevsk, in Ukraine. It was fired upon by Soviet forces and forced to land; it turned out, Izvestiya reported, to be a German bomber.²⁵¹

WHO WANTS WAR?

Also on September 15, after intense internal bickering and foot-dragging in Tokyo, the Japanese acceded to a cease-fire in the border war. Signed by the ambassador with Molotov, it took effect at 2:00 a.m. on September 16 and was to be followed by a boundary demarcation commission.²⁵² Japan’s military defeat at Nomonhan village had compounded its severe loss of face over its German ally’s nonaggression pact with the USSR.²⁵³ On September 17 at 2:00 a.m., exactly twenty-four hours after the truce had taken effect, Stalin gave German embassy personnel four hours’ notice of a Red Army advance into Poland. “In order to avoid incidents, Stalin urgently requested that we see to it that German planes as of today do not fly east of the Białystok-Brest-Litovsk-Lemberg [Lvov] Line,” Schulenburg reported to Berlin. “Soviet planes would begin today to bomb the district east of Lemberg. I promised to do my best with regard to informing the German Air Force but asked in view of the little time left that Soviet planes not approach the abovementioned line too closely today.” Stalin declined, but he did allow Schulenburg to edit the text of the Soviet statement on Poland for German sensitivities.²⁵⁴

There was no Soviet declaration of war. Potyomkin summoned Polish ambassador Grzybowski at 3:15 a.m. and read aloud a note, in the name of Molotov, unilaterally abrogating the Soviet-Polish nonaggression pact; the envoy refused to take the document.²⁵⁵ Poland’s high command had predicted back in June that the Red Army would attack Poland “only in the final period of a war, when disadvantageous developments had turned against us and the Russian government would have concluded that the Poles had lost the campaign.”²⁵⁶ On the radio, Molotov announced a Soviet military action supposedly necessitated by the disappearance of the Polish state and the possible ensuing chaos. “The Soviet government regards as its sacred duty to proffer help to its Ukrainian and Belorussian brothers in Poland,” he stated.²⁵⁷ In fact, the Polish government continued to function, having relocated to Kuty, in the southeast, on the Polish side of the border with Romania. Although Poland’s high command had effectively lost contact with its armies, the latter retained about 50 percent of their troop strength, and were still fighting the Wehrmacht in central and southeastern Poland.²⁵⁸

Such was the extreme narrowness of the Soviet regime that Nikolai Kuznetsov, the naval commissar, had not been informed beforehand of the Soviet invasion of Poland. He went to Molotov to complain, averring that if he was not trusted, he should not occupy such a high post. “In response, [Molotov] recommended that I read the TASS summaries of foreign news, which he ordered be sent to me from that day,” Kuznetsov recalled. “But is that really the way—the naval commissar should learn about major military and (especially important) political events which affect him, from foreign sources?!”²⁵⁹

German generals, meanwhile, had crossed the secretly agreed-upon German-Soviet demarcation line (which ran along the Pissa, Narew, Vistula, and San rivers). Schulenburg had warned Molotov, back on September 4, that the Wehrmacht, in hot pursuit of Polish forces, might have to cross over temporarily into the Soviet section of Poland. The next day, Molotov had replied in a conciliatory manner, “We understand that as the operations proceed, one of the parties or both parties might be forced temporarily to cross the line of demarcation between the spheres of interest of the two parties; but such cases must not prevent the strict execution of the plan adopted.”²⁶⁰ Whether German generals knew about the Pact’s secret protocol on the precise territorial division remained uncertain, however. Stalin had no guarantee the trespass would be temporary, or that the entire Pact had not been a ruse. When had these Nazis kept their word—over the Munich Pact? General Köstring, in the Little Corner with Schulenburg in the wee hours of September 17, had requested a delay in the Red Army offensive so that the Germans would have time to get out of the way. Stalin had declined. As some 600,000 Red Army troops poured into eastern Poland, they encountered few Polish troops, but some German units came under Soviet fire. Hitler himself was in Poland. He had set out on September 3 in his armored train, Amerika, trailed by weaponized railcars, and traveled through the front in Pomerania and Upper Silesia, on his way to Danzig, which he would reach on September 19.²⁶¹ He billeted, along with Himmler, Ribbentrop, and a huge entourage, at the Kasino Hotel in Sopot (Zoppot, in German), a Baltic Sea resort adjacent to Danzig.

On September 18, Schulenburg reported that Stalin had told him “that on the Soviet side there were certain doubts as to whether the German high command at the appropriate time would stand by the Moscow agreement and would withdraw to the line that had been agreed upon.” In response to assurances, he said that Stalin “replied that he had no doubt at all of the good faith of the German government. His concern was based on the well-known fact that all military men are loath to give up occupied territories.”²⁶² Earlier that day in Berlin, with General Wilhelm Keitel and his chief of operations, Major General Alfred Jodl, away on the eastern campaign, Walter Warlimont, senior operations staff officer, had shown the deputy Soviet military attaché a map indicating that the Lwów/Lviv/Lvov region and its valuable Drohobycz oil fields, as well as a direct train line south from Polish Kołomyja down to Romania, fell within the German sphere. But on the map that Ribbentrop had signed with Molotov in Stalin’s presence, these territories were on the Soviet side. Warlimont either had no knowledge of the secret protocol, was deliberately pretending not to know, or was just indicating the location of German forces at that moment. Molotov, on the evening of September 19, summoned Schulenburg and stated that “the Soviet government as well as Stalin personally are surprised at this obvious violation of the Moscow agreement.” Schulenburg called it a misunderstanding.²⁶³

But on September 19–20, 1939, approaching Lwów/Lemberg/Lvov—not far from where the Germans had imposed the diktat of Brest-Litovsk on Soviet Russia in 1918—advancing Red Army troops were greeted by German artillery. Both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht took casualties.²⁶⁴ Had the Germans mistaken the approaching Soviets for Poles, as some would claim? Or were the attacks deliberate? We shall never know. But the speed and depth of the Soviet military advance into eastern Poland had surprised the condescending German brass.²⁶⁵

Hitler, in “liberated” Danzig on September 19, had been soaking in the jubilation. “It was a state built on force and governed by truncheons of the police and the military,” the Führer said of Poland, with no hint of irony.²⁶⁶ The streets of the predominantly ethnic German city—like those of Vienna the year before—were festooned with swastikas, flowers, and admirers. Precisely when, and under what circumstances, the Führer learned of the armed clashes taking place near Lvov is unclear.²⁶⁷ Ribbentrop instructed Köstring over the phone to attempt to have the accepted demarcation line modified so that Germany could keep this area, Borisław-Drohobycz, and its oil fields. Köstring phoned the Soviet defense commissariat several times on September 20. “East of Lvov Soviet tanks clashed with German troops,” he stated over the phone. “There is a disagreement about who should take Lvov. Our troops cannot withdraw until we have destroyed Polish forces.” Köstring proposed, on orders from Berlin, that the Germans and the Soviets storm Lvov together, after which the Germans could hand the city over.²⁶⁸ The Soviets refused. Schulenburg also conveyed Ribbentrop’s request to retain the seized oil fields to Molotov, who rejected it—as well as Schulenburg’s fallback position of a temporary German military occupation, pending a final political adjudication.²⁶⁹

Somebody would have to back down. On September 20, Köstring got an order directly from Hitler to help negotiate an immediate German withdrawal from Lvov, which was to be abandoned to the Soviets. Voroshilov received Köstring and asked what had caused the military clashes. The German attaché answered that it had been just a small local incident. He joked that Warlimont, who had shown the Soviets the map in Berlin, was an oilman and perhaps had been seduced by the oil fields. Köstring took out his own map, which showed, in black, the line of German advance and, in blue, the agreed-to territorial division, and he again vowed that the German army would withdraw.²⁷⁰ But even while abandoning the advanced positions in eastern Poland, the Wehrmacht continued to fire on the Red Army.

On September 22, Hitler flew from Sopot to the outskirts of Warsaw to take in the devastation he had wrought.²⁷¹ As of that day, after its defenders capitulated, Lvov was in Soviet hands, and by the next day the Red Army had established full operational control over Polish territory up to the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers, a five-day romp facilitated partly by the fact that the Polish command had issued orders not to engage Soviet forces unnecessarily and instead to prepare for evacuation to Hungary or Romania.²⁷² On the afternoon of September 23, a ceremonial joint military parade was held in Brest-Litovsk to mark the German handover of the town that morning to the Soviets. Presiding over the event, on an improvised low platform, were the respective tank commanders Heinz Guderian, who had been born just 300 miles away in Chełmno (Kulm), and Semyon Krivoshein. The two shook hands. But the Luftwaffe flew aggressively low passes, and the two sides tussled over the city’s war booty.²⁷³ Guderian privately observed that relinquishing Brest was “disadvantageous.”²⁷⁴ Germany’s commanders had suffered many casualties to seize these Galician territories—needing that oil—and they remained deeply unhappy about the pullback. (Stalin also managed to hold on to the Volhynian grain fields.) Halder, the man who had planned the Polish campaign, confided in his diary, “A day of disgrace for the German political leadership!”²⁷⁵

Hitler, perhaps for the first time, had kept his word in an international agreement. But Stalin gained the impression—fatefully, it would turn out—that German “militarists” wanted war against the Soviets, and that Hitler was the restraining influence.

STALIN’S SUDETENLAND

Stalin had managed to undo the Soviet defeat in the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, reclaiming imperial Russian lands at the cost of just 700-odd lives. (Not that he cared about Soviet casualties.) The Germans in Poland, by contrast, had lost between 11,000 and 13,000 killed. At least 70,000 Poles were killed and nearly 700,000 taken prisoner by the aggressors on both sides.²⁷⁶ Hitler, in improvisational fashion, toyed with leaving a rump independent Poland of some sort, but Poland’s state effectively vanished again, partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as Lithuania and Slovakia. Members of Poland’s government fled into Romania, hoping to proceed to France and set up a government in exile to continue the fight, but they were placed under house arrest.²⁷⁷ The Polish supreme commander’s efforts to have surviving troops evacuated via Romania or Hungary to form a new Polish army in France were interdicted by the NKVD, which sealed the border along the Zbruch River. Many of the Polish army’s now 190,000 troops, taken prisoner by the Soviets, were interned in Gulag camps, with the intention of exploiting them as slave laborers. Thousands of Polish officers were separated into special camps.²⁷⁸

Poland’s immense Jewish population of nearly 3.5 million had experienced trying times under the Polish government. Between 1935 and 1937, 79 Polish Jews had been killed, and significant incidents of anti-Jewish violence had been recorded in 97 towns; quotas introduced in 1937 had halved the number of Jewish university students. Indeed, Jews could be discriminated against within the framework of Polish law, including by exclusion from chartered professional associations. In 1937 alone, 7,000 trials took place of Jews accused of “insulting the Polish nation.” When the government suspended the validity of the passports of its citizens who had been living abroad for five years or more consecutively, in an attempt to preempt a mass flow of Jewish immigration from Nazi-annexed Austria (which had ceased to be a refuge), the act precipitated the expulsion of 17,000 Polish Jews from Nazi Germany in October 1938. The Polish regime refused to allow them back into Poland; many were trapped in a no-man’s-land, without shelter or food. Several thousand who managed to cross the border at Zbąszyń ended up in a hastily formed restricted camp—with some begging to be let back into Nazi Germany. The head of the Catholic Church in Poland, Cardinal Augustyn Hlond, had accused the Jews of “spreading atheism and revolutionary Bolshevism . . . [and] contributing to the decline of Polish morals.”²⁷⁹ On December 21, 1938, the leader of the politically powerful National Unity Camp had reiterated the oft-stated view that Jews hindered the development of the Polish nation, and urged the government to take energetic action to reduce the number of Jews. Some Polish military leaders called a departure of Jews a matter of national security.²⁸⁰ But all that turned out to be prelude: with the Nazi occupation, SS Einsatzgruppen (special action groups), as well as militarized regular police—both of which were under Heinrich Himmler—began scouring the land to murder Polish Jews and torch or dynamite synagogues.²⁸¹

The SS also targeted non-Jewish Poles. Nazi terror against the “racial enemy” in these conquered lands far eclipsed what had descended on Germany itself since 1933, and further empowered the SS institutionally. The atrocities would continue long after the main combat was over.²⁸² More than a million Poles would be forced to work as slaves in Germany. Nazi propaganda portrayed the war as having been imposed on Germany, a necessity for the very survival of the German race—a mutilation of the truth that a majority of Germans appear to have accepted, leavened, as it was, with lurid fables of Polish atrocities and German victimhood.²⁸³

Soviet terror methods were different, spurring self-destruction of existing social bonds by soliciting anonymous denunciations by aggrieved individuals against their neighbors, a story to be more fully examined below. In the meantime, the occupiers found a cornucopia. “Long trains with Soviet functionaries and their families, mostly from Kiev and Kharkov, began pulling into the station,” remarked one observer in what had been Poland’s territory. “Streets filled with crowds of shabbily dressed and dirty people frantically eyeing already modest-looking store windows. They bought almost everything available to them, especially watches—the most sought-after commodity.” Some Soviet functionaries returned to Kiev with foreign-made cars, provoking volunteerism for service in former Poland. But the Red Army arrived in these regions in torn uniforms and scrounged for food out of obvious hunger, rolling cigarettes with paper picked off the street. When the Poles ridiculed the soldiers for chasing after consumer items even though, according to Soviet propaganda, the USSR enjoyed abundance, the Red Army conscripts shot back that while the Poles had silk stockings and perfumes, the Soviets had tanks, guns, and fighter airplanes. “Frankly,” admitted one Pole, “it was a shrewd point, which often cut the discussion off.”²⁸⁴

Boris Yefimov, the Soviet cartoonist, drew a map of Europe with red arrows showing the Soviet territorial advance westward, with an irate, frightened Neville Chamberlain raising his striped trouser leg to stamp his foot impotently. But the Soviet regime had long trumpeted its policy of “peace,” an ideological pillar, and on September 18, 1939, the day after troops had burst into Poland, Izvestiya had reiterated that the Soviet Union would maintain “a policy of neutrality” in the European war. Two days later, the British and the French, rather than declare war on the USSR for invading Poland, as they had on Germany, requested an “explanation” of Soviet actions. The Soviets remonstrated in public, as they had in private, that the Polish state had “ceased to exist” and that the “vacuum” threatened the USSR, justifying the dispatch of the Red Army. At the same time, the Soviets portrayed their military action as a class and national rescue operation. The Polish state had, in fact, mistreated not just its Jews but also its large Ukrainian and Belorussian minorities. Molotov privately admitted to the Germans that the Soviet regime had heretofore not bothered much about the Ukrainians and Belorussians living in Poland.²⁸⁵ But now Soviet propaganda efficaciously cast the invasion and landgrab as Ukrainian-Belorussian “liberation.”

Censorship precluded public mention of the fact that perhaps 40 percent of the population in the territories seized by the USSR was ethnic Polish, or that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles were being displaced, deported, or pressed into forced labor; that at least 30,000 ethnic Ukrainians sought refuge in the German-occupied zone; that some invading Red Army soldiers had deserted by heading to the German zone; and that even some Jews, who mostly tended to flee toward the Soviet zone, preferred a return to their homes under Nazi occupation to a life under Soviet rule.²⁸⁶ What the Soviet populace might have made of such information will never be known. What we can say is that many ordinary Soviet inhabitants perceived justice in the fight against Polish “class and national oppression,” as well as in a rearranged border that reunited “blood brother” Ukrainians and Belorussians, in repudiation of Piłsudski’s “imperialist” Treaty of Riga (1920).²⁸⁷ The Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic doubled in size for the second time (the first had been 1924–26, when it was awarded territories carved from the Russian republic). Ukrainian irredentist dreams were fulfilled. “Everyone approves the seizure of (western) Ukraine and Belorussia,” wrote the regime critic and geochemist Vernadsky in his diary that fall of 1939. “The Stalin-Molotov policy is realistic and, it seems to me, correct, a Russian policy of state.”²⁸⁸

Trotsky deemed Stalin’s invasion progressive, despite the Soviet leader’s own supposed counterrevolutionary inclinations. “In the regions which must become a component of the USSR, the Moscow government will take measures to expropriate the big property owners and to nationalize the means of production,” he explained. “Such action is more likely not because the bureaucracy is true to the socialist program, but because it does not wish to and is unable to share power and the privileges connected with it with the old ruling classes of the occupied regions.” Trotsky evoked Napoleon: “The first Bonaparte brought the revolution to a halt with the aid of a military dictatorship. But when French forces invaded Poland, Napoleon signed a decree: ‘Serfdom is abolished.’ This action was dictated not by Napoleon’s sympathies for the peasants, nor by democratic principles, but by the fact that the Bonapartist dictatorship rested not on feudal but on bourgeois property. Since Stalin’s Bonapartist dictatorship rests not on private but on state property, the Red Army’s invasion of Poland must essentially bring with it the liquidation of private capitalist property, in order thereby to bring the regime of the occupied territories into line with the regime in the USSR.”²⁸⁹

Soviet dishonesty and spite were epic. Scenes for the film The First Cavalry Army, adapted from the play by Vishnevsky about the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, were being shot on location just as the Red Army had smashed across the border into Poland on September 17. It depicted the Poles, not the Ukrainians, as the perpetrators of the civil-war-era pogroms against Jews. On September 21, the film Burning Years, directed by Vladimir Korsh-Sablin, which also portrayed the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, premiered to wide acclaim (“not in terms of its artistic merits, but in terms of its political significance,” one critic sniffed).²⁹⁰ The Soviet-Belorussian film July 11, by Yuri Tarich, which would premiere October 20, similarly took up the 1919–20 events of that war, showing drunken Polish soldiers forcing Belorussian girls to dance and entertain them, in the ashes of their occupied village, until Soviet partisans fight back and unite with the Red Army to recapture Minsk on July 11, 1920.²⁹¹ Polish POWs in Soviet camps were shown July 11, rubbing salt in their wounds.²⁹²

Eastern Poland in a way constituted Stalin’s Sudetenland, an analogy that resonated in some quarters of London and Paris, too: the new frontiers, after all, corresponded to the line once proposed by Britain’s Lord Curzon. From the despot’s point of view, Poland had refused years’ worth of probes for bilateral security cooperation. And once the Wehrmacht was on the move, if he had not annexed these eastern Polish regions, Hitler would have seized all of Poland. That would have made possible the creation of a puppet Ukrainian state in eastern Poland, which, in turn, could have been used as a pressure point against Moscow to yield Soviet Ukraine in a “unification.” Of course, this was the argument that Poland had used when participating in Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia (preventing Germany from dominating the entire territory).²⁹³ Now, instead of German troops waltzing right up to the vicinity of Minsk, significantly closer to Moscow, Stalin, as he observed privately, had managed “to extend the socialist system onto new territories and populations.”²⁹⁴ The annexation also delivered a windfall of captured Polish intelligence archives—pleasure reading for the despot, who could sift through what the Poles had made of him and his regime.²⁹⁵ In the confiscated Polish archives, the NKVD claimed to have discovered 186 secret agents—real ones—who had carried out or were carrying out missions against the USSR, and began to neutralize them.²⁹⁶

POLITICAL ECONOMY

During all the foreign policy gamesmanship, Stalin remained in constant private conversation with Lenin, rereading his teacher’s texts, inserting strips of paper to mark his place, writing marginal comments. For example, on his copy of the 1939 reissue of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), a philosophical work that had attacked the non-Leninist Bolshevik Alexander Malinovsky, known as Bogdanov, Stalin wrote: “1) Weakness, 2) Idleness, 3) Stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue.”²⁹⁷ But Stalin was experiencing inordinate difficulty executing a Marxist-Leninist textbook on political economy: the labor theory of value, the proper role and significance of money, wage differentiation, trade, prices. In 1939, he received the second version of the text (out of six between 1938 and 1941), which he marked up extensively.²⁹⁸ In his estimation, the draft did not supersede the old handbook that he continued to consult, A Course on Political Economy (1910), last issued in 1925, and written by Bogdanov (1873–1928). The perceived need for an updated treatise on Marxist political economy based on the now twenty-two years of Soviet experience demonstrated again Stalin’s fundamental commitment to ideology and putting phenomena in theoretical terms.

Real-world political economy also pressed upon the Little Corner. Economic preparation for war demanded every ounce of labor power, no matter how low its relative productivity. Back on June 10, 1939, Stalin had ended most early releases from the Gulag. Inmates could still be released before term by special boards, but solely on a case-by-case basis. No longer would slave laborers automatically obtain sentence reductions for fulfilling work quotas. The Gulag held around 3 million prisoners, but it probably took more than two camp inmates to perform the labor of one regular worker, which meant forced laborers amounted to just 2 percent of the labor performed in the Soviet economy.²⁹⁹ But in July 1939, some 160,000 Uzbek and Tajik collective farm “volunteers,” watched by NKVD guards, were drafted to build a nearly 200-mile Great Fergana Canal, to move water from the Syr Darya for irrigation of cotton fields. It had been pronounced complete after a mere forty-five days of construction, without mechanization—another propaganda feat.³⁰⁰ The canal would devastate the inland Aral Sea.

Gulag labor was a Beria responsibility. Since his transfer to Moscow, he had been meeting with Stalin in the Little Corner at least twice weekly and, during some stretches, even every day. By spring 1939, Beria’s audiences were lasting two hours or more. He well understood the place of Molotov in the hierarchy, but on August 10, 1939, Stalin had permitted the airing of accusations of “enemy spy elements” in the entourage of Molotov’s wife, Zhemchuzhina, one of the few women leading a government agency. As the Red Army was seizing Poland and clashing with the Wehrmacht, her “case” was reviewed at the “politburo.” Stalin pronounced the accusations against her “slanderous,” but he had her removed as fishing industry commissar “for imprudence in her contacts.” After a month of uncertain fate, she was named head of textiles in the light industry commissariat of the RSFSR. The close call, whatever the intrigues behind it, conveyed a message to Molotov and the entire inner circle.³⁰¹

FRIENDSHIP AND THE BORDER

Stalin had second thoughts about Poland. Even before Warsaw had fallen, he had Schulenburg summoned to the Kremlin, on September 25, 1939, to receive a message indicating that the Soviets wanted to trade their share of ethnically Polish Poland for Lithuania, which, except for two ice-free ports, the Pact had assigned to Germany. Stalin’s precise motivations remain unrecorded. He had Molotov inform the Germans that the foreign affairs commissar could not reciprocate Ribbentrop’s visit to Moscow with one to Berlin, because on the Soviet side the negotiations would require the involvement of “the highest personage,” who “could not go abroad.”³⁰² Ribbentrop and his entourage had to fly to Moscow a second time. He arrived on September 27 at around 6:00 p.m.³⁰³ This time, swastika banners, alongside hammer-and-sickle flags, as well as a phalanx of Red Army men and a guard of honor, greeted him.

In Molotov’s Kremlin office that same evening, between 10:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m., Ribbentrop tried to convince Stalin that the Soviet Union was geographically immense compared with little Germany, and that Germany had been the one that annihilated Poland, so the Soviet Union ought to yield not just the ethnic Polish territories Stalin was proposing but also those around the San River, with the oil. Stalin launched a soliloquy about how “the main element of Soviet foreign policy had always been the belief in the possibility of German-Soviet cooperation. At the very beginning, when the Bolsheviks came to power, the world accused the Bolsheviks of being paid agents of Germany. . . . The Soviet Government has now renewed cooperation with Germany with a clear conscience.” He observed that “the Soviet government never had sympathy for England. It is only necessary to glance at the works of Lenin and his pupils to understand that the Bolsheviks always cursed and hated England above all.” Stalin wanted to hand over Polish territories “with ethnic Polish population,” but the oil region was occupied by ethnic Ukrainians, and these lands had already been “promised to Ukraine.” Finally, Stalin now wanted Lithuania, too. Overall, he said he was proposing a trade of four million people for two million, “and people are the most important thing one could receive.”³⁰⁴

Stalin and Molotov, according to the German notetaker, “insisted on their point of view.”³⁰⁵ Ribbentrop indicated that he would send a cable to Hitler regarding the Soviet proposals. He knew the Führer wanted Lithuania, where the Teutonic Knights had settled centuries before, and he was concerned about reports that Stalin was pressuring the Estonians—thought to be racially close to the Germans—for military bases. Soviet ultimatums were issued to the three Baltic states for “mutual assistance pacts,” beginning with Estonia, where the Red Army had massed 150,000 troops on the frontier. The next day at 3:00 p.m., the German delegation was back in the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate, but there had been no response from the Führer, who was off inspecting U-boats. Ribbentrop nonetheless indicated that he had consulted with Hitler, saying he was in agreement overall but wanted a few small changes. Soviet chief of staff Shaposhnikov unfolded a giant map on the green felt of Molotov’s conference table. The two sides discussed their differences, but within the parameters of Stalin’s proposal; Stalin offered a few tiny concessions (keeping a railhead here, yielding a forest there), and German and Soviet cartographers set to work on the details. Ribbentrop underscored the expected great value of Soviet economic assistance in the trade negotiations, then asked about the Baltic states. Prematurely, Stalin indicated that Estonia had agreed to his proposals for a pact and a military base.³⁰⁶ With regard to Bessarabia, he stated that “the Soviet government has no intentions at the current time of touching Romania.”³⁰⁷

Just before 6:00 p.m., Stalin announced a break for a banquet in Ribbentrop’s honor. Rather than the usual venue for foreign dignitaries (Spiridonovka), the festivities took place in the gilded St. Catherine’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace.³⁰⁸ Ascending the majestic sixty-six-step staircase, Ribbentrop was startled to encounter, in the land of Bolshevism, an immense oil painting of Alexander III. Twenty-four courses were served. The drink flowed like the Volga. Stalin sipped his customary wine, but the ex–wine merchant Ribbentrop sampled the pepper vodka (“so potent it took your breath away,” he noted). Here, with the amplitude of ancient Russian power on display, Stalin evinced his solicitousness but also his mischievousness. He introduced Ribbentrop to Beria by saying, “Look, this is our Himmler.” (SS chief Himmler, a onetime chicken farmer, also happened to wear a pince-nez.) Stalin was not done. As Molotov, the official host, pronounced toasts “in honor of Germany, its Führer, and its minister” and then toasted each member of Ribbentrop’s ample delegation, Stalin circumambulated the hall, clinking glasses with them. Suddenly the despot said, “Let’s drink to our people’s commissar of railways, Lazar Kaganovich!” and walked over and clinked glasses with Kaganovich, a Jew. The Nazi Ribbentrop was compelled to do likewise.³⁰⁹

Ribbentrop and entourage were whisked to the imperial box at the Bolshoi to catch an act of Swan Lake with one of the great dancers of all time, imported from Leningrad for the occasion, for one of the greatest roles in ballet: Galina Ulanova (b. 1910) as Odette/Odile.³¹⁰ This diversion allowed Stalin and Molotov to apply the final screws to the delegation from Estonia. The world might have been divided between capitalism and socialism, but it was also divided between large and small powers. “Poland was a great country,” Stalin told the Estonians. “Where is Poland now?”³¹¹ When the Germans returned to complete the negotiations in the Kremlin, at around 1:00 a.m., the browbeaten Estonians were made to glimpse the Nazis in Molotov’s suite.

The despot shook down Ribbentrop almost the same way he had the Balts, only affably and, in Ribbentrop’s case, not for his own homeland but for a third party’s territory. Finally, Hitler surfaced: Ribbentrop spoke to him on a line in Molotov’s office. The Führer assented to handing Stalin Lithuania as well as to Stalin’s language for the joint communiqué.³¹² Ribbentrop asked the despot about the British. Stalin said there would be talks with them about possible economic cooperation, but that “the Soviet government had no intention of entering into any ties with such states as England, America, and France. Chamberlain is a blabbermouth. Daladier is an even bigger blabbermouth.” Stalin further related how Daladier had called in Soviet ambassador Surits to inquire what was going on between Germany and the Soviet Union. “The French government,” Stalin noted, “was given to understand that the Soviet Union does not tolerate having its representatives subjected to interrogation.”³¹³ (Unless that was done by the NKVD.) In voicing his dislike, distrust, and dismissiveness of England, Stalin also showed his respect for the United States and its economic prowess, and his glee at having killed so many Japanese in the border war. “This is the only language these Asiatics understand,” he told the German diplomats. “After all, I am an Asiatic, too, so I ought to know.”³¹⁴

At around 5:00 a.m. on September 29, the state documents were signed (but dated the previous day). They included a full-color map of some three by five feet (scale: 1:1,000,000), which, unlike the Pact, was autographed by Stalin himself, in a ten-inch flourish of blue pencil. The readjusted border was moved 70 to 100 miles east of Warsaw, from the Vistula to the Bug River, placing nearly 5 million more people (Poles and Jews) on the German side and helping to provoke formation of a so-called General Gouvernement for those parts of Poland not directly annexed to the Reich. The Soviet Union, all told, had acquired nearly 13 million inhabitants: 7 million Ukrainian speakers and 3 million Belorussian, as well as just 1 million Poles and 1 million Jews.³¹⁵ Ribbentrop, who had arranged for a Mercedes to be given to Molotov’s wife as a gift, had been goading Schulenburg into requesting that the Soviets “lease” him hunting grounds in what was now western Ukraine, which was rich in stag, but Molotov demurred. Still, the Nazis did retain a small area on the Polish-Lithuanian frontier, the Suwałki protrusion, which was said to contain prime hunting grounds. Stalin also had Beria extradite 4,000 German political refugees sought by the Nazis. Many were Jewish, and at least 1,000 were Communists. They and their family members would be handed over in ceremonies at the frontier bridge at Brest-Litovsk. Let Hitler expend the bullets.

As Ribbentrop boarded the Condor to depart, the Soviet honor guard raised their right arms in Nazi salute. “The Gauleiter of Danzig, who had accompanied me,” Ribbentrop later recalled, “told me on our return flight that at times he had almost imagined himself among old party comrades.”³¹⁶ Hailed in Pravda as “another glorious confirmation of the policy of peace,” the September 28 “Treaty of Friendship and the Border” raised eyebrows even among the Communists who had swallowed the nonaggression pact with fascism.³¹⁷ “What kind of friendship?” exclaimed the arrested Soviet airplane designer Andrei N. Tupolev (who was working at a so-called prison institute) while crumpling the newspaper. “What’s going on with them over there? Have they gone out of their minds!”³¹⁸

A month earlier, Stalin had brushed aside Ribbentrop’s desire for a preamble to the Pact on the “friendly” character of Soviet-German relations. In connection with their economic agreement, a Soviet commission of almost fifty members was touring German production facilities and constantly upping its appetites, seeking—and, in many cases, getting—the best that Germany had to offer, from naval cruisers to fighter aircraft.³¹⁹ Mikoyan, following Stalin’s instructions, was driving a hard bargain, demanding specific machines, ships, and chemical processes, at rock-bottom prices.³²⁰ Many Nazis suspected that the Soviets would not live up to their promises to supply critical raw materials, a suspicion that proved false, while German industrialists whined that they were being forced to give away their secrets, which was true. Equally important, because Stalin had held firm, using armed force, over the Galician oil fields at Drohobycz, he was in effect trading Hitler oil that the Wehrmacht had effectively seized.

KINDRED INTERESTS

In the Little Corner on September 30, 1939, not long after Ribbentrop and the Nazi delegation had departed, Stalin heard a report on lengthening the workday at military factories. To compensate for the extra hours, wages were supposed to be raised. The despot, several times, asked those present about the parameters of the wage hikes; unsatisfied with their answers, he said he would not vote for their proposal until it had been clarified. “Stalin,” according to the government notetaker, “turned to Shvernik”—head of the trade unions—“and, jokingly, said, ‘What about you, the representative of the workers? You do not defend the interests of workers.’ But I, a ‘bureaucrat,’ defend them, and you are silent!’ and he laughed.”³²¹ Of course, the great friend of the workers had just cut a second, even deeper deal with the Nazis. The intelligence defector Krivitsky, who had predicted the Hitler-Stalin Pact, along with Trotsky, went further than the latter and suggested that the agreement had arisen from regime affinity.³²²

Each was a dictatorship with administered mass organizations, an institutionalized ideology, mass state violence against purported enemies, and a leader cult. But salient differences existed, and not just in their irreconcilable worldviews. Nazi party membership stood at 5.3 million by 1939, at a time when the German population was close to 80 million, thus representing approximately 6.5 percent of the population.³²³ In 1939, the Soviet Communist party ranks regained some strength, rising to 2.3 million (1.51 million full members and 793,000 candidates), up from 1.9 million the previous year, but, given that the population stood at around 170 million, this represented just 1.3 percent.³²⁴ At the same time, however, Communist party cells were far more ubiquitous. Nazi party “cells” did not exist in every single institution. Hitler abjured a party-state, concerned that an over-empowered Nazi movement could revolt and choose a different leader. German military officers were not allowed to join the party. To be sure, symbolically, the Nazi party spectacularly dominated the German public sphere.³²⁵ But the Nazi party had not victimized itself and the state in enemy hunting.

A second crucial difference consisted in the degree of control over life chances. The Nazi economy was not owned or even managed by the state. Many banks that had been nationalized during the Depression had been reprivatized in 1936–37, and, aside from the Hermann Göring Works (low-quality iron ore), the Nazi regime created few state enterprises. A robust finance ministry opposed state companies as inefficient and expensive. Private companies that refused ministerial directives suffered no consequences. To be sure, plenty of incentives existed for private business to curry favor with the regime, and foreign policy considerations also shaped private investment (one quarter of the labor force worked in industry directly connected with weapons). Still, freedom of contract was preserved as enterprises continued to select their own customers. Private corporate profits had risen 400 percent higher than they had been a decade earlier. Hitler and his regime viewed private property, entrepreneurship, and market incentives as valued instruments for the advance of the German race.³²⁶ Stalin himself explained to the Soviet government notetaker that bourgeois states “have not absorbed the economic organizations, but our state is not only a political organization but an economic one.”³²⁷ His point was that the absence of private companies (and legal markets) had created a complex and difficult challenge of management; but it also meant the Soviet state was the only employer, the only source of housing, the only arbiter of schooling for one’s children, the only provider—or not—of a host of necessities and amenities. The possibility of self-employment, a private housing market, private religious schools, and private holiday resorts provided for significantly less life control over non-Jews under Nazism.

All that said, the two regimes did share a crucial attribute: personal rule. The Pact had been made possible not by an affinity between the regimes but by the two leaders’ unquestioned authority. Hitler and Stalin had no need to worry about parliamentary majorities, genuine ratification votes, a free press, or even independent voices in the inner circle, giving each an absolute freedom to act.³²⁸ They did so because of a temporary confluence of interests against Britain and the Versailles offspring, Poland, engaging in a parallel, if differing, revisionism. In his most revealing comment on the Pact (made later to a British official), Stalin would explain that “the USSR had wanted to change the old equilibrium. . . . England and France had wanted to preserve it. Germany had also wanted to make a change in the equilibrium, and this common desire to get rid of the old equilibrium had created the basis for rapprochement with Germany.”³²⁹

• • •

FROM LATE AUGUST through late September 1939, Stalin had the month of a lifetime, convincingly winning a major border war against Japan and obtaining a sweetheart deal with Hitler. Mekhlis, the despot’s mouthpiece, had boasted at the 18th Party Congress, in March 1939, that in the event of the outbreak of a “second imperialist war,” the Red Army would “carry the battle to the territories of the enemy and fulfill its international duty to increase the number of Soviet republics.”³³⁰ In truth, Stalin had lacked the confidence and the external facilitation for such expansionism on his own. Hitler was driving world politics. Stalin presented him a draft pact that greatly favored the Soviet side, and Hitler took it.³³¹ Stalin was an opportunist, and Hitler had opened the door.³³² Chamberlain, rightly fearing Soviet expansionism in Europe, had nonetheless helped push the Soviet despot through that very door of expansionism by not only rejecting Stalin’s offer of a genuine military alliance but playing charades with him. Perhaps Stalin would have agreed to a deal with the Western powers if he had faced a certain imminent British-German agreement at his expense, but Chamberlain would have taken the German deal instead. Hitler, for his part, had done something remarkable: he had scorned Chamberlain’s July 1939 feelers to double-cross Poland in a repeat of Munich.³³³

Had the Führer accepted the British PM’s entreaties to once again “negotiate” a handover of someone else’s territory, it likely would have fatally undermined the talks between Nazi and Soviet intermediaries. Hitler’s snubbing of Chamberlain did not signify that the Führer would necessarily cut a deal with Stalin, however. Japan had drawn back from a military alliance with Germany on the latter’s terms, influencing Hitler’s moves. But the bottom line was that, even if he could obtain a great deal of Polish territory for free, Hitler had thirsted for a war—and Stalin, over many years, had positioned the Soviet Union to reap the rewards of that action.³³⁴ Stalin’s Pact with Hitler had not been inevitable, especially the specific content. In the circumstances of the time, the Pact constituted a significant achievement for Soviet state interests. Whereas in the 1938 Munich Pact, Nazi-Western collusion had excluded the Soviets from European affairs, now the Soviet Union had reemerged as an arbiter of European power politics. In the bargain, the revolutionary expansionist fantasy outlined by Mekhlis had begun to be realized.³³⁵

Burning with animus toward Britain, Stalin appears to have suspected that the Western “imperialists” would, at some point, declare war on him over Poland.³³⁶ In the meantime, editing the draft of an Izvestiya editorial, “Peace or War?” (October 9, 1939), he inserted a remarkable passage about the inadmissibility of any war to “destroy Hitlerism.” “Each person is free to express his relation to this or that ideology, and has the right to defend or repudiate it, but it is a senseless and stupid brutality to exterminate people for the fact that someone does not like certain opinions and a certain worldview,” Stalin warned of Western opposition to Nazi Germany. He added, “One can respect or hate Hitlerism, as in the case of any system of political views. This is a matter of taste.” (So much for the “popular front” against fascism.) Launching a war in opposition to Nazi Germany, Stalin concluded, “returns us to the dark times of the Middle Ages, when devastating religious wars were conducted in the name of eliminating heretics and those who thought differently.”³³⁷

The First Blow, the bestselling novella by Nikolai Shpanov about an easy Red Army victory over Nazi Germany, was quickly withdrawn.³³⁸ But a nonaggression pact founded on mutual state interests would last only as long as those interests did not fundamentally clash. The multisided machinations were in many ways just beginning. Back when the Nazi war machine had been gearing up to launch the assualt on Poland, the German diplomats at the Warsaw embassy had been ordered to evacuate to Germany. This included those secretly working as Soviet agents: Rudolf von Scheliha (“Aryan”) and Gerhard Kegel (“X”), as well as the high-placed journalists Ilse Stöbe (“Alta”), Kurt Welkisch (“ABC”), and Margarita Welkisch (“LCL”). Stöbe headed to Berlin, but her husband and handler, Rudolf Herrnstadt (“Arbin”), was Jewish and could not be posted to the Nazi capital; he headed for Moscow. (The couple would never see each other again, their dedication to antifascism trumping their dedication to each other.) Instead, Captain Nikolai Zaitsev (b. 1895), a relatively recent recruit to the bloodied ranks of military intelligence, would become the principal handler of the Soviet spies in Berlin, under the cover of the Soviet trade mission and code name of “Bine.” A graduate of an artillery academy, Zaitsev had learned German from Volga Germans he grew up with in his native Saratov; they had since been internally deported. His first boss during an earlier posting in Berlin, Soviet trade representative Kandelaki, had been executed. After familiarizing himself, in Moscow HQ, with the top-secret mission files generated by Herrnstadt, Zaitsev took up residence in Berlin as the new handler for Stöbe in the field. She, in turn, reestablished contact with Kegel, who was hired into the German foreign ministry economics department for the east, and Scheliha, who would be hired into the German foreign ministry press bureau, a prime crossroads of secret information.³³⁹

Hitler remained volatile. As Warsaw was still burning, in mid-September 1939, the Führer had returned from his triumphal promenade in Danzig and ordered a gathering of his military brass to prepare for an attack against the West at the end of October—that is, within a few weeks. Even Göring was flabbergasted.³⁴⁰ A handful of old-line German conservatives began to whisper about somehow stopping Hitler—the very Chamberlain fantasy of a German palace coup. Halder, the Wehrmacht chief of staff, had taken to carrying a loaded revolver, but, though he saw the Führer often, Halder shrank from using it.³⁴¹ Still, a more resolute conspirator, acting alone, was found among Germany’s working classes. On November 8, 1939, at around 8:00 p.m., Hitler arrived at the Munich Beer Hall—where he had staged the failed putsch in 1923—to deliver his annual commemorative address to the old fighters and the Bavarian leadership. Goebbels, Heydrich, and Hess were in tow. This was one of the largest beer halls in the city, seating 3,000, and therefore ideal for political gatherings. Munich’s upper crust turned out in numbers: party men, military officers, bankers, business owners. The rite usually lasted from around 8:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. At 9:20, a time bomb exploded in the high-ceilinged, chandeliered hall, killing eight and wounding more than sixty. Many of the bleeding survivors thought a British warplane had dropped a bomb. In fact, a German cabinetmaker, Georg Elser (b. 1903), had planted the explosive in a pillar right behind the podium.

Elser held Hitler responsible for deceiving the workers and fomenting war. As he would explain, “I considered that the situation in Germany could only be changed by the elimination of the current leadership.”³⁴² During the course of some twelve months, he had planned and stolen explosives and a detonator from his workplace and begun taking his meals at the beer hall. Later, before closing time, he would hide in a storeroom, then come out and set to work by flashlight, creating a secret door in place of the pillar’s wood paneling, until the staff returned at 7:30 a.m. and he would sneak out the back. Elser spent more than thirty nights in the beer hall, and carried out cement and other debris, even sawdust, in a suitcase; at least once he was caught on the premises after closing but not turned over to the police. In the daytime he worked on the bomb and the timer. As fortune would have it, on the night of November 8, the fog was too thick to risk flying, and Hitler did not have his own separate train, so he would have to take the regularly scheduled one. This meant he had to begin his speech early, at 8:00 p.m., and end it early, and instead of staying for the usual chitchat, rush out to catch the train back to Berlin, where he was scheduled to finalize the approved battle plans for an offensive in the west. Only the musicians and the cleaning staff remained in the beer hall. The dais was crushed by the collapsed ceiling. The Führer’s speech had ended at 9:07 p.m.; he departed the venue no more than ten minutes before the deadly blast.