Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

CHAPTER 13 GREED

Stalin takes advantage of the hour. . . . All from our success. We make victory easy for the others.

JOSEPH GOEBBELS, diary entry, June 28, 1940 ¹

If the Germans propose a partition of Turkey, then you can reveal our cards.

STALIN, instructions to Molotov for meeting with Hitler, November 13, 1940 ²

BRITAIN AND FRANCE had supplied weapons to Finland and contemplated attacking a strategic vulnerability—the insatiable thirst for oil—of both the Soviets and their trade partners the Germans, with whom the Western powers were at war. In what was designated Operation Pike, the idea emerged to launch air raids using airfields in Syria, Turkey, and Iran to obliterate the rigs, refineries, and storage tanks in Soviet Baku, Grozny, and Batum. The British put out rumors that the plans were afoot, evidently in part to distract the Soviets from possible Western operations planned to defend Scandinavia, but the Royal Air Force did not undertake reconnaissance flights over the intended Caucasus targets until after Finland had capitulated. Of course, any Western bombing of Baku might have backfired, rendering the perennial British-French accusation—that the USSR and Nazi Germany were in alliance—into a reality. Be that as it may, Pike never occurred.³ A French threat to intervene militarily on Finland’s behalf had never materialized, either: Daladier had once more left the key decision to Chamberlain, and when nothing came of it, the French leader resigned. The upshot was the worst of all worlds: Stalin had escaped without damage, but with his profound distrust of the British and French reinforced.⁴

Hitler, in April 1940, had occupied Norway and Denmark with relative ease, protecting his vital raw material imports from Sweden. On April 9 in Norway, Major Vidkun Quisling seized power in a Nazi-backed coup d’état. Nazi assertions that the Wehrmacht had been compelled to seize these countries to protect them from British-French violations of their neutrality were repeated in the Soviet press. Molotov voiced Soviet approval of the Nazi occupation of Denmark and Norway to Schulenburg, wishing Germany a complete victory in these “defensive measures.” The British, he added, “have gone too far.”⁵ Similarly, Zhdanov, on April 13, stressed that “from the USSR’s point of view,” it was “more pleasant, useful, and valuable to have nearby not the anti-Soviet Anglo-French allies who intended to attack either Germany or Leningrad, but a country that is in friendly relations with us.”⁶ Four days later, at a meeting with the high command, Stalin complained of Britain and France that “they are, you know, fighting a war over there, but it is a weak war; either they are in combat or they are playing cards. They might suddenly make peace.”⁷

Stalin and his minions were dead wrong on the latter point. On May 10, 1940, Germany smashed into the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, on a path to France. Luxembourg effectively did not oppose the German occupation, while the Netherlands capitulated on May 15; the Belgians did so slightly later (without even consulting their French allies). Such was “the peace” between the Nazis and the Western powers: further conquests by Hitler.⁸ A disgraced Chamberlain announced his resignation to the cabinet. His fate had been sealed with the abysmal failed defense of Norway, which had sparked a searing debate in the House of Commons on May 7–8. (One conservative MP had admonished him, “In the name of God, go.”) No one had contributed more to Britain’s Norway debacle than Winston Churchill, who, as first lord of the Admiralty, was responsible for naval operations. But aided by Conservative rebels, Churchill outmaneuvered his main Tory party rival, foreign secretary Viscount Halifax (a member of the House of Lords, not the Commons), and got himself named the prime minister of a new coalition government with Labour.

Churchill, the scion of a British aristocrat and an American heiress, was lucky to be alive. Back in December 1931, he had been struck by a taxi on Fifth Avenue in New York City, after looking the wrong way while crossing the street. “A man has been killed,” a witness had called out erroneously.⁹ Churchill was a staunch imperialist, perhaps even more so than Chamberlain, having advocated for using poison gas against rebellious Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq, a British mandate. Also like Chamberlain, Churchill was ready, for the sake of the empire, to bargain with nasty types, but, unlike Chamberlain, he viewed the German national character as dangerous under certain leadership, such as Hitler. Regarding Munich, Churchill had prophetically told the House of Commons that Britain “has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame and will get war.” In 1940, many British elites were still waffling, urging a “settlement” with the Nazis. Chamberlain remained in government as lord president of the Privy Council (responsible for much of domestic policy, which did not much interest Churchill) and as formal leader of the Tory party. When Chamberlain entered the House of Commons on May 13, 1940, for the first time since resigning as prime minister, the “MPs lost their heads, they shouted, they cheered, they waved their order papers, and his reception was a regular ovation.”¹⁰ Churchill, however, steadfastly refused all entreaties to seek terms with Hitler, a man he would never meet, but whose measure he took.¹¹

Born the same decade as Churchill, Stalin missed these important cues. The ideologically blinkered despot tended to be dismissive of all British “imperialists,” lumped together, and kept in force the Comintern directive that “not fascist Germany, which entered into an agreement with the USSR, but reactionary anti-Soviet England, with its immense colonial empire, is the bulwark of capitalism.”¹²

Stalin had gone in deeper than ever with Nazi Germany. After the signing of the most recent commercial agreement, in 1940, Soviet demands had gone through the roof: they sought the nearly finished “surplus” cruisers Seydlitz, Prinz Eugen, and Lützow, and the blueprints for the battleship Bismarck, 31,000 tons of armor plating, torpedoes, ammunition, artillery, dehydration equipment (for synthetic fuel), steel-hardening technology, and all models of German planes in production (Messerschmitts, Dorniers, Junkers, Heinkels). The Germans were incredulous. Stalin, through Mikoyan, employed pressure tactics, holding up grain and oil deliveries, which induced the Germans to deliver some thirty state-of-the-art warplanes. He also interceded to reduce some Soviet demands. But Molotov and Mikoyan insisted to the Germans that the partially finished heavy cruiser Lützow had to be handed over. On May 26, 1940, for a price of 104 million reichsmarks, Germany allowed the ship, renamed Petropavlovsk, to be towed to Leningrad for completion, with their help.¹³ The Germans were worried that Soviet intelligence would be able to duplicate advanced German construction methods.¹⁴ Soviet counterintelligence would outfit the German team’s residence with listening and photographic devices, and promptly set up a honey trap with a young beauty.¹⁵

Stalin was still obsessing over Trotsky as well. On May 27, word came to the Little Corner that the NKVD had failed, yet again, to assassinate the exile, despite an assault on his villa by some twenty men and the discharge of more than 200 bullets into Trotsky’s bedroom. Beria demanded a report from the head of the operations team, Sudoplatov, then whisked him to Stalin’s Near Dacha, a half hour’s drive from Lubyanka, so that the operative could report in person on the failure—and on new plans to fulfill the assignment. Stalin was said to have asked a single question, then issued instructions: the entire global Trotsky surveillance network should be put on the line to eliminate Trotsky, because once Trotsky was eliminated, the need for surveillance would disappear.¹⁶

Beyond his greed and distraction, Stalin’s inability to pick up on the political changes in London was driven by an abiding antipathy toward the Western powers.¹⁷ But Churchill, too, had trouble perceiving all his options. He reveled in little Finland’s fight against the Soviets, publicly declaring that it proved how “Communism rots the soul of a nation.”¹⁸ He had ceased his cultivation of Maisky. But the West’s war against Germany was going poorly. Even after the first British evacuation of Dunkirk, the new PM had dispatched still more ground troops to France, to prevent that country’s fall. In doing so, Churchill almost lost his land army—and the war—right then and there. The commander of British reinforcements in France was soon imploring the PM to evacuate these troops, too. Some 338,000 British as well as French and Belgian soldiers did manage to escape from Dunkirk back across the Channel, thanks only to a blunder by Hitler and his top commander, halting their ground attacks, as well as French sacrifices in a rearguard action. “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be,” Churchill exhorted on June 4, 1940, as Britain’s land army fled in boats. “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” This ringing oratory elicited a lukewarm domestic reception, a further sign of British precariousness.¹⁹ It did not take a genius to grasp that the only formidable land army remaining on the continent, besides Hitler’s, was Stalin’s.

NEW REALITIES

On June 5 and 6, Pravda printed portraits of Soviet military brass, apparently to reassure the public in the face of the latest triumphal march of the Wehrmacht. By June 14, after a little more than four weeks, the Germans had already entered Paris.²⁰ The fathers and grandfathers of these troops had fought for more than four years and never seized that prize.²¹ On June 17, a new French government sued for peace. “Honor, common sense, and the interests of the country require that all free Frenchmen, wherever they be, should continue the fight as best they may,” a general named Charles de Gaulle quixotically broadcast from London to France over BBC radio on June 18.²² Three days later, the German victory was sealed in the same French forest, inside the very same railway carriage—a rickety old wagon-lit used by Marshal Foch—in which the Germans had surrendered in the First World War. Hitler sat in Foch’s former seat.²³ Nazi Germany decided to occupy more than half of France, including the Atlantic and English Channel coasts.²⁴ A collaborationist rump French state was allowed in the southern city of Vichy.

France’s fall came to seem inevitable, especially since it lacked the protection afforded by the Channel, but in the years leading up to 1940, French military industry had created an arsenal roughly equal to the Nazi one.²⁵ True, the French air force significantly lagged the Luftwaffe, but France fielded more ground soldiers and tanks than did the Wehrmacht. And the German tanks were often inferior.²⁶ French intelligence operated a remarkable agent network, signals intelligence, and photoreconnaissance, but after France’s famed Second Bureau had issued a dozen secret warnings of an imminent German attack—going back to November 1939 and including four in April 1940—and the predicted invasion had failed to materialize, the officers had lost their credibility.²⁷ French higher-ups, for their part, failed to make proper use of the plentiful information acquired of German plans.²⁸

An even deeper problem involved tactics: the French fought a war of position, the Nazis a war of movement.²⁹ France’s plan of battle had two aspects: fixed defensive fortifications, known as the Maginot Line, and a motorized northern army intended to thrust into Belgium and Holland and establish front lines there.³⁰ Between the two lay a soft spot, the Ardennes, which some French military experts considered traversable even by mechanized forces, despite its forested and mountainous terrain and a substantial river, but the French had done nothing to prepare for such an eventuality, laying no antitank obstacles and only scattered bunkers. This was exactly where the audacious Germans struck.³¹ The Wehrmacht could not conceal its massing of troops for an assault through the Ardennes, of course, but Germany conducted a feint, invading the Low Countries through the Gembloux Gap, drawing the bulk of French forces northward to interdict a presumed Wehrmacht advance to the Channel coast. By instead slicing with its main strike between the French and British land forces massed in Belgium, to the north, and the Maginot Line, to the south, the German army stormed into a vacuum and achieved the largest encirclement in military history.

This brilliant plan of battle had been serendipitous. The first three versions of the German battle plan had called for an attack via the north, into the teeth of the French deployments, but inclement weather had compelled a delay in Hitler’s winter attack scheme, during which two careless German staff officers were shot down over France carrying a portfolio with staff maps. The battle plan could not remain the same. In the meantime, a German intelligence officer playing the part of the French and British commanders in war games had demonstrated to the German general staff that the enemy would position its top forces in Belgium, but only weakly defend the Ardennes, and would be slow to shift forces to counter a German attack there. The late-in-the-day fourth and final battle plan, under Erich von Manstein (b. 1887), a staff officer, hit upon the feint (by 29 divisions through northern Belgium and the Netherlands) and the massive “sickle cut” (by 46 crack divisions through the Ardennes).³² The plan was beyond audacious, and a nervous high command threw everything into the initial assault, without any reserve panzer divisions, on a very narrow front, in vulnerable columns 250 miles in length, with flammable fuel trucks in front. Yet the much-feared Western bombing raids and counterattacks against exposed German flanks did not materialize until it was too late.

Even then, decisive victory had come only after the German tank specialist Heinz Guderian ignored his orders and, exploiting his Ardennes breakthrough, suddenly raced for the Channel—a bold act of insubordination.³³ He had punched through to the Channel by May 20, a mere ten days into the war (admittedly, over high-quality French roads outside the Ardennes).³⁴ But neither he nor Hitler had expected this armored blitz to seal the fate of France (Guderian later called it “a miracle”). After all, once caught out by surprise, no foe remains passive. But even after being shown aerial photographs of German traffic jams in the Ardennes woods, the French brass did not manage to redeploy their formidable war machine to seize back the initiative, being, in effect, defeated psychologically.³⁵ Tactical military failures were compounded by administrative and political ones. Maxime Weygand, an ultrarightist, replaced the initial top French commander, Maurice Gamelin, and undercut the Third Republic’s civilian leadership; the lion of the Great War, the eighty-four-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, had been brought into government, and immediately plotted against it, too. France’s political class folded, opening the way for hard rightists to pursue their long-sought authoritarian regime in rump Vichy. Despite German air superiority, therefore, the defeat of France’s Third Republic was contingent—derived from egregious generalship, political treachery, and German audacity.³⁶

The myth of a planned blitzkrieg—annihilation of the enemy’s fighting capacity in a lightning strike—was born. The improvisation notwithstanding, armored warfare had succeeded spectacularly.³⁷ The French lost 124,000 killed and 200,000 wounded, while 1.5 million Western troops were taken prisoner; German casualties were fewer than 50,000 dead and wounded. (Mussolini had waited until Paris fell to attack southern France; Italy suffered some 4,000 casualties in direct fighting, the French 104.) The Wehrmacht became intoxicated by its swift victory, and bound ever more tightly to Hitler.³⁸ The Führer, unlike Stalin, had embraced integrated, independently operating armor and panzer divisions, overriding the conservatism of the majority of German generals and standing by Guderian, who had led a minority in the push for the novel formations.³⁹

More broadly, Hitler’s foreign policy recklessness had once again resulted in exhilarating success. It had taken Stalin 105 days to subdue the Finnish nation; it had taken Hitler less than half that time to subdue a nation ten times the size. “Stalin was very quick-tempered and irritable at that time,” recalled Khrushchev. “I had rarely seen him like that. At meetings he hardly ever sat down in his chair but constantly paced. Now he literally ran around the room and cursed like a longshoreman. He cursed the French and he cursed the British, asking how they could have let Hitler smash them like that.”⁴⁰

The despot needed to find a mirror. Besides him, there had been a total of thirty-two members and candidate members of the politburo between inception (1919) and 1940. Three of them (Lenin, Dzierżyński, Kuibyshev) had died of natural causes; two (Kirov and one on Stalin’s orders) would be assassinated; two (Tomsky, Orjonikidze) had killed themselves. Fourteen had been executed as enemies: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin, Uglanov, Krestinsky, Kosior, Baumanis, Syrtsov, Chubar, Eihe, Postyshev, Rudzutaks, Yezhov. One (Petrovsky) had been expelled but spared. The remaining ten—Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Kalinin, Zhdanov, Andreyev, Shvernik, Khrushchev, Beria—were alive, at his forbearance. Such despotism smothered policy give-and-take. Stalin summoned them when he saw fit; they fed him the information he sought. The conduct of Soviet foreign policy, unlike that of most great powers, was significantly less subject to the usual vagaries of internal regime jockeying among interest groups, but it was utterly hostage to Stalin’s misconceptions.⁴¹

Right after he made the deal with the Nazis, Stalin had privately observed that “the nonaggression pact is to a certain degree helping Germany. Next time we’ll urge on the other side.”⁴² This looks like a blustery lie to soften the political damage of the Pact. Molotov, on June 17, 1940, offered German ambassador Schulenburg his “warmest congratulations . . . on the splendid successes of the German Wehrmacht” (according to the German notetaker), while adding (according to the Soviet notetaker) that “Hitler and the German government could scarcely have expected such rapid successes.”⁴³ It was, of course, Molotov’s and Stalin’s expectations that had been upended.⁴⁴

Stalin had staked Soviet security on France’s fighting capabilities, then contributed mightily to France’s defeat: the 1940 economic agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany was four times larger than the 1939 one. Altogether, in 1940, the Soviets would supply 34 percent of German oil, 40 percent of its nickel, 74 percent of phosphates, 55 percent of manganese ore, 65 percent of chromium ore, 67 percent of asbestos, and more than 1 million tons of timber and of grain.⁴⁵ True, big new Soviet shipments from the February 1940 agreement did not arrive in time for the offensive against France, but, knowing that Stalin’s shipments were coming, German military planners were confidently depleting stocks. “Hitler conducts his military operations, and Stalin acts as his quartermaster,” Trotsky had quipped.⁴⁶ The Wehrmacht’s actual quartermaster general remarked, “The conclusion of this treaty has saved us.”⁴⁷ Stalin’s Pact also allowed Hitler to confidently retain a mere 10 divisions in the east. The Soviet contribution to German logistics was crucial as well. British sea power had once blockaded Napoleon’s bid for continental empire, but now, thanks to Stalin, Nazi Germany managed to circumvent a British naval blockade with the transshipment of goods from the Near and Far East through Soviet territory. Thus could a Central European country take on a global empire.⁴⁸

To be sure, Stalin was also making out like a bandit. Berlin dragged its feet over shipments, but he got samples of artillery, tanks (along with the formulas for their armor), chemical warfare equipment, a naval cruiser, the plans to the battleship Bismarck, heavy naval guns, locomotives, turbines, generators, diesel engines, machine tools. Stalin evidently was not going to risk that German bounty—and Hitler’s wrath—by playing both sides of the conflict. But his overwhelming support of the Nazi war machine, when he was counting on the French land army, smacks of miscalculation and pettiness.

With France’s defeat, the strategic ground shifted radically.⁴⁹ In the very early morning of June 23, 1940, for the first and only time in his life, an exultant Hitler toured Paris, accompanied by two of his favorites, the architect Albert Speer and sculptor Arno Breker. The Führer was driven first to the neobaroque Opéra, which he examined in light of the architectural plans he had studied as a young man. Later he posed for photographers in front of the Eiffel Tower and took in Napoleon’s tomb. “It was the dream of my life to be permitted to see Paris,” he remarked. He had been expected to preside over a German victory parade, and in anticipation, some staff inside the British security establishment proposed bombing the reviewing stand, but their suggestion was rejected. In the event, Hitler opted not to stage a parade, evidently because of the danger of a British air raid, and already by 9:00 a.m. on June 23 he was back at the airfield for the return to Berlin. He would tell his entourage, “I am not in the mood for a victory parade. We aren’t at the end yet.”⁵⁰

As it happened, also on June 23, Semyon Kotko, an opera by Sergei Prokofyev, premiered at the Stanislavsky Opera Theater, in Moscow, following many postponements. It was based on a novella by Valentin Katayev, I Am the Son of the Working People, and marked Prokofyev’s first foray on a quintessential Soviet theme.⁵¹ The score was infused with folk song intonations. “That evening, when I first heard Semyon Kotko, I understood that Prokofyev was a great composer,” recalled the virtuoso pianist Svyatoslav Richter.⁵² When Prokofyev first composed the score, his friend Meyerhold, who also felt a need to demonstrate his allegiance to the regime, begged to be the one to stage it. After Meyerhold had vanished without trace and Sergei Eisenstein claimed to be otherwise occupied, the direction fell to an actress. In the story, Kotko (a tenor) returns, in 1918, from the Romanian front of the Great War to his village in Ukraine, where pillaging foreign interventionists are trying to restore the landlords; an embittered kulak, the father of Kotko’s teenage fiancée, Sofia (a soprano), forbids her from marrying a poor peasant. Thanks to heroic partisan warfare and the resolve of this “son of the working people,” Semyon and Sofia are reunited as anti-Soviet forces are driven away or executed. Stalin’s Pact with Hitler precluded using the novella’s portrayal of Germans as the villains, and so in the opera’s staging the Germans (as well as Austrians) mostly became Ukrainian nationalists.⁵³

A NEW UNION

Molotov had not only congratulated Schulenburg, but also stated—and here the congratulations look like a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down—that from June 14, 1940, the Red Army had sent substantial additional forces to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, where “changes of governments” were in process.⁵⁴ In the wee hours of June 15–16, Molotov summoned the envoys of Estonia (1:00 a.m.) and Latvia (1:10 a.m.) to inform them that, just as in Lithuania, the Red Army would soon be crossing their borders, and instructed them not to resist militarily but to await the formation of a new government.⁵⁵ In other words, the USSR was violating its recent pledges to respect the sovereignty of the three Baltic states. Of the three, Lithuania had the largest Communist party in early 1940—a mere 1,500 members, following Stalin’s mass terror.⁵⁶ “There are no Communists outside Russia,” he had told the Lithuanian foreign minister a few months before. “What you have in Latvia are Trotskyists: if they cause you trouble, shoot them.”⁵⁷ By summer 1940, Estonia had a mere 150 Communists, out of a country of 1.3 million. Latvia had a similar number.⁵⁸ But Stalin’s coercive, rapid-fire Sovietization did not rely on indigenous Communist movements. Rather, the operations followed the formula laid down by the Red Army’s thrust into eastern Poland in fall 1939.⁵⁹

In eastern Poland, the NKVD had deported more than 1 million of the 13.5 million residents to labor camps. (Interrogators called their truncheons “the Polish Constitution.”) Soviet operatives and local collaborators nationalized industry and redistributed some farmland, although an arduous collectivization was put off for the time being. To smoke out locals unreconciled to Soviet rule, the NKVD used provocateurs. The Polish officer in charge of the fledgling Polish underground turned Soviet informant.⁶⁰ But even with this formidable apparatus of coercion, the Soviet secret police had lacked the bureaucratic resources to themselves smash all existing institutions and associations. In a cunning type of revolution, however, the NKVD allowed free rein to criminal gangs and vigilante groups, which they glorified as citizen militias, and set up anonymous denunciation boxes and walk-in centers, leveraging the grievances built up in society. Who had been fired from a job and could now seek revenge? Who had lost a court case? Who had sold a cow for a price that in retrospect seemed too low? Who had been cuckolded? By bringing forth these denunciations and then acting upon them without verifying, the NKVD effectively allowed state power to be “privatized” by thousands of people looking for redress, survival, cover-up, or promotion. It was Poles themselves who undermined pre-Soviet social bonds, clearing the way for Communist monopoly.⁶¹ That was the essence of totalitarianism: people’s agency was elicited to destroy their own agency.

Despite people’s evasions and self-misrepresentations, the NKVD—full of half-educated people—amassed a stunning amount of operational information, seizing local archives and personnel files, and using censuses and tax registers, to enumerate the entire population politically. The NKVD locked factory gates with the workers inside until registrations were complete, and put the onus on urban landlords, who would answer with their heads, to march whole apartment buildings to prearranged sites for “registration.” In villages, volunteer or conscripted facilitators were promised rewards for meeting “quotas” of farmers delivered to in-person registrations.⁶²

Then, across nearly 80,000 square miles of territory littered with impassable marshes, served by sparse rail or paved roads fit for vehicles, with a mass influx of refugees and other wartime dislocation, functionaries managed to ensure that every adult in former eastern Poland took part in single-candidate “elections” to a “People’s Assembly.” Posters went up, film screenings were organized, marches staged. The elections provided a legal façade for the transfer of sovereignty, but, more profoundly, they entailed political conditioning in the new regime. The coerced voting took place in full view of others, some of whom were eager or reluctant stool pigeons. Many people nonetheless crossed off the name of the candidate, and some slipped manure into the ballot envelopes. But many of those who spoiled ballots or failed to show were arrested. After the vote, the public displays and slogans remained, and political speeches with mandatory attendance continued. State-sponsored associations were established. State schools replaced private ones, and a new political vocabulary reflecting Communist ideology took over the public sphere and people’s identities.⁶³ In less than two years, western Ukraine and western Belorussia recapitulated much of what had been carried through in the Soviet Union over two decades.

In summer 1940, a similar “revolution from abroad” was enacted in the Baltics. Stalin ordered forced Sovietization of Estonia, to be overseen by Zhdanov; of Latvia, overseen by show-trial prosecutor Vyshinsky; and of Lithuania, overseen by Dekanozov, the Beria protégé and Molotov deputy at foreign affairs. Each commanded gangs of functionaries newly promoted as a result of the terror. But here, too, local inhabitants were incited to orgies of denunciation, such that, in avenging wrongs, assuaging hunger, and satisfying greed, they helped level their societies and pave the way for Communist monopoly. Once again, the local archives were seized for operational purposes.⁶⁴ Scores of thousands of local inhabitants would be deported to Siberia, and those not removed were compelled to take part in single-candidate “elections” to People’s Assemblies; the installed deputies, in turn, “voted” to form Soviet socialist republics and join the USSR. The economies were confiscated (“nationalized”), including land, although collectivization was held off. Even as underground resistance units formed, substantial numbers of people on the political left in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—including the ethnic Russian and Jewish workers—supported this Sovietization.⁶⁵

All told, between March and June 1940, five new Soviet socialist republics were established (including Karelia, elevated to Union republic status), increasing their total to sixteen and the Soviet population to 200 million. On June 5, 1940, a “Ten-Day” culture festival celebrating the expanded Belorussian SSR, involving 1,200 participants, opened in Moscow.⁶⁶ The regime had long since shifted from award ceremonies for milkmaids and cotton pickers, with Stalin and entourage donning national costume, to showcases of the Union’s national cultures. The first Ten-Day, in 1936, had celebrated Soviet Ukraine, with some 500 participants, numerous awards bestowed on artistic organizations, and additional funds allocated for the arts in the republic.⁶⁷ Similarly extravagant Ten-Days had followed for Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, whose troupes and ensembles performed in the top theaters and conservatories of the capital.⁶⁸ The USSR committee on artistic affairs took no chances, dispatching composers to republics and lavishing robust sums on them to compose a “national” opera or ballet.⁶⁹ Moscow-worthy performances required the addition of singers or musicians from the capital and a large crew comprising everything from choreographers to hairdressers.⁷⁰ Each “national” folk dance or “national” opera became recognizably Soviet.⁷¹

CLASH

Hitler took Stalin’s Baltic annexations badly. The secret protocols of the Pact delimited “spheres of influence” but did not specify the actions permitted—or forbidden—within the respective spheres. There was not a word in the Pact about Soviet occupation of any countries, let alone implanting clone regimes. Stalin was well aware that Hitler had not authorized him to annex former tsarist possessions. But for a long time the despot had cultivated the idea that a fratricide among the imperialist powers might afford unique opportunities to expand “the revolution” in the resulting chaos and destruction. At the Bolshoi back on January 21, 1940 (the sixteenth anniversary of Lenin’s passing), he had boasted, of eastern Poland’s Sovietization, that “Red Army activities are also a matter of world revolution.”⁷² Then, in the face of the lightning German conquest of France, he had decided to unleash his revolutionary opportunism again. In the seemingly endless rows about whether Stalin’s Kremlin was pursuing Soviet security, defensively, or revolutionary expansionism, the answer was: both, if someone else provided the opportunity.

On June 26, Molotov conveyed an ultimatum to Romania for former tsarist Bessarabia, which again surprised Germany. German officials pressured the Romanian government not to resist the landgrab and thereby afford Moscow a pretext for a full takeover of the country, whose oil fields thirty-five miles north of Bucharest were a life-or-death resource for the Wehrmacht. The Romanians hastily—and angrily—withdrew as the Red Army occupied Bessarabia. Hitler refrained from public criticism but told his adjutants that this was “the first Russian attack on Western Europe.”⁷³ The Führer became angrier still at the Soviet seizure of northern Bukovina, which had never been tsarist, was not covered by the Pact, and was full of ethnic Germans. Molotov told Schulenburg that “Bukovina constitutes the last part that is still missing from a unified Ukraine.”⁷⁴ The mass-circulation magazine Ogonyok printed photographs of Romanians greeting the Red Army (“the Great Liberator”) with flowers and smiles.⁷⁵ The Nazi inner circle seethed. The Wehrmacht had smashed Poland on the battlefield while the Soviets had waltzed in and grabbed the Polish territory with the oil. This time, the Wehrmacht had smashed the French land army while the Soviets seized large pieces of Romania, as well as the defenseless Baltic states. “Grave robber!” Goebbels wrote of Stalin in his diary.⁷⁶

Berlin demanded transfer to Germany of the 125,000 Volksdeutsche in Bessarabia and Bukovina, receipt of the 100,000 tons of grain from Bessarabia specified in a German contract with Romania, and guarantees for all German property as well as the railroad tracks transporting Romanian oil to the Reich.⁷⁷ Stalin began stationing what would increase to 34 divisions on former Romanian soil, linking what was now Soviet Lvov (Lwów, Lemberg) with Soviet Chernovitsy (Cernăuţi, Czernowitz), in the Ukrainian SSR, while improving the security of Odessa. The fundamental clash of interests between Moscow and Berlin and the Soviet need to counterbalance Germany’s continental aggrandizement could scarcely have been plainer. Just as the Winter War had definitively pushed Finland into the German camp, the seizure of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina consolidated Romania as a staunch German ally.⁷⁸

Stalin also needed to reckon with the circumstance that his own value to Hitler was declining in relative terms. German-annexed Silesia and the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia were major industrial centers. (Austria had minimal industry, but it gifted Germany an underemployed labor force.) France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands all possessed significant industries as well, from steel and autos to aircraft and electronics, as well as railway locomotives and freight cars that exceeded the stock of the Reich. France and Norway produced chemicals and aluminum, too. The combined population of Greater Germany and the occupied lands, along with Italy, was now 290 million, and in terms of territory it was almost as large as the United States. This vast potential remained to be consolidated (Denmark refused a move toward a customs-and-currency union), but the direction was clear.⁷⁹ And the coup de grâce? Following his self-destructive bloodbath to extirpate phantom enemies, Stalin now acquired an actual fifth column on Soviet territory: resolute anti-Soviet saboteurs in the newly annexed territories of western Ukraine, western Belorussia, and the Baltic republics. In 1940, these regions, which contained a mere 10 percent of the Soviet population, would account for some 60 percent of the arrests by the NKVD. At the same time, thanks to the multiple German economic and trade delegations Stalin was allowing onto Soviet territory and into Soviet factories in 1940, direct German intelligence gathering, which had been almost nonexistent, became significant.⁸⁰

TOYING WITH THE BRITISH

Stalin was presented an opportunity for a strategic shift, thanks to Sir Stafford Cripps, a high-profile, wealthy vegetarian and leftist whose agitation for an anti-fascist united front against Germany had gotten him expelled from the Labour party. The day before the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, Cripps had urged his friend Foreign Secretary Halifax to send a mission to Moscow to negotiate a nonaggression pact with Moscow, paralleling the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The idea had gone nowhere, but in February 1940, en route to the UK from war-torn China, Cripps had been received by Molotov in Moscow, where he drew the conclusion that the countries could work out a bilateral trade agreement, and possibly more than that. Maisky, in London, had also proposed reviving discussions on trade, but the foreign office had questioned Soviet motives and worried about Soviet reexport of British goods to Britain’s enemy Germany. Then, in May 1940, with France about to fall, Churchill, now PM, had acceded to the suggestion by Halifax, perhaps initiated by Maisky, to send Cripps to Moscow as a special envoy to spur trade talks. Molotov refused to accept Cripps under special envoy status. On June 3, 1940, the Soviet spy Gerhard Kegel (“X”), now in the economics section of the German embassy in Moscow, reported to Soviet military intelligence that the Germans were concerned about the pending Cripps visit and a possible Anglo-Soviet trade agreement.⁸¹ At Soviet insistence, London appointed Cripps as a normal ambassador.⁸² He arrived in Moscow on June 12.

Britain’s imposing embassy, the former residence of a sugar magnate, was located on the embankment directly across the Moscow River from the Kremlin, with a spectacular view. Inside, its condition was appalling: not merely tasteless—sickly looking silk brocade of hideous colors (as Cripps observed)—but dilapidated. The embassy tableware consisted of bits and pieces—no dishes, no glasses, no silver—and the facility lacked a butler or maid, making diplomatic receptions that much more of a challenge. The small staff was unable to keep up with the volume of cipher work, let alone the diplomatic rounds in the complex city. Most British embassy staff were Russians and Soviet ethnic Germans, making German the dominant language.⁸³ That was British grand strategy: everything on the cheap—you fight my war, you staff my embassy.

Two days after his arrival—the very day Paris fell to Hitler—Cripps saw Molotov in the Kremlin for an hour and expressed a desire to improve relations. That same day, Molotov and his deputies sent birthday cards for the king (George VI) for the first time. But Molotov was not forthcoming with Cripps: also on June 14, the Soviet government head signed off on the Soviet ultimatum to the Lithuanians, a prelude to the occupation of the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina. These aggressive Soviet actions proved to be an indirect boon to Cripps, though: soon, more than a hundred crates of ill-matched furniture and furnishings were evacuated from shuttered British missions in the three Baltic states and sent to the embassy in Moscow. Still, the moves exacerbated anti-Soviet sentiment in London.

Not everyone in the British establishment was hostile. On June 16, 1940, old David Lloyd George, who had once been an ardent partisan of appeasement, calling Hitler “the George Washington of Germany,” told Maisky—during a discussion about a possible evacuation of the British government to Canada, if necessary—that “peace between England and Germany is impossible.” When Lloyd George inquired whether the Soviets might finally stand up to Hitler, Maisky demurred. Lloyd George raised his finger: “Watch out that it does not turn out to be too late!”⁸⁴

The British government, for its part, had both minimalist aims—induce the Soviet Union not to increase its largesse toward Nazi Germany—and maximalist ones: attain significant Soviet exports to Britain. Cripps believed it was possible to go beyond even the latter and get Britain and the Soviet Union to join forces against Germany, notwithstanding the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression and trade pacts, the dismemberment of Poland, the aggression against Finland, and now the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states.⁸⁵ A lawyer rather than a diplomat, Cripps was capable of criticizing Soviet realities, but he had defended Stalin’s arrests of British nationals as spies in fabricated trials, as well as the Soviet Union’s 1939 seizure of eastern Poland. Unlike Churchill (or Chamberlain), Cripps harbored no anxieties about Soviet penetration of Europe as a catalyst for spreading socialist revolution; he saw Stalin as security-minded and defensive. But Cripps met a wall of skepticism from the British foreign office, whose officials warned against enabling Stalin to exact better terms from Hitler by using “negotiations” with London. Surprisingly, at least to Cripps, the Soviet side was no more receptive.⁸⁶ He waited and waited to be received a second time after his first chilly audience with Molotov.

Finally, on July 1, bearing a message from Churchill (dated June 24) on “the prospect of Germany establishing hegemony over the Continent,” Cripps was received by none other than Stalin—and in the Little Corner, in the presence of Molotov, between 6:30 and 9:15 p.m.⁸⁷ Among the difficult matters aired during what Cripps described as a “severely frank discussion” was that of British sanctions on Soviet imports of nonferrous metals. (The British suspected they would be rerouted by Stalin to Hitler; in fact, Germany needed these raw materials to produce the goods it owed to the Soviet Union.) “I could of course give a promise that not a single pound of metal would go to Germany,” Stalin stated acidly, “but that would be dishonest. A promise is of no use which is not fulfilled.” He went on to categorize Churchill’s message about German expansionism as reactionary. “If the prime minister wants to restore the old equilibrium,” he told Cripps, “we cannot agree with him.” On the contrary, the despot remarked, “We must change the old balance of power in Europe, for it has acted to the USSR’s disadvantage.”⁸⁸

Stalin was still preoccupied with British “imperialism” even now. He could not fail to have noticed that Hitler had become uppity following the conquest of France, but seared into the despot’s mind was the debacle of the Western-Soviet military talks in summer 1939 and the enmity over the Soviet-Finnish War. Churchill’s private communication calling for “harmonious and mutually beneficial” bilateral relations had a concrete aspect—encouraging strong Soviet actions in the Balkans, beyond even Bessarabia, to deny their strategic exploitation by Nazi Germany—but to Stalin this looked like the usual scheming to embroil the USSR in the war, allowing the British to escape. After the session, Cripps soberly wrote, “If anything is to be accomplished here, there is a very difficult past to be got over, and it’s going to be slow work at the best.”⁸⁹

Cripps’s failure to create any momentum toward rapprochement might be blamed on a stubborn Churchill (as well as knaves in the foreign office).⁹⁰ Churchill, however, had provided the basis for bilateral cooperation in his resolve. On July 3, 1940, to prevent French warships from falling into German hands, he had scuttled the main part of the French navy, stationed near Algeria, killing 1,297 of his ally’s sailors. A French battleship and five destroyers escaped, but Churchill’s ruthless action made an impression on Hitler, as well as on Roosevelt. That same day, Churchill received Maisky at 10 Downing Street and told him Britain would never come to terms with Hitler. The next day, when Churchill reported on the naval destruction, the British Parliament rose in ovation; Maisky was present.⁹¹ Stalin kept insisting that Churchill refused to accept how the Versailles order had been shattered, but in truth, the British PM did admit Versailles was kaput.⁹² What the Bulldog did not want to admit was that a replacement international order would require a significant place for the Communist Soviet Union, in its now expanded borders, including Poland and the Baltics, the same tiny former tsarist possessions causing Stalin trouble with Hitler. The arch-imperialist Churchill, while holding one quarter of the world, took offense at these Soviet annexations of white peoples.⁹³ He wanted to prevail in the war without empowering the Soviets in Europe in the bargain. Neither he (nor most subsequent scholars) would admit as much, but this was the same sticking point that had inhibited Chamberlain from signing any alliance with Stalin.⁹⁴

The dilemma was stark. “We cannot defeat Germany fully without allies,” The Economist would editorialize in late July 1940. “Patiently, if need be, but with great persistence, we must work for a Russian alliance.”⁹⁵ Churchill, however, held to the minimalist British aim of stopping an escalation in Soviet material support of Germany, and he was already fixated on salvation from Roosevelt and the United States, which had the eighteenth-largest land army in the world, with fewer troops than Bulgaria, and no air force to speak of, but had immeasurable potential.⁹⁶ Such considerations amounted to formidable obstacles for Stalin to overcome. Perhaps they could not have been overcome. But the despot did not try.

Rumors were swirling in Berlin of a change in the USSR’s foreign policy orientation.⁹⁷ Back on the eve of Cripps’s arrival in Moscow, Soviet military intelligence had warned Stalin that German delays in military deliveries to the USSR stemmed from Berlin’s concern that Cripps would be bearing “some gifts.”⁹⁸ On July 13, Stalin had Molotov send a Soviet record of his conversation with Cripps to the Soviet envoys in London, Berlin, and Rome—and to the German ambassador in Moscow. Stalin aimed not to intimidate Hitler but to demonstrate his continuing loyalty. Stalin, as if speaking not to Cripps but directly to Hitler, was recorded as having replied to the ambassador’s suggestion that Britain and the USSR “ought to agree on a common policy of self-protection against Germany and on the re-establishment of the balance of power” by saying that “he did not see any danger of the hegemony of any one country in Europe and still less any danger that Europe might be engulfed by Germany.” He added that he “knew several leading German statesmen well” and “had not discovered any desire on their part to engulf European countries. Stalin was not of the opinion that German military successes menaced the Soviet Union and her friendly relations with Germany.”⁹⁹

German intelligence was closely following Cripps’s activities, thanks to intercepted telegrams sent to Belgrade by the Yugoslav envoy in Moscow, Milan Gavrilović, a Cripps confidant. Hitler was in a position to know the talks were fruitless. But to the Führer, Britain and the USSR were talking. The Wehrmacht, for its part, was monitoring Stalin’s troop buildup on the Soviet side of the border throughout southeastern Europe. German military aircraft were violating Soviet airspace but then claiming that these were errors committed by pilots in training.¹⁰⁰ On July 3, 1940, the German army chief of staff, Halder, in a conversation with the head of his operations section, had noted that a “military intervention . . . will compel Russia to recognize Germany’s dominant position in Europe.”¹⁰¹

INCOHERENCE

Other Soviet actions belied this pro-German bluster. That same July of 1940, Shaposhnikov, in his last days as chief of the general staff, signed off on a detailed assessment of what a German attack on the USSR would look like.¹⁰² He never acted without Stalin’s approval.¹⁰³ Red Army force dislocation also spoke volumes: of its 188 divisions, just 18 were in the Soviet Far East, and 10 in Eastern Siberia. The main concentrations were on the western frontier: the Kiev special military district (27), Western special military district (25), Odessa military district (11), Baltic special military district (18), and Leningrad military district (15).¹⁰⁴ After August 1940, by which time Meretskov had replaced Shaposhnikov, Germany (supported by Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Finland) was being explicitly named as the likely enemy in the Soviet strategic deployment plan; Britain was no longer mentioned. What is more, the Soviet military districts on the frontier had fleshed out detailed contingencies for war against Germany.¹⁰⁵

At the same time, the economic benefits of the relationship with Germany were still flowing to Moscow. In the second quarter of 1940, the Škoda Works in German-annexed Bohemia would ship orders to the USSR for 393 devices to manufacture machine tools worth billions of rubles.¹⁰⁶ Equally crucial, Ogonyok printed dramatic photographs of European war devastation, including the urban bombing, vivid reminders of how the Soviets had remained outside the conflict.¹⁰⁷ Maisky, according to the British foreign office, said that whereas, according to conventional accounting, in the air war between Britain and Germany, Royal Air Force losses were placed on one side and Luftwaffe losses on another, “he was in the habit of adding them together in one column.”¹⁰⁸ Stalin, furthermore, was absolutely convinced that Churchill wanted not to fight Hitler together with him but to deflect the Wehrmacht eastward and conclude a separate peace with Germany.¹⁰⁹

But Stalin’s views on Britain and geopolitics bordered on incoherence. Steeped in Marxism-Leninism, he was given to dismissing the British—the world’s number-one arms exporters—as a supposed “nation of shopkeepers” (among the ultimate Marxist insults), yet he was also inclined to regard Britain as the arch-imperialist manipulating all world affairs.¹¹⁰ Germany, dominating nearly the entire continent, somehow still remained the victim of the Versailles order.

Soviet propaganda banged on about how the British empire constituted the world’s principal bloodsucker and threat.¹¹¹ The regime called on the full force of its astonishing ideological arsenal: nearly 9,000 newspapers, with a combined daily circulation of 38.4 million, and almost 6 million “radio points” delivering radio by wire (as well as 1 million radio receivers with dials), not to mention countless cinemas showing newsreels, live theater, posters, and publicly displayed slogans. Even if the Soviet masses remained skeptical about this or that regime pronouncement, the population was marinated day and night in Stalin’s worldview.

Inside the Little Corner, in the narrow circle that had regular access to the despot, there were no Anglophiles—like Göring, the counterweight to Ribbentrop in the Nazi regime—who could counter Stalin’s Germanophilia or the Germanophile influence of Molotov, whose signature was on the Pact and who combined the functions of a Göring (overseeing the economy) and a Ribbentrop (foreign affairs).¹¹² As for Voroshilov, even had he admired Britain—he did not—he lacked Molotov’s strength of character to stand up for any view that contravened Stalin’s. Mikoyan, a skilled operative, was too clever to advocate for or against specific policies, knowing Stalin’s personality as well as anyone (and having had some clashes with him in the 1920s). The policy views of Beria could best be described as “Yes, comrade Stalin. It shall be done, comrade Stalin.” Anyway, it is not even clear whether Stalin informed his minions, besides Molotov, about the details of the new British ambassador’s approaches.

In summer 1940, Eugene Lyons published Stalin: Czar of All the Russians, reusing the interview he had obtained a decade earlier, only now it was not to humanize the despot but to dehumanize him. He alluded inaccurately to Stalin’s “modest apartment of three rooms,” a space the journalist never saw, but he wielded the credibility of his rare face-to-face encounter and long service as the Moscow correspondent of the United Press. Disabused dupes had a lot to make up for. Having previously called Stalin a “thoroughly likable person,” Lyons (prodigiously borrowing from Souvarine’s biography) now cast him as a duplicitous tyrant.¹¹³ According to Lyons, Stalin nursed a youthful humiliation all his life over his lack of any distinction, “the ugly-duckling of Gori, the sulking professional revolutionist of Tiflis and Baku, the shadowy figure among the giants of the overturn of 1917.” The author tore into the despot’s foreign machinations, from the Spanish civil war to the attack on Finland. “It is not beyond possibility that Stalin may double-cross Hitler at some point, particularly if an Allied victory seems inevitable,” Lyons speculated. “There is even more chance that Hitler may double-cross Stalin.”¹¹⁴

A DESPOT MEETS HIS LIMITS

The Red Army was expanding toward 4 million men (as compared with just 1 million in 1934). Some 11,000 of the 33,000 officers discharged during the terror had been reinstated. Industrial production (in constant prices) had tripled since 1928.¹¹⁵ That said, 1940 GDP per capita in the Soviet Union was not very different from projected trends based on economic performance during the tsarist era. The regime had industrialized in no small part by severely repressing consumption. Consumer shortages had been worsening since 1938.¹¹⁶ At the same time, alcohol production reached 250 million gallons, up from 96.5 million gallons in 1932. By 1940, the Soviet Union had more shops selling alcohol than selling meat, vegetables, and fruit combined.¹¹⁷

None of the wildly ambitious industrial targets in the Five-Year Plans (1928–32, 1933–37, 1938–) had been or would be reached. Output continued to be dogged by input shortages, which managerial black marketeering struggled to overcome through hoarding (which exacerbated the shortages) and bartering. Some enterprising factory officials reopened closed mines and sold the coal on the side, which fetched more than four times the state price; others established commercial exchanges for goods that had vanished from factory books and were in high demand throughout the Union, thereby making markets. But extra-plan entrepreneurialism was illegal.¹¹⁸ In 1940, a Leningrad military-industrial research institute fulfilled just 14 percent of its plan, and yet the director and the chief engineer, possessing scarce know-how that factories craved, managed to contract with state companies to obtain not just gramophone records and a piano but also vital engineering tools, pneumatic devices, and plastics. Criminal charges resulted, however.¹¹⁹

More than one third of all industrial workers were classified as “Stakhanovites,” but worker go-slows, also known as Italian strikes, and the constant queuing for food and basic goods continued to depress productivity. So did quitting in search of lower norms and better pay.¹²⁰ Back on June 26, 1940, Stalin had had the criminal penalties for absenteeism and unauthorized job changing augmented; additionally, lateness of just twenty minutes was now criminalized. Violations were punishable with “corrective labor,” mostly in the form of reduced pay at one’s place of employment, but sometimes with several months in a camp.¹²¹ Some 30 million people were now in the Soviet state workforce, and over the next year more than 3 million of them would be investigated for absenteeism and job changing. Of these, nearly half a million would be sentenced to prison for four months; the rest would be sentenced to “forced labor” at their regular place of employment, meaning pay reductions, for six months.¹²² And yet the number of such infractions was likely higher. Some people stole goods from work or otherwise violated discipline deliberately to get fired, so that they could leave undesirable jobs.¹²³ But managers did not investigate many instances of lateness or refrained from sending cases to the procuracy, instead imposing “fines” that were not collected.¹²⁴ Stalin’s orders to mete out punishments for even minor infractions clashed with his directives to meet production targets at all cost.¹²⁵

STUMPED, WRATHFUL, RESTLESS

Hitler stood at a new zenith of power in July 1940. And yet, despite all his conquests and Britain’s manifest inability to dislodge him from the continent, the British government vowed to keep on fighting. He had repaired to his alpine retreat, to confer with his military on the feasibility of a cross-Channel invasion. Germany would need control of the Channel by sea and air, which was not remotely in prospect.¹²⁶ Under Chamberlain, the British had built several ships and radar stations and greatly expanded production capacity for fighter airplanes without actually making many of them, thereby controlling peacetime expenses and limiting stockpiles of obsolete weapons. In 1940, when fighting broke out, Britain quickly managed to outproduce Germany in single-engine fighters, which contributed significantly to the British ability to beat back the Luftwaffe air assault. The British Home Fleet alone—only a part of the Royal Navy—possessed 5 battleships, 11 cruisers, and 30 destroyers.¹²⁷ The Norwegian campaign had weakened the German navy, which at this point was down to one heavy cruiser, two light cruisers, and four destroyers. Grand Admiral Raeder, the German naval commander in chief, and others harbored grave doubts about landing on the British Isles without a huge prior buildup. All seemed to depend on the Luftwaffe.¹²⁸

Churchill, under German bombardment, dreamed of escape. “If Hitler fails to beat us here he will probably recoil eastwards,” he had written to the prime minister of the Union of South Africa (June 27, 1940). “Indeed, he may do this even without trying invasion [of the UK], to find employment for his Army, and take the edge off the winter strain upon him.”¹²⁹

Hitler understood the transcendent value that Britain attached to its global empire and, in his own way, was sincere in his offers to allow that empire to remain intact, certainly in the medium term, in exchange for a free hand on the continent, where raw materials and racial Lebensraum awaited him. Churchill, however, genuinely cared about the balance of power on the continent, on which the empire’s existence ultimately depended.¹³⁰ But Hitler could not fathom Britain’s “futile” resistance to an accommodation, except by imagining some hidden encouragement—from the United States, from the USSR.¹³¹ On July 16, he issued Directive No. 16: “Since England, despite her hopeless military situation, still shows no sign of willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare, and if necessary to carry out, a landing operation against her. . . . The preparation for the entire operation must be completed by mid-August.” The lack of confidence (“if necessary”) was evident. On July 19, he gave a much-delayed address to the Reichstag, reviewing German military conquests, current strength, and future strategy, while offering vague “final” peace terms to Britain.¹³² The British press and radio were immediately dismissive. Churchill initially greeted the “offer” with cold silence.¹³³

At a “Führer conference” with only the highest military men, on July 21, 1940, Hitler stated that “even though Moscow is unenthusiastic about Germany’s great success, she will nevertheless make no effort to enter the war against Germany of her own accord.” Rumors—duly conveyed to Stalin—were rife that Germany was getting ready to attack the USSR even before France had fallen.¹³⁴ The Wehrmacht was transferring back eastern units that had been called to France and Belgium, and Soviet military intelligence was reporting German troop concentrations on the eastern frontier (railroads were under covert surveillance).¹³⁵ German officers were said to be studying Russian language at courses given in occupied Prague. Ethnic Russians and Ukrainians living in Poland had been organized. Everyone was talking, everywhere: troop exercises, planned diplomatic evacuations, imminent war. Was it real? Disinformation? German fortifications in the east were being greatly expanded; then again, the German state had expanded, so this was to be expected. Germany’s military attaché in Moscow, Köstring, told his Soviet interlocutors (July 9) that German forces were being “demobilized” from the west and stationed in East Prussia and former Poland, where new garrisons were being formed, “since retaining many troops in the West is no longer necessary.”¹³⁶

The “parking” of German troops in the east was accelerating, but bombing raids by the Luftwaffe over Britain continued, as Soviet intelligence also reported.¹³⁷ Could Hitler really intend to initiate a two-front war? At the secret July 21 Führer conference, Hitler called an attack on Britain “not just a river crossing, but the crossing of a sea which is dominated by the enemy.”¹³⁸ Nonetheless, Raeder was given ten days to work out the parameters of a cross-Channel invasion. At the same time, the Wehrmacht was to make a preliminary study of invading the USSR that very fall of 1940.¹³⁹

Germany endeavored to goad Japan into attacking Singapore, so as to provoke Britain into war in the Far East and perhaps also drag the United States in (and away from European affairs), but Tokyo’s ability to commit remained stymied by interest group infighting.¹⁴⁰ At the same time, Major General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff, had raised the possibility of bringing Britain to its knees indirectly, by hitting vulnerable spots in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, reasoning that as the screws were tightened on Britain’s global position, it would surrender, to stem its losses. The Italians, he thought, could occupy the Suez Canal. Spain or another country could grab Gibraltar. The oil terminus in Haifa could just be blown up.¹⁴¹ This had sparked the notion of a broad anti-British front of Italy, Spain, and maybe the Soviet Union, even as Hitler was contemplating smashing the latter to bits, as a way to get Britain to capitulate. “Crossing of Channel appears very hazardous to the Führer,” army chief of staff Halder recorded in his diary (July 22). “Invasion is to be undertaken only if no other way is left to bring terms with England.”¹⁴² That same day, Halifax broadcast a definitive British rejection of the German terms for “peace.” On July 23, Hitler went on his annual pilgrimage to Bayreuth for the Wagner Festival, taking in Götterdämmerung.¹⁴³

Jodl and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, de facto war minister, managed to convince Hitler that a fall 1940 date for an invasion of the USSR was “hopelessly impractical” (according to a memo written by the former and signed by the latter).¹⁴⁴ On July 29, at another Führer conference at the Berghof, Hitler shifted a Soviet invasion target date out to May 1941, which was both the earliest feasible date and the latest date from the point of view of safe concentration of forces in the east.¹⁴⁵ Jodl informed only a tiny group of war planners, headed by Walter Warlimont, in the strictest secrecy, for Halder and other top Wehrmacht generals saw no basis for a war against the Soviet Union, and plenty of opportunity for rapprochement with Stalin.¹⁴⁶

On July 31, Hitler convened yet another narrow-circle Führer conference at the Berghof.¹⁴⁷ Raeder and Halder reported. Those present argued that a cross-Channel invasion of Britain could not be carried out until September 1940 (if then). Hitler signed Directive No. 17, on stepping up the air war (which would be called the Battle of Britain) “to prepare the ground for the final crushing of England.”¹⁴⁸ He rejected Raeder’s postponement of the Channel invasion, Operation Sea Lion, until spring 1941, but postponement is effectively what happened, for Hitler stated that if the results of the air attacks on Britain proved unfavorable, Sea Lion preparations would be stopped.¹⁴⁹ As for the Wehrmacht, despite a plan to reduce its size to lessen the strain on the economy, Hitler ordered a ramp-up from 120 to 180 divisions (a number that would grow) and the launching of a massive logistics program in the east.¹⁵⁰ Göring, when told, would be thrilled.¹⁵¹ This represented a policy victory for both the peripheral strategy against Britain and the full-scale invasion of the USSR. “Our action must be directed to eliminate all factors that let England hope for a change in the situation,” Hitler told the attendees. “Russia is the factor on which Britain is relying the most. . . . With Russia smashed, Britain’s last hope will be shattered.”¹⁵²

Hitler had effectively conceded that he lacked the resources to defeat the world’s leading navy and air force, but he felt he could summon the resources to defeat world’s largest land army. This was, in a way, logical, reflecting his own force structure. But several top Wehrmacht officers viewed an unprovoked invasion of the east before securing victory in the west as unsound.

It was, in any case, passing strange. For decades, the Führer had been hammering the necessity of annihilating Bolshevism and following the siren call of Lebensraum in the east, in an existential war, but now he was asserting that the way to defeat Britain was to attack the Soviets.¹⁵³ Stalin felt secure, because Britain was the one stuck doing the fighting against Nazi Germany, but the more Britain resisted Hitler, the more Hitler entertained an attack on the Soviet Union. And the more Soviet intelligence warned Stalin about Hitler’s aggressive attitudes toward the USSR, the more Stalin suspected British efforts to embroil him in war with Germany.

MISPLACED JOY

On August 10, 1940, Stalin hosted a banquet in the Grand Kremlin Palace to celebrate his newest and expanded Union republics: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Moldavia (which included Bessarabia and northern Bukovina). He seated their Soviet-installed leaders at his own table, alongside marshals Timoshenko and Voroshilov.¹⁵⁴ Hitler’s directives and the accompanying feasibility studies for an attack on the USSR remained supersecret. Soviet military intelligence, on the basis of agent information, reported that, at a conference in Salzburg on August 9, Hitler had proposed to Romania joint regulation of all disputed issues with Hungary and Bulgaria; stated that all territorial changes in Eastern Europe up to that point were temporary; and “declared that current actions were the first stage in preparation for a war against the USSR, which would begin immediately after the end of the war with England.”¹⁵⁵ Five days later, Hitler handed out diamond-studded batons to his field marshals in the Reich Chancellery. “Russia has once shown an inclination to overstep the agreements made with us,” he remarked privately. “But she remains loyal at present. But should she reveal the intention of conquering Finland or attacking Romania, we shall be forced to strike. Russia should not be allowed to be the sole master of the eastern Baltic. Furthermore, we need Romania’s oil.”¹⁵⁶

Mikoyan reported on August 11 that for the first six months of 1940, the Soviets had received goods worth 80 million reichsmarks, while shipping goods worth 190 million.¹⁵⁷ (In the fourth quarter of 1940, Stalin would again shut off the export valves.) Molotov, on August 15, wrote a revealing letter to his wife, Polina, who was away on holiday in Crimea. This was his second letter to her in three days, divulging, in passing, that political negotiations had been launched with Japan (“I hope something serious will result”). He also complained that, “unfortunately, I cannot stay current in economic matters, but I do try not to lose sight of the most important of them, and it seems there is a turn for the better.” He broached the idea of holidaying together the next year in Sochi. “I wait impatiently for you in order to hug you tightly-tightly and kiss you all over, my dear, sweet love.”¹⁵⁸

Stalin had not written a letter like that in a decade. He could, at least, rejoice in the fact that Beria’s agents, finally, had proved better than Yezhov’s: Ramón Mercader managed to smash an alpine pick into the head of Trotsky on August 20, 1940. The exile survived in a coma for twenty-six hours before succumbing.¹⁵⁹ He was sixty years old. “The murder of Leon Trotsky at Mexico City,” The Times of London editorialized (August 23), “will relieve the Kremlin of not a few anxieties and will draw few tears from the majority of mankind.” When the celebrity’s open casket was driven through the streets of the Mexican capital, nearly a quarter million people turned out. Stalin edited the Pravda report on the “inglorious death of Trotsky” (August 24) and, among many insertions and cross-outs, he altered the conclusion to say, “Trotsky became a victim of his own intrigues, treacheries, and treason. Thus, he ingloriously ended his life, this despicable person, entering the grave with the stamp of an international spy on his skeleton.”¹⁶⁰

The draft was dated August 16, indicating Stalin’s sense of anticipation over the operation. The omnipotent despot had maintained a collection of everything written by and about Trotsky in a special cupboard in his study at the Near Dacha: Stalin School of Falsification, An Open Letter to Members of the Bolshevik Party, The Revolution Betrayed, The Stalinist Thermidor. These texts, published in dozens of countries, helped shape Stalin’s image in world opinion.¹⁶¹ Trotsky had taken to predicting that war between Hitler and Stalin would sweep away both, in social revolution, and that he (Trotsky) and his Fourth International would replace them. “Under cover of darkness, revolutionary elements in Berlin are putting up posters in the working-class districts saying ‘Down with Hitler and Stalin!’ and ‘Long Live Trotsky!’” he imagined in 1940. “It’s lucky Stalin does not have to black out Moscow at night, otherwise the streets of the Soviet capital would also be covered with equally meaningful posters.”¹⁶² When the spectral Fourth International, its meager archive pilfered and delivered to Stalin, had finally managed its founding congress, it was attended by a mere twenty-one delegates, who had met in secrecy in a village outside Paris for just a single day, the stateless Trotsky himself had not been able to attend.¹⁶³

Hitler’s troop movements and the high tensions in Nazi-Soviet relations were playing out in Eastern Europe.¹⁶⁴ Stalin had begun inciting Hungarian irredentism over their conationals in Romanian-controlled Transylvania; Hitler unilaterally handed northern Transylvania over to Hungary in late August 1940. Stalin had a protest lodged with the German ambassador regarding what he considered to be a violation of their Pact’s clause on prior consultation.¹⁶⁵ Romania would also be forced to cede southern Dobruja to Bulgaria, losing the last of the territories it had gained as a result of the Great War and sinking the popularity of the Bucharest government and the monarch. “I was not an enemy of Your Majesty,” General Ion Antonescu (b. 1882), the former war minister and the leader of the pro-Nazi Iron Guard, wrote in protest to King Carol II. “I was a fanatic servant of this nation. I was removed through intrigue and calumny by those who have led this country to where it is now.”¹⁶⁶ Carol promptly had him arrested. Mass public demonstrations and Iron Guard shock troops known as Legionnaires got Antonescu released. In a quick coup, he would force the beleaguered king to step down in favor of his nineteen-year-old son, Mihai I (a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria). But most of the monarchy’s dictatorial powers would be transferred on September 5 to Antonescu, newly designated as “Conducător” (Führer).¹⁶⁷ He deepened Romania’s relationship with Nazi Germany.

ENEMIES RECAST

The writer Vishnevsky had managed to take over the executed Isaac Babel’s dacha in Peredelkino, then, in his diary, decried a lack of material incentives (“The stimulation by pay is lacking; we are well cared for, many of us writers fully so, for years to come”).¹⁶⁸ He was right only in respect to elite writers. In 1939, when the deputy boss of Central Committee agitprop, Georgy Alexandrov, earned an enormous salary of 27,000 rubles, Nikolai Pogodin, the playwright, had taken in 732,000 in royalties and payments.¹⁶⁹ Vishnevsky went on to lament the lack of attention from Stalin and other top political figures. “After the death of A. M. Gorky we have had fewer possibilities and places where we could speak with big people on big questions of life and our work,” he was recorded as stating by the writers’ union duty officer in discussion with a colleague. “The last big conversation in the Central Committee was spring 1938. It gave us a lot, but already two years have passed, and writers as a collective, as an ‘active,’ have not spoken with the Leaders.”¹⁷⁰

As it happened, on the evening of September 9, 1940, party leaders and cultural functionaries assembled to discuss a film, The Law of Life, by Alexander Stolper and Boris Ivanov, which had been released in early August. It portrayed a student Communist youth leader as corrupt, yet it had somehow managed to pass all the censorship authorities, from the studio (Mosfilm) through the state committee for cinema affairs (headed by Ivan Bolshakov) right to the Central Committee propaganda department. Pravda’s unsigned review, edited by Zhdanov, condemned the film as “insincere,” and after ten days, despite being the lead draw of the day, it was withdrawn.¹⁷¹ Stalin, in the course of extended remarks, reminded those present that workers were not ipso facto trustworthy; Tomsky had been a worker yet fell into conspiracy with Trotsky. Some workers were scum, he added. “It’s a law of life.”¹⁷²

When Fadeyev, head of the writers’ union, praised the ethnic Polish writer Wanda Wasilewska as “a genuine artist,” Stalin responded, “I do not know if she’s a genuine artist or not, but I do know that she writes truthfully, honestly. I read three of her works: The Face of the Day, which depicts the life of a worker correctly, honestly; then Motherland, which takes up the life of a farmhand working in bondage for a landlord—wonderfully, nicely, simply conveyed; Land Under the Yoke, which depicts the life of an individual poor peasant, middle peasant, and farmhand. Wonderfully well conveyed. But about her, for some reason, there is silence.”

At this point, Nikolai Aseyev, the poet and screenwriter, who was attending such a gathering for the first time, committed a remarkable act. “I will speak openly,” he stated. “Comrade Stalin said that he likes the writings of Wanda Wasilewska. Very well, I should say, that you liked the works of Wanda Wasilewska. Personally, I read them and they did not touch me deeply. Why am I saying this? Because tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, Wanda Wasilewska will suddenly become the single standard of writerly achievement.” Aseyev continued, “I am not afraid of anything; I believe that here everything will be properly taken into account and weighed, but sometimes it happens thusly: ‘But comrade Stalin said it!’ Of course we must take this into account, but if comrade Stalin likes this or that written work, this or that painting, it does not signify that such works should be repeated, three hundred thousand times repeat the same written work, the same painting.” Stalin interjected: “It does not mean that.”

Aseyev was dead right: Stalin’s tastes were dispositive. The despot offered closing instructions. “I would prefer that we portrayed enemies not as beasts, but as people, harmful to our society, yet not devoid of some human qualities,” he advised. “The worst scoundrel has human qualities; he loves someone, he respects someone, he is prepared to sacrifice himself for someone.” Then this: “Why not depict Bukharin, no matter what kind of monster he was—he had certain human qualities. Trotsky was an enemy, but he was an able person, indisputably. Portray him as an enemy with negative qualities, but also with positive qualities, because he had them, indisputably.”¹⁷³

Who in their right mind might take up Stalin’s suggestion to depict Bukharin and Trotsky as having had positive qualities?

Stalin declared that evening that he disliked The Law of Life’s depiction of those who unmasked enemies, such as the protagonist Communist Youth League student, as not properly Soviet people. “We had, for example, 25 to 30 million people who starved—there was not enough grain—but now they have started to live well,” Stalin suddenly acknowledged. “Our enemies inside the party think as follows: ‘We’ll give this piece [of land] to the Germans, that to the Japanese; we have plenty of land.’ But it has turned out the opposite: we give nothing to anyone. On the contrary, we are expanding the front of socialism. . . . This is beneficial for humanity; indeed, the Lithuanians, western Belorussians, Bessarabians, those we freed from the yoke of the landowners, capitalists, police, and every other kind of scum, consider themselves lucky. From the point of view of the world struggle of forces between socialism and capitalism, this is a big plus, for we are expanding the front of socialism and shrinking the front of capitalism.”¹⁷⁴ After midnight, he repaired to the Little Corner with Zhdanov, Molotov, and Beria.¹⁷⁵

AMBIGUITIES

Thanks to Hitler’s secret July 1940 order to expand Germany’s already sizable military, shipments to the Soviet Union fell far behind contractual obligations. Beginning in August 1940, in a show of strength, Stalin had his trade representatives convey that the Soviets would be cutting back on all deliveries, including oil.¹⁷⁶ Germany had more options than ever, following the occupation of France, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Norway, to go with strong commercial ties to neutral Sweden and its ally Romania. Continued reliance on the Soviet Union, moreover, was becoming a sore point. Even if Stalin might be ready to resume and perhaps deliver even more, it was better, in the words of the Nazi economics minister, not to be “dependent upon forces and powers over whom we have no influence.”¹⁷⁷ By September 1, German divisions in East Prussia, former Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, and Austria climbed to 94 from 27 (as of June 15), according to a report from the new head of Soviet military intelligence, Lieutenant General Filipp Golikov, to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and the military high command.¹⁷⁸

On August 31, 1940, Molotov had received Schulenburg and complained that Germany had violated the Pact by failing to consult the USSR regarding German moves in Hungary and Romania. On September 2, the Soviet envoy in Berlin, Shkvartsev, had an audience with Ribbentrop, who stated of the Pact, “I share your satisfaction and think that the year has brought great benefits to both Germany and Russia. Germany has achieved great victories and will achieve them.” That same day, Shkvartsev requested Moscow not to send wives and children to Berlin, “in light of the almost daily systematic bombing” by Britain.¹⁷⁹ On September 3, TASS announced the signing of a clarification agreement in Berlin on regulating the Germany-USSR border, “negotiations for which had proceeded in a benevolent atmosphere.”¹⁸⁰

Ambassador Ott, in Tokyo, had been instructed to inform Germany’s ally, as Sorge reported to Moscow, “that the German troops being sent to the eastern borders have no relation whatsoever to the USSR. They were sent there because there is no longer a need for them in France and the time for their dispersal has not arrived.”¹⁸¹ On September 6, Jodl issued a secret order explaining that the concentration of forces in the east would accelerate even more over the following weeks.¹⁸² In parallel, on September 6 and 18, Admiral Raeder submitted detailed plans on the peripheral strategy against Britain.¹⁸³ Hitler’s Directive No. 18, concerning war in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, was drafted that month. Perhaps that was the reason for the massive troop concentrations not only in Nazi-occupied Poland but also in southeastern Europe?

Stalin was sitting on an analysis written in the aftermath of France’s fall by Jenő Varga, the director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, in Moscow, and a long-standing foreign policy adviser, who argued that the “contradictions” had disappeared between Britain and the United States, such that the latter would enter the war against the Axis. “Comrade Varga!” Stalin answered on September 12. “Your interpretation is completely correct. . . . Matters changed radically after Germany destroyed France and got its hands on all the resources of the European continent, and England lost France. Now the bloc of Germany, Italy, and Japan threatens not only England but also the U.S. In that light, a bloc between England and the U.S. is a natural result of such a turnabout in international affairs. With Communist greetings.”¹⁸⁴

On September 23, 1940, Stalin held a meeting in the Little Corner, summoning, among others, the historian Arkady Yerusalimsky, who had been tasked by the foreign affairs commissariat with preparing the Russian-language reissue, in three volumes, of Otto von Bismarck’s Thoughts and Recollections (Moscow, 1940–41). Stalin hand-corrected Yerusalimsky’s introductory essay, softening its tone where it pointed out the potential consequences of Germany ignoring Bismarck’s solicitousness toward Russia.¹⁸⁵ Bismarck had been the lodestar of Stalin’s conservative imperial Russian predecessors, Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin. What, if anything, the Soviet despot absorbed from the German’s thinking remains unknown. But he seems to have presumed, based on the way things worked inside the Soviet Union, that the Germans would read the introduction to a history book as a statement or signal of Soviet policy.

Stalin gave indications of the economic strain. After the thirty minutes devoted to Bismarck, he received Mikoyan and Khrushchev, followed by the aviation industry commissar (Shakhurin) and a deputy commissar (Vasily Balandin); the heavy machine building commissar (Vyacheslav Malyshev); and the first deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (Nikolai Voznesensky). “When one gives a new task to our people’s commissars, they make obligatory the construction of new factories to fulfill it,” Stalin complained to them. “But the main thing is that one needs to look at what can be done at the old factories. This is the most reliable and shortest way. One can expand production at old factories more quickly than build new factories.”¹⁸⁶

The tension in the Little Corner was heightened by the arrival at this time of Wehrmacht troops in Finland. Germany had provided no advance warning, in contravention of the consultation clause of the Pact, which, of course, had put Finland in the Soviet sphere.¹⁸⁷ Stalin’s war there had brought about the very eventuality it had sought to forestall. His spies passed on details about 1.5 billion reichsmarks in secret military aid from Germany to Finland, deliveries that were supposed to go to the Soviet Union. Stalin suspended all long-term projects for export to Germany, diminishing further any German economic dependency on him.¹⁸⁸ Nothing more starkly demonstrated the deterioration of the Soviet position than Finland, where the Soviet Union had expended so much blood, treasure, and reputation.

TRIPARTITE RELIEF

Japan, Germany, and Italy, on September 27, 1940, signed a Tripartite Pact in the Reich Chancellery. The three Axis signatories delineated spheres of influence and pledged for the next ten years “to assist one another with all political, economic and military means when one of the three contracting powers is attacked.” This represented a turnabout for Japan. Pro-German circles in Tokyo had been systematically removed from influential posts, thanks to Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, but with the defeat of France, the Japanese hoped to use German victories in the west to expand southward in French Indochina, which would require deterrence of the United States.¹⁸⁹ “The basic aim of the pact is to avoid war with the United States,” Prime Minister Konoe told the cabinet. “However, I think it is necessary for us to display firmness, because if we act humbly, it will only make the United States presumptuous.”¹⁹⁰ Perhaps there was also anticipation of some spoils from a British surrender to Germany. Hitler saw Japan’s enthusiasm as an attempt “to cash in” on Germany’s victories by offering to serve as “harvest helpers.”¹⁹¹ But following the debacle of the air campaign against Britain, the Führer had come around to seeking to deter U.S. support for Britain by wielding the Japanese cudgel.¹⁹²

The agreement still fell short of a binding military alliance. It also specifically excluded the Soviet Union as a target. “Its exclusive purpose,” Ribbentrop informed Molotov, two days before the scheduled signing, “is to bring the elements pressing for America’s entry into the war to their senses.”¹⁹³ When Weizsäcker briefed the Soviet ambassador in Berlin on September 28, he underlined the desire on the part of the three signatories for better relations with the USSR.¹⁹⁴ “Exceptional significance,” noted Comintern chief Dimitrov in his diary for September 28. “Further expansion of the war to world-war dimensions.”¹⁹⁵ An unsigned front-page analysis in Pravda (September 30)—written by Molotov—maintained that the new three-country pact signed in Berlin signified formation of two blocs: Germany, Italy, and Japan versus Britain and the United States, the fantasy Stalin had divulged to Varga, with the Soviet Union as happy bystander. Molotov, anonymously, further reassured readers that the Tripartite Pact had been “no surprise” and reemphasized Soviet neutrality and the continuing validity of the bilateral nonaggression pacts with Germany and Italy.¹⁹⁶

Japanese ruling circles now hoped for improved relations with the USSR, to secure the country’s northern flank and increase the pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to capitulate. Secretly, on October 3, 1940, Japanese and Soviet negotiators were working on a draft nonaggression pact and preliminarily agreed that “the USSR will abandon its support for Chiang and will repress the Chinese Communist party’s anti-Japanese activities; in exchange, Japan recognizes and accepts that the Chinese Communist party will retain as a base the three northwest provinces (Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia).” Negotiators further agreed that the Soviets would acquiesce in any Japanese moves in Indochina, and Japan would not oppose any future Soviet moves in Afghanistan.¹⁹⁷

The fly in the ointment remained German troops in the east. Golikov had reported (October 2) that the Germans were moving many of the troops from within East Prussia and the General Gouvernement closer to the Soviet border. Stalin’s NKVD station chief in Bulgaria secretly reported the shipment of German heavy armaments on barges along the Danube to the Black Sea, right on the Soviet doorstep. But Soviet intelligence adhered to the line that the sharp troop buildup reflected only the unavoidable necessity of moving troops out of France, given the anti-German attitudes prevalent in conquered France. Still, analysts also mentioned Germany’s desire to strengthen its influence in Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans.¹⁹⁸

HITLER’S LATIN FRUSTRATIONS AND BALKAN AMBITIONS

Schulenburg was in Berlin in late September, trying to put relations with Moscow back on track by encouraging a German invitation for a state visit.¹⁹⁹ Ribbentrop had never abandoned his efforts to restore friendly bilateral relations by inviting Molotov, or even Stalin, to Berlin. The Germans, like the British, mistakenly believed that Molotov had never been out of the country (he had visited fascist Italy in 1922), but they nonetheless believed he would reciprocate the German foreign minister’s two visits to Moscow.²⁰⁰ Ribbentrop let the count know that a new invitation to Molotov was in the works. This hoped-for meeting was predicated on a vast European-Asian bloc directed against the British, Ribbentrop’s dream castle.²⁰¹

Hitler’s failure to subdue Britain was eating at him. Britain’s Royal Air Force not only had prevented the Luftwaffe from attaining the air superiority required for a cross-Channel invasion, but was bombing Berlin and other German cities.²⁰² Between July 10 and October 31, 1940, in the so-called Battle of Britain, Hurricanes and Spitfires shot down 1,733 Luftwaffe aircraft. The British lost 915 planes. (“Never had so many owed so much to so few,” Churchill would remark of the air war.) Both Sea Lion and the vague preliminary plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union had been postponed, from fall 1940 to spring 1941. The Wehrmacht was the largest unemployed land army in the world. The Führer, losing the initiative, went into seclusion at the Berghof from October 5 to 8 to contemplate his options.

NKVD intelligence under Beria was reporting that at least 85 infantry divisions—two thirds of the German land army—were deployed in the east, and airfields and other military installations were going up one after another.²⁰³ In October 1940, Beria suddenly became solicitous toward the few hundred Polish officers whom he had not murdered at Katyn and other sites back in spring 1940. He even had the interned Polish lieutenant colonel Zygmunt Berling retrieved from a Soviet labor camp to Moscow in first class. When Merkulov told Berling that there were plans to form a Polish army on Soviet territory, the latter assumed that the more than 20,000 captured Polish officers were in the Soviet Gulag somewhere. “We have no such people now in the Soviet Union,” Beria responded, laconically. Merkulov added: “We committed a big mistake with them.”²⁰⁴

Soon Beria informed Stalin that the NKVD had assembled some two dozen Polish officers as the basis for an anti-German army, just in case. It was a new era. Not a single one of the thirty-five Soviet films produced in 1940 would feature a principal “enemy” of domestic origin.²⁰⁵ No foreign films would be allowed onto the Soviet screen the entire year. Still, a new breakthrough musical comedy emerged: on October 8, 1940, The Radiant Path premiered in Moscow, another smash hit by Grigory Alexandrov, with music by Isaac Dunayevsky, including his “March of the Enthusiasts.” The Radiant Path would seize honors as the year’s top film. It depicted a Cinderella-like illiterate rural housemaid named Tanya (played by the blond-braided, ever radiant Lyubov Orlova), who, thanks to a party organizer, attends literacy classes, becomes a textile factory Stakhanovite weaver, earns the Order of Lenin, flies through the air in an open-top car alongside the Grand Kremlin Palace, and wins love. Tanya easily unmasks the villain, a kulak arsonist, early in the action. “A good film and . . . without a portrait of Comrade Stalin,” the despot told Alexandrov, while smiling with his eyes.²⁰⁶

Also in October, Marshal Kulik married his third wife (Olga Mikhailovskaya), a friend of his daughter’s who was in her final year of high school—he was thirty-two years her senior. Stalin, now in the eighth year of his (second) widowhood, took no such indulgences. He was adjudicating between rival screenplays for a film about a seventeenth-century Georgian military figure, Giorgi Saakadze, who had led an uprising against the Persian shah to liberate and unify Georgia. “The princes and feudalism proved stronger than the [Georgian] tsar and nobles,” Stalin explained to film boss Bolshakov in a letter on October 11, 1940, adding that Saakadze’s efforts to compensate for domestic weakness with foreign alliances had failed, for objective reasons.²⁰⁷

Hitler emerged from his alpine hideaway with a renewed push to subdue Britain, indirectly. But first, on October 12, Wehrmacht troops occupied Romania to secure the Ploieşti oil fields. “The Germans have raised a barrier,” remarked the Italian ambassador to Moscow to his confidant, Schulenburg. “The [Russian] march to the south has been stopped, the oil is at the disposal of the Germans, through Constanza the Germans have reached the Black Sea, the Danube is a German river. This is the first diplomatic defeat of comrade Stalin.”²⁰⁸ In fact, even though TASS issued a denial, Berlin had afforded Moscow forty-eight hours’ advance notice of “training troops” to be stationed on the Danube to “instruct” the Romanian army.²⁰⁹

Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator premiered in the United States on October 15, 1940, parodying Hitler (called Adenoid Hynkel) as a megalomaniacal buffoon whose dictatorship threatens a Jewish barber; Chaplin, who was neither German nor Jewish, played both roles. The reviewer in the New York Times enthused about “the feeble, affected hand salute, the inclination for striking ludicrous attitudes, the fabulous fits of rage and violent facial contortions,” adding of Chaplin’s pantomime: “He is at his best in a wild senseless burst of guttural oratory—a compound of German, Yiddish, and Katzenjammer double-talk, and he reaches positively exalted heights in a plaintive dance which he does with a large balloon representing the globe, bouncing it into the air, pirouetting beneath it—and then bursting into tears when the balloon finally pops.”²¹⁰ In one scene, Hynkel, the dictator of Tomania, meets and bargains with Benzino Napaloni, dictator of Bacteria.²¹¹

On October 17, Molotov’s deputy Vyshinsky received Cripps, who hinted at British movement in its position opposing Soviet incorporation of the Baltic states and claimed to have confidential government information for Molotov personally; when Vyshinsky insisted on a foretaste, according to the Soviet account, Cripps stated, “in connection with events over recent weeks in the Balkans, Near East, and Far East, that British relations with these parts of the world had changed, and accordingly, the relations between Britain and the Soviet Union should also change.” Cripps had convinced himself somehow that the USSR did not want Germany to win the war, and he urged de facto British recognition, until the end of the war, of the territories that the USSR had received to entice it to treat Britain and Germany with equal favor.²¹² That same day, Molotov bade farewell to the Japanese ambassador, who was returning home after two years in Moscow. Each expressed a desire for continued improved bilateral relations, although they had failed to agree to a neutrality pact. When the Japanese envoy inquired of German-Soviet relations, Molotov called them “solid” and predicted that “they would develop further.”²¹³

Ribbentrop had dispatched a nineteen-page letter to Stalin inviting Molotov to Berlin, and, also on October 17, Schulenburg managed to hand it to Molotov.²¹⁴ The text reviewed German-Soviet bilateral relations, justified German military moves in Eastern Europe, and proposed that four powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan, plus the Soviet Union—divide up the world, at British expense. Ribbentrop ingratiatingly pointed out that both the Soviet Union and Germany “were animated in the same degree by the same desire for a New Order in the world against the congealed plutocratic democracies.” What the Nazi foreign minister omitted to mention was that each power had its own “new order,” which clashed not just ideologically but physically over the same Eastern European territories. Stalin, angered over the unilateral German move into Romania, nonetheless agreed to send his top deputy to Berlin in the near future and to thank Ribbentrop for “the instructive analysis.”²¹⁵

Ribbentrop now felt confident enough to draft a German-Italian-Japanese-Soviet pact, and he mused with Hitler about confronting Britain with the most geographically expansive military coalition in history.²¹⁶ At the same time, Hitler was exploring other anti-British chess moves. Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, was sent on a three-day visit to Spain, beginning on October 20, 1940. He was paraded through Madrid streets bedecked in Nazi swastikas, received by Franco at the Pardo Palace, and shown a special bullfight. Julio Martínez Santa-Olalla, a Spanish ethnoarchaeologist who had studied in Germany, regaled Himmler with tales of Spanish-German racial connections through the Visigoths.²¹⁷ But Himmler frowned upon Franco’s gratuitous post-civil-war massacres. To the SS chief, it made more sense to incorporate the workers into the new order, not annihilate them. (The German occupation of France had led to many Spanish political refugees being turned over to Franco.) Be that as it may, Himmler’s visit was mere preparation. Hitler himself, also on October 20, set out on what would be a journey of nearly 4,000 miles on his special train, Amerika, to persuade the French, Spaniards, and Italians to put aside their squabbles in the establishment of a continental bloc against Britain.²¹⁸

On October 23, Hitler met Franco for a one-day summit in France, at Hendaye, a railway station near the Spanish border. The caudillo arrived late, in an aged train once used by King Alfonso XIII, with his foreign minister and brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Súñer in tow. Franco and Hitler went into the parlor coach of the Führer’s train. Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr (military intelligence), had warned Hitler that Franco would resemble “not a hero but a little sausage.” During the talks and dinner, which lasted some nine hours, Franco made breathtaking territorial claims, mostly at French expense, as his price for entering the war on the Nazis’ side. In Hitler’s mind, Franco’s regime would never have survived had it not been for German military aid back in 1936—and yet the caudillo now saw fit to point out that even if Germany were to defeat Britain on the home isles, the British government would sail with its navy to Canada or the United States and continue the war from there. This cheek provoked a riled Hitler to his feet. “Rather than go through that again,” Hitler would tell Mussolini of the meeting, “I would prefer to have three or four teeth taken out.”²¹⁹

The next day, Hitler held a one-day summit with Marshal Pétain of Vichy France, also to explore a potential new ally for the anti-British fight. The French leader put forth a relatively more modest territorial wish list as his price to turn against France’s erstwhile ally Britain, but Pétain did not appear overly enthusiastic. The elderly marshal kept pretending not to hear Hitler very well. The conversation was vague enough that Hitler could imagine France was going to support his proposal, but nothing concrete was achieved. Only in Romania did the Führer come upon a kindred spirit: General Ion Antonescu. At the general’s insistent requests, Hitler had moved German troops into Romania, nominally to help “reorganize” its army.²²⁰ But Mussolini, Hitler’s formal ally, bristled at Germany’s “fait accompli” in Romania, and viewed inclusion of the Spanish or the French in a bloc as a threat to his own fantastic wish list of spoils. Hitler felt constrained to try to mollify the duce, redirecting his train to Florence for a summit meeting on October 28.²²¹ That very morning, Mussolini launched an invasion of Greece. “He will learn from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece,” the duce privately boasted. “This way, things will be even once again.”²²²

Franco, Pétain, and now Mussolini. Greece was already ruled by a pro-Nazi dictator who had studied in Germany, and the gratuitous Italian invasion was launched in the fall rains, on the eve of the winter snows in the Balkan uplands.²²³ Moreover, the Balkans were Germany’s jumping-off point for attacking British positions in the Near East, in the so-called peripheral strategy. Already on November 4, 1940, the Wehrmacht had been directed to plan its own invasion of Greece, via either Hungary and Romania or Yugoslavia and then Bulgaria.²²⁴ Hitler did not abandon some sort of cooperation with France and Spain against Britain.²²⁵ But Molotov committed to visiting Berlin after the USSR’s November 7 holiday.²²⁶ Ribbentrop reminded Molotov of his promise to bring along a portrait of Stalin, and Molotov eagerly agreed to do so.²²⁷ Perhaps the lunatic scheme pushed by the Nazi foreign minister of adding Stalin to the Axis, in a four-power pact, to force Britain into submission, seemed no worse than any of the other (non) options on Hitler’s table? If so, it was clear that Hitler would require German dominance of the entire Balkans.²²⁸

MESSAGE FROM BERLIN

The mass of Soviet inhabitants remained very distant from these machinations, but that was also true of almost all party and state functionaries. They, too, knew little to nothing. Valentin Berezhkov, who was working at the Soviet embassy in Germany, helping to oversee procurement related to the Nazi-Soviet trade agreement, was summoned to Moscow. Previously, he had worked in the tourist bureau in Kiev, where he held the belief that all the foreigners whom he hosted were rich, while “in the Soviet Union we were building a system that would be fair for all.” But upon arriving in capitalist Riga in 1940, on his way to Berlin, he had been shocked at the abundance and affordability of food. Berezhkov’s father had been arrested in the terror but released, so Berezhkov “came to believe that if a person was truly innocent, no one was going to harm him.” Still, having now been recalled to Moscow, he fretted about his own possible arrest. Upon reaching the Soviet Union’s side of the border, he experienced a rush of patriotic feeling, but he was subjected to a humiliating search, as if he were a foreign agent. Berezhkov was promoted, becoming one of Molotov’s two German interpreters, and instructed to prepare for a state visit to Berlin. Thus, a mere two years after having graduated with a degree in engineering, Berezhkov was set to meet Hitler. “The young people of my generation did not know about Stalin’s atrocities,” Berezhkov would recall. “We thought he was like a wise, just, and caring, if strict father of the peoples of our country.”²²⁹

Molotov, in response to Ribbentrop’s long written tutorial and invitation, had bombarded Schulenburg with accusations that Germany had violated the terms of the 1939 Pact, and with Soviet demands: immediate withdrawal of German forces from Finland; long-term Soviet military bases on the Turkish Straits (the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, promised to tsarist Russia in the Great War by Britain and France); a Soviet security treaty with Bulgaria, another key to controlling the Straits; Japan’s revocation of concession rights on Sakhalin; and recognition of a Soviet sphere south of Batum and Baku, in the direction of the Persian Gulf.²³⁰ In other words, relations with Hitler had gravely deteriorated, and Stalin’s ambitions from the relationship had soared.

The Soviet despot was following the same script as he had in August 1939: seeking an advantageous deal. But before Molotov’s arrival in Berlin, Hitler did not bother to respond to the soaring demands. NKVD intelligence reported that “in Germany preparations for improved relations with Russia were proceeding apace” and were aimed at showing the whole world, especially Britain, that nothing could come between Berlin and Moscow. The Germans were saying that Britain stood on the verge of total defeat. NKVD intelligence further reported that Germany was ready to propose a Polish-style partition of Turkey with the Soviets, awarding Stalin the Straits, and possibly a partition of the entire Near East, Britain’s colonial realm. At the same time, there were warnings of consequences if the Soviets failed to support the “Nazi New Order in Europe.” The chatter from the Germans seemed to be directed at feeding the Soviets information to the effect that Berlin was going to rewrite the rules, and from a position of strength.²³¹ Whether Stalin caught this deflating message is unclear.²³²

There were many signals of trouble: Stalin learned from NKVD counterintelligence that Germany was trying to stop Denmark and Sweden from selling machines and equipment to the USSR.²³³ Stalin even sent Gorsky back to London, with a handful of young, inexperienced operatives, to restore the USSR’s intelligence station. Gorsky arrived in November 1940, and his team set about reestablishing contact with the expansive network of agents who had been abandoned, such as Kim Philby in MI6, Anthony Blunt, nominally an officer of the British general staff but actually in British counterintelligence, and others in the foreign office. They were tasked with digging into British efforts to cut a deal with Germany.

The strain on the despot was hard to miss for the inner circle. In impromptu remarks at the end of the annual intimate banquet for the November 7 holiday, in Voroshilov’s Grand Kremlin Palace apartment, Stalin complained that during the major border war with Japan in 1939, he had discovered that “our aircraft can stay aloft for only thirty-five minutes, while German and English aircraft can stay up for several hours!” But when he summoned the aviation specialists for an account, they told him that no one had specifically tasked them with designing Soviet planes that would stay aloft longer. “I am busy at this every day now, meeting with designers and other specialists,” Stalin lashed out. “But I am the only one dealing with all these problems. None of you could be bothered with them. I am out there by myself. . . .”

On what was normally a festive occasion, the despot delivered an aggravated-assault speech. Against the background of recent publications reprising the mythology of his defense of Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) back in 1918, he saw fit to bring up the civil-war-era conflict with Trotsky over tsarist military officers, whom he contrasted with the “people loyal to the revolution, people connected to the masses, by and large noncommissioned officers from the lower ranks.” He also asserted that Lenin had supported him in those clashes with the now assassinated Trotsky. It went far beyond defensiveness, however. “You do not like to learn; you are happy just going along the way you are, complacent,” Stalin berated the men of his regime. “You are squandering Lenin’s legacy.” When Kalinin dared interject something, Stalin became especially menacing: “People are thoughtless, do not want to learn and relearn. They will hear me out and then go on just as before. But I will show you, if I ever lose my patience. You know very well how I can do that.” The group stood silently. Voroshilov’s eyes welled with tears, according to Dimitrov, who observed, “Have never seen and never heard J. V. [Stalin] the way he was that night—a memorable one.”²³⁴

The next night, at the grand banquet in the St. George’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, Stalin—unusually—was absent, provoking rumors among Western diplomats that a struggle for power might be under way.²³⁵ It was nothing of the sort, of course: he was working, likely at the Near Dacha, on his detailed instructions for Molotov’s meeting with Hitler. Point 1 would begin as follows: “To find out the true intentions of Germany and all the participants of the pact of three (Germany, Italy, and Japan) in the execution of the plan to form the ‘New Europe’ and similarly the ‘Great East-Asian Sphere.’”²³⁶

SOVIET-BRITISH FEELERS

Litvinov was living under a form of house arrest at a state dacha in the suburbs, making occasional trips to the Lenin Library, in the city center, to research a dictionary of Russian synonyms.²³⁷ Those in the know speculated that Stalin was keeping him as “insurance” against Hitler, for a possible reorientation to the West.²³⁸ But the intuitive, always prepared Beria had his most trusted minions, including the assassin Sudoplatov, prepare scenarios to make Litvinov disappear, in the event of an order to do so.²³⁹ When it came to the West, Stalin seemed unable to forgive and forget. He had observed (back in November 1939) that “in Germany, the petit-bourgeois nationalists are capable of a sharp turn—they are flexible—not tied to capitalist traditions, unlike bourgeois leaders like Chamberlain and his ilk.”²⁴⁰ By 1940 Hitler was at the height of his power, and Chamberlain and his ilk had been sacked. (On the eve of Molotov’s Berlin visit, Chamberlain died of bowel cancer.) A new, nontrivial gesture had come from Churchill that seemed to play into Stalin’s wheelhouse, but the despot had used an audience with Stafford Cripps to kowtow to Hitler. Not long after Hitler began stationing troops in Romania and making moves to station troops in Turkey, further threatening the British position in the Near East, the foreign office permitted Cripps to submit more formal proposals to Moscow for a British-Soviet pact.²⁴¹

Churchill was not a blind anti-Communist. “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” he had remarked in a radio broadcast not long after the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Treaty of Friendship and the Border. “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”²⁴² He did not spell out how Britain, rather than just Germany, could appeal to those interests. Cripps remained deeply convinced that Nazi and Soviet interests were fundamentally inimical, in a way that British and Soviet interests were not. On October 22, 1940, after having been denied a meeting with Molotov, Cripps had handed the latter’s deputy Vyshinsky a revised offer from the British government. It vowed to treat the USSR on a par with the United States by consulting with Moscow about a postwar order, and in the meantime not to enter into an alliance against the Soviet Union, provided Moscow also refrained from hostile action (even indirectly through agitation). Cripps further communicated—exceeding his authority—that, pending a final postwar settlement, the British government could recognize de facto Soviet sovereignty in the Baltic states, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and “those parts of the former Polish State now under Soviet control.”²⁴³

Cripps relayed that Britain would sign a trade agreement as well, supplying the USSR with goods necessary for its defense. In return, Moscow had to promise to observe the same benevolent neutrality vis-à-vis Britain as the Soviets had adopted toward Germany. Britain was further prepared, if no complications arose with the Axis powers, to proceed to a pact of nonaggression, while asking that if Iran and Turkey became embroiled in war with Germany or its allies, the USSR would assist them in such defense measures as it had adopted toward China (against Japanese aggression) in the past.²⁴⁴ A few days later, on October 26, Cripps again saw Vyshinsky, who indicated that the Soviet government regarded the proposals as being of the greatest importance.²⁴⁵

Then, silence.

Stalin would appear at a reception on October 30, 1940, to culminate the Ten-Day cultural festival of the Buryat-Mongol autonomous republic, the ninth in the kitschy extravaganzas. “The Ten-Days cemented the friendship of peoples and gave it a deep and concrete concept,” enthused Alexander Solodovnikov (b. 1904), a former leather factory worker who had risen to overseeing all theaters for the USSR committee on artistic affairs. “The preparation for the Ten-Days facilitated the development of countless talents, hitherto hidden among the people. Members of Russian theaters actively assisted the establishment of the theaters of brotherly republics. . . . At the same time, they received the richest palette of colors and variety in artistic forms, devices, examples, and cultural traditions lavishly revealed by the peoples of Central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine, Belorussia.” Solodovnikov had led brigades to Minsk and to Ulan Ude, where he discovered that the local wooden theater had no heat, and that the Ukrainian-born party boss of the Buryat-Mongol republic, Semyon Ignatyev, who had survived the terror, kept a collection of bronze Buddha statues in his office cabinet.²⁴⁶

The reason for Soviet silence vis-à-vis Cripps had taken time to emerge: on November 10, Soviet newspapers suddenly announced that Molotov had accepted an invitation from Ribbentrop to visit Berlin. Cripps demanded to see the Soviet foreign affairs commissar but was again fobbed off onto Vyshinsky, with whom he exchanged heated words. When Cripps insisted that Britain’s offer could not wait indefinitely and asked whether the Soviet government had a decision to communicate, Vyshinsky told him the answer was still forthcoming.²⁴⁷

SPIES AND FOOLS

Because of Stalin’s terror rampages and Beria’s ascent, the Germans acquired a double agent with ready access to the Soviet embassy in Berlin. Whereas in 1935 the NKVD intelligence station in Berlin had sixteen operatives besides the station chief, by 1939 that number had dropped to two. For nine months after the station chief had died on the operating table with an ulcer in December 1938, he had no replacement, until finally the Beria minion Amayak Kobulov (“Zakhar”) arrived, posing as an embassy counselor. Kobulov (b. 1906) was a Tbilisi-born Armenian like his older brother, Bogdan. He had completed five years at the Tiflis Trading School, spoke no German, had no intelligence experience, and had never even been abroad. During the terror, in Gagra, he beat those he arrested himself with a pole, after having them placed on the floor. Most recently he had served as NKVD regional boss for Abkhazia (1938) and then Ukraine (1938–39).²⁴⁸ In Berlin, Kobulov fooled no one, as confirmed by the Soviet agent in Gestapo counterintelligence, Willy Lehmann (“Breitenbach”), who had fallen completely out of contact but in late June 1940 had taken the risk of throwing a letter into the Soviet embassy mailbox with rendezvous coordinates and password, thereby reestablishing contact.²⁴⁹ Kobulov was forbidden by Moscow Center to have any contact with the Soviet civilian intelligence spy networks in Germany, which were being reconstituted (see chapter 14). He needed his own.

Kobulov violated basic spycraft, visiting agents at their apartments and bringing them together in a single place. He had been recalled to Moscow HQ to defend his work; Beria complained in writing to Fitin, his underling for foreign intelligence, about the corridor whispers concerning Kobulov’s dangerous amateurism.²⁵⁰ Beria ordered Kobulov to step up the agent recruitment and, in traceable ways, the minion sought spies among the Berlin population who had past Soviet connections. He met Orests Berlings, a twenty-seven-year-old Latvian, the former Berlin correspondent for the Latvian newspaper Brīvā Zeme, who claimed to be well disposed to the USSR, well connected to the German foreign ministry press department, and penniless. By August 15, ten days after their initial acquaintance, Kobulov was already reporting directly to Stalin and Beria that Berlings had been “recruited” and put on retainer, calling him “most reliable.” Berlings told the Germans, who promptly enrolled him as their agent (code-named “Peter”).²⁵¹ Kobulov’s superiors at the NKVD, belatedly alerted, quickly established that Berlings had opposed the Soviet annexation of Latvia and disseminated pro-Nazi propaganda. But Kobulov bragged in Berlings’s presence that his information, bypassing channels, went straight to Stalin.²⁵²

MOLOTOV-HITLER

While Stalin fantasized about a new pact with Hitler, events on the far eastern flank of the USSR continued to be alarming.²⁵³ In the third Five-Year Plan’s investment allocation, the Soviet Far East received fully 10 percent, allowing for construction of strategic railroads to buttress frontiers, a secret tunnel under the Amur River at Khabarovsk, a pipeline under the sea to transport Sakhalin oil to refineries at Komsomolsk, a second port (in addition to Vladivostok) on the Tatar Strait, and roads. Despite mass deportations from the region, a combination of incentives and coercion had boosted the local population to 3.15 million by 1940, up from 2.27 million in 1937.²⁵⁴ Japan, in a dream come true for Stalin, had become stalemated in its war to conquer all of China. But, contrary to his further wishes, a domestic showdown loomed there, desired by both the Nationalists and the Chinese Communists. Mao had dispatched a coded telegram (November 7, 1940) warning of an imminent Chinese Nationalist attack on the Chinese Communists and seeking Stalin’s permission for “a preventive counteroffensive.” Mao’s telegram was received in Moscow on November 12. Dimitrov convened the Comintern executive committee, then tried to stall, instructing Mao to prepare his forces but not to act. That same day, at around 11:00 a.m., Molotov arrived at Berlin’s Anhalter train station, near Potsdamer Platz.²⁵⁵

As Molotov stepped off the train in Berlin, there were puddles everywhere. The greeting party included Ribbentrop, Keitel, Robert Ley (German Labor Front), and Himmler, but not the staunch ideologues Goebbels and Rosenberg. Molotov would be in the Nazi capital for forty-eight hours, accompanied by a sixty-five-person entourage, including Dekanozov (foreign affairs), Tevosyan (ferrous metallurgy), Yakovlev (aviation), and Alexei Krutikov (foreign trade), who would remain in-country for industrial and trade matters. Merkulov (NKVD) supervised sixteen “security” guards tasked with maintaining surveillance of the Soviet delegation (and, the Gestapo suspected, leaving agents behind).²⁵⁶ After an inspection of the honor guard, the Soviets departed the station in a sixty-vehicle convoy. “There was almost no one . . . along the streets,” according to an American correspondent.²⁵⁷ They arrived at the refurbished Schloss Bellevue, a former neoclassical Hohenzollern palace of more than 130 rooms set amid the exotic plants of the Tiergarten. Scented roses filled the opulent rooms and, as at the train station, the hammer-and-sickle flag flew alongside the swastika banner.²⁵⁸ After breakfast, cigars, and cognac, the Soviets were taken to the foreign ministry. Only Molotov and Dekanozov, with interpreters and notetakers, were received. “A luxurious study, perhaps somewhat smaller than Hitler’s own,” the Soviet interpreter Berezhkov recalled of Ribbentrop’s office, some of whose furnishings might have been trophies looted from the Low Countries and France. “Antique gilded furniture. Tapestry covers the walls from floor to ceiling, pictures hanging in heavy frames, porcelain and bronze statues on high stands placed in the corners.”²⁵⁹

A genial Ribbentrop pontificated at length about a division of the world, but he refrained from making concrete proposals. “Germany has already won the war,” he crowed. “No state in the world could alter the situation created as a result of Germany’s victories.”²⁶⁰ Molotov, demanding specifics, managed to get a few words in. Following a white-gloved lunch back at the Bellevue, the foreign affairs commissar was brought to Hitler’s grandiose new Chancellery, in an elaborately choreographed entrance designed to awe. The Führer, in a “study” the size of a congress hall, greeted the Soviet representative with the Nazi upturned palm. Invited to sit on a sofa, Molotov, who wore a rimless pince-nez and generally favored gray suits and stiff-necked white collars, was deemed by the Germans to resemble a mathematics professor. Hitler, described by an aide as “surprisingly gracious and friendly,” delivered a long monologue from his armchair. He expounded on how Germany had been compelled to “penetrate into territories remote from her,” to secure vital raw materials or prevent Britain from establishing a toehold, and acknowledged that “possibly M. Molotov was of the opinion that in one case or another there had been a departure from the conception of spheres of influence which had been agreed.” He also asserted that “as soon as atmospheric conditions improved, Germany would be poised for a great and final blow against England.” Molotov was not awed. No sooner had the monologue finished, recalled the German interpreter, than “the questions hailed down upon Hitler.”²⁶¹

The Hammer made no effort to be ingratiating (not part of his skill set anyway). His top aide had told another member of the delegation, General Alexander Vasilevsky, first deputy chief of the general staff operations directorate (responsible for battle plans), that the aims of the Berlin visit were “to determine the further intentions of Hitler, and as much as possible to delay a German aggression.”²⁶² Whereas Hitler spoke of Soviet interests in British imperial lands (which Britain still controlled), Molotov spoke of Soviet security interests up and down Eastern Europe (which Hitler eyed). Molotov stated that Stalin had given him exact instructions, enumerated the mutual benefits of the Pact, and demanded to know “What was the meaning of the New Order in Europe and in Asia, and what role would the USSR be given in it?”²⁶³ He insisted that “precision is necessary in a delimitation of spheres of influence,” and “particular vigilance is needed in the delimitation of spheres of influence between Germany and Russia.”²⁶⁴

The session lasted two and a half hours before Hitler broke it off. Ribbentrop hosted a lobster dinner, sans Führer, at the Kaiserhof Hotel, near the foreign ministry. The German state secretary, Weizsäcker, thought the Soviets, in their standard-issue dark suits and felt fedoras, resembled extras in a gangster movie. But then again, Göring sported medals across his corpulent frame, from shoulder to waist, and multiple rings of precious stones on his fat fingers. Based on a report by Berlings, the Gestapo conveyed to Hitler and Ribbentrop that “last night, after the reception in the Kaiserhof, Molotov returned to the Bellevue and gathered a narrow circle of his entourage and embassy personnel. According to our agent, he was in a brilliant mood. The length of the talks he had with the Führer and the Reich foreign minister made a major impression on him. Then he said that he had a wonderful personal impression and that everything was going as he had envisioned and hoped.”²⁶⁵

Molotov (perhaps suspecting listening devices) understood that his ingratiating words would reach his Nazi hosts.²⁶⁶ Around midnight at the Bellevue, he wrote a coded telegram for Stalin, his second such cable of the day. “Their answers in conversation are not always clear and require further clarification,” he observed of the meetings. “Hitler’s great interest in reaching agreement to fortify the friendship with the USSR and spheres of influence is evident.” Molotov’s statement to Stalin indicates, of course, that this was Stalin’s great interest. Notwithstanding the nine-page detailed charge (dated November 9, 1940) that Molotov was following to the letter, he took nothing for granted, concluding, “I ask for directives.”²⁶⁷ Molotov was the sole person in the regime to whom Stalin was willing to entrust a one-on-one with Hitler, yet Stalin was micromanaging the talks from Moscow.

Molotov’s second day (November 13) included visits to Göring at the air ministry to discuss German military goods, and to Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess at Nazi party HQ, after which Molotov cabled Stalin that “they received me well and it is evident that they want to strengthen relations with the USSR.”²⁶⁸ In the afternoon, Hitler, this time in the company of Goebbels and Ribbentrop, again received Molotov, along with Dekanozov and Merkulov, for breakfast at 2:00 p.m. The menu, spartan as far as the Soviets were concerned, consisted of beef tea, pheasant, and fruit salad. Formal discussions resumed in Hitler’s vast ceremonial study, ninety feet long and fifty feet wide, with paneling of rare woods, a massive portrait of Bismarck over the colored marble fireplace, and a white marble statue of Frederick the Great on horseback sitting atop a marble table.²⁶⁹ The discussion lasted three and a half hours. Hitler was famous as a gifted orator and actor who intuited his audience’s moods and aspirations, and adapted accordingly. In the Reichstag he was a wise statesman; at party rallies, a fanatical leader; among industrialists, a reasonable nationalist; to women, a child-friendly father figure; to foreign interlocutors, a theatrical performer, alternating between lordly and warmly intimate.²⁷⁰ With the impassive Molotov, neither the poses nor the melodrama worked.

Adhering to Stalin’s cabled corrections of him, Molotov underscored that the 1939 Pact remained in force, adding that “not without the assistance of the Pact with the USSR had Germany been able to complete its operations in Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and France so quickly and with such glory.”²⁷¹ Hitler raised concerns about Bukovina. Molotov accused Hitler of trying to alter the terms of the secret protocol regarding Finland and Romania; Hitler claimed otherwise. Molotov noted that the Soviets merely wanted to protect themselves against an attack through the Gulf of Finland, the Straits, or the Black Sea. The exchange “never became violent,” recalled Hitler’s interpreter, “but the debate on both sides was conducted with singular tenacity.”²⁷² Goebbels judged that Molotov “made an intelligent, astute impression, very reserved. One gets almost nothing out of him. He listens attentively, but nothing more. Even with the Führer.”²⁷³

Hitler rose. As he escorted Molotov and his entourage to the door, he said he “regretted that he had not yet been able to meet such an immense historical personage as Stalin, especially since he believed he himself might possibly enter history,” according to the notetakers. “Molotov agreed with Hitler’s statement on the desirability of such a meeting and expressed the hope that such a meeting would take place.”²⁷⁴

The two sides could not even agree on a follow-up visit by Ribbentrop to Moscow. Amid the inconclusiveness, scores of top Nazis—but not the Führer—attended a farewell banquet given by the Soviet ambassador (the former textile plant manager) at the Unter den Linden Soviet embassy, whose fading tsarist-era splendor was now overseen by a bust of Lenin. The vodka and caviar were prodigious. “No capitalist or plutocratic . . . table could have been more richly spread,” recalled the German interpreter. “It was a very good party.”²⁷⁵

Churchill cut the festivities short: a British bombing squadron appeared over central Berlin at around 8:30 p.m. Ribbentrop conveyed Molotov the short distance to the safety of his bunker beneath the foreign ministry (the Soviet embassy had none). As a result, additional, unplanned talks ensued, from 9:45 p.m. until nearly midnight. The Nazi foreign minister removed from his pocket and read aloud a draft text, three paragraphs in length, on converting the Tripartite Pact into a four-power pact, with secret protocols to be appended later. A four-power pact would have confronted Britain, as well as the United States, with formidable challenges: the likely fall of not just the European continent but the Mediterranean, the Near East, and the Far East into the clutches of authoritarian Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union.²⁷⁶ At the same time, it was doubtful whether the tripartite alliance could counter the combined might of the Anglo-American bloc without the Soviet Union.

Molotov, according to the German record, again insisted that a new understanding of Soviet-German relations was a prerequisite to discussions about the USSR joining a pact of four; the Soviet record indicates that Molotov demanded an explanation of the alliance between Germany, Japan, and Italy and insisted on the importance to the USSR of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Swedish neutrality, Finland, and more.²⁷⁷ Ribbentrop resumed expounding on the pending liquidation of the British empire. “If England is defeated, why are we sitting in this shelter?” Molotov interjected, in a retort Stalin would cherish and retell. “And whose bombs are dropping so close that we can hear the explosions even here?”²⁷⁸

THE NONPIVOT

The British press descended into a frenzy over Molotov’s visit to Berlin, warning that the Soviet Union was about to join the Axis. Prior to Molotov’s return, Stalin had sent suggestions on what the despot assumed would be a joint communiqué issued in Berlin. “The exchange of views took place in an atmosphere of mutual trust,” Stalin had written, “and they established mutual understanding on all the most important questions of interest to the USSR and Germany.” He had also instructed Molotov that “it would be better if the Germans proposed their draft first.” In fact, the Germans proposed nothing, and no joint communiqué was issued. After midnight on November 13–14, Molotov had cabled Stalin and admitted that the Berlin meetings “had not delivered the desired results.” The USSR’s interests in Eastern Europe were not being acknowledged. “Nothing to boast about, but at a minimum I ascertained the current mood of Hitler, which is something we will have to come to grips with.”²⁷⁹ Molotov departed Berlin later that morning. Pravda (November 15) published the proposed joint communiqué unilaterally.²⁸⁰ But the Soviet press proved unable to name a single concrete achievement of Molotov’s visit.²⁸¹

The Germans recorded Amayak Kobulov as having stated that Molotov’s visit was a “powerful demonstration,” but that “not everything that shines is gold.”²⁸² Some members of the Soviet delegation, while still in Berlin, had voiced suspicions that with the Tripartite Pact, Germany was actually working to “encircle” the Soviet Union, while also embroiling it in conflict with Britain over imperial possessions. Soviet military intelligence would inform Moscow that Scheliha (“Aryan”) had heard high officials in the German foreign ministry conclude that, during Molotov’s November 1940 visit, “consensus was not reached on a single important question—not on the question of Finland, not on the question of Bulgaria.”²⁸³ On the German side, Dr. Otto Meissner, the head of the (ceremonial) presidential chancellery, considered an old-school adherent of the Bismarckian policy of ties with Russia, was given the impression—which, as expected, he repeated so that it reached Soviet ears—that Hitler was “very satisfied with the visit and that Molotov’s personality impressed him.”²⁸⁴ This was disinformation that the Nazi regime rightly expected would now spread. Most German insiders judged Molotov’s visit a failure. “Two things became clear in the discussions,” one of Hitler’s interpreters later noted. “Hitler’s intention to push the Soviet Union in the direction of the Persian Gulf, and his unwillingness to acknowledge any Soviet interest in Europe.”²⁸⁵

Molotov reached Moscow on November 15. There is no reliable account of the report he delivered that evening to Stalin and anyone else the despot summoned to the Near Dacha.²⁸⁶ On orders, Molotov’s interpreter (Pavlov) told a pro-Soviet American that Molotov had “thawed” in Berlin and that Hitler had made a big impression. A cable from Molotov to Maisky in London (November 17) soberly noted that the Germans were trying to push the Soviets toward India and wanted Turkey for themselves.²⁸⁷ But at a reception given by the Italian ambassador, Augusto Rosso, for representatives of “friendly countries,” the Bulgarian envoy to Moscow perceived Molotov as “swollen-headed and puffed up.”²⁸⁸ Molotov, just as Stalin instructed, had stood up to Hitler.

Back in 1939, when Stalin had understood, correctly, the emptiness of the British and French negotiating positions vis-à-vis Moscow, he had not hesitated to humiliate them. Of course, at that time, he was assiduously cultivating an alternative: Nazi Germany. In 1940, he had not pursued a genuine alternative to Germany should its negotiating position prove empty. Stalin had not gone to the British of his own accord to create leverage for his demands vis-à-vis a newly triumphant Germany; the British, in the person of Sir Stafford Cripps, had come to him. Stalin only belatedly responded to the sincere British offers of a trade-and-nonaggression pact, and not even through the diplomatic channels in which they had been conveyed. Cripps, to accommodate Stalin’s requests, had urged the British government that any talks with Moscow had to be carried out in the utmost secrecy—no small feat for an open society and leak-prone political system like Britain’s. But then, on November 16, the confidential British proposals appeared in the English-language press, as Cripps heard over BBC radio in Moscow. Irate, he suspected the British foreign office, but the source was the Soviet embassy in London.²⁸⁹ In the event, Vyshinsky’s initial reaction to the Cripps proposal—deeming it of the greatest importance—had been shamelessly disingenuous. Stalin had used Cripps, again, then hung him out to dry, in a clumsy warning-cum-ingratiation directed at Hitler.

Other British actions unintentionally worked against rapprochement: Molotov’s unplanned refuge in the Berlin bomb shelter, a result of British bombing raids, had evidently helped solidify his view that Germany was still deeply mired in a war in the west, a circumstance that he interpreted in light of his conviction that no German leader would willingly launch a two-front war by attacking in the east. “Even after his visit to Berlin in November 1940, Molotov continued to assert that Hitler would not attack,” recalled Zhukov, who added that “one must take into account that in Stalin’s eyes, in this case, Molotov had the added authority of someone who had personally visited Berlin.”²⁹⁰

BULGARIAN GAMBIT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

READING HITLER’S INTENTIONS

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

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

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

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

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

SUPREME CUNNING?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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