In 1936 Andr6 Gide, a faithful friend of the Soviet Union, visited the land of socialism by invitation from the highest quarters. His travel notes, Retour de VURSS, contained quite a few critical remarks, although his impressions of the country on the whole were favorable. This led to a scandal among "progressives" around the world and especially in the Soviet Union. Gide was branded forever an enemy of socialism. He had observed quite rightly that "in the USSR everyone knows ahead of time that there is only one opinion on any question, once and for all. ... Every morning Pravda instructs Soviet citizens in what they should know, think, and believe."55 Gide failed to understand the main thing, though; Pravda had a far more important task—to make Soviet citizens remember differently and think differently than they had been made to do the day before.

Stalin's "comments" on historical questions stressed above all that a history of Russia should be written together with a history of the other peoples that had joined the Soviet federation. A famous formula was changed: instead of "Russia, a prisonhouse of nations," it was necessary now to say "tsarism, a prisonhouse of nations." Among Pravdas articles on cultural questions in 1936, it printed a special resolution by the Central Committee on a production of Borodin's comic opera Bogatyri (Epic heroes), updated with a new text by Demyan Bedny. The farce had been received favorably in 1932: 'The play makes some daring incursions into the present day, which heightens its political effectiveness," said a review in Worker and Theater.56 By 1936 everything had changed.

The production... (a) attempts to glorify banditry in Kievan Russia as if it were a positive revolutionary element, which contradicts real history and is completely false in its political implications; (b) it gratuitously slanders the heroes of Russia's folk epics, when in the eyes of the people the most important of those heroes represent the best features of the Russian people themselves; (c) it gives an antihistorical and contemptuous picture of Russia's conversion to Christianity, which in reality was a positive step in the history of the Russian people.57

A decree of the Central Committee and the Sovnarkom was published together with the "comments" announcing the formation of a commission "to review, improve, and where necessary, rework already written history textbooks." On March 3, 1936, a contest began for "the best elementary school textbook presenting a basic course on the history of the USSR, with brief reference to world history." The results were announced in August 1937. Besides announcing the "best textbook," oddly enough the jury subjected all the views presented in the "comments" to scathing criticism, not naming the authors, of course, but only certain persons "active in historical science." This criticism was not purely academic; nine of the ten jurors were arrested in 1937—1938. The tenth was Zhdanov, who had served as chairman of the jury.

From 1934 to 1936 the past was nationalized and totally relativized. Facts only existed to the degree that Stalin mentioned them, and only in the interpretation he gave them. If he said, 'The barbarians and the slaves overthrew the Roman empire with a crash," any professor who dared to tell his students that the empire had lasted another 550 years after the Spartacus revolt would go straight to jail. Once when he casually remarked that the Azerbaijani people must have descended from the Medes, the result was that linguists searched for fifteen years to find words of Median origin in the Azeri language, "although the 'Median language' existed only in myth."58

'The past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished," George Orwell wrote in his account of a society without memory.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and tree and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.59

"Marxist-Leninist history" was the sole "truth about the past," said Pravda on January 27, 1936. "History in the hands of the Bolsheviks must be a concrete science, the objective truth, and thereby serve as a tremen­dous weapon in the struggle for socialism," Pravda repeated on August 22, 1937. In a similar vein Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: "History is not studied to learn what happened in the past but to learn what behavior will be necessary in the future to fight for the existence of our people."60

In order to assume the role of supreme historian, Stalin had to discredit and destroy the Pokrovsky school. That was one of the reasons why Stalin revived Russian nationalism and patriotism. Pokrovsky had ardently ex­posed and denounced Russian imperialism and colonialism and the Russian autocracy. For him, "Muscovite imperialism" began in the sixteenth century, when "the southern part of the river route from Europe to Asia, from Kazan to Astrakhan, was seized" by Moscow and when it began its effort "to seize the northern part as well, the outlet to the Baltic Sea."61 Likewise the conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia were criminal colonial wars: "Making Asians tremble at the Russian name was not achieved easily or cheaply. ... Entire villages were burned to the ground in retaliation for one Russian body found in the vicinity."62 Pokrovsky publicized little-known vices of the "great" Russian tsars, that Peter the Great had been a syphilitic, that the monster Ivan the Terrible "brazenly asserted he was not a Russian at all, but a German, and the entire boyar nobility of his time, imitating their tsar, began to trace their ancestries back to some foreign notable."63

Having completed the edifice of his state, Stalin needed some ideological cement to help hold it in place, something that orthodox Marxism, with its promise of "the withering away of the state" could not provide. The cement he found was patriotism, which he called Soviet, although it sounded more and more like plain old Russian patriotism. What counted most for Stalin was that Russian patriotism had deep roots among the people. Also, Russian history contained useful examples for training his subjects in such virtues as loyalty to the state, and to the ruler, and military courage. Stalin chose what he found useful out of the Russian past: heroes, worthy character traits, enemies to hate, friends to love.

Soviet history, as cooked to taste by Stalin, took the form of a monstrous mixture of nationalism and Marxism. The history textbook was allowed to mention the coming of Christianity to Russia, but only because it repre­sented "progress compared to pagan barbarism," and to assert that the monasteries had played "a progressive role in the first few centuries after Russia's conversion" because they taught people to read and write and served as "bases for colonization."64 The building of a strong Muscovite state and the drive to reach an outlet to the sea were also labeled progressive, as were certain grand dukes and tsars, through whom the laws of history operated, and if certain movements among the people hampered the "pro­gressive" actions of the tsars, the former became "reactionary." The people were progressive when they supported a good tsar and, incidentally, usually did support him, especially against reactionary feudal lords. That was how orthodox Marxist schematism was ingeniously intertwined with schematic orthodox nationalism.

Aleksei Tolstoy apparently foresaw the changing attitude of the party, that is, Stalin, toward the Russian past. His novel Peter the Great first appeared in 1930, with a second part in 1934. The critics in RAPP de­nounced it as "ideologically alien." In 1931 Emil Ludwig asked Stalin, "Do you consider yourself a continuator of the work of Peter the Great?" Stalin answered categorically: "Not at all. Historical parallels are always risky. This one is absurd,"65 In 1937 Pravda showed the change of attitude: "Owing to the baneful influence of Pokrovsky, many of our historians have taken a terribly contemptuous approach to the figure of Tsar Peter I." That was wrong. "Peter was a great political figure and a great reformer for his time, an outstanding personality, colorful and picturesque." Pravda went on the explain that "the age of Peter I was one of the most progressive periods in Russian history."66

Another great progressive was born in 1937, Prince Alexander Nevsky. The resurrection of Saint Alexander, whose remains had at one time been scornfully ejected from the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Petrograd by the Bolshevik scientific atheists, had become necessary owing to foreign policy considerations. An enemy of the Germans, and a victor over them, was needed.

The first volume of the Small Soviet Encyclopedia, which was also the first Soviet encyclopedia, had taken a dim view of Alexander Nevsky.

As prince of Novgorod, he rendered valuable service to the capitalists of Novgorod, successfully holding onto the shores of the Gulf of Finland for their sake. In 1252 he obtained the yarlyk from the Golden Horde, making him a grand duke. Alexander skillfully smoothed over the conflicts between the Russian feudal lords and the Tatar khan and suppressed disturbances among the Russian population protesting the heavy tribute being paid to the Tatars.

All of this changed in 1937. Suddenly Alexander Nevsky was proclaimed a great patriot, a great warrior who had stopped the German Drang nach Osten, and a great statesman, who had tried to achieve centralization and the unification of the Russian principalities under "one strong arm." On Stalin's orders, Sergei Eisenstein made a film showing that the main enemy was the Germans. "We can wait to deal with the Mongols. There is an enemy more dangerous than the Tatar. ... Closer, more vicious. One you can't buy him off by paying tribute—the German."67 In 1937 when this screenplay was written by Eisenstein and Petr Pavlenko, and in 1938 when the film came out, these words sounded almost like an article from Pravda on foreign policy, with the Mongol (Japan) on one side and the German (Hitler) on the other. Nine months after the film's appearance, in August 1939, the foreign policy lineup had changed, the film had lost its topicality, and it was withdrawn from Soviet movie theaters. The German was no longer the enemy; he had been bought off with tribute.

Alexander Nevsky also had a message for the domestic political scene; it showed the harmful influence of the veche (the elected popular assembly in Novgorod) and the benefits of a single ruler toward whom the boundless devotion of the people is directed. Stalin personally revised the screenplay, editing out the scene of Alexander's death. He preferred the movie to end with Alexander's triumphal entry into Pskov. After all, "Such a good prince must not die!"68 In an Aleksei Tolstoy screenplay, another "good prince," Tsar Peter, is made to say: "I was very harsh with you, my children. Not for my own sake, but because Russia was so dear to me."

Aleksandr Dovzhenko, speaking in 1940 at a conference on the historical film, took note of one of its peculiar features:

In the films on Peter the Great, on Alexander Nevsky, on Minin and Po- zharsky, and on Bogdan Khmelnitsky... there is a kind of servile desire to bring history closer to our time and even to put lines in the heroes' mouths that are virtually taken from the current speeches of our leaders. The result is that Alexander Nevsky could be appointed secretary of the regional party committee in Pskov, and something along the same lines with Peter and the others.69

Dovzhenko's remarks, not published until 1964, were amazingly bold. He knew very well that Peter and Alexander Nevsky were speaking with the voice not of some regional secretary but of the general secretary of the Central Committee and that the general secretary had appointed himself the new Peter, the new Alexander Nevsky—and later, the new Ivan the Terrible.

Petr Pavlenko, Stalin's favorite scriptwriter, was working on a novel at the same time as the screenplay for Alexander Nevsky. It was about the coming war. In it he imaginatively portrayed how Stalin would parade through Moscow on the night the war began, and he described the scene in the same terms he had used for Alexander Nevsky's triumphal entry into Pskov.

The crowd roared. It chanted, "Stalin, Stalin, Stalin." It was a battle cry of strength and honor. 'Forward," it seemed to say. At the height of its aroused fury the crowd was calling for its leader, and at two o'clock in the morning he came from the Kremlin to the Bolshoi Theater to be with Moscow in its time of peril. ... His calm figure, dressed in a soldier's greatcoat buttoned to the neck, with a soldier's cap on his head, was modest enough to make you cry. There was nothing superfluous or accidental about his person. His face was stern. He strode along at a rapid pace, turning often to the members of the Politburo and the government who surrounded him to say something to them, holding his hand up all the while to the crowds of people.70

Four years later, when war actually broke out, Stalin did anything but come out to greet the people. He went into hiding at his dacha outside Moscow.

Films and novels about "history," promoting Stalin's current policies and his shifting, utilitarian conceptions of the past, of course had the purpose of inducing "the desired psychological state" in the citizenry, as a historian of Nazi films put it in reference to the analogous process in Germany. Soviet and Nazi movies strikingly resembled each other. The Nazi movie The Old King and the Young (1935) dramatized the conflict between the Prussian king, Frederick Wilhelm I, and his son, the future Frederick II, with the father demanding unconditional obedience as commander-in-chief of the army and head of state. This scenario was repeated almost word for word in the conflict between Peter the Great and Tsarevich Aleksei (in the screen version of Aleksei Tolstoy's Peter the Great). The only difference was that Peter saw he could not make a great ruler out of his son, and so killed him. "All of Hitler's actions became acceptable," writes a historian of the Nazi cinema, "because ever since the time of Frederick Wilhelm II people supposedly had said, 'The country will collapse if it is not guided by a strong will.'"71

The elimination of the "Marxist historical school" untied Stalin's hands. Pokrovsky's schematism had certain fixed points of reference, such as classes, the role of the proletariat. In keeping with orthodox Marxism, Pokrovsky argued that semifeudal Russia could not have been more pro­gressive than capitalist England. Stalin swept aside all these 'Talmudic subtleties," while retaining Marxist phraseology and Marxism's unlimited possibilities for "dialectical" self-refutation. Stalin himself would decide what Marxism was. He made clear that it was unnecessary for others to read Marx; he had done the reading for them.

This "turn on the historical front" had important practical consequences, especially in relation to the non-Russian nationalities.

The first period in the history of the national republics, from the adoption of the 1922 constitution to the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan, passed under the aegis of the slogan "indigenization" (korenizatsiya), meaning the training and development of "indigenous cadres" and reliance on the native population, rather than Russian or Russified elements. The term first ap­peared in party resolutions at the Tenth Congress, in 1921. The Soviet authorities could not get by in that early period without the help of the native intelligentsia and was forced to try to win them over. The national republics at that time enjoyed fairly broad powers in domestic political, economic, and especially cultural affairs. Each republic was not only al­lowed but obliged to have its own language. Every national group, even the smallest, acquired its own alphabet. There was another aspect, however, to the imposition of an obligatory national language in areas where several languages were spoken, as in Byelorussia and especially Transcaucasia. It prevented the unification of several nationalities around one major non- Russian language. Administrative fragmentation, especially in Central Asia, served the same purpose.

The policy of encouraging indigenous populations bore some fruit, es­pecially on the cultural level. In the Ukraine, for example, a real cultural renaissance took place. There was a negative side, however. Native "cadres" were inclined toward independence from the center, toward cultural au­tonomy and "national communism." An attempt to combine communist ideas with national traditions emerged in the non-Russian republics as well as at the center of power. These national communist trends contained an element of discontent over the centralizing habits of "Soviet colonialism." Stalin sent up a danger signal about this as early as 1926 in a letter to Kaganovich and other members of the Ukrainian Politburo.72

From the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, as a Soviet historian admits, "fundamental changes occurred in relations between the central government and the republics. The powers of the central institutions were considerably expanded, and the centralization of the unified state was intensified."73 In this second period of relations between the republics and the center, Moscow stripped the national republics of all their rights. "The economic autonomy of the republics was narrowed down more and more." In addition, "cen­tralization was carried out in a number of cases with violations of Leninist principles, expressed in the form of a downgrading or diminution of the sovereign rights of the union republics."74

Arrests took place in all the national republics. Purges began in 1929 and continued without interruption for ten years, hitting the native cadres particularly hard. In 1933 Pavel Postyshev was sent to the Ukraine by Moscow with a special assignment to "knock some people in the head as a lesson to others."75 His main target was Nikolai Skrypnik, the Old Bol­shevik and Ukrainian commissar of education, who was an ardent supporter of Ukrainization. In 1928 he had approved a new Ukrainian orthography. In 1933 he was accused, among other things, of attempting to "separate the Ukrainian language from Russian" and "sell it" to Polish, German, and other Western languages.76 On July 7, 1933, Skrypnik committed suicide. Half a year later Stalin spoke of Skrypnik's "falling into sin."77

In Tadzhikistan the premier, Khodzhibaev, was expelled from the party, along with the president of the republic's Central Soviet Executive Com­mittee, Maksum, and other leaders.78 The leaderships of Byelorussia, Kirghizia, and other republics were also purged. A 1932 Central Committee resolution calling for the dissolution of all literary tendencies, groupings, and associations made national cultures all the more dependent on Moscow.

The Stalinist interpretation of history furnished the central government with a new and powerful weapon in its struggle against all forms of national independence. Stalin's "comments" called for a history not just of Russia but of the Soviet Union as a whole, and sure enough, when a history textbook appeared in 1937, A Short Course in the History of the USSR, under the editorship of one Professor Shestakov, it began with the history of the kingdom of Urartu. Thus the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Re­publics began on the shores of Lake Van, nine centuries before Christ. The ruling of the jury in the contest for the best textbook on the history of the Soviet Union went even further. Reconsidering the main thesis of the Pokrovsky school, that annexation of other nations by the Russian empire had been an absolute evil, the jury recommended that such annexation be viewed as "a lesser evil." A few years later historians were advised to regard unification with Russia as an absolute good. To this day, Soviet historians invariably refer to the incorporation of the Ukraine (under Bogdan Khmelnitsky) into Russia as the "unification of two great sister peoples." Earlier, in 1931, the Small Soviet Encyclopedia had criticized Khmelnitsky for betraying the Ukrainian "peasants' revolution to the Moscow serf owners." In 1940 the same historical event was described as "a lesser evil than annexation by the Poland of the landed gentry or the sultan's Turkey. "79

The new conception of history, which was completely ahistorical and allowed facts, dates, events, individuals to be juggled freely in accordance with the latest resolutions of the Central Committee, opened up tremendous practical possibilities. For example, in 1940, when Molotov explained the reasons for the annexation of the Baltic republics (in the post-Stalin era this was always called "the victory of the socialist revolution in the Baltic states,"80 he indicated that these nations had been "part of the USSR" in the past.81

Until 1930 it was commonly said that the revolution had opened the way to friendship among the peoples of the Soviet Union. After the 1934—1936 period this friendship was said to be "eternal," these nations had always been friends, from the time of Kievan Rus and the grand dukes of Moscow, and their friendship would live forever. It became a crime to question this idea. Under the slogan of eternal friendship a brutal, massive repression was carried out in the union republics—during the Great Terror. The totalitarian state, which had achieved unification in all spheres of life, wished to fuse the varied Soviet peoples into a single socialist people, with a common past but no memory.

ORDINARY TERROR

The Kirov assassination inaugurated an era that is often called the Great Terror. This period is particularly interesting because of the prominence of the victims: leaders of the party, the government, the military, and the economy. In fact, the party seemed to be bent on its own destruction. Nevertheless, the breadth of repression in 1936-1938 was not on a par with the genocide against the peasants in 1930—1934. The Great Terror, if we are to use the term, was unique in its universality. Preceding waves of repression had targeted specific social groups, but the terror that began in 1935 was directed against society as a whole.

The enigma of the Great Terror has never ceased to fascinate historians, sociologists, psychologists. Nikita Khrushchev, in his memoirs, asks: "Why did Stalin commit these crimes? Was he deceived? If he was deceived, then by whom? And with how many victims did we pay for this deception?"82 The question, What were the causes of the Great Terror? has evoked nu­merous and varied answers, ranging from the need to replace an aging generation of leaders to Stalin's madness. All of them may fit as parts of the puzzle—with the exception of madness. There are substantial indi­cations that after the war Stalin became mentally unbalanced,83 but the same cannot be said of the period 1935—1938. To be sure, the obvious pleasure he took in torturing and killing people was no sign of perfect mental health. In 1937 he suggested that all leading officials train at least two deputies capable of replacing them. Four times he assigned people to the post of commissar of posts and telegraph before destroying them. This was how he displayed his "sense of humor," which Churchill so greatly appreciated.

Some writers have seen in Stalin a personality similar to that of Joseph Fouche, the French revolutionist who went on to become minister of police under the Consulate and Napoleon, and who also served Louis XVIII after the restoration. Stalin, for his part, spoke highly of Fouch6: "He tricked them all; he made a fool of everyone." Boris Souvarine noted the "curious similarity in temperament and psychology" between Stalin and Fouch6, adding that both had been seminarians in their youth.84 The difference was of course that Fouch6 never became emperor. It may be that after reading Stefan Zweig's book Joseph Fouch^, which was a great success in Moscow in the 1930s, Stalin began to fear that there was a Fouch6 around him. Ezhov, in fact, accused Yagoda, after replacing him as people's commissar of internal affairs, of "conducting a policy к la Fouche."85

Stalin pursued a different kind of policy. In building a socialist state, that is, a totalitarian one (the terms may not be synonymous in theory, but in practice they have been identical), Stalin needed a monolithic party, one that would "obey him like a corpse," to borrow the excellent German expression. By 1935 the party had penetrated every cell of the social organism, so that a blow against the party affected every part of the state. That is why the terror became total. When one strand was pulled, the whole ball of string came along: the governmental, military, economic, and cultural apparatuses.

The enemy was everywhere. The country was in the throes of madness. On March 3 and 5, 1937, Stalin gave his most candid speeches, at the notorious "February—March Plenum" of the Central Committee, which was entirely devoted to implementing the terror. Stalin warned that since the enemy was everywhere, he who carried a party card was the most dangerous. This line of thought was developed in numerous pamphlets all with the same title: "Certain Perfidious Practices of Foreign Intelligence Agencies in Their Recruitment Work." One of the authors explained, "In order to carry out their spy missions, they find all means are good, being an 'active militant,' being a Stakhanovite at work... or even constantly marrying and divorcing as a way of finding a suitable informant."86 The enemy was everywhere, the "former people" (those who had held positions under the old regime), the wreckers, the kulaks, and now the spies. No one could be trusted. The newspapers hammered away at that theme, and so did the movies. Pavlenko's novel about the coming war included a Chinese Com­munist, broken by torture, who escaped while being taken out to be shot. In the movie version of the book, this Communist confesses to being a spy. In another movie the hero and the spy resemble one another exactly. The message was constantly stressed: anyone could be a spy. In a terrible joke of the period, a man looks at himself in the mirror and says, "It's either you or me."

The patron—proteg6 system on which the party apparatus was based meant that when an important leader was arrested a geometric progression of arrests ensued. On March 5, 1937, Stalin cited the case of a Central Committee secretary named Mirzoyan who, when assigned to Kazakhstan, gathered up thirty or forty of "his own people" from Azerbaijan and the Urals, where he had previously worked, and "entrusted them with the responsible posts" in his new location. Mirzoyan, said Stalin, had an entire "workshop" that he took around with him. Obviously things did not go well for this crew when its foreman was arrested.

There were other grounds for arrest, though. Stalin observed that there were comrades who had always "fought against Trotskyism but nevertheless maintained personal relations with certain Trotskyists." Personal links with enemies of the people was sufficient reason to arrest someone. According to Khrushchev, Beria warned him, after becoming head of the NKVD, that his relations with former NKVD boss Ezhov had been too friendly.

Arrests in this period were not limited to friends and acquaintances of those arrested earlier, however. They were based on regional and district quotas. Planning applied to this industry, too. Vladimir Petrov, who worked in the cryptography division of the NKVD in Moscow, recalls the texts of some telegrams sent out at the time: "Frunze. NKVD. You are charged with exterminating 10,000 enemies of the people. Report results by signal. Ezhov." The telegram to Sverdlovsk ordered that 15,000 be wiped out.87

"The party began to lose its authority and become subordinated to the NKVD," Khrushchev reports. Certainly all the arrests and executions were carried out by the NKVD, which was also in charge of the camps, but it and its personnel were just as defenseless as other Soviet institutions and citizens. On September 25, 1936, Stalin sent a telegram from Sochi to Moscow, addressed to Kaganovich, Molotov, and the other members of the Politburo. (It was cosigned by Zhdanov.)

We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent that comrade Ezhov be appointed to the post of people's commissar of internal affairs. Yagoda has definitely proved himself to be incapable of unmasking the Trotskyite- Zinovievite bloc. The GPU lagged behind for four years in this matter. This has been noted by all party activists and by most representatives of the NKVD.

(The reference to a four-year lag was Stalin's way of reminding the others of the Ryutin affair, in which he had asked for the death penalty to no avail.) That telegram was sufficient to put an end to Yagoda, although he had been Stalin's most loyal henchman since 1933 and controlled the "all- powerful" machinery of the NKVD. He went like a lamb to the slaughter, exactly like the millions of Soviet citizens he himself had victimized. On March 18, 1937, Ezhov spoke to a gathering of the senior officers of the NKVD in their clubroom at the Lubyanka, NKVD headquarters. He announced that their former boss, Yagoda, had been an agent of the tsarist Okhrana since 1907 (at which time he would have been ten years old), that he was a German spy, and that his closest collaborators had also been German spies. Nobody blinked an eye.88 Thus the Cheka officials of "the Yagoda enrollment" went to their deaths as submissively as their chief. In July 1938 Stalin repeated the operation. He appointed Beria to be Ezhov's deputy, then in December Beria replaced Ezhov, and the "Ezhov enroll­ment" was liquidated without the slightest resistance.

The mad wave of terror was speeded along more madly than ever by the bloody Moscow trials. In August 1936 Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen "coconspirators" were tried. A year and a half earlier they had been con­victed as "morally responsible" for the Kirov assassination, a charge they admitted. Now they were tried for the assassination itself, and for planning to kill Stalin, spying for foreign intelligence, and so forth. In January 1937 came the turn of Pyatakov, Radek, and fifeen "coconspirators" accused of essentially the same crimes.

On June 13, 1937, Commissar of Defense Voroshilov published an an­nouncement concerning the arrest of a group of top military commanders, who had confessed to "treason, sabotage, and espionage." Pravda reported that they had all been shot after being sentenced by a military court. Among them were Deputy Commissar of Defense Tukhachevsky; Yakir, commander of the Kiev Military District; Uborevich, commander of the Byelorussian Military District; Primakov, deputy commander of the Leningrad Military district; Putna, the Soviet military аиасЬё in London; corps commanders Eideman and Feldman; and army commander Kork. Another traitor was said to have shot himself—Yan Gamarnik, also a deputy commissar of defense and head of the army's political directorate.

The Red Army was decapitated. Its best senior commanders were de­stroyed. In 1932 Boris Souvarine had asked Isaac Babel if there was any change in the Soviet Union. Babel had a one-word answer: war. In the event of war, who would lead the army? Souvarine asked. Babel, who knew the army's top commanders very well, answered without hesitation: Putna.89 Vitovt Putna, who had served in the same guards regiment as Tukhachevsky before the revolution, was among the first to be executed.

From May 1937 to September 1938 the victims of repression [in the military] included nearly half the regimental commanders, nearly all brigade com­manders, and all commanders of army corps and military districts, as well as members of military councils and heads of political directorates in the military districts, the majority of political commissars in army corps, divi­sions, and brigades, almost one-third of the regimental commissars, and many instructors at military academies.90

In reality the army's losses were even more devastating than the above admission in an official publication. Because of the purge in the military the army was totally unprepared at the outbreak of war, entirely lacking a well-trained command staff.

One of the side effects of the terror was a new wave of defections. One defector, Walter Krivitsky, had a chance to reveal some of Stalin's secrets before being murdered by a Soviet agent. In particular, he revealed that Stalin had given orders to the NKVD to collaborate with the Gestapo in falsifying all the documents that later served as the main evidence against Tukhachevsky and the other murdered generals. After the war a Gestapo agent named Alfred Naujocks, who had directed the doctoring of these documents, confirmed Krivitsky's allegations. The only difference was that Naujocks believed the idea had been masterminded not by Stalin but by Heydrich, the head of the Gestapo, who said that "if this affair is successful, it will be Russia's greatest disaster since the revolution."91 Neither Heydrich nor Hitler (who gave the green light for the operation) knew that Stalin had dreamed up the whole elaborate scheme. Stalin oversaw all the details of this purge in person. At the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961 it was revealed that there had been no trial of the leaders of the Red Army. The Politburo had simply voted for their execution, then afterward the press accounts told of an imaginary military tribunal, sentences and so on.

Stalin's work in personally supervising the terror consisted essentially in signing lists that were brought to him, lists authorizing the arrest or execution of tens of thousands of leaders of the party, the government, and the economy. He also directly oversaw some of the interrogations, making insertions or deletions in the "confessions" certain victims were expected to sign, including the names of others Stalin might want to be incriminated. Aleksandr Orlov, who held a responsible post at the NKVD in Moscow during the preparations for the first Moscow trial, said that Stalin personally deleted the name of Molotov from a list of "beloved leaders of our party" against whom terror had allegedly been planned by purge victims. Pravda published the list without Molotov's name. There were Stalin, Ordzhoni- kidze, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Kosior, Postyshev, and Zhdanov.92 Why wasn't Molotov among them? people wondered. "For six weeks Stalin held Molotov between life and death, then spared him."93 In other words, he finally ordered Molotov's name included as one of the "beloved leaders"

targeted by the "terrorists" whose confessions were being prepared for trial.

Stalin personally insisted on the use of torture. Orlov recalls a conver­sation he had with an NKVD official named Mironov, one of Yagoda's closest collaborators, who was in charge of preparations for the first big show trial. When Mironov had reported to Stalin that Kamenev did not want to confess to crimes he had not committed, the Leader asked the NKVD man, "How much does our state weigh, including all our factories, machines, army, and navy?" The baffled Mironov said he had no idea. Stalin insisted. "Well, it would have to be some astronomical figure," Mironov guessed. "Exactly," Stalin concluded. "Now, could Kamenev or anyone else bear up under such astronomical weight? Don't come back to see me without Kamenev's confes­sion in your briefcase."94

The exact number of victims of the Great Terror is not likely ever to be known. Robert Conquest, who analyzed all available data up to 1971 (for the second edition of his book, The Great Terror) arrived at the extremely guarded estimate that in January 1937 the prisons and camps held about 5 million people and that between January 1937 and December 1938 approximately 7 million more were arrested. Conquest did not include common criminals in this figure, since he did not think they could be regarded as victims of Stalin's terror. Actually, a large number of children of "enemies of the people" were classed among the "common criminals." Conquest estimated that under Ezhov (that is, from January 1937 to De­cember 1938) approximately 1 million were shot and 2 million died in prison.95 Solzhenitsyn's estimate is larger—1,700,000 shot by January 1, 1939.96

In The Great Terror, Conquest wrote that up to 1950 in the camps of the Kolyma region alone at least 2 million prisoners died. In his later book Kolyma he cites an objective and impartial source, Lloyd's Register, for all the ships carrying prisoners to Kolyma were insured by Lloyd's, and comes to the conclusion that no less than 3 million must have died in those camps. The British author added that from 1938 on Kolyma held at least twice as many prisoners as all the prisons of tsarist Russia in 1912 (when there were 183,249 prisoners, the highest number in Russian history up to that point) and that in one camp on the Serpantinka River alone more prisoners were shot in 1938 than in the last hundred years under the tsars.Sol- zhenitsyn, in explaining how difficult it was to imagine the monstrous scale of this empire of prison camps, said that the prisoners themselves gave the exaggerated figure of 20-30 million, "when in fact there were only between 12 million and 15 million."

The first socialist totalitarian state had been built, containing an empire of camps such as history had never seen. Hitler was offended by criticism of the Nazi death camps: "If I had the vast spaces of Siberia, I wouldn't need concentration camps."98 Stalin made use of the vast spaces of the entire Soviet Union and far outdid Hitler in the number of prisoners he held. The empire of the camps, the Culag Archipelago, as Solzhenitsyn was to call it, played an important economic and psychological role. In a country where the number of political prisoners was counted in the millions, the inhabitants could not help feeling a constant daily, hourly pressure crushing their spirit, forcing them to obey, conform, fulfill the quotas, do the work.

The monstrous terror of the Ezhov era (the "Ezhovshchina") shook the country to its depths once more, stunning it with horror, eliminating finally all those who might still show some initiative, have faith in moral values, believe in revolution or in anything other than Stalin. Yes, Stalin had built socialism and created the kind of party he had dreamed of, an order of Knights of the Sword. This party was also Lenin's dream come true, a combat party, a party of a new type. On March 3, 1937, Stalin had referred to the "leading cadres of our party." The top command consisted of 3,000— 4,000 officials; below them was an officer corps of 30,000—40,000; then a stratum of noncommissioned officers numbering 100,000—150,000. The remaining millions of party members were merely the rank and file, a gray herd, to be driven or used as the leaders chose.

Stalin was the commander-in-chief and the high priest. His power knew no bounds. In 1937 the Polish poet Antoni Slonimski, a lover of practical jokes, published a "letter from Moscow" in a Warsaw literary magazine reporting on the coronation of Stalin. Many readers believed him. Un­doubtedly, had Stalin wished to be crowned, he could have easily become the first socialist monarch. The party was willing to accept anything from him. Khrushchev, who in 1937 was one of the party's top "generals," says that when Stalin showed him and the other "leading cadres" the confessions of Tukhachevsky, Yakir, and the others, he did not question their authen­ticity, not even the statement of a close friend of Khrushchev's, "confessing" that during the civil war he had killed his commander, Nikolai Shchors, in order to replace him in his post.99 Aleksandr Fadeev, a "proletarian" writer who never lost faith in Stalin, wrote a message a few hours before committing suicide in May 1956: in it he grieved over the many Soviet writers "destroyed by the enemy hands of Ezhov and Beria."100 The men Stalin chose to lead the party, and to be his servants in every sphere, including literature, were well described by Arthur Koestler: "They believed whatever they could prove and proved whatever they believed." The only thing Koestler forgot to add was that any forgery served them as "proof."

Stalin had complete control of the machinery of terror. Anthony Eden, an admirer of Stalin's, told of a conversation in December 1941 (after Hitler had invaded the USSR) in which Stalin commented that Hitler was an exceptional genius who had been able, in a short time, to turn a divided and bankrupt nation into a world power and to make the German people obey him blindly. "But Hitler has shown that he has a fatal weakness," Stalin added. "He does not know when to stop." Eden could not hold back a smile. Stalin had been speaking seriously. He paused and asked what Eden found so amusing. Before he could answer, Stalin went on: "I under­stand why you're smiling, Mr. Eden. You're wondering if I will know when to stop. I assure you that I will."101

In 1938 Stalin showed he was capable of stopping. In July, Ezhov was transferred to the Commissariat of Water Transport (one of Stalin's jokes), and in December the "liberal" Beria took over the NKVD. Beria's advent was meant to signal a drawing back, a liberalization, but even Khrushchev admitted that, far from coming to an end, the terror simply became more subtle and discriminating.102

The totalitarian socialist state's most characteristic feature was its denial of the existence of terror. In 1918 Soviet power proclaimed the Red Terror openly, to all the world. In 1930 and after, the genocide against the peas­antry was carried out under the somewhat veiled, but still sufficiently clear slogan: liquidation of the kulaks as a class. The mass terror in the second half of the 1930s proceeded under the slogan of "expanding democracy." Speaking at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939, Stalin himself described the close connection between the terror and the expansion of democracy:

In 1937 Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich, and other fiends were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR were held. In these elections, 98.6 percent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet government. At the beginning of 1938 Rosengolts, Rykov, Bukharin, and other monsters were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the supreme soviets of the union republics were held. In these elections 99.4 percent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet government.103

Socialism had been built, according to the official dogma. In fact, what had been formed was a society that took the Leader's words for reality and rejected the reality it lived in. A French song was very popular in 1937, "Tout va UЈs bien, Madame la Marquise" ("Everything's just fine, Madame Marquesse"). Written in 1935, it penetrated the Soviet Union with extraor­dinary rapidity. The Soviet authorities undoubtedly thought it reflected conditions in the land of socialism quite well. Another popular song of the time, which virtually became a second national anthem, contained these lines: "I know no other country/ Where people breathe so freely."

ON THE ROAD TO WAR

During the second half of the 1930s the international situation was marked by the emergence of several states that made no secret of their aggressive designs. In 1935 Fascist Italy invaded Abyssinia. In 1936 Germany oc­cupied the demilitarized Rhineland, driving the final nail in the coffin of the Versailles system. In 1937 Japan, which had taken Manchuria in 1931 and turned it into the puppet state of Manchukuo, began a new war against China.

Stalin directed Soviet foreign policy, but from the shadows, rarely grant­ing interviews to the foreign press and never meeting foreign diplomats. It was not until a few years later that he acquired the taste for such meetings. "Stalin does not hold any government office," Litvinov explained to the British ambassador, who wanted to meet the party's all-powerful general secretary. "He does not like to meet foreigners and has entrusted that task to me."104 The only exception Stalin made was for the American ambassador, William Bullitt, and for his successor, Joseph Davies.

On questions of foreign policy Stalin did not take a complicated approach. (This can be illustrated by a comparison of Stalin's views with those of Harry S. Truman.) In 1941 the Soviet press indignantly denounced the senator from Missouri for saying that the United States should wait and see which side was winning the war, Germany or Britain and France, and then support the winner. Unknowingly Truman was repeating a position Stalin had taken as early as 1925, although Stalin's words were not published until after the war, in 1947: "If war breaks out, we cannot stand aside with folded arms. We must enter in, but we will be the last to do so. And we will step in to throw a decisive weight on the scales, a weight that may tip the balance in our favor."105

The two main considerations in Stalin's foreign policy were Germany and Japan. In its relations with Japan the Soviet Union sought on the one hand to solve all conflict peaceably (for example, by selling the Chinese Eastern Railway, a source of tensions, to Manchukuo in 1935) and on the other hand to try to divert Japan into a war with China. Stalin had hoped that after 1933 the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, would more actively oppose Japan over China, but in that hope he was soon deceived. As for Germany, Stalin wished to base relations on the same kind of col­laboration that had existed before Hitler's accession to power. Ideological differences did not seem to him to be an obstacle. On May 7, 1939, Boris Souvarine warned of the possibility of a Stalin-Hitler pact, one of the only voices in the West to foresee that. Why should Stalin take fascism and nazism more seriously than he did bolshevism? Souvarine asked. What was important to Stalin was strength.106 Germany was the strongest world power, Ezhov explained to Krivitsky in 1936, echoing Stalin. "We must come to an agreement with the great power that is Nazi Germany."107

The Soviet approach toward Germany had a dual aspect. On the public level, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations on November 19, 1934 (before that the League had been scornfully dismissed as a band of robbers), signed a mutual assistance pact with France on May 2, 1935, and introduced a "popular front" policy (favoring the Western democracies against fascism) to be carried out by the Communist parties and the Com­intern. But Stalin had no real love for the "democracies" and no confidence in their power. The same Comintern congress that adopted the "popular front" policy, the seventh and last congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow in August 1935, stated in one of its resolutions that "the main contradiction in the imperialist camp" was, strangely enough, "the Anglo- American antagonism."108 The democratic countries were portrayed as being torn apart by internal contradictions, which the Communist parties were urged to intensify. These parties were instructed to fight against military spending and the "militarization of youth." An exception was made for France, however, since it had become an ally of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet attitude toward Japan and Germany was not consistent. The Japanese aggressors should be fought by all possible means, said a Com­intern directive to the Chinese Communists. By contrast, the German Com­munists were advised to join Nazi organizations, such as the Arbeiterfront, and fight there for higher wages and better conditions.

Commissar of Foreign Affairs Litvinov represented the public line of Soviet policy, with his calls for "collective security" and resistance to aggression. The behind-the-scenes policy was indicated by Molotov, the Soviet premier and Stalin's close collaborator, in a speech on foreign policy in 1935 which dealt mainly with Soviet—German relations. The documents of the German Foreign Ministry, captured by the Allies at the end of World War II and published in London during the 1950s, show that secret ne­gotiations between Stalin's agents and the Hitler government began as early as 1933. Evgeny Gnedin, a counselor at the Soviet embassy in Berlin in 1935—1936 and after that a journalist and head of the press department at the Moscow Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, states that Stalin's confi­dential spokesman in secret talks with the German ambassador to Moscow was none other than Karl Radek.109 Gustav Hilger, a German diplomat who had worked in Moscow since the revolution, referred to the 1934—1935 period this way: "We noticed in many Soviet leaders a deep and unchanging nostalgia for the olden days of Soviet—German collaboration."110

In the summer of 1935, in talks with the German economic minister, Hjalmar Schacht, the Soviet trade representative in Berlin, David Kan- delaki, began to explore the terrain, under Stalin's direction, for a possible Soviet—German agreement. In 1936 Kandelaki was able to meet with Goe- ring. After Germany and Japan signed the anti-Comintern pact in September 1936, Stalin again assigned Kandelaki to probe the possibilities for an agreement. Krivitsky wrote that Stalin at that time reported to the Politburo: "In the near future a pact with Germany will be signed."111 However, two and a half years passed before Stalin's prediction came true.

On July 18, 1936, General Francisco Franco led a rebellion in Spain against the Republican government. Stalin waited until October 4 before sending a telegram to Spanish Communists expressing support for the Span­ish Republic. The Soviet Union gave limited support to the Republican side in Spain and pursued cooperation with the "democracies" in a moderate way. More than ever Soviet policy functioned on two levels. All aid to Spain was channeled through the Comintern; on the official level a low profile was maintained. Germany and Italy openly sent regular units to support Franco, while the Soviet Union sent only a few advisers. The recruitment of volunteers for the International Brigades went on among Communists and antifascists all over the world, but not in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the NKVD operated extensively in Spain. From 1937 on the main enemy in Spain bore the name "Trotskyites" or "Trotskyite accom­plices." The practice of eliminating foreign Communists, which had begun among those living in the Soviet Union, was extended to Spain. Those who thought they had escaped the terror in Moscow found their executioners had caught up with them. Stalin had no need for revolution, nor was he interested in such things as "the emancipation of the working class." His own kind of revolution was all that interested him, one which placed people in power who would be as obedient to him "as a corpse."

The terror, the "meat grinder," as Khrushchev called it, dealt a serious blow to Soviet foreign policy. An astounded world looked on as one after another leading government figure was sentenced to death in the Moscow trials. People concluded that the Soviet state was afflicted with an incurable illness. The decapitation of the Red Army gave rise to serious doubts about its fighting capacity. Among the reasons for Anglo—French "appeasement" in relation to Hitler was lack of confidence that the Soviet army would be able to fight.

The changes that took place in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, along with the victories of the fascist states, had a curious effect on the Russian emigre "diaspora." Above all, the emigr6s were forced to acknowledge the undeniable: their hopes for a collapse of the Bolshevik regime were in vain. The West had no desire to intervene, and no internal force had been able to overthrow the regime, nor had it collapsed as a result of the disputes inside the party or the economic disasters. The recognition of these facts logically led a section of the emigre community to accept the Soviet gov­ernment. The ideas of the changing landmarks tendency and the Eurasians took the form of a movement for a "return to the homeland."

The arguments of the emigres who wished to return to the Soviet Union (the "returners," vozvrashchentsy, as they were called) were described as follows by I. Bunakov-Fondaminsky, one of the founders and editors of the emigre publication Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary notes) and coeditor with Georgy Fedotov of Novy grad (New city). Soviet foreign policy was becoming more nationalistic, that is, protective of national interests; the army was acquiring discipline; individual landownership was becoming stronger (a reference to the private plots peasants were allowed to have around their homes); the school system was being reorganized; and respect for the family and for one's country was being encouraged among the youth. Bunakov summarized the thinking of the "returners" this way: "Underneath the Red flag, the USSR is becoming nationalist Russia—we must return to the homeland."112

Bunakov, for his part, argued against the "return to the homeland" movement. It made no sense, he said, because a new wave of emigration was soon going to start, of those who would want to think for themselves. "By educating the people, the Bolshevik government is unavoidably laying the groundwork for its own destruction." The youth, when it had developed and matured, would ask "even more important questions, about the indi­vidual, about freedom, about God. At that point the conflict with Bolshevik ideology will become inevitable." The new wave of emigr6s, Bunakov pre­dicted, would want to "think about things they had never thought through before, give shape to their new realizations, and set up a radio station to send waves of free thought back to the homeland from abroad."113

The emigr6s reacted in contrasting ways to the successes scored by the fascist states. Some were attracted to national socialist and fascist ideas: a corporatist state, a strong leader, hostility toward democracy, anti-Semitism, and chauvinism. The realization, however, that Nazi Germany represented a danger to Russia split the emig^s into "defensists," who believed that in the event of war they should support Stalin, and "defeatists," who believed that the overthrow of the Soviet government, even with Hitler's help, would be the lesser evil.

The NKVD played a sinister role in emigr6 political life, continuing the worthy tradition of the Cheka and GPU. Walter Krivitsky recalled meeting a man named Furmanov, the head of Soviet counterintelligence work con­nected with the White emigr6s.114 In any future history of the Russian emigre community, Furmanov should have a prominent place, along with his predecessors and successors. Operation Trust dealt a terrible blow to the monarchist wing of the Russian emigration, in particular to the asso­ciation of former officers, the Russian Union of All Military Men, or ROVS (Rossiisky Obshche-Voinsky Soyuz). The "organs" of the Soviet security police paid special attention to those organizations which "actively" engaged in anti-Soviet work, especially those which sent agents into the Soviet Union. This "activism," which Georgy Fedotov called the "senseless her­oism of the blind," ended in the virtual destruction of the ROVS, and it caused heavy losses to another organization, the National Union of Russian Youth, formed at a congress of youth and student organizations in 1930, which later became the NTS (Natsionalno-Trudovoi Soyuz), or National- Labor Alliance of Russian Solidarists.

In 1930, GPU agents in Paris kidnapped General Kutepov, the president of ROVS. Thirty-five years later, Krasnaya zvezda (Red star) published an article praising S. V. Puzitsky, a "pupil of Dzerzhinsky's," for his brilliant leadership of the "operation to arrest Kutepov."115 In 1937, Kutepov's suc­cessor, General Miller, was likewise kidnapped in Paris. It then became evident that an assistant to Kutepov and Miller, a much-heralded White general named Skoblin, was an NKVD agent. Skoblin managed to escape from France, but his wife, a famous singer of Russian folk songs, Nadezhda Plevitskaya, was arrested and ended her days in a French prison. Much later, it became known that she too had worked for the "organs." A Moscow theatrical figure recalled in his memoirs that in the mid-1920s, through her booking agent, Plevitskaya had asked for permission to come to Russia, but Dzerzhinsky would not grant such permission; he wanted his agent to stay at her post. "Dzerzhinsky knew something her manager didn't know," writes the memoirist.116 Plevitskaya continued to pierce the hearts of emigr6s with her plaintive songs: "Ah, Mother Russia, you are covered deep in snow...."

The "meat grinder" of the late 1930s forced the emigr6s to define their attitude toward the homeland. This period saw a deepening rift between those for whom the question of Russia was seen from a moral angle and those who looked at it from a purely political viewpoint. Georgy Fedotov wrote,

We will never forgive the Bolshevik regime for the profound and terrible way in which it has deformed the soul of the people. This loss of moral sense stems not so much from the materialist and atheist propaganda and the destruction of the family as from the universal necessity to lie and betray, from the penetration of the political police into people's most private affairs. You have to lie to live, betray for a piece of bread.117

Among politically minded emig^s there were a few small groups, mostly right-wing, who regarded the Stalinist terror as positive, since it rid the country of many Communists and Jews. The "returners," on the other hand, saw Soviet successes as proof of a renaissance of Russia and the terror as necessary to counteract the enemy. The Union for Repatriation (Soyuz Vozvrashcheniya), which functioned in Paris under the tutelage of the Soviet embassy, attracted many young emigr6s.

After 1929—1930 the iron curtain hid the Soviet Union completely from the eyes of young emig^s. Trips abroad by Soviet citizens (and thus the chance for emig^s to meet them) virtually came to an end. The Soviet press stopped mentioning emigr6 writers and literature altogether. Only after Stalin's death, for example, would people in the Soviet Union hear of a world famous Russian emigr6 writer, Vladimir Nabokov. The young emigr6s who came to the Union for Repatriation wanting to go back to their roots, of which they knew so little, were told they had to earn the right to re­patriation. Some were asked to fight in Spain, others to perform missions of a different kind. Sergei Efron, husband of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, sent one of his acquaintances to Spain, "to Comrade Orlov," who was the chief NKVD operative there.118

In 1937, Ignace Reiss, a man highly placed in the Soviet intelligence network, broke with Stalin and called for a "return to Lenin." Paris received orders to eliminate the traitor. Sergei Efron and several other aspiring "returners" were given the assignment. Reiss's bullet-riddled corpse was found near Lausanne, and Efron returned to Russia, where prison and death awaited him. 119

In 1938—1939 the emigres made their choice between Hitler and Stalin. Most chose Stalin because Hitler seemed worse and Stalin embodied Rus­sia. Some who chose Hitler, however, discovered after the war how similar the two totalitarian systems were and unhesitatingly passed from the Nazi camp to the Communist fatherland. Some went to Moscow, where they were greeted warmly. Konstantin Rodzaevsky, head of the Russian Fascist party, who turned himself in to the Soviet authorities in Harbin in 1945, repented in a letter to Stalin filled with boundless ingenuousness:

The erroneous principle of the liberation of the motherland from Jewish communism at all costs was the source of my fatal error and of the wrong general line of the Russian Fascist party during the Soviet-German war. ... I issued a call for an "unknown leader," appealing to the strong elements in the USSR to save millions of Russian lives by selecting a Commander X, an unknown leader capable of overturning the Jewish government and cre­ating a new Russia. I failed to see that, by the will of fate, of his own genius, and of millions of toilers, Comrade J. V. Stalin, the leader of the peoples, had become this unknown leader.120

Historians have not finished trying to decipher by whose "will" Stalin became the "leader of the peoples." But they all agree that by the end of the 1930s socialism had been built in the Soviet Union.

In February 1938 the third and last major show trial took place in Moscow, bringing to an end the Ezhovshchina and the building of socialism. This was the most notorious of the three trials, with Bukharin, "the favorite of the whole party," the last of Lenin's comrades-in-arms, on the stand, along with Yagoda, Stalin's loyal hatchetman, who knew too many secrets. Then socialism began to flower. In September 1938 the new epoch was blessed with the publication of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Short Course, more commonly referred to simply as the Short Course. With this publication the totalitarian state received its bible.

Thus was achieved a society in which the individual depended entirely on the state. The state gave him his daily bread, both material and spiritual, and he better not ask for any other. With the appearance and sanctification of the Short Course, the only permissible version of history, memory was taken away. History became an essential tool in the process of dehuman- ization.

In December 1938, Beria replaced Ezhov as commissar of internal af­fairs, a signal that the latest application of the shock treatment was nearly over. A "liberal" would replace the blood-stained executioner, and life would become peaceful. Meanwhile, the country was heading full steam ahead toward war.

CHAPTER

-7

ON THE BRINK,

1939-1941

READY TO REPEL THE FOE?

According to the 1939 census, the population of the Soviet Union, as of January 17, was 170.6 million (on a territory of 21.7 million square ki­lometers). Two-thirds of the population, or 114.5 million (67.1 percent), lived in the countryside, and only one-third, or 56.1 million (32.9 percent), lived in the cities. An estimated 8 million Soviet citizens, or 9 percent of the total adult population, were in concentration camps.1

The Soviet Union is a land of great riches, with vast mineral reserves, including oil, coal, and precious metals. Numerous rivers and seas provide an important energy source. The diversity of climate, soil type, and terrain provides remarkable possibilities for grain production, livestock raising, fruit and vegetable growing, fishing, and forestry. These natural resources would have sufficed to meet the needs of many generations, had they been utilized in a rational way.

Forced industrialization was carried out in a very short time, mainly at the expense of agriculture, which was brought to ruin, and of consumer goods industry, which was largely neglected. As we have seen, industrial­ization and collectivization meant the destruction of the most productive strata of the rural population (the so-called kulaks and well-to-do middle peasants) and the transformation of a significant part of the peasant pop­ulation into a cross between wage workers and paupers, reduced to servitude and tied to their particular localities. Compulsory deliveries of farm prod­ucts to the state in inordinate quantities and at extremely low prices debased the value of the collective farmer's labor and prevented most kolkhozes from breaking out of perpetual poverty and de facto servitude to the state. Millions of people who were driven from the rural areas on the basis of "class criteria" or who fled to the cities before the internal passport system was introduced in 1932, and hundreds of thousands recruited for work in the cities, swelled the ranks of the industrial working class, which together with the scientists and engineers built an industrial base during the 1930s that provided the basis for the defense industry.

On the eve of World War II the Soviet Union held first place in the world for extraction of manganese ore and production of synthetic rubber. It was the number one oil producer in Europe, number two in the world; the same for gross output of machine tools and tractors. In electric power, steel, cast iron, and aluminum it was the second largest producer in Europe and the third largest in the world.2 In coal and cement production it held third place in Europe and fourth place in the world. Altogether the USSR ac­counted for 10 percent of world industrial production.3

It is not enough to evaluate overall productivity, however. One must also take into account the size of investments, the productivity of labor, the quality of production, and the state of production relations.

Let us look, for example, at the ferrous metallurgy industry, a key sector, and one of the most powerful in the Soviet economy. The statistics are fairly impressive: 99 blast furnaces, 391 open hearth furnaces, 207 electric fur­naces, 227 rolling mills, and 139 batteries of coke ovens.4 At the same time, starting in 1937, at the height of the terror, and continuing through the first half of 1940, this sector of industry regularly failed to fulfill the plan. The official figures on increases in production, themselves very much open to question, claim only a 3 percent increase in the smelting of cast iron and steel from 1938 to 1941 and only a 1.1 percent increase in sheet iron production. The average output of steel per square meter of open hearth furnace was less in 1940 than in 1937.5 Production also decreased from 1937 to 1940 in the motor vehicle industry, electrical engineering, transport, road building, the paper industry, and construction machinery. 6

One reason for these decreases was that the targets set by the Third Five-Year-Plan (1938-1942) did not correspond to the economic realities. Another no less important reason was the mass terror carried out by Stalin.

Repression not only stripped industry of managers, chief engineers, and scientific and technical personnel; it also sowed fear and uncertainty. The spy phobia artificially created by the party leaders intensified the general atmosphere of suspicion. Very broad prospects opened up for careerists and climbers of all sorts, for informers, slanderers, slackers, and self- seekers—in short, the cream of the new ruling class. Newly appointed managers often preferred not to make technological improvements, whose benefits might not be evident immediately, out of fear of being charged with "wrecking activity" by members of this new elite.

Right up to the outbreak of war, ferrous metallurgy, the foundation for all processing and machine industries, remained one of the weakest links in the Soviet economy. This especially affected the arms industry.

During the ten years preceding the war, arms spending increased fivefold, according to the official budget figures, from 5.4 percent of the total budget during the First Five-Year Plan to an average of 25.4 percent during the first three years of the Third Five-Year Plan.7 The projection for 1941 was that 43.4 percent of the budget would go for defense.8 The USSR was far behind schedule in introducing mass production of new types of weapons, particularly fighter planes, tanks and artillery. At the outbreak of war the arms industry was still in the process of retooling, although its infrastructure had been significantly expanded.

As in the Soviet economy generally, the decisive role in the arms industry was not played by economic or technological considerations but by the frequently incompetent opinions of the party leadership, especially those of Stalin and Zhdanov, the Central Committee secretary in charge of the army and defense industry. Their conceptions of war, military technology, and strategy and tactics had not advanced beyond the experiences of the civil war. For example, Stalin suggested that tanks produced at one Len­ingrad factory be equipped with 107mm cannon, because such cannon had made a very good showing in the civil war.9

Stalin had no idea that the field artillery he was talking about was a completely different weapons system from the kind of cannons mounted on tanks. As a result of similar ignorance, a decision was made on the eve of the war to stop production of the most urgently needed types of antitank guns, the 45mm and the 76mm.10 This went on despite the objections of Boris Vannikov, people's commissar of the armaments industry, who bluntly told Zhdanov during a meeting of a commission of the Central Committee, "You are disarming the army on the eve of war." Vannikov was arrested at the beginning of June 1941.11 Similarly, Professor V. I. Zaslavsky, a talented tank designer, fell victim to repression, and В. I. Shavyrin, a designer of mortars, was accused of slowing down the output of mortars, although he had nothing to do with the production process.12 In general, a search went on everywhere for people to blame for alleged disruption of war preparations, but those truly responsible, the top leaders of the party and government, were never touched. The situation was no better with the production of anti-aircraft guns, antitank weapons, and machine guns.

At the beginning of 1939 the great wave of terror ebbed. The blood­stained dwarf Ezhov was replaced at the NKVD by Beria, who had arrived from Georgia. Under Beria repression took on more routine forms. Beria used his position in the NKVD not only to strengthen his influence within the party leadership but also to exploit more systematically the labor of prisoners and internal exiles as well as the "free" work force in the NKVD's employ.

Since the Soviet government does not publish statistics on the number of prisoners, approximate figures must be used. The most cautious and conservative estimates made by Western researchers place the number in the camps at the beginning of the war with Germany at 6.5 million (in 1940), down from 8 million in 1939.13 The reason for this decline was the high death rate. Most of those arrested in 1937 and 1938 were unable to survive the harsh conditions in the camps for more than two or three years. It is true that the Soviet concentration camps did not have gas chambers or crematoriums like the Nazi death camps. Mass extermination was or­ganized in a more primitive way, due to technical backwardness. People were simply shot, starved to death, or killed off by disease, brutal treatment, or unendurably demanding labor.

The Gulag described by Solzhenitsyn and other writers both Soviet and foreign was only one part, though certainly the most important part, of the monstrous state within a state that was the NKVD. In addition to the camps the NKVD had special research laboratory prisons (sharashkas), industrial enterprises, and separate administrative divisions for the construction of canals, tunnels, roads, and railroads.

The NKVD played an important part in the Soviet economy. With the most inexpensive labor supply in the world, the prison and camp population, the NKVD functioned as a cornerstone of the economic system, as is shown by official Soviet documents. According to the "State Plan for the Economic Development of the USSR in 1941,"14 the NKVD was responsible for 50 percent of the lumber production and export in the Far East and in the Karelian and Komi autonomous republics, more than one-third in Arkhan­gelsk and Murmansk provinces, and between one-fifth and one-fourth in Yaroslavl, Gorky, Molotovsk, and Sverdlovsk provinces and in the Kras­noyarsk Territory. The NKVD was also involved in hauling, delivering, and exporting timber in thirty-two other provinces, autonomous republics, and union republics.15

NKVD enterprises produced bricks in the Khabarovsk Territory and oil on the Ukhta River (250,000 tons according to the 1941 plan).16 Its prisoner labor brought in 40 percent of the chrome ore extracted in the Soviet Union as a whole for the same year (150,000 tons out of a total of 370,000).17 NKVD economic components likewise produced cement, lumber for con­struction and other commercial uses, steam-powered tugboats, motor launches, barges, tractor trailers, scrapers, heavy graders, steamrollers, farming equipment, furniture, knitted fabric for underwear, socks and stock­ings, shoes, and so on.18 From other sources we know that prison labor was also used for uranium, coal, and gold mining.19

The fullest picture of the NKVD's place in the Soviet economy may be derived from the plan for capital construction in 1941. The total sum to be allocated for such construction was 37,650 million rubles (not including the amounts for the commissariats of defense, the navy, and roads). The NKVD was allotted 6,810 million rubles, that is, 18 percent, much more than any other commissariat. As for installations that were expected to begin operations in 1941, their total value was 31,165 million rubles, of which the NKVD accounted for 3,860 million rubles' worth, or more than 12 percent.20

In view of the fact that the capital equipment (tools and machinery) available to prisoners was on a level incomparably lower than that used by free workers, we can state with assurance that on the eve of the war with Germany forced labor constituted more than 20 percent of all labor in the Soviet Union. The scanty information that we have concerning wages in one of the divisions of the NKVD, the Main Highway Construction Ad­ministration (Gushossdor), indicates that the average yearly wage in this division was half of that for industrial workers in other commissariats (2,424 rubles as opposed to 4,700).21

According to figures that are far from complete, the deployment of this slave labor force in 1941 was as follows: mining, 1 million; hired out to various state enterprises, 1 million; general construction, 3.5 million; con­struction and maintenance of camps and manufacture of camp necessities, 600,000; logging, 400,000; agriculture, 200,000.22 An unprecedented eco­nomic and administrative power was thus concentrated in the hands of the NKVD. Even the party apparatus, not to mention the state, was to one degree or another under its control.

In "free" enterprises, events proceeded in their own way. "Storming" (shturmovshchina) flourished. When the plan could not be met during the initial weeks, efforts were made to meet it "by storm" during the last ten days. Many Soviet firms still practice this rush job method today. Very often factories had to stop work because the prerequisite raw materials or semifinished goods were not delivered on time. In Leningrad in 1940, for example, in the heavy machinery industry, 1.5 million work hours were lost for this reason.

There was a constant search for scapegoats, a completely sterile task, because no particular Comrade X or Y was to blame; the fault lay with the defective planning system and party leadership as a whole.

Unable to cope by normal methods with the existing inefficiency and waste or with such plagues as shturmovshchina, absenteeism, and drunk­enness, the government decreed a number of harsh new labor laws in June— July 1940. A system of "work books" (trudovye knizhki) had been introduced in 1938, in effect tying the worker to a particular enterprise, where this book containing his work record was kept. Without it he could not take a new job. Then on June 26, 1940, a new law changed the workday from six or seven to eight hours and the work week from six to seven days. Workers were now denied the right to change jobs without a permit. Ab­senteeism and lateness became criminal offenses, with penalties ranging from a fine to outright imprisonment. In July 1940 tractor and combine drivers were forbidden by law to leave their jobs without authorization.23 In October 1940 a system of "state labor reserves" was established, in­cluding young people from the age of fourteen up. Children who ran away from factory schools (to which they were assigned) could be punished with up to six months' imprisonment.

In 1936 Stalin had announced to the world that socialism had essentially been built in the USSR. Then the party announced that a new kind of human being had emerged in the process—Soviet man. At the same time the party and state decreed a return to the most archaic social relations in production, long since left behind by all of the more advanced countries— that is, the binding of the worker to the place of production. This was not a very surprising development, however, because the overwhelming majority of the population, the peasantry, had been tied to the kolkhoz since col­lectivization and to the local village since the internal passport system was introduced in 1932.

Now workers and peasants became equals, as it were, in their social rights relative to production. Both classes found themselves in absolute subservience to the state, the only employer. The new labor laws created a situation highly reminiscent of war communism, with its compulsory labor service and other draconian measures.

One of the main arguments for introducing such drastic laws in industry was the need for iron discipline in view of the war threat, an argument used throughout Soviet history. The siege mentality created by repeated war scares, in 1927, again in 1931, again in 1937, and so on, allowed the party leadership to justify its arbitrary and repressive acts as necessary against foreign agents, who were "everywhere."

Throughout the mid-1930s no government in the world was actually in a position to launch a major war, even if one had wanted to. It is well known that Nazi Germany, despite its great military-industrial potential, the intensely chauvinist atmosphere prevailing within it, and the favorable international situation it enjoyed, still required six years before it was ready to attack Poland. The real danger of war for the USSR began with Nazi aggression in Europe.

ON THE WAY TO THE MOSCOW-BERLIN AXIS

The entire second half of the 1930s was overshadowed by constantly ac­cumulating military and political conflicts. Events were moving swiftly toward a new world war.

In 1935 Germany repudiated the military provisions of the Versailles treaty and introduced the draft. To this measure Stalin responded with understanding, even approval. At the end of March 1935 he told Anthony Eden: "Sooner or later the German people are bound to free themselves from the chains of Versailles. ... I repeat, a great people like the Germans are bound to break loose from the Versailles chains." And he added, "The Germans are a great and courageous people. We never forget that."24 What impressed Stalin about the Germans was not their cultural achievements but their "greatness" and "courage." Little did it matter that the Germany he was talking about was Nazi.

There was a certain logic in Stalin's position. He had long dreamed of an alliance with Germany. Now that the Versailles system had collapsed, its two opponents, Russia and Germany, could work together openly. The fact is that Stalin repeatedly expressed his desire for a general political accord with Nazi Germany, as an examination of the events leading up to the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 23, 1939, demonstrates.

"Stalin has been obsessed with the idea of an agreement with Germany since 1933," a Soviet diplomat named Gelfand, who defected to the United States from a post as counselor at the Soviet embassy in Rome, told a British diplomat, N. Butler, in a confidential interview.25

Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. Three months later, in the first half of May, a group of senior officers headed by General von Bock- elsberg visited Moscow. Defense Commissar Voroshilov, in his speech wel­coming the German military delegation, stressed the Red Army's desire to continue its longstanding friendly relations with the Reichswehr.26

At about the same time Stalin read the Russian translation of Mein Kampf. Although he might not have been completely convinced from this reading that Hitler harbored anti-Soviet intentions, since a goodly share of Hitler's remarks might have been dismissed as propaganda, Stalin nevertheless felt obliged to take some measures. The special relationship with the Reich­swehr was ended, and its installations on Soviet territory were closed down.27

Still the question of future relations between Germany and the Soviet Union remained undecided. The Soviet leadership continued to hope that after an initial period of tension during the Nazi consolidation of power it would be possible to reestablish the previous rapport between the two countries. On August 16, 1933, Abel Enukidze, secretary of the USSR Central Executive Committee, expressed this view openly to the German ambassador, von Dirksen. "The National Socialist reshaping [of Germany]," he said, "could have favorable consequences for German—Soviet relations." Enukidze was quite blatant in his attempt to point out common lines of development and analogous traits between German national socialism and Soviet communism.28

In late 1933 and early 1934, that is, right when the Soviet government was deciding to orient its foreign policy toward "collective security," it made persistent overtures to Germany, one after another, urging a renewal of friendly relations.

On November 6, 1933, Deputy Defense Commissar Tukhachevsky said to von Twardowsky, counselor at the German embassy in Moscow, "In the Soviet Union the Rapallo policy remains the most popular." It would never be for­gotten, he added, that the Reichswehr had helped to train the Red Army in very difficult times. The Red Army would heartily welcome the renewal of such collaboration. All that was needed was to dispel the fears of a hostile policy by the new German government toward the Soviet Union. 29

In a meeting with Mussolini on December 4, 1933, Litvinov said, "We want to have the best possible relations with Germany. However, the USSR fears an alliance between Germany and France and seeks to parry such a move by making its own rapprochement with France."30

On December 13 Litvinov reiterated this to Nadolny, the German am­bassador in Moscow: "We will not instigate anything against Germany. ... We have no intention of intriguing against her."31 This theme was developed by both Litvinov and Molotov in speeches before a session of the Central

Executive committee of the USSR on December 29, 1933.32 The session was held shortly after the Central Committee of the party had passed a resolution favoring a policy of collective security in Europe.33

Although in 1934 the Soviet Union made an official turnabout in foreign policy, even joining the League of Nations in September and becoming a very active member, Stalin secretly continued the old orientation toward Germany. Defense Commissar Voroshilov and Chief of Staff Egorov, in conversation with German officials in January 1934, repeatedly stressed the Soviet desire for the best possible relations with Germany.34

Stalin pursued the same line in his report to the Seventeenth Party Congress in February 1934. He was quite cautious in his assessment of the situation in Germany. He noted that "fascism of the German type... is wrongly called national socialism—wrongly because the most searching examination will fail to reveal even an atom of socialism in it."35 As to the first part of the name, suggesting nationalism, Stalin had no comment. Instead he began to revise the party's traditionally unfavorable attitude toward nationalism in general, including Russian nationalism. It was not long after this that the "comments" by Stalin, Kirov, and Zhdanov on Soviet history textbooks were written. This shift in attitude toward the historical past occurred simultaneously with the beginning of a revised attitude toward fascism, particularly the German type.

Stalin considered the Nazi party an instrument of the big industrialists and the Reichswehr. He did not grasp the relatively autonomous character of the fascist movement. Believing that the Reichswehr had complete control of the situation, and being intent on a renewal of military col­laboration with Germany, he never understood the danger nazism rep­resented.

"We are far from being enthusiastic about the fascist regime in Germany," he said to the Seventeenth Party Congress. "But fascism is not the issue here, if only for the reason that fascism in Italy has not prevented the USSR from establishing the best relations with that country."36 The door remained open for an entente with Germany.

According to Walter Krivitsky, head of Soviet military intelligence in Western Europe, Stalin regarded the events of June 30, 1934, in Germany (the "Night of the Long Knives," when Hitler murdered his former cohorts, among them Ernst Roehm) as the end of the "party period" and the be­ginning of the "state period" of the Nazi regime.37 Shortly after June 30, Krivitsky reports, "the Politburo decided at all costs to induce Hitler to make a deal with the Soviet government." After the Night of the Long Knives, Stalin concluded that "Hitler represented the organized state power standing above the nation," the kind of organized power Stalin valued so highly. Only one problem remained—to convince Hitler that Russia was Germany's logical ally.38

Although the Soviet press had been carrying on a campaign in favor of collective security and against the aggressive, expansionist aims of the Nazis, Radek, himself the director of the press campaign, explained with cynical candor to Krivitsky: "Only fools can imagine we would ever break with Germany. What I am writing here is one thing—the realities are something else. No one can give us what Germany has given us. For us to break with Germany is simply impossible."39

Radek was probably referring not only to military collaboration with Germany but also to the important technical and economic assistance re­ceived from that country during the First Five-Year-Plan. It is certainly true that foreign economic assistance, including German, played a decisive role in Soviet industrialization.

The Soviet Union began presenting proposals to Germany, one after the other—for example, that the two powers provide joint guarantees to the Baltic states; that they join together in an "Eastern Pact" that would guar­antee the security of all participating countries; and so on. Hitler rejected all these proposals.

At the same time, the policy of collective security, that is, rapprochement with France and England, was pursued more intensively. Stalin's new hope was that fear of encirclement would prompt Germany to improve relations with the Soviet Union.

Kalinin, the official head of state (president of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets), told the new German ambassador, Schulenburg: 'The outcries in the press should not be given too much importance. The German and Soviet peoples are linked by many different ties and depend on one other in many ways."40

During Anthony Eden's visit to Moscow in March 1935, Stalin tried to give him the same impression, to frighten him with the prospect of a Soviet— German alliance in order to dissuade Britain from seeking an agreement with Germany at the expense of the USSR. He told Eden that Soviet talks with Germany for loans and credits had included the question of "certain products" that did not bear mention out loud, in other words, armaments, chemicals, and the like.

Eden (agitated): What? Surely the German government hasn't contracted to deliver arms to your Red Army?

Stalin: Yes, they have, and in the next few days we will probably sign a credits agreement.41

The stakes were high. If Stalin could persuade the British that Hitler was not to be trusted, the danger of an Anglo—German accord directed against the Soviet Union would be eliminated. Then Hitler would have no choice but to seek an agreement with the Soviet Union.

Three and a half months after Eden's trip to Moscow, in July 1935, Stalin ordered his confidant, David Kandelaki, Soviet trade representative in Berlin, to initiate talks aimed at the improvement of political relations between Germany and the USSR. Kandelaki was in charge of economic negotiations underway at the time with the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, who had close ties with top industrial and financial circles. By Stalin's logic, the big industrialists were the real power behind Hitler; thus talking with Schacht meant talking directly to the boss. Kan­delaki also met with Goering, whom the Soviet leaders considered to be the link between the industrialists and the German government. Schacht advised Kandelaki to pursue the matter through diplomatic rather than commercial channels. For his part, he promised to inform the German Foreign Ministry of the Soviet inquiry.42

The "Kandelaki initiative" was backed up by Surits, the Soviet ambas­sador in Berlin, by Bessonov, a counselor at the Berlin embassy, and by others who persistently called for improved Soviet—German relations. In a visit to the German Foreign Ministry on December 21, 1935, for example, Bessonov stated bluntly that it would be desirable to supplement the 1926 neutrality pact between the two countries with a "mutual nonaggression pact."43

Evgeny Gnedin, a prominent Soviet journalist and diplomat who served at the Berlin embassy in 1935—1936, has confirmed that a serious reap­praisal of attitude toward nazism was being made in Moscow at the time. "I remember," Gnedin writes,

that we members of the Berlin embassy staff were rather taken aback when Eliava, the deputy commissar for foreign trade, who was passing through Berlin (in 1936, as I recall) and who had access to Stalin because of long­standing personal ties, gave us to understand that "at the top" Hitler was viewed "differently" than he was in the Soviet press or by the Soviet embassy staff in Berlin.44

During 1935 and 1936 Stalin continued to hope for an agreement with Hitler despite warnings from the international section of the NKVD that "all of the Soviet attempts to appease and conciliate Hitler are doomed. The main obstacle to an understanding with Moscow is Hitler himself."45 When, in May 1936, Germany did grant the Soviet Union substantial credits as a result of the talks in 1935—1936, Stalin read the action as a desire for a general political agreement. At a Politburo meeting Stalin took issue with the NKVD: "Well, now, how can Hitler make war on us when he has granted us such credits? It's impossible. The business circles in Germany are too powerful, and they are in the saddle."46

During 1936 neither the confrontation with Germany in Spain nor the signing of the "anti-Comintern pact" between Germany and Japan dissuaded Stalin from the conviction that it was possible to reach an agreement with Germany. At the end of May 1936, Kandelaki and his deputy Friedrichsohn met with Goering, who was not only very interested in an improvement in German—Soviet relations but also promised to take the matter up with Hitler.47 In July Bessonov had a meeting with Hencke, a high-ranking official in the German Foreign Ministry. Bessonov listed the concrete con­ditions necessary to reach a nonaggression pact. Hencke explained that, in the German government's view, nonaggression pacts were possible only between states sharing a common border, and that was not the case with the Soviet Union and Germany.48

This statement was of crucial importance for the future of Soviet—German relations. In December 1936 and February 1937 Schacht met again with Kandelaki and Friedrichsohn. He explained that trade relations could be expanded on the condition that the Soviet government renounce all further Communist agitation outside its borders. According to Schacht's notes, Kandelaki expressed "sympathy and understanding." Kandelaki revealed that he had been entrusted by Stalin and Molotov to make known their views, which he had with him in written form. He then read the statement, which said that the Soviet government had never placed obstacles in the way of political talks with Germany, that Soviet policies were not in any way directed against German interests, and that the Soviet government was ready to enter into negotiations concerning the improvement of German— Soviet relations. Schacht urged Kandelaki to have this communication presented officially by the Soviet ambassador in Berlin.49

After the conclusion of the economic agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany in May 1936, Stalin was convinced that the talks with Hitler were on the right track. "In the immediate future we shall consummate an agreement with Germany," he told Ezhov, according to Krivitsky. And in December 1936 Krivitsky himself was ordered to "throttle down" intelli­gence work in Germany.50

On February 11, 1937, however, the German foreign minister, von Neu- rath, informed Schacht that the Soviet proposals had been rejected because of the Franco—Soviet mutual assistance pact and the activities of the Com­intern. At the same time, Neurath explained that if events inside the Soviet Union continued to evolve in the direction of an absolute despotism, more and more dependent on the army, Germany might reconsider its policy toward the USSR.51

Hitler was guided by a number of considerations in rejecting Stalin's overture at that time—not only domestic instability and the anti-German policy of collective security but also the weak response by France and England to Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland and unilateral denun­ciation of the Locarno pact (in March 1936). To Hitler this meant that an expansionist Germany need not fear any serious resistance from the Western powers. He decided that for the moment it was more advantageous to play the anti-Soviet card.

Hitler used the Soviet overtures to try to frighten Britain with the pros­pects of a Soviet—German rapprochement. At the beginning of 1936 British military and diplomatic circles were taking this threat very seriously. Baron Geyer, the German military attache in London, in a conversation with British Chief of Staff Dill, spoke of strong pro-Russian tendencies in the German army and suggested that a Soviet—German pact could well become a reality if Britain and Germany did not come to an agreement themselves.

In London it was believed that the policy of rapprochement between Germany and the Soviet Union enjoyed the support of the Reichswehr, Schacht, an important group of industrialists interested in business dealings with Russia, and even a section of the Nazi party. But Hitler was thought to be adamantly opposed to any improvement in relations other than on the level of trade.52 There was a mistaken assumption in British political circles that the Germans had taken the initiative in this policy.53 The Foreign Office feared that if the system of collective security collapsed, a German—Soviet rapprochement would be inevitable. Only the collective security policy could prevent a Soviet—German pact.54

In the Soviet Union the situation began to deteriorate rapidly. An unheard of reign of terror was setting in. Radek, at the Moscow trial of January 1937, playing the double role of defendant and chief witness for the pros­ecution, confessed to treason and spying in behalf of Germany. (These lies about himself and others did not save his life for long. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but died in a labor camp, apparently in 1940.)

In the spring of 1937 rumors of an imminent agreement between the USSR and Germany circulated in Western foreign ministries and the West­ern press. The Soviet Union issued a formal denial of these rumors, but only in April 1937, two months after Hitler's categorical rejection of the Soviet proposals.55

In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria. On September 30, 1938, the Munich agreement was signed, under which Great Britain and France acceded to the separation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia and its incorporation in Germany. The Munich agreement, however, was aimed not only at Czechoslovakia but also at the Soviet Union. After Munich and the Anglo—German declaration of nonaggression an analogous Franco—German declaration soon followed.56 Moscow's nervousness increased when a pro- Nazi puppet government was established in the Transcarpathian Ukraine, a former part of the Russian empire which had gone to Czechoslovakia but was now detached from that country. Rumors spread that the Germans were reviving one of their old projects, a formally independent, German vassal state in the Ukraine.

Under these conditions Stalin decided to resort once again to his favorite tactic, the double-cross. In his report to the Eighteenth Party Congress on March 10, 1939, he warned Great Britain and France that their "nonin­tervention" policy was bound to fail and hinted at a possible reversal of Soviet foreign policy.57

Several months later, on August 23, after the signing of the Soviet- German nonagression pact, during an evening reception to celebrate the occasion, Molotov "raised his glass to toast Stalin, commenting that it was Stalin with his speech in March 1939, which had been correctly understood in Germany, who achieved the turnabout in political relations [between the USSR and Germany]."58 A week after that celebration Molotov told the deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR that it had been Stalin who at the Eighteenth Party Congress had predicted an agreement between the USSR and Germany. "It is evident now," Molotov added, "that in Germany on the whole they understood this statement of Comrade Stalin's correctly and drew practical conclusions from it. (Laughter.).. .The historical fore­sight of Comrade Stalin was brilliantly confirmed. (Stormy applause in honor of Comrade Stalin.)"59

Five days after Stalin's speech Germany occupied Czechoslovakia and installed on its territory the German protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia and an "independent" Slovakia under the tutelage of the Third Reich. These events radically changed political opinion in Britain. In response to new German pressure on Poland (demands for the annexation of Danzig and the Polish corridor), Britain adopted a "policy of guarantees." From March to May 1939 Britain gave commitments of direct military aid to Poland, Ro­mania, Greece, and Turkey in the event of unprovoked aggression.60 The draft was reintroduced in Britain for the first time since World War I. Chamberlain's government asked the Soviet Union to clarify what its policy would be in the event that Poland and Romania were threatened with aggression.61 At the same time, Chamberlain began to probe the possibility of an agreement with the Germans that would guarantee British security.62 The Soviet Union, for its part, began to play its own kind of double game. In mid-April 1939 it initiated talks with Britain and France on the question of a military alliance. On the other hand, energetic soundings were resumed in Berlin on the possibility of a broad political agreement between the USSR and Germany against Britain and France.

On April 15 the British government urged the USSR to declare publicly that in the event of aggression against any European neighbor of the USSR, as long as that country itself resisted the aggression, it could count on Soviet assistance.63 On April 17 the Soviet Union proposed a mutual as­sistance pact to England and France, to last from five to ten years, with guarantees of assistance to any Eastern European country bordering on the Soviet Union between the Baltic and Black seas that fell victim to aggres­sion. The Soviet proposal provided for the signing of a military convention.64 Ten days before this, however, Peter Kleist, a German Foreign Ministry official, heard Georgy Astakhov, the Soviet сЬа^ё d'affaires in Berlin, say that it made no sense for Germany and the USSR to engage in ideological warfare when they could coordinate their policies.65 And on the same day that the Soviet proposal was delivered to Britain, Aleksei Merekalov, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, told Weizsaecker, the German deputy foreign minister, that the Soviet Union would like to have normal relations with Germany, relations that "might become better and better, " and that ide­ological differences should not be an obstacle.66

On May 3 Maxim Litvinov, who during the 1930s had come to symbolize the policy of collective security, was dismissed as commissar of foreign affairs. The dismissal of this Jew, who had often been a target of Nazi propaganda, and his replacement by Molotov produced a very favorable impression in Berlin. A German diplomatic courier stressed that Molotov's appointment "apparently guarantees that Soviet foreign policy will be con­ducted in strict accordance with the conceptions of Stalin."67

On May 5 Astakhov was informed that armaments which the Soviet Union had ordered from the Skoda factories in German-occupied Czechoslovakia would be delivered.

During May, the exchange of proposals and further discussion through diplomatic channels continued between England and France, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other. The essential point for the USSR was a guarantee that the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) would not somehow fall to the Germans and that, in the event of war with Germany, Soviet troops would be allowed to pass through Polish and Ro­manian territory unimpeded. This meant, in effect, that the Soviet Union was asking England and France's approval for the annexation of the Baltic nations. The governments of Poland and Romania rejected the request for free passage of Soviet troops on their territory because they feared, not without reason, that this would result in irreversible social and political changes.

On May 20, in the midst of these negotiations with England and France, Molotov called in the German ambassador, Schulenburg. The ambassador was amazed by one of Molotov's remarks: that both governments should seriously think about ways of placing their relations on a better political foundation.68 In Berlin this statement was seen as a very promising opening, but a decision was made to wait until Molotov became more explicit. The Nazis suspected the Soviet government of using the German government's willingness to improve relations as a way of pressuring Britain and France into making greater concessions. In one of his memorandums to Hitler, the German foreign minister noted, however, that the USSR no longer aggres­sively promoted world revolution and that a gradual normalization of Ger­man—Soviet relations was possible.69 The German Foreign Ministry began an intensive study of the prospects of a German—Soviet rapprochement and its possible effects on Germany's alliance with Japan and Italy. During June and July, Stalin and Hitler refrained from any decisive moves. At the same time intensive Soviet—German trade talks continued.

At the end of May 1939 the Far East became the scene of major battles between Japanese forces, on one side, and Soviet Mongolian troops, on the other. The deterioration of Soviet—Japanese relations increased the Soviet government's anxiety and its fear of being drawn into a war on two fronts, west and east.

Hitler was preoccupied with a similar concern. His generals clearly stated their opposition to a two-front war. The overall strategy of Nazi Germany was to defeat its adversaries one at a time, while seeking to prevent a political or military alliance among them. The worsening of Polish—German relations and the relative military weakness of Britain and France made Hitler more receptive to the idea of a rapprochement with the Soviet Union.

In the middle of June Stalin decided to try talking with the Germans again, but to be more explicit this time. On June 15 Astakhov met with Draganov, the Bulgarian envoy to Berlin, and explained to him that the Soviet Union had to choose among three possibilities: a pact with France and Britain; prolongation of the Anglo—Franco—Soviet talks; or an agree­ment with Germany. The latter possibility would correspond most closely with Soviet wishes, he said, and he proceeded to outline for Draganov the substance of a Soviet—German agreement. He noted in particular that the Soviet Union refused to recognize Romanian sovereignty over Bessarabia; in other words, he made it clear that one of the bases for a future agreement would be the "return" of Bessarabia to the Soviet Union. He also said that the one obstacle to an agreement was the Soviet fear of a German attack through the Baltic countries or Romania. If Germany were to declare that it would not attack the Soviet Union or would agree to a nonaggression pact, the USSR would probably refrain from making a pact with Britain. However, Astakhov continued, since the Soviet Union did not know Ger­many's real intentions, there was much to say in favor of prolonging the talks with Britain, in order to maintain a free hand. Draganov, as Astakhov surely expected, informed the German Foreign Ministry of this conversation without delay.70

On June 15, while Astakhov was meeting with Draganov, the British and French governments were conveying to the Soviet government their re­sponses to its proposals. They agreed to a mutual assistance pact but refused to sign a military convention simultaneously because the time period was too short. They suggested instead that there be consultations between the three countries' general staffs.71

The British government wished to prolong the negotiations because at that point it was making a deep probe of German intentions. Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, saw Goering on June 9 and told him that if Germany wanted to initiate peace talks with Britain, it would meet with a "not unfriendly response."72 From June to August 1939, British—German talks of an unofficial character began, were broken off, and began again several times.73 However, Germany's demands, especially the demand that the Near East be viewed as its "natural economic sphere," were absolutely unacceptable to Britain. The positions of Germany and Britain were irrec­oncilable in another respect: the Nazis aspired to unrestricted supremacy on the European continent.

Stalin did not understand that this was a favorable moment for the Soviet Union, although he constantly harped on the theme, derived from Lenin's theory of imperialism, that the contradictions between the rival capitalist powers were irreconcilable.

It was thus that in the summer of 1939 both Britain and the Soviet Union found themselves interested in prolonging negotiations on a mutual assis­tance pact. In so doing, they left the key decisions on the fate of the world in the hands of Hitler's Germany, which desired the outbreak of war as quickly as possible.

On June 28 Molotov again made the point to Schulenburg that the nor­malization of political relations with Germany was possible and desirable.74 Schulenburg replied that Germany would welcome such normalization. Molotov expressed his satisfaction; he was particularly pleased that Ger­many regarded the 1926 neutrality pact between the two countries as still in effect.75

On July 22 commercial talks between Germany and the Soviet Union started again, with a high-ranking German official, Julius Schnurre, in attendance. The next day, the Soviet government suggested to Britain and France that talks be held in Moscow between representatives of the armed forces of the three countries. Britain and France accepted the proposal on July 25. The government of Neville Chamberlain nevertheless attempted to stall the talks. The British military mission did not arrive in Moscow until August 11, and it came with instructions not to make any specific commitments that might under certain circumstances tie the hands of the British government. The delegation was instructed in particular not to discuss the Baltic states or the positions of Poland and Romania.76 So unencouraging were the instructions from the British government to its military mission, in fact, that the British ambassador in Moscow wrote to Lord Halifax to inquire whether his government actually desired progress in the negotiations.77

Stalin's mistrust of Britain's intentions deepened. Probably by this time Soviet intelligence already knew that Germany had set August 26 as the date for the attack on Poland.

Hitler, for his part, was worried about the military talks in Moscow. So was the German high command, whose strategic conception was to subdue Poland with a blitzkrieg, limiting the fighting to that one front.

On July 27, Schnurre stated clearly to Astakhov and Babarin, the head of the Soviet delegation at the trade talks, that a gradual normalization of political relations between Germany and the Soviet Union was possible and desirable. Astakhov objected to this gradual approach; the matter was urgent, and the Soviet Union felt an imminent threat from the direction of Germany, all the way from the Baltic to Romania. Astakhov wanted to know whether Germany had long-range political aims in regard to the Baltic states, and he underscored the seriousness of the Romanian question. He also stated outright, the first time for a Soviet diplomat, that Danzig should be returned to Germany and that the question of the Polish corridor should be resolved in Germany's favor.78 In this conversation the main outlines of the future Soviet—German pact began to emerge.

On July 29, Schulenburg received orders from Berlin to meet with Mo­lotov to confirm Astakhov's and Babarin's statements. The telegram espe­cially underlined the point that no matter how the Polish question might be resolved, by peaceful means or otherwise, Germany was ready to ensure Soviet interests and to reach an agreement with the Soviet government.79 On August 3, Ribbentrop met with Astakhov in Berlin.80 The same day Molotov met with Schulenburg in Moscow. Both sides sought to clarify exactly what their respective obligations would be under the indicated agreement. Schulenburg told Molotov that from the Baltic to the Black Sea there were no conflicts of interest between the Soviet Union and Germany, that the anti-Comintern pact was not directed against the Soviet Union, any more than Germany's nonaggression pacts with the Baltic states, and that Germany's demands on Poland did not affect Soviet interests. Molotov restated what the Soviet side wanted from Germany and expressed his distrust of Germany's intentions, but more importantly, he left no doubt that the Soviet government was ready for a new relationship with Germany.81

It was thus that at the beginning of August, on the eve of talks between the military missions of the Soviet Union, Britain, and France, the situation was such that the Soviet Union was able to choose among three possibilities: to ally itself with Britain and France against the fascist aggressor, Nazi Germany, which was preparing to attack Poland; to guarantee its own interests by reaching an agreement with Germany and thereby open the door to a German attack on Poland and hence a general war; or to stay clear of any and all agreements and thereby hope to keep out of war.

Later assertions by the Soviet government that it had no choice in making its pact with Germany do not correspond to historical reality. In fact, Stalin was inclined toward an agreement with Germany for many reasons. Above all, he hoped to obtain from Germany the Baltic region, eastern Poland, and Bessarabia. Also, as an absolute despot, he was extremely hostile toward any form of democracy. He easily understood the psychology of his fellow dictator, Hitler. After all, the two had so much in common. They had learned a great deal from one another; they used analogous methods against their real or imagined political opponents; and there was a striking similarity between Soviet and Nazi propaganda.

On August 10, one day before the British military delegation arrived in Moscow, Astakhov met with Schnurre again and informed him that instruc­tions he had received from Moscow stressed the Soviet government's desire to improve its relations with Germany. Astakhov explained that the USSR had entered into military talks with France and Britain, not with any special enthusiasm, but simply out of the necessity to protect itself from the German threat, which had forced the Soviet government to seek help wherever it could find it. The situation had changed once talks with Germany had begun. The outcome of the talks with Britain and France was uncertain, and it was quite likely that the question of alliances was completely open from the standpoint of the Soviet government. Astakhov's own meeting with Schnurre was undoubtedly an indication of this. At the heart of the dis­cussion was the question of Poland, but neither participant wished to be candid on the subject; each sought only to present his government's po­sition.82

The military talks with Britain and France began the next day in Moscow. During the most intensive phase of the negotiations, on August 14, Astakhov informed Schnurre over the phone that he had been instructed by Molotov to say that the Soviet Union was interested in discussing not only economic problems but also such matters as the press, cultural cooperation, the Polish question, and past Soviet—German political relations. Moscow was sug­gested as the site of the negotiations. 83

Thus, by mid-August the Soviet Union had decided in principle to make an agreement with Germany. In effect, the terms had already been for­mulated by Molotov and made known to the German government: the Baltic states, including Lithuania, were consigned to the Soviet sphere of interest, along with Bessarabia; and the Polish question to be solved "in Germany's favor." All that remained was to hear the German reply.

Astakhov left Schnurre on August 14, at about 2 PM. Seven hours later, Ribbentrop sent Schulenburg a telegram, telling him to communicate the following message to Molotov: First, the period when Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were in hostile camps was past. A new future was coming into existence. Second, there were no real conflicts of interest between Germany and the USSR. Germany did not harbor any aggressive designs toward the Soviet Union. In the area between the Baltic and the Black Sea there were no problems that could not be solved to the mutual satisfaction of the two great powers, in particular those of the Baltic states, Poland, southeastern Europe, and so forth. Ribbentrop announced a turning point in German—Soviet relations. He was ready to travel to Moscow at once to meet with Stalin and explain to him Hitler's view. He did not exclude the possibility of establishing a basis for further improvement in their rela­tions.84

On August 16, Schulenburg communicated this information to Molotov, whose reaction was very encouraging. The Soviet government, he said, welcomed the German desire to improve relations and believed in the sincerity of Germany's intentions. He raised the idea of a nonaggression pact being signed during Ribbentrop's visit. He restated the Soviet de­mands: a nonaggression pact; German pressure on Japan to improve re­lations with the Soviet Union and put an end to the border conflict; and mutual guarantees in regard to the Baltic states.85

At that point the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union were in a hurry. They knew that ten days later Germany would invade Poland. Hitler needed support from the USSR, which shared a long border with

Poland. Stalin was eager to obtain what he wanted from Germany before the attack on Poland. In the Kremlin the draft of a nonaggression pact was hastily prepared.

On August 16, Ribbentrop sent Schulenburg a new telegram to deliver to Molotov. Germany would be willing to sign a twenty-five-year nonaggres­sion pact with the USSR and jointly to guarantee the Baltic states. At the same time it would use its influence to help normalize Soviet—Japanese relations. Since a serious incident with Poland might occur at any moment, the telegram said, a rapid and thorough clarification of Soviet—German relations was desirable. The German foreign minister would be ready to go to Moscow at any time after August 18.86

On August 17, Molotov informed Schulenburg that the Soviet government was willing to forget the past and improve its relations with Germany. First, however, economic and credit agreements should be signed, with a non­aggression pact to be concluded shortly thereafter. In any event—and this was the most important part of Molotov's reply—a protocol should also be signed in which, among other things, the German statements of August 15 would be included. While agreeing in principle to Ribbentrop's visit, Mo­lotov specified that a certain amount of time would be necessary to prepare for his arrival.87

The Soviets needed this delay to find a convenient pretext for breaking off the talks with the French and British military delegations. The pretext was furnished by the British, who, on the one hand, did not have formal authorization to sign an agreement and, on the other, had not been able to persuade the Polish and Romanian governments to allow Soviet troops to pass through their territories in the event of war with Germany. These could be used as grounds for breaking off the talks. However, had the Soviet government sincerely wished to reach an agreement with Britain and France, it could have waited a few days longer to learn the results of the French and British diplomatic efforts in Warsaw.

Such patience was no longer consistent with Stalin's plans. He had decided upon an alliance with Germany. The idea had long been ripening in his mind, and the time to realize it had come.

On August 17, a four-day suspension of the Anglo—Franco—Soviet talks was announced.

On August 19, the Soviet government formally agreed to Ribbentrop's visit to Moscow, to occur during the week after the signing of the Soviet— German economic agreement. At the same time Molotov delivered to Schu­lenburg the Soviet draft of a nonaggression pact.88 It included a special clause: the treaty would go into effect only if a secret protocol were signed on foreign policy questions of interest to both parties.

The trade pact was signed on August 20. The next day Pravda noted in its lead story that the agreement "could be a serious step toward a further improvement of relations, not only economic but also political, between the USSR and Germany."89

At 3 PM on August 21, Schulenburg delivered a telegram to Molotov in which Hitler announced his agreement in principle with the Soviet draft treaty and the secret protocol. Hitler warned that a crisis in German—Polish relations could break out at any time and insisted that Stalin meet with Ribbentrop on August 22 or 23 at the latest.90

Stalin's reply was positive. He agreed to meet with Ribbentrop on August 23. In his answer to Hitler he expressed the hope of seeing the establishment of peace and cooperation between the USSR and Germany.91

The same day, August 21, after the British and French delegations announced that they had received no replies from their respective govern­ments, Voroshilov, who was chairing the talks, announced their adjournment for an unspecified period, until Paris and London produced their answers. But all this mattered very little. Stalin had made up his mind. The double game was at an end.

Neville Chamberlain's game of double-cross also came to an end. For him, it ended in defeat, for at that point Britain faced the certainty of war with Germany.

On the evening of August 23, at the Kremlin, the Soviet—German non- aggression pact was signed. Hitler did not accede to all of Stalin's demands; nevertheless, the pact went further than the usual promises to renounce aggression and resolve differences through peaceful means. The two parties also agreed (in article 4) not to participate in any alliance aimed directly or indirectly against the other signatory. Treaties of friendship or alliance often include such clauses.

Germany promised to try to persuade its ally Japan to normalize its relations with the Soviet Union. The USSR agreed to supply Germany with food and strategic raw materials in return for industrial equipment.

The additional secret document signed at the same time as the non- aggression pact left no doubt that this ten-year treaty was a political alliance, establishing the two powers' spheres of influence in Europe.

The preamble to the agreement stated that in strictly confidential con­versations the representatives of the two states had discussed "the question of the boundary of their respective spheres of influence in Eastern Europe." The Soviet Union and Germany agreed that in the event of political and territorial "rearrangement" in the Baltic region (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern border of Lithuania would be considered the border between the spheres of German and Soviet influence. In that case Vilnius would be returned to Lithuania. In the event of changes in the Polish state, the border between the two spheres would go along the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers. This meant that the Baltic states and eastern Poland would be in the Soviet sphere. Germany also stated that it had no interest in Bessarabia, meaning that it would go to the Soviet Union.92

This secret agreement, never published in the Soviet Union, became known only at the Nuremberg trials. Even now the Soviet government conceals from its people the real nature of the Stalin—Hitler pact. This was the first but not the last secret agreement to be reached between Germany and the USSR in 1939-1941.

On the evening of August 23 a party was held in the Kremlin to celebrate the signing of the pact. As the German guests were leaving, Stalin addressed Ribbentrop "with words to this effect," according to Hencke, one of the Nazi officials present: 'The Soviet government takes the new pact very seriously. He [Stalin] could guarantee on his word of honor that the Soviet Union would not betray its partner."93

Stalin also warned the Germans against underestimating the strength of their adversaries, England and France. "England," he told Ribbentrop, "despite its weakness, would wage war craftily and stubbornly," and he expressed the opinion that the French army was a factor to take into serious account.94

For Stalin, the pact with Germany was the culmination of many years of effort. In an August 31, 1939, report to the Supreme Soviet on the reasons for the nonaggression pact, Molotov said first of all that Russia and Germany had suffered the most from World War I. He stressed that the Soviet government had long desired to improve its political relations with Germany. Recalling that Hitler had extended the 1926 neutrality pact in 1933, he added: "Even before this the Soviet government considered it desirable that a major step be taken on the path of improved relations with Germany, but circumstances were such that this did not become possible until now." These words clearly expressed Molotov's regrets that the pact had not been reached earlier (and remind us of the Kandelaki initiative). Molotov also regretted that the Soviet—German agreement was limited to a nonaggression pact.

It is true that in the present case this is not a mutual assistance pact, as was discussed in the talks with France and Britain, but only a nonaggression pact. Nevertheless, given the present circumstances, it is difficult to over­estimate the international importance of the Soviet—German pact. ... It is a turning point in the history of Europe, and not only of Europe.94 (Emphasis added.)95

It truly was a turning point in the history of Europe and of the world. By signing the pact with Germany, the Soviet Union opened the door to war. It was no coincidence that the same session of the Supreme Soviet passed a law on compulsory conscription, replacing the previous law on universal military service.96 The very name of the new law testified to the fact that a qualitative change had occurred in the Soviet government's attitude toward war and peace. The time had come when a war in Europe would be beneficial to Soviet interests, just as the policy of collective security, buttressed by the Comintern's popular front tactic, had served those interests until then.

With the conclusion of the secret agreement with the Soviet Union, Germany was protected against a major conflict on its eastern front. The way was clear for an attack on Poland.

On August 24, Pravda called the Soviet—German pact an "act of peace," which would undoubtedly contribute to "an easing of tensions in the present international situation." A week later, on September 1, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began.

On September 3, Ribbentrop asked Molotov whether the Soviet Union would not find it desirable to move against the Polish army and occupy the Soviet sphere of influence. Stalin did not want the Soviet Union to be identified with the German aggression. He preferred to wait and present to the Soviet people and the world the Red Army's entry into Poland as an action intended to protect the Ukrainian and Byelorussian population from German aggression. This was why Molotov said in his reply that the Soviet Union agreed with Germany that the right moment was absolutely necessary for taking concrete action, but that moment had not yet arrived. Hasty action could only "hurt our cause," he said, and contribute to the unification of "oar adversaries." The text of this document is very important, for in speaking of "our adversaries" and "our cause" Molotov implied—the first time for the Soviet Union—that the Soviet government had the same ad­versaries and objectives as Nazi Germany.97

At that point Stalin felt the time was right for Soviet troops to enter Poland. All reservists up to the age of forty-five, especially technicians and medical personnel, were called up. Hospitals were improvised in school buildings, many goods disappeared from the stores, and rumors spread that rationing was about to begin.98 The Soviet population, particularly in the western regions, felt the winds of war.

The swift advance of German troops through Poland took the Soviet government by surprise. It had expected military operations to last longer. This was a major lesson in modern military strategy. Future events were

to show that it was a lesson the Soviet leadership never fully grasped.

In Berlin the Soviet delay in entering Polish territory was viewed with growing concern. Such action represented the only way of testing the prac­tical value of the German—Soviet pact. The German press agency distributed a statement by General von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of German land forces, implying that an armistice between Germany and Poland would be signed at once and that therefore military action on Poland's eastern border would be unnecessary. This statement sought to prod the Soviets into action. Meanwhile, the Soviet government was seeking to justify a move against Poland in the eyes of the Soviet people. On September 10 Molotov told Schulenburg with undisguised cynicism that "the Soviet gov­ernment wants to use the continuing advance of German troops to explain that Poland has fallen and that, consequently, the Soviet Union is forced to come to the aid of the Ukrainians and Byelorussians 'threatened' by Germany." This action would provide respectability in the eyes of the masses and would remove the impression that the Soviet Union was acting as an aggressor."

Needless to say, this approach was not to the liking of the Germans, who suggested instead a joint communiquё justifying military action in Poland on the grounds that order needed to be restored on the former Polish territory.100 This proposal was rejected; Stalin feared such close identifi­cation with Hitler.101 A convenient formula was soon found. Without men­tioning Germany, it spoke nebulously of third parties that might attempt to take advantage of the chaos in Poland. Molotov asked the Nazis to under­stand that there was no other way of justifying the Soviet intervention to the masses.102

On September 17 the Red Army crossed the Polish border. It was a treacherous stab in the back of the Polish army, which kept up its desperate resistance for another two weeks.

Pressed by Germany, Stalin was finally forced to agree to a joint com­munique. The original draft proposed by the Germans was far too candid in Stalin's opinion. Eventually, the Soviet draft was accepted, but even that was fairly revealing. The presence of German and Soviet troops in Poland, it said, was not in contradiction to the interests of the two states, as defined in the Soviet—German pact.103 A protocol signed in Moscow on September 20, 1939, by representatives of the Soviet and German armed forces (with Voroshilov, the people's commissar of war, and Shaposhnikov, chief of the general staff, signing for the Soviet side) contained a paragraph on the will­ingness of the Soviet command to place the necessary troops at the Germans' disposal in order to destroy Polish military units or "bands" if it turned out that the German command did not have sufficient forces at hand. To the Soviet population and the rest of the world, the Soviet intervention was presented as a liberating crusade. The full truth about the facts and events connected with the Stalin—Hitler pact have been carefully hidden from the Soviet people.

The Soviet—German aggression against Poland culminated in a joint parade of Soviet and German troops at Brest-Litovsk.104 The Soviet press, as was to be expected, did not say a word about it.

On September 27 Ribbentrop made a second visit to Moscow. The next day a Friendship and Border treaty was signed. It established the border between the German and Soviet spheres of influence, a border passing through Polish territory. At the same time another confidential protocol was signed. It authorized the departure of German nationals from the territories occupied by the Soviets, as well as of Ukrainians and Byelorussians from the German-occupied territories. A special additional secret protocol pro­vided that Lithuania would be in the Soviet sphere, while the province of Lublin and part of Warsaw Province would be in the German sphere.

In another secret agreement Germany and the Soviet Union stated that neither would allow, on its territory, "Polish agitation" directed against the other party, that they would nip all such activities in the bud and would keep one another informed, so that the necessary measures could be taken. Thus Nazi Germany and the socialist Soviet Union joined hands against the Polish Resistance.105 In a joint statement on the signing of the friendship pact, the German and Soviet governments announced that the pact had resolved all problems arising from the collapse of the Polish state and had laid the basis for a lasting peace in Eastern Europe. They likewise stated their desire for an end to the war between Germany, England, and France. If Britain and France refused to stop the war, Germany and the USSR would engage in mutual consultations in regard to necessary measures. "It is not only absurd, it is criminal," Molotov said, "to wage a war to 'smash Hitlerism,' under the false slogan of a war for democracy."106 Eighteen months later, Stalin would speak of the need to smash Hitlerism and would raise high the banner of the defense of democracy.

The partitioning of Poland between Germany and the USSR, and the secret agreements between the two powers, radically changed the situation in Europe. For the Soviet government it was very important to show that the Red Army had taken as much a part as the Wehrmacht in the war against Poland. Germany had to remember that the USSR provided military as well as political help. At the session of the Supreme Soviet on October 31, Molotov bragged about the military partnership with Germany: "It proved enough for Poland to be dealt one swift blow, first by the German army and then by the Red Army, to wipe out all remains of this misshapen offspring of the Versailles treaty" (emphasis added).107

Answering Ribbentrop's congratulations on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Stalin made a special point: "I thank you, Herr Minister. The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union forged in blood has every reason to be lasting and solid" (emphasis added).108

In Moscow people joked cynically: the friendship was forged in blood all right, Polish blood.

The Soviet leadership did its best to present the backstabbing of Poland by the Red Army as an attempt to save the Ukrainian and Byelorussian populations from the sorry situation they had been brought to by the sense­less policies of the old Polish government. It is characteristic of the attitude of the Soviet and German governments that no document of the period refers to the Polish population: it was treated as though it had never existed. Three million Poles lived in the areas annexed by the Soviet Union. Special NKVD troops were rushed into eastern Poland, under the leadership of General Ivan Serov, with the mission of finding, arresting, and deporting "socially alien elements." These troops were accompanied by party func­tionaries whose role was to prepare the 12 million inhabitants of eastern Poland to "freely choose" fusion with the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Soviet socialist republics.

The secret agreement provided for Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. In the fall of 1939 the governments of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, under heavy Soviet pressure, signed mutual assistance pacts with the USSR. Then, in 1940, under the false pretext of anti-Soviet activities on their territories, Soviet troops were brought in. Again, the populations of these countries were organized to "freely choose" absorption into the Soviet Union, on the basis of a schedule carefully worked out in Moscow. From June 17 to June 21, 1940, in Lithuania and Latvia, "people's governments" were formed, then elections to popular assemblies held. On July 14 and 15 similar elections were held to the State Council in Estonia. On July 21, 1940, Soviet power was established simultaneously in all three countries.109 Two weeks later the Supreme Soviet admitted the three Baltic republics to membership in the USSR. The new Soviet republics were immediately flooded with NKVD troops, and preparations for mass deportations to Si­beria of suspicious persons or elements hostile to Soviet power soon fol­lowed. General Serov was in charge of all these operations.

Bessarabia had been occupied by Romanian troops and annexed to Ro­mania in 1918. The Soviet government had never recognized this action.

In July 1940, assured of support by Nazi Germany, the USSR demanded the immediate return of Bessarabia, and the Romanian government was forced to comply. In August Bessarabia merged with the autonomous re­public of Moldavia to form the Moldavian SSR.

Whereas the Soviet Union might have had some arguable legal right to Bessarabia, the occupation of northern Bukovina, which had been part of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, was a simple annexation. It was not even provided for in the secret Soviet—German agreements of 1939. Molotov, in reply to the question of the German ambassador in Moscow, explained that Bukovina was "the last missing component of a reunified Ukraine."110

Hitler had used similar arguments to justify the occupation of Austria, the Sudetenland, Klaipeda (Memel), and so on. He was simply including in the Reich all areas with German-speaking populations. Stalin sympa­thized with this approach.

Finland, under the secret protocol of August 23, 1939, was included in the Soviet sphere of influence. On October 2, when the Finnish ambassador to Germany, Wuorimaa, tried to find out the intentions of Germany and the Soviet Union toward his country, German deputy foreign minister Weiz- saecker made it clear that Germany would not interfere in relations between Finland and the Soviet Union.111

Annexation was not initially part of the Soviet plan; Stalin hoped to bring Finland into his orbit through political pressure alone. He had no intention of going to war against a country that would have the support of Britain, possibly Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and the United States as well. Essentially his aim was to move the border, which ran across the Karelian isthmus only thirty-two kilometers from Leningrad, farther to the north, away from this Soviet industrial center. The city was too easily exposed to heavy artillery fire. He also wished to block access to Leningrad from the Gulf of Finland and to guarantee the security of the rail line from Murmansk. Of course, Finland itself was not a threat to the Soviet Union.

On October 5 the Soviet government presented its demands to Finland. If Finland would cede the Karelian isthmus, the USSR would in exchange give it a vast territory, twice the size of the isthmus, from Soviet Karelia, along the Finnish border. (The Soviet territory was sparsely populated and of very little value.) In addition, the Soviet Union demanded the right to lease the Finnish peninsula of Hanko (Hango), at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, and the ice-free port of Petsamo on the northern coast west of Murmansk, in order to build Soviet naval and air bases. The Finns were naturally reluctant to give up Hanko, since this could mean placing Fin­land's fate in the hands of its powerful neighbor. No resolution of the issue could be found, and talks between the two countries were broken off on November 13. Both sides began to mobilize their forces and strengthen their defenses.

The Finns had the well-equipped Mannerheim Line of fortifications stretching across the Karelian isthmus for about 125 kilometers, quite a strong position, although not the very last word in military technology. In his haste to wring the desired concessions from Finland, Stalin organized a provocation. He ordered the military command in Leningrad to shell the Soviet village of Mainila, about 800 meters from the Finnish border, then blamed it on the Finns. The Soviet press was immediately filled with calls for retaliation: "Wipe out the Wretched Gang" was one.112

Stalin's hope that he could intimidate Finland into accepting the Soviet terms and thus avoid an armed conflict was not borne out. Finland would not yield its territory and compromise its independence. The Finnish people wholeheartedly supported their government, which was led by the Social Democrat Wajno Tanner. Stalin, infuriated, ordered that Finland be issued an ultimatum and, if it did not accept, that shelling of its border positions begin. On November 28 the Soviet Union tore up its nonaggression pact with Finland. Stalin was confident that the artillery attack would be enough to force Finland to capitulate and accept his conditions. However, just in case, he ordered the formation of a puppet government headed by Otto Kuusinen, a Comintern leader and veteran of the Finnish Communist party. A so-called people's government of the (nonexistent) Finnish Democratic Republic was established at Terioki, and the Soviet government immediately concluded a friendship and mutual assistance treaty with this fictional entity.113 He planned to create a Karelo-Finnish Soviet Republic as part of the USSR, by merging Finland with the existing Karelian Autonomous Republic.

Events, however, did not conform with Stalin's expectations. The Finns were not intimidated by his ultimatum. Advancing Soviet divisions en­countered fierce resistance, and it soon turned out that the Soviet troops were not at all ready for a war under winter conditions. They were not trained to fight on skis; there were shortages of automatic weapons; many did not have winter uniforms; and cases of frostbite were numerous. Surprise attacks by elite Finnish sharpshooters inflicted heavy casualties. In an attempt to overcome the Red Army's deficiences, Soviet professional skiers were inducted, and many met inglorious deaths. Soviet transport equipment was likewise unfit for the harsh winter. All attempts to crack the Finnish defenses by a frontal assault on the Mannerheim Line were repelled, with heavy casualties.114 The Red Army leaders in charge of the Finnish op­erations proved incompetent. General G. M. Shtern had to be called from the Far East, and General Meretskov, head of the Leningrad military com­mand, was replaced by Marshal Timoshenko. To raise morale, volunteers from the Communist youth of Leningrad and Moscow were brought in. Many of them had only rudimentary military training. Hastily thrown into battle, they suffered enormous losses. The two largest Soviet cities, Moscow and Leningrad, were soon suffering from food shortages. The particularly cold winter of 1939—40 caused chaos in transportation. For the people the war against tiny Finland proved a terrible bloodletting. Only in February 1940, after twenty-seven divisions and thousands of guns and tanks were con­centrated, did the troops under Marshal Timoshenko manage to break through the Mannerheim Line. At that point Finland's only recourse was to call for a truce.115

During this ignominious campaign, the Soviet Union's military weakness was glaringly revealed. To this day the Soviet government has not told its people the truth about the losses suffered in that war. According to recent Finnish figures, 100,000 Soviet soldiers were killed, while the Finns lost 20,000.

The war with Finland cost the Soviet Union more than just physical losses. It was discredited internationally. The League of Nations formally condemned the USSR for aggression in December 1939, expelling it from the organization. Three other states had been branded aggressors by the League of Nations: militarist Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany. Now the socialist Soviet Union joined the list.

The British and French governments were preparing to take advantage of the indignation of world public opinion to shift the center of military activity from Western to Northeastern Europe. An expeditionary corps of 50,000 volunteers was quickly organized, but the Finnish government chose not to let its territory become a testing ground for the great powers, as Spain had been. It decided, after some hesitation, to sign a peace treaty with the USSR. The agreement was signed in Moscow on March 12. The Soviet Union received the Karelian isthmus, including Vyborg (Viipuri) and the Gulf of Vyborg with its islands, the western and northern shores of Lake Ladoga, including the towns of Keksholm, Sortavala, and Suojarvi, a number of islands in the Gulf of Finland, some territory east of Merkjarvi, including the town of Kuolajarvi, and the western parts of the Rybachy and Sredny peninsulas. It was also granted the right to lease the Hanko peninsula and surrounding islands to install naval and air bases and gar­risons.116

The so-called people's government was never supported by the people of Finland; it disappeared as quickly as it had arisen. Kuusinen, the head of this rump government, soon became the president of the Presidium of

the Supreme Soviet of the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Republic, a new component of the USSR made up of the former autonomous republic of Karelia and the new regions acquired from Finland under the 1940 agreement. The new republic reminded freedom-loving Finns that their country could be annexed at any time. Only in 1956, when the Soviet government became convinced that Finland was firmly under its influence, did the Karelo- Finnish Republic once again become the Karelian autonomous republic within the RSFSR.

One negative result of the war with Finland was that it further convinced Germany that, in military respects, the Soviet Union was a colossus with feet of clay, that it could easily be defeated.

The war exposed serious shortcomings in the Soviet military organization, especially in the Commissariat of Defense. It was revealed, for example, that information from Soviet intelligence on the positions of gun emplace­ments in the Mannerheim Line had not been marked on the field maps of front-line units, resulting in needlessly heavy Soviet losses inflicted by the Finnish batteries.

"In our war against the Finns," said Khrushchev,

we had an opportunity to choose the time and the place. We outnumbered our enemy, and we had all the time in the world to prepare for our operation. Yet even in these most favorable conditions it was only after great difficulty and enormous losses that we were finally able to win. A victory at such a cost was actually a moral defeat.

Our people never knew that we had suffered a moral defeat, of course, because they were never told the truth.117

The top leaders of the party and government, Stalin, Molotov, and the other Politburo members, could not help but see that the war with Finland was a sharp warning of danger ahead. Although Voroshilov was removed as people's commissar of defense, he remained a member of the Politburo, when he should have been tried by a military tribunal. The top leadership knew that for years he had neglected his duties as head of the armed forces. His subordinates (Tukhachevsky among them), while still alive, had taken care of all administrative functions; Voroshilov himself had not the slightest idea of the real condition of the Red Army.

Voroshilov was replaced as people's commissar of defense by Marshal Timoshenko, the former commander of the Kiev Military District. There were other changes, too, but none of them could fundamentally alter the sorry state of affairs in the army's high command, since the best generals had been liquidated or sent to prisons and concentration camps. General Shtern, one of the ablest Soviet military leaders, was shot in April 1941,

after his successful part in the Finnish campaign. The officers promoted to the highest positions lacked experience in commanding large units. Officers on the middle and lower levels also left much to be desired. As of May 1, 1940, Soviet infantry units lacked as many as one-fifth the officers they required. Officer training at the military academies was of very poor quality. At company and squad level, 68 percent of the com­manders had only five months of military training for the rank of second lieutenant.118

At the beginning of the war with Germany, only 7 percent of the officers had higher military education, and 37 percent had not completed their secondary education. Approximately 75 percent of the commanders and 70 percent of the political commissars had less than one year's experience in the positions they then held.119 In mid-1940 the Soviet government suffered serious arms shortages. By mid-1940 the Soviet government was fairly well aware of seriously neglected aspects of the country's preparations for war, despite the practically unlimited spending for military purposes (in 1941, for example, allocations for defense alone amounted to 43.4 percent of the state budget). Industry, for example, was not producing enough modern weapons, and mass production of up-to-date military aircraft was only in the preparatory stages.

In the 1930s the Soviet government proceeded from the assumption that sooner or later the USSR would be drawn into a world war. Soviet military doctrine, and with it the official propaganda machine, told the population that any future war would be fought on enemy soil and would not be costly in human lives. The war would inevitably be an offensive, not a defensive one. That was why, in negotiating with the French and British, the Soviet side repeatedly sought free passage for the Red Army through Polish and Romanian territory in the event of war with Germany. The absence of a common border with a potential enemy as dangerous as Nazi Germany had been a positive factor of prime importance, for it meant that a surprise attack by Germany from the west was ruled out. The Soviet Union was separated from Germany, let us recall, by Poland, the Baltic countries, and Romania. The Soviet leadership had often denounced these states as a cordon sanitaire erected by the west against the Bolshevik revolution. This assertion contained an element of truth, but the cordon sanitaire also worked in reverse. It was impossible to launch a surprise attack on the Soviet Union since it was necessary, first, to pass through these intermediate states.

After Stalin's "ingenious" conclusion of his pact with Hitler, the situation changed. Now Germany had a common border with the Soviet Union. All the immediate advantages the USSR obtained from the Stalin—Hitler pact were minor compared to this negative consequence. With the partition of Poland and the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, Stalin placed himself on a 3,ООО-kilometer border with a potential aggressor, every point on which was vulnerable. This was a fatal mistake.

Soviet historians do not say a word about this, of course, and for good reason. To acknowledge this error would lead to further acknowledgments. Thus far the official position has been that the refusal of France and Britain to sign a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union left it with no choice: it was obliged to sign a nonaggression pact with Germany and stay out of the war; otherwise, it would have been drawn into a war on two fronts, against Germany in the west and Japan in the east.120

Let us take a closer look at these arguments.

One reason the British and French hesitated to conclude a military alliance with the USSR during the talks in the summer of 1939 was that they had doubts about the military capacity of the Soviet army, which had been weakened by the mass extermination of its officers in the 1930s. The Soviet government, for its part, had little confidence in Chamberlain, author of the Munich accord. But did Hitler, who violated the Munich agreement and invaded Czechoslovakia, inspire greater confidence as a political part­ner?

Official Soviet historians contend that if the USSR had failed to sign the nonaggression pact with Germany, the German army would have marched into the Soviet Union after occupying Poland, with the blessing, perhaps even the support, of England and France. This does not correspond to reality. Without the Stalin—Hitler pact, it is highly unlikely that Germany would have dared to invade Poland, since it would have risked confronting a coalition of Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Even the belated conclusion of an alliance between Britain and Poland on August 25 dis­concerted Hitler enough to make him postpone his attack until September l.121 Thus, within days of the Soviet—German agreement, Hitler was ques­tioning the correctness of his calculations.

It is a myth that the Soviet government had only one alternative in August 1939. As we have seen, Astakhov himself, in his conversion with the Bulgarian envoy Draganov, outlined three possibilities facing the Soviet Union: agreement with Britain and France; agreement with Germany; no agreement of any sort with anyone, that is, a policy of waiting, of delaying, in short, a policy of neutrality.122 This means that the Soviet leadership had considered the policy of neutrality. (Astakhov certainly did not raise it on his own initiative.) Indeed neutrality, staying out of the European conflict altogether, could have been the best course for the Soviet Union.

Let us suppose, however, that Hitler the adventurist had decided to settle accounts with Poland, despite the lack of an agreement with the Soviet Union, on the assumption that Britain and France would not stir in Poland's behalf any more than they had for Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Still, if the Soviet Union had backed Poland, would Hitler have risked a war? At that point it was impossible. Germany lacked the human and material resources for such a war. A simple comparison of Germany in 1939 with Germany in 1941 proves the point.

Against Poland Hitler was able to marshal a force of fifty-seven divisions (to Poland's forty-seven divisions and brigades), 2,000 tanks (to Poland's 166), and 1,800 planes (to Poland's 771). In addition, Germany had thirty- three understrength divisions in the west, to counter any attack by France and Britain.123 We should add that Germany's war industry was only be­ginning to develop and was suffering from major shortages of oil and other strategic raw materials.

According to Marshal Shaposhnikov, head of the Soviet General Staff, in his remarks to the British and French military delegations in Moscow in August 1939, the Soviet Union could at that time have mobilized against Germany 120 infantry and 6 cavalry divisions, 5,000 pieces of medium and heavy artillery, 9,000—10,000 tanks, and 5,000—5,500 bombers and fighter planes.124

Given this unfavorable relationship of forces for Germany, the Soviet thesis of an immediate danger from Germany after its attack on Poland does not stand up.

Another official thesis of Soviet historiography is true, however: Germany was able to go to war against the Soviet Union only after taking over most of continental Europe and adapting the economic resources thus acquired to the German war effort.125 But this refutes the thesis of a German threat in 1939. In September 1939, even if Germany had waged war against Poland under conditions of political isolation, there was no danger that it would have gone on to attack the Soviet Union at that time.

The official Soviet argument suffers from another weakness: at the time of the Stalin—Hitler pact there was no real danger of war with Japan. As we have seen, there were major clashes with Japan on the Mongolian border in the summer of 1939. But Japan got the worse of the encounter and chose to reconsider its "grand strategy," turning its eyes instead to the Asian and southern Pacific colonies of the European powers. Even in 1941, when the Soviet Union found itself in serious difficulties, Japan concentrated its attention on southern Asia and the Pacific, so that the Soviet government decided to withdraw entire divisions from the Far East to the Soviet—German front.

The official Soviet argument insists on the danger of a two-front war.126

One reason for this is that for nearly ten years the Soviet leadership was hypnotized by the idea that war with Japan was likely—in view of Japanese expansionism in Manchuria and China.127 (Japan's policy reversal in 1939 apparently did not register, and so the preconception remained unaltered.)

The truth is that all of the rationalizations for Stalin's decision to make a pact with Hitler were invented after the fact to justify Soviet policy and whitewash the military-political leadership.

The Soviet—German pact actually was motivated in part by the idea of setting the capitalist powers against one another. The Leninist doctrine that contradictions between capitalist states should be exploited to further the cause of socialism made any policy justifiable as long as it promoted war between the imperialist powers.

Which side to choose to try to achieve this end? Germany offered certain long-term advantages, and of more immediate importance, it offered eastern Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia.

Another consideration drew Stalin to the pact with Hitler.

Stalin was sure that Germany would not risk attacking France and Britain unless it felt safe on its eastern front. In signing the pact with Hitler, Stalin knew quite well that war in Europe would inevitably follow. In his report to the Supreme Soviet on August 1, 1940, Molotov said with satisfaction: "This agreement, which our government will abide by scrupulously, has eliminated all possibility of friction in Soviet—German relations while Soviet measures are taken along our western border, and at the same time it has provided Germany with a calm certainty in the east."128

The official press echoed these words: 'This agreement and the economic and practical pacts between the USSR and Germany which followed it have provided Germany with a calm certainty in the east. They also provide it with substantial assistance in solving the economic problems it faces" (emphasis added—A. N.).129 This undoubtedly referred to the agreed-upon Soviet deliveries of food and strategic raw materials.

Stalin needed a war in Western Europe for one other reason. Despite his boasts about the strength of the Red Army, he knew the situation was very serious. The best military cadres had been eliminated, the arms in­dustry was not yet producing up-to-date weapons, agriculture was still in crisis, and civilian industry was functioning by fits and starts. The Soviet Union needed time to prepare for a major war. Stalin assumed that the pact with Germany would buy time, that Germany would be bogged down in positional warfare on the western front, as it had in World War I, that bloody battles like those of the Marne and Verdun would weaken France, Britain, and Germany alike. Then the Soviet Union's moment would come. Soviet policy during 1939—1941 flowed from this perspective. Military production targets were scheduled to ensure readiness for war no earlier than 1942.

Contrary to the predictions of Hitler s strategists, the war in Poland lasted six weeks, not two. Despite its lack of modern armament, its isolation, and the inertia of its French and British allies, the Polish army, fought the invader with extraordinary courage. Hitler's armies were not able to take Warsaw completely until September 28. Even after the Red Army's treach­erous attack in their rear, the Poles fought on for another two weeks, with battalions of workers coming to the aid of the regular Polish army. The last center of resistance, on the Hela peninsula, held out until the early part of October. Then a reign of terror settled over Poland.

Shortly after this victory Hitler launched a "peace offensive" toward Britain and France. His condition for making peace was the recognition of German hegemony over Europe; in effect he was asking for the capitulation of the Western powers. The Soviet Union supported this "peace offensive." Stalin and Molotov declared that Britain and France were the aggressors, that Germany was only defending itself. A campaign was launched in the Soviet press to persuade the United States not to intervene in Europe and not to support Britain and France.

In April 1940 the German army occupied Denmark and Norway. On May 10, 1940, it launched its offensive on the western front. The same day, Molotov told the German ambassador that he had no doubt of Germany's success.130

The campaign in Western Europe ended a month and a half later with the capitulation of France, the evacuation of the British expeditionary force from Dunkirk to the British Isles and the occupation of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg by German troops. The entire western part of the continent was in German hands. Britain alone continued the war against Germany, but its situation was extremely grave.

The speed with which France was defeated came as a total surprise to government leaders around the world, including Stalin. His expectation of protracted positional warfare in the West turned out to be wrong, and his conception of World War II as a repetition of the "first imperialist war" proved hopelessly outmoded.

Molotov conveyed to the German ambassador in Moscow the Soviet gov­ernment's warmest congratulations on his army's "brilliant successes" in France.131 But the real mood in the Kremlin was anything but cheerful. A decision was made to incorporate the Baltic states and Bessarabia into the USSR without delay. This was done during June and July 1940. Stalin's haste reflected his uncertainty over Germany's next move. The fall of France had decisively shifted the balance of forces. The international position of the Soviet Union had worsened considerably, and the Soviet—German ac­cords of 1939 were no guarantee against German attack.

In late June and early July 1940, the new British government of Winston Churchill made several moves in the direction of improving relations with the USSR, but no positive response came from the Soviet government, mesmerized as it was by the German victories.132

After the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Ger­many began to intervene in Romania and the Balkans, while Italy began making moves against Yugoslavia and Greece.

On September 27, 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a military alliance, the Tripartite Pact. Although it contained a proviso that the re­lations of the signatories with the USSR would not be affected, the Soviet government correctly interpreted the pact as a step toward widening the war.

In the midst of these difficulties and complications, Stalin had a chance to rejoice. On August 20, 1940, his agents finally succeeded in killing his mortal enemy, Trotsky. They had pursued the exiled revolutionary for years, killing one of his secretaries, Erwin Wolf, in Spain in 1937; then his older son, Leon Sedov, in 1938; and finally, Trotsky himself. His murderer, Ramon Mercader, drove an iceax into Trotsky's head. Stalin rejoiced over the way his rival was killed—like a mad dog—as much as over the fact of his death. On August 24, 1940, Pravda celebrated the event in char­acteristic fashion: an editorial entitled "Death of an International Spy."

Mercader, who was sentenced to twenty years in prison, refused to name those who had guided his hand. He was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. (He was fated to receive his Hero's gold star more than twenty years later in Moscow—not from Stalin or Beria, who would no longer be on the scene, but from someone with Politburo authorization. At that time Mer­cader would change his name to Lopez and apply for membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but his application would be rejected on formal grounds, the real reason being that the post-Stalin Soviet leaders would prefer not to be further associated with Trotsky's assassin. Despite everything, these leaders sometimes do consider the judgment of history. The rejected Mercader-Lopez, in anger, would tear the gold star from his chest. Nevertheless, to the end of his days he remained a member of the fraternal Spanish Communist party.)

In autumn 1940 the Axis powers intensified their moves into Southeastern Europe, threatening British as well as Soviet interests. Hungary and Ro­mania were by then virtual satellites of Germany, German military influence in Bulgaria was increasing, and at the end of October Italy invaded Greece.

Under these circumstances, in the late autumn of 1940 Britain again tried to open talks with the Soviet Union, but the attempt failed. Moscow's attitude toward Britain and the United States had undergone a certain change: it was evident that Britain would not capitulate to Germany and was waging war more and more stubbornly; it was also evident that the expansion of Germany and Italy into the Balkans was a direct threat to the security of the USSR. The Soviet leadership chose to adopt a more active approach, lest it find itself completely isolated. The stupid Soviet press campaign against U.S. entry into the war was stopped. On August 6, 1940, a Soviet—U.S. trade agreement was renewed. At the end of January 1941 the United States made a conciliatory gesture, lifting a "moral embargo" that had been in effect since December 1939, when because of the Soviet attack on Finland the U.S. government advised American companies not to trade with the Soviet Union. In March 1941 Congress rejected an amend­ment seeking to exclude the USSR from aid under the lend-lease program. But matters did not reach the point of rapprochement with Britain and the United States, primarily because the Soviet Union continued to respect scrupulously its agreements with Germany and wished not to give Hitler any pretext for violating those agreements. Fear of provoking Germany was the key to Soviet policy in this period.

In 1940 and 1941 the Soviet Union conscientiously abided by the terms of its agreement to supply Germany with strategic raw materials, in par­ticular oil and grain. In this way the Soviet Union contributed significantly to the German preparations for war against—the Soviet Union itself.

Soviet—German economic relations had been defined by the agreements of August 19, 1939, and February 10, 1940. Germany needed strategic raw materials. At the beginning of World War II the German economy depended to a great extent on imports, such as tin (90 percent imported), rubber (over 85 percent), raw materials for textiles (approximately 70 per­cent), bauxite (99 percent).133

During the seventeen months from the Stalin-Hitler pact to the German invasion, the Soviet Union supplied Germany with 865,000 tons of oil, 140,000 tons of manganese ore, 14,000 tons of copper, 3,000 tons of nickel, 101,000 tons of raw cotton, over 1 million tons of lumber, 11,000 tons of flax, 26,000 tons of chrome ore, 15,000 tons of asbestos, 184,000 tons of phosphates, 2,736 kilograms of platinum, and 1,462,000 tons of grain.134

The Soviet side honored its commitments with exceptional care and punctuality. The last train of goods crossed the Soviet border heading for Germany a few hours before the German attack in the early hours of June 22, 1941.

It was not only through direct Soviet deliveries that Germany received assistance in building up its military might; deliveries from other countries were also able to reach Germany through Soviet territory. Under the Soviet— German agreement the USSR purchased strategic raw materials in Ger­many's behalf in the Far East, the Middle East, Latin America, and so on. The Soviet Union also bought nonferrous metals for Germany. Great quan­tities of rubber, bought by Japan, moved over the Trans-Siberian Railway to Germany, which urgently needed them, since it had reserves sufficient only for two months. On one occasion in 1941 the Soviet government went to the extreme of making up one entire freight train loaded with rubber for Germany. Graphite from Madagascar, tungsten and rubber from French Indochina, crude oil, dairy products, fats, soybeans—all these products reached Germany by Soviet rail. The Germans assessed the Soviet economic aid and the USSR's role as an intermediary as "of the utmost importance."135 It is entirely possible that without this help Germany would not have been able to go to war against the USSR. Hitler was to a considerable extent justified in telling his council of war on August 22, 1939, that Germany had nothing to fear from a blockade, in the event of war, because the East would provide everything it needed.

In return the Soviet Union was supposed to receive weapons from Ger­many for the Soviet navy, including fully equipped cruisers and other armaments. Germany actually did provide the cruiser Lutsev, equipment for submarines, artillery systems, and so on. The Lutsev, delivered to Kronstadt in June 1940 at a price of 100 million Reichsmarks, was not completely finished or equipped. Part of its equipment was never delivered. Germany also agreed to send advisers to the USSR to train the Lutsev crew.136

Germany did not completely fulfill its commitments under the economic agreements. At the time of Germany's invasion of the USSR it still owed 229 million Reichsmarks' worth of goods. The Nazis got the best of the deal. They obtained substantial economic aid which helped them prepare their attacks on France and the Balkans and, after that, on their supplier, the Soviet Union.

The Soviet government's assistance was not confined merely to supplying strategic materials to Germany. Some six weeks after the Stalin—Hitler pact, at the beginning of October 1939, the Soviet government proposed that the Germans build a naval base for themselves thirty-five miles northwest of Murmansk, for fueling and repairing its submarines and warships. The Germans used "Basis Nord," as it was called, during their campaign in Norway, abandoning it only in September 1940, when they had no more use for it. Admiral Raeder, commander-in-chief of the German navy, sent a letter thanking the Soviet government, which replied that it was glad to have been of service.

German auxiliary cruisers, involved in operations against the British, were allowed to take on fuel and food at Murmansk. For this Admiral Raeder and the German government expressed their thanks to the Soviet naval com­mand. 137 Admiral Kuznetsov, commissar of the Soviet navy, promised to re­spond to these thanks "not with empty words but with deeds. "138

The Soviet government also authorized German naval vessels to seek refuge in the port of Murmansk. When war began in September 1939, the Soviets held British and other Allied naval vessels in Murmansk, to allow German ships to travel safely back to their bases in Germany. Later, when the battleship Bremen tried to break the British blockade and return to Germany, the Soviet authorities held all British and Allied ships at Mur­mansk until the Bremen had reached home safely.139

Stalin's government likewise made its icebreakers available to help Ger­man commerce raiders, camouflaged as merchant ships, pass through the northern Arctic route to the Pacific. On August 12, 1940, the raider Schiff- 45 was helped through the Bering Strait by a Soviet icebreaker and reached the Pacific on September 5.140 Together with another German raider, Schiff- 45 was responsible for sinking a number of Allied vessels with a total tonnage of 64,000.

The Germans, for their part, limited the movement of their ships in the Baltic and Black seas during the Soviet—Finnish war. Abusing its formal neutrality, the USSR sent its ships out to obtain weather information for the Germans. This was used by the Luftwaffe in the bombing of British cities.

In its desire to appease Hitler, the Soviet government went to the extent of handing over to the German authorities approximately 800 anti-Nazi German and Austrian activists, including former Comintern functionaries who had been held in Soviet prison camps. The formal pretext for this action was the clause in the Stalin—Hitler pact providing for the liberation of German and Austrian citizens detained in the Soviet Union on charges of "espionage for Germany." They were handed over to the Nazis. It is easy to imagine the joy of the Gestapo at the delivery of, among others, Franz Korichoner, founder of the Austrian Communist party. There was nothing unusual about all this. The core of the Comintern had been eliminated in the USSR during the Great Terror of the 1930s. The Gestapo took care to eliminate the rest. "/ deshevo i milo (Cheap and sweet)," as Stalin used to say.

The very organization of the Comintern had been placed at the disposal of the short-term foreign policy interest of the Soviet state. At the beginning of the war many Western Communist parties, following Moscow's orders, declared the democratic states (Britain and France) to be the aggressors.

As Germany occupied Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and other countries, the Soviet government closed the Moscow embassies of each victim of aggression and denied support to the populations of those countries in their resistance against the German occupation. This situation lasted until the Soviet Union itself became the victim of German attack.

Shortly after the capitulation of France, Germany began a propaganda offensive, with Soviet support, urging Britain to make peace.141 At the same time the German air force began its terroristic bombing raids on British cities. But the British refused to surrender. Hitler was in a hurry. He wanted to establish German hegemony over all of Europe as quickly as possible, and he became convinced that Britain would not give in as long as the Soviet Union existed. In July 1940 Hitler and the German high command began a discussion of the problems connected with waging war against the Soviet Union.142 On July 31 the German General Staff received orders to draw up a plan for such a war. This was to become Plan Bar- barossa.143

Hitler then began his war preparations on the diplomatic level. First he needed to consolidate the forces of the totalitarian states (Germany, Italy, and Japan), who wished to divide the world among themselves. Hence the Tripartite Pact of September 27, 1940, under which Germany was assigned the "Euro-African space," Italy the "Mediterranean area," and Japan "the East Asia space." Soon after, Germany sent a military mission nearly the size of a division to Romania. The mission's real task was to prepare the Romanian army for the attack on the Soviet Union. Also in September, Germany sent troops to Finland, which it considered a prospective ally.

The German military-industrial base was strengthened. At the end of 1940 Germany's "Lebensrauni" consisted of 4 million square kilometers, with a population of 333 million. From the summer of 1940 on, the Germans began to make systematic use of the economies of the occupied or satellite countries for the war effort. Foreign workers were brought in as labor for German industry, freeing a significant number of Germans for military service. Industrial production soon experienced major growth.

As the German Reich grew larger and stronger, conflicts with the Soviet Union became more and more frequent. The Reich no longer needed Soviet assistance to the same degree as it had in the first months of war.

For its part, the Soviet government sought to use the period of peaceful relations with Germany to increase its own territory and strengthen its position, wherever possible. On April 9, 1940, Molotov told Schulenburg that the Soviet Union was interested in the continued neutrality of Sweden. Germany was forced to take this into account.

Lithuania also became a source of friction between the Soviet Union and Germany. Under the secret protocol of 1939, the Lithuanian region of Mariampol was to remain in the German sphere of influence, and the Soviet Union had agreed to stay out of the area. Yet on August 3, 1940, Soviet troops occupied this territory.

The dispute over Lithuania was resolved later, on January 10, 1941, when the two powers signed another secret agreement, under which the Soviet Union agreed to pay Germany $7.5 million, one-eighth of which would be paid immediately in the form of nonferrous metals, the remainder to be paid in gold.144

Earlier in 1940, during the German offensive in Norway, the USSR had slowed down its deliveries of strategic goods, fearing that the German move into Scandinavia might have a bearing on the Baltic states within the Soviet sphere of influence. Once it was convinced that the German offensive would be limited to Norway, deliveries were resumed. But the incident left its mark on relations between the two powers, making Germany particularly sensitive to its dependence on Soviet supplies.

In August and September 1940 new frictions developed in the wake of the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Germany gave Romania a unilateral guarantee and, acting as a mediator, awarded Tran­sylvania to Hungary. For the Soviet Union, this was a violation of article 3 of the nonaggression pact, which called for discussions between the two powers on problems affecting their common interests. Economic negotia­tions between the two states likewise produced friction. In addition, the Soviet Union objected to the fact that it had not been notified of the Tripartite Pact until the eve of its being signed.

In October 1940 Germany explained to the Soviet Union that it was sending its military mission to Romania at Romania's request and suppos­edly, to protect Germany's interest in Romania's oil.145 Serious tensions between the Soviet Union and Germany were also developing over Bulgaria and the rest of the Balkans.

It was under these circumstances in the fall of 1940 that the question arose as to whether it was possible and desirable to continue collaboration, or whether Soviet and German interests had become irreconcilable. On October 13, Ribbentrop sent Stalin a letter that began with an analysis of the relations between the two countries and ended with an invitation to the USSR to join the Tripartite Pact and thus share in the division of the world into spheres of influence. Ribbentrop invited Molotov to Berlin to discuss these questions and said that he was ready to come to Moscow with rep­resentatives of Japan and Italy to pursue this proposal, which he emphasized "would be practically beneficial to all of us."146

Molotov arrived in Berlin on November 12. He listened quietly to the speeches of Ribbentrop and Hitler, who explained that Britain had been defeated and would never set foot on the European continent again. Molotov agreed with Hitler that both powers had greatly benefited from their col­laboration. He stressed that Germany had been protected on its eastern flank and that this had been a major factor in the victories of the Reich in the first year of war. He added, however, that not all problems had yet been solved, in particular the questions of Finland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. The German minutes of the meeting (the Soviet version has never been published) state that Molotov agreed with the Flihrer's obser­vations on the role of America and England. "Soviet adherence to the Tripartite Pact," he said, "seemed perfectly acceptable in principle, as long as it participated as an equal partner, not just a passive object." If this condition were accepted, he saw no obstacle to Soviet participation "in this joint effort" (emphasis added—A. N.).147 But he asked for further clari­fication, particularly of the Asian area.

Molotov reproached the Germans for not responding to Stalin, who had asked that Southern Bukovina be added to the Soviet sphere. He further insisted on the withdrawal of German troops from Finland and cessation of anti-Soviet propaganda in that country. Hitler promised all of this but at the same time warned Molotov to avoid another war with Finland. Molotov asked German agreement to a Soviet guarantee of the integrity of Bulgaria, such as the German one given to Romania. Hitler had no objec­tion, as long as Bulgaria itself asked for such a thing. He also said that he shared the Soviet point of view on the need to change the agreement to include the Turkish straits and to authorize free passage of Soviet war­ships from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

Molotov listened without commenting when the proposed agreement on the division of the world into four spheres of influence was outlined. On November 14 he returned to Moscow. Twelve days later the Soviet answer was sent to Hitler. The USSR accepted the German proposal to divide the world into spheres of influence but with certain changes: the Soviet sphere should extend south of Baku and Batum, that is across Turkish territory, into northern Iran and Iraq. The USSR should have the right to establish a military base on the straits, Turkey should be invited to join the Tripartite Pact, and territorial guarantees should be given to Turkey jointly by Ger­many, Italy, and the Soviet Union. If Turkey refused, the three powers would take appropriate military and diplomatic measures to safeguard their interests.

In addition, the Soviet government, while agreeing to respect German economic interests in Finland, insisted that Germany immediately withdraw its troops from that country. It also asked that Japan renounce its claims to coal and oil deposits on the northern Sakhalin island and that Bulgaria become part of the Soviet sphere and sign a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union.148

These were the conditions the socialist Soviet Union proposed for agree­ing to the Nazi plan to divide up the world. Later official claims that the Soviet government had rejected the Nazi proposals do not hold water. Molotov wrote to the Germans several times after that, asking for their answer to the Soviet counterproposals. All in vain. Hitler had decided on war against the USSR. On December 18, 1940, Plan Barbarossa was adopted in its final form.

A month earlier King Boris of Bulgaria had arrived in Berlin to discuss Bulgaria's adherence to the Tripartite Pact. (It formally joined on March 2, 1941.) On November 20, 1940, Hungary joined the pact. On November 23 Romania followed suit, as did Slovakia on November 24. Hitler had obviously decided to disregard Soviet views on such matters. Soviet protests were never answered. The irritation in Moscow over these developments took the form of erratic behavior. For example, the Soviet government spoke out against a rapprochement between Finland and Sweden (which could have had the beneficial effect of ensuring Finnish neutrality in the event of a Soviet—German war). It warned Finland that an agreement of this kind would annul the peace treaty it had signed with the Soviet Union. In other words, it threatened Finland with a new war. The result was that inside Finland the supporters of a rapprochement with Germany gained ground against the moderates.

Nazi Germany was clearly preparing for a new war, this time against the Soviet Union. But it decided first to take the Balkans and in that way isolate its two enemies, Britain and the Soviet Union.

In fact, the Balkan war was started by Italy, which on its own initiative, without consulting Germany, invaded Greece on October 28, 1940. In March 1941 Germany attacked Greece, saving Italy from a military disaster. The Reich then demanded that Yugoslavia join the Tripartite Pact. The Yugoslav premier agreed, but on March 27 he was overthrown in a popular revolt.

It was at this late hour, on April 5, 1941, that the Soviet Union signed a friendship treaty with Yugoslavia, which gave no practical aid to the besieged Yugoslavs but served as a kind of Soviet protest against Nazi expansion in the Balkans. The next day, April 6, Germany attacked Yu­goslavia and quickly defeated its army. The Soviet Union did not lift a finger to help its "friend."

On June 18 Turkey signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. By this time Germany had completed its military buildup in Poland and Romania along the Soviet border. On June 20 German paratroops finished their operations in Crete against the British, who were forced to withdraw to Egypt.

The normalization of Soviet—Japanese relations was the only major suc­cess for Soviet foreign policy during this period. The fighting along the Mongolian border had ended in mid-September 1939, after the signing of the Stalin—Hitler pact. Germany's pact with the Soviet Union, the fall of France, the occupation of the Low Countries, the beleaguering of Britain— all this supported the views of the militarists in Japan, who advocated expansion to the south against the French, British, and Dutch colonies, not to the north and west, against the Soviet Union. Industrial and com­mercial sectors in Japan, interested in trade relations with the Soviet Union, especially those in the fishing industry, urged their government to sign a new fishing treaty with the Soviets. The old one had expired in 1939. Germany was also interested in seeing Japan expand southward, since this would distract the United States from Europe and force the British to disperse their forces to protect their empire.

The fishing pact was extended through 1942. On April 13, 1941, Jap­anese Foreign Minister Matsuoka, on a visit to Moscow, signed a neutrality pact. This normalization of relations was very important for the Soviets at a time when relations with Germany were increasingly strained. The agree­ment was signed by the Japanese in spite of direct pressure on Matsuoka by Hitler and Ribbentrop, who hinted to him quite clearly that war against the Soviet Union was not far away. But since Japan had already chosen to expand southward, Matsuoka chose to guarantee its northern flank by sign­ing the treaty. Thus the danger of a two-front war, both for Japan and for the Soviet Union, was greatly reduced.

DECEPTION AND SELF-DECEPTION

The Soviet government had a vast international intelligence network at its disposal. Classified information on military and political matters found its way to Moscow through various channels: the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, the Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Commissariat of Defense, and the Comintern. The Soviet intelligence operations in Europe and Asia were among the best in the world, not only because they were staffed by steeled professionals, such as Richard Sorge, Lev Manevich, Rado, and Trepper, but also because they had a fairly broad base of support among Western Communists, antifascists, and left intellectuals, whose de­votion to communist ideals and to the first socialist country in the world led them to assist the Soviet intelligence effort. As a result, Soviet infor­mation was exceptionally reliable.

Nevertheless, during the Stalin terror of the 1930s, nearly every Soviet intelligence operative outside the country became suspect. Many of them, after returning to Moscow, were arrested in the late 1930s, along with their families, accused of high treason, and shot. Despite the enormous damage the Soviet government did in this way to its own intelligence service, it maintained a core of reliable agents.

As early as the fall of 1940 Moscow received word from Switzerland that a plan for an attack on the Soviet Union, Plan Barbarossa, was being drafted. The source of this information was an officer on the German General Staff. In early 1941 more detailed information on Plan Barbarossa reached Moscow.

Confirmation of such reports from Bern, Berlin, and Paris came from Tokyo from Sorge, whose sources had access to the most confidential doc­uments in the Japanese government's possession. For six years Sorge had transmitted absolutely reliable information to Moscow. On several occasions he had assured the Soviet government correctly that despite the armed clashes between Japanese and Soviet forces in Mongolia, Japan would go to war against the United States, not Russia.

In early May 1941 Sorge provided Moscow with the substance of a conversation between Hitler and the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, in which Hitler revealed his intention of attacking the Soviet Union. On May 12 Sorge reported that 150 German divisions were being massed along the Soviet border and that the proposed date for the invasion was June 20. In his next report, May 15, Sorge corrected the date to June 22 and provided a rough outline of the planned operations. At the height of the German offensive against Moscow, in October 1941, Sorge informed his superiors that the Japanese government intended to attack the British and Dutch colonial possessions in Southeast Asia. On October 18, 1941, Sorge was arrested; three years later, on November 7, 1944, the Japanese government executed him by hanging. The Soviet government did not lift a finger to save him. Stalin had no desire to save the life of this or any other firsthand witness to his mistakes and crimes. Sorge's wife was arrested by the Soviet authorities and sent to a camp. Likewise, nothing was done to save Ma­nevich, who was arrested in Italy. No wonder that a number of Soviet intelligence agents chose not to return to their homeland. Those who did were either shot or spent many years in confinement.

On March 1 and March 20, 1941, official warnings about the coming German attack were also delivered to the Soviet government by Sumner Welles, the U.S. undersecretary of state.149

On April 2 Churchill instructed Ambassador Stafford Cripps to meet with Stalin to give him certain vital information concerning the movement of German troops in Poland and to warn him of an imminent German invasion. Stalin and Molotov avoided meeting with the British ambassador, however.150 Only on April 19 did Cripps succeed in relaying his information to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.151

Stalin treated all reports with distrust, suspecting British intelligence of fabricating them in order to provoke a war between the Soviet Union and Germany. To please Stalin, Filipp Golikov, head of Soviet army intelligence, told him that the possibility was not excluded that the British were inventing false reports about an imminent German attack. Nevertheless, these reports were so numerous and so consistent that it must have been hard not to conclude that the Germans actually were preparing to attack.

The Soviet border patrol likewise systematically informed the Central Committee and the government of the situation along the border. The num­ber of "enemy spies" killed or detained while on reconnaissance on Soviet territory rose during the first quarter of 1941 to a figure fifteen to twenty times greater than in the first quarter of 1940, and during the second quarter of 1941 the figure was twenty-five to thirty times greater than in the same period of 1940.152 In 1940 there had been 235 incidents on the Soviet western border, and several groups of German commandos wearing Red Army uniforms had been discovered. Starting in the summer of 1940, both the number and depth of penetrations into Soviet air space increased. From January to June 1941 there were 152 such incidents.153

On April 20, 1941, the Ukrainian frontier military district reported increased military preparations on the German side all along the border and on Hungarian territory. On June 5 the Main Frontier Troops Admin­istration (GUPV) reported that during the months of April and May the Germans had concentrated between eighty and eighty-eight infantry divi­sions, thirteen to fifteen motorized divisions, seven tank divisions, sixty- five artillery regiments, and other forces along the Soviet border.

On June 6 the GUPV reported that approximately 4 million German troops had been concentrated near the Soviet border. Stalin was personally informed of this on the same day. On June 11 Stalin was informed that since June 9 the German embassy in Moscow had been burning its papers and that its personnel had been instructed to prepare for evacuation in a week's time.

On June 10 and 13 the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, was invited to the British Foreign Office and informed that Germany was about to launch an invasion of the Soviet Union. In the event of such an attack, Foreign Minister Anthony Eden said, Great Britain was ready to aid the Soviet Union. Similar warnings were sent to Moscow by Soviet diplomats assigned to the Vichy government in France.

Groups of anti-Nazi fighters warned the Soviet Union of the concentration of troops in Poland, Romania, and Hungary and military construction ac­tivities and other preparations for war on those territories. Among inhab­itants of the regions on both sides of the border rumors that the Germans were about to attack circulated widely, and the Soviet command was fully aware of these rumors.

Nevertheless, in spite of abundant information, as well as the urgent requests by the military authorities of the border regions that at least minimal precautions be taken in case of an attack, no orders came from Moscow. Some commanders chose to act on their own authority. On June 18 Lieutenant General Bogdanov, commander of the frontier troops in the Baltic region, ordered the evacuation of the families of all military personnel and on June 20 took additional measures to strengthen border defenses.

The German ambassador, Schulenburg, returned to Moscow toward the end of April after reporting to Hitler in Berlin. He came away from his meeting with Hitler with the impression that the attack on the Soviet Union would occur in the very near future. Risking arrest on treason charges, he tried to warn the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Dekanozov (who was also deputy commissar of foreign affairs and a confidant of Beria). Dekanozov dismissed Schulenburg's warning with the greatest suspicion, considering it a provocation.154 (In 1944 Schulenburg took part in the plot against Hitler and was executed.)

On August 22 and 23, 1939, there had been total surprise when the Soviet press reported Ribbentrop's arrival and simultaneously printed an account of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, Germany. For many long years the German fascists had been denounced in the Soviet press as the most hated enemies of the Soviet Union. Now it suddenly turned out they were not fascists but National Socialists—that is, socialists of some kind. Ribbentrop, who to the Soviet press had been a warmonger, was greeted ceremoniously at the Moscow airport, which was decked with flags bearing the iron cross as well as the hammer and sickle. The newspapers showed

Ribbentrop next to Stalin, who was smiling and looking pleased. The population of course knew nothing of what went on at the meetings with Ribbentrop.

The strongest emotional reactions against Soviet—German rapprochement came from Soviet youth. At Moscow University those who presented the official account of the new development, the teachers of Marxism-Leninism, encountered angry and sarcastic questions and comments. Their confused explanations provoked outbursts of laughter.

Thousands of propagandists were sent to offices and enterprises to explain that the rapprochement was not a tactical maneuver but a change of policy of historical significance. A two-volume edition of Bismarck's memoirs was hastily prepared. He had been a strong proponent of a German—Russian alliance. Professor A. S. Jerusalimsky, the best Soviet expert on German history, was assigned to write an introduction. Stalin himself read the proofs of the introduction and made a number of changes. The main idea was summed up in these words, clearly intended for Hitler: "Bismarck saw the main danger for Germany in a conflict with Russia. ... His policy was based on an understanding of the strength and invincibility of the Russian people."155

On government orders, Sergei Eisenstein produced a Wagner opera at the Bolshoi Theater. Before then the German composer had not been re­garded with favor, to say the least. The periodicals were filled with articles about the traditional friendship between the Russians and Germans. For­gotten were the "dog knights" whom Eisenstein himself had caricatured in Alexander Nevsky.

ТЕЛЕГРАМ

Канал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками

Книжный Вестник

Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)

Поиск книг

Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах

Любовные романы

О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте

Саморазвитие

Детективы и триллеры, все новинки

Детективы

Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки

Фантастика

Отборные классические книги

Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕ

Цитаты, афоризмы, стихи, книжные подборки, обсуждения и многое другое

Книжный Вестник
БИБЛИОТЕКИ

Библиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории

Любовные романы

Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров

Фантастика

Самые популярные книги в формате фб2

Топ фб2 книги