At first, Hitler’s anti-communism was more pertinent to domestic politics than his anti-Semitism. To control the German state, he would have to break the communists and the social democrats. Over the course of 1933, some two hundred thousand Germans were locked up, most of them men seen as left-wing opponents of the regime. Hitler’s terror in 1933 was meant to intimidate rather than eliminate: most of these people were released after short periods in what the Nazis euphemistically called “protective custody.” The communist party was not allowed to take up the eighty-one seats that it had won in the elections; soon all of its property was seized by the state. By July 1933 it was illegal in Germany to belong to any other political party than the Nazis. In November the Nazis staged a parliamentary election in which only their candidates could run and win. Hitler had very quickly made of Germany a one-party state—and certainly not the sort of one-party state that Stalin might have expected. The German communist party, for years the strongest outside the Soviet Union itself, was broken in a matter of a few months. Its defeat was a serious blow to the prestige of the international communist movement.11
At first, Stalin seemed to hope that the Soviet-German special relationship could be preserved, despite Hitler’s rise to power. Since 1922, the two states had engaged in military and economic cooperation, on the tacit understanding that both had an interest in the remaking of eastern Europe at the expense of Poland. The 1922 agreement at Rapallo had been confirmed by the neutrality pact of the Treaty of Berlin, signed in 1926 and extended for another five years in 1931. The clearest sign of good relations and common purpose were the German military exercises on Soviet soil. These came to an end in September 1933. In January 1934, Nazi Germany signed a nonaggression declaration with Poland. This surprise move seemed to signal a basic reorientation in German foreign policy. It seemed that Warsaw had replaced Moscow as Berlin’s favored partner in the East. Might the Germans and the Poles now fight together against the Soviet Union?12
The new German relationship with Poland likely meant more to Stalin than the oppression of the German communists. Stalin himself always conducted foreign policy at two levels: the diplomatic and the ideological, one directed at states, the other at societies, including his own. For the one he had his commissar for foreign affairs, Maxim Litvinov; for the other he had the Communist International. He probably assumed that Hitler’s approach was much the same, and thus that overt anti-communism need not prevent good relations between Berlin and Moscow. But the approach to Poland added what looked like anti-Soviet diplomacy to an anti-communist ideology. As Stalin correctly suspected, Hitler was trying to enlist Poland as a junior ally in a crusade against the Soviet Union. While the German-Polish negotiations were underway in late 1933, Soviet leaders rightly worried that the Germans were trying to buy Polish territory in the west with the promise that Poland could later annex territories from Soviet Ukraine. Poland, however, never showed any interest in Germany’s propositions to extend the accord in such a way. The German-Polish declaration did not in fact include a secret protocol on military cooperation against the USSR, despite what Soviet intelligence and propaganda claimed. Yet Hitler did wish to use the German-Polish declaration as the beginning of a rapprochement with Warsaw that would culminate in a military alliance against the USSR. He wondered aloud in spring 1934 about the necessary inducements.13
In January 1934, the Soviet Union seemed to be in a dreadful position. Its domestic policies had starved millions of its own citizens to death. Its foreign policies had contributed to the rise of a threatening anti-communist dictator, Hitler, who had made peace with the previous common German-Soviet enemy, Poland.
Stalin found the rhetorical and ideological escape route. At the Soviet communist party congress of January-February 1934, known as “The Congress of Victors,” Stalin claimed that a second revolution had been completed within the Soviet Union. The famines, the most unforgettable experience of the Soviet peoples, went unmentioned. They blurred into a general story of how Stalin and his loyal retinue had overcome the resistance of enemies to implement the Five-Year Plan. Lazar Kaganovich praised his master Stalin as the creator of “the greatest revolution that human history has ever known.” The rise of Hitler, despite appearances, was a sign of the coming victory of the Soviet system in the world. The brutality of the Nazis revealed that capitalism would soon collapse under its own contradictions, and that a European revolution was around the corner.14
This interpretation could only make sense to revolutionaries by conviction, to communists already bound to their leader by faith and fear. It took a special sort of mind to truly believe that the worse things appeared, the better they actually were. Such reasoning went by the name dialectics, but by this time that word (despite its proud descent from the Greeks through Hegel and Marx) meant little more than the psychic capacity to adjust one’s own perceptions to the changing expressions of Stalin’s will.15
For his part, Stalin knew that rhetoric was not enough. Even as he proclaimed that Hitler’s revolution was a sign of the coming socialist victory, Stalin hastened to change his domestic policy. He did not take revenge on the Ukrainian peasant year after year. The peasants had to live on, frightened and intimidated, but productive of the foodstuffs needed by the Soviet state. Soviet policy now allowed all peasants to cultivate a small plot, the equivalent of a private garden, for their own use. Requisition quotas and export targets ceased their unreasoning climb. Starvation within the Soviet Union came to an end in 1934.16
The rise of Hitler was indeed an opportunity to present the Soviet Union as the defense of European civilization. Stalin, after more than a year, finally took it in June 1934. According to the new line of the Communist International, propagated then, politics was no longer a matter of “class against class.” Instead, the Soviet Union and communist parties around the world would unite the Left in a camp of “anti-fascists.” Rather than engaging in uncompromising class struggle, communists would rescue civilization from the rising tide of fascism. Fascism, the term popularized by Mussolini in Italy, was presented by the Soviets as a general corruption of late capitalism. Though fascism’s spread signified the end of the old capitalist order, its vicious hatred of the Soviet Union (went the argument) justified Soviet and communist compromises with other capitalist forces (in the interest of defending the Soviet Union). European communists were to restyle themselves as “anti-fascists,” and to cooperate with social democrats and other parties of the Left. Communists in Europe were expected to join “Popular Fronts,” electoral alliances and win election victories with social democrats and other parties of the Left. For the time being, communists were to work within democracies, rather than toward their destruction.17
This came too late for German communists and social democrats, of course. But throughout western and southern Europe, people concerned with halting the spread of Hitler and fascism celebrated the new Soviet approach. By presenting the Soviet Union as the homeland of “anti-fascism,” Stalin was seeking after a monopoly of the good. Surely reasonable people would want to be on the side of the anti-fascists, rather than that of the fascists? Anyone who was against the Soviet Union, was the suggestion, was probably a fascist or at least a sympathizer. During the period of the Popular Front, from June 1934 through August 1939, about three quarters of a million Soviet citizens would be shot to death by order of Stalin, and still more deported to the Gulag. Most of the repressed would be peasants and workers, the people whom the Soviet social system was supposed to serve. The others would generally be members of national minorities. Just as Hitler’s rise had obscured the Soviet famine of 1933, Stalin’s response would distract attention from the Great Terror.18
The Popular Front enjoyed the greatest chances for success in the west European democracies furthest from the Soviet Union, France, and Spain. The greatest triumph was in Paris, where a Popular Front government indeed came to power in May 1936. Left-wing parties (including Herriot’s Radicals) won elections, and the socialist Léon Blum
became prime minister. The French communists, part of a victorious electoral coalition, did not formally join the government, but they did provide the parliamentary majority and influence policy. The votes could thus be found for reforms—although the communists were chiefly concerned with ensuring that French foreign policy was friendly to the Soviet Union. In Paris, the Popular Front was seen as a triumph of native traditions of the Left. But many, not least the political refugees from Nazi Germany, saw it as a Soviet success, and even a confirmation that the Soviets supported democracy and freedom. The Popular Front in France made it far more difficult for some of the most impressive European intellectuals to criticize the Soviet Union.19
In Spain, a coalition of parties also formed a Popular Front, and won the elections of February 1936. There, events took a rather different turn. In July army officers, supported by far-right groups, tried to overturn the elected government in a coup d’état. The government resisted, and the Spanish Civil War began. Though for Spaniards this was an essentially domestic struggle, the ideological enemies of the Popular Front era took sides. The Soviet Union began to supply arms to the embattled Spanish Republic in October 1936, while Nazi Germany and fascist Italy supported the right-wing forces led by General Francisco Franco. The Spanish Civil War occasioned closer relations between Berlin and Rome, and became the center of attention of Soviet policy in Europe. Spain was on the front pages of major Soviet newspapers every day for months.20
Spain became the rallying cry of European socialists who came to fight for the side of the endangered republic, many of whom took for granted that the Soviet Union was on the side of democracy. One of the more perceptive of the European socialists, the English writer George Orwell, was dismayed by the struggle of Stalinists within Spain to dominate the Spanish Left. As he saw it, the Soviets exported their political practices along with their weapons. Stalin’s assistance to the Spanish republic came with a price: his right to carry out factional struggles on Spanish territory. Stalin’s greatest rival, Trotsky, was still alive (if in distant Mexican exile), and many of the Spaniards defending their republic were more attached to Trotsky’s person than to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Soon communist propaganda was presenting the Spanish Trotskyites as fascists, and Soviet NKVD officers were sent to Spain to shoot them for their “treason.”21
The enemies of the Popular Front presented it as a conspiracy of the Communist International to rule the world. The Popular Front provided Japan and Germany with a convenient pretext to solidify their own relations. On 25 November 1936, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which obliged the two states to consult with each other if either was attacked. An agreement between Japanese and German intelligence agencies of 11 May 1937 provided for the exchange of intelligence on the USSR, and included a plan for both to use national movements in the Soviet borderlands against the Soviet Union.22
From the Soviet perspective, the Japanese threat was more immediate than the German. During the first half of 1937, Germany appeared to be an addendum to a Japanese threat, rather than the other way around. Japanese politics was dominated by dueling visions of empire, one in the south and one in the north. An important clique in the Japanese military believed that Siberian resources were the key to the country’s future economic development. Japan’s Manchurian satellite, Manchukuo, had a long border with Soviet Siberia, and looked ever more like a launching pad for an invasion. The Japanese were toying with the idea of establishing a puppet Ukrainian state on Soviet territory in eastern Siberia, based on the million or so Ukrainians who lived there as deportees or settlers. As Tokyo understood, Ukrainians deported to the Gulag might well oppose Soviet power, given the assurance of foreign backing. Polish spies who knew of the idea referred to it as “Manchukuo Number Two.”23
The Japanese certainly seemed to have a long-term interest in Siberia. A special Japanese academy in Manchukuo, in the city of Harbin, had already trained a first generation of young, Russian-speaking imperialists, such as Chiune Sugihara. He was one of the negotiators of an agreement whereby the Soviets, in 1935, sold their rights to the railway in Manchuria to the Japanese. Sugihara was also in charge of the foreign policy office of Manchukuo. A convert to the Russian Orthodox religion and husband to a Russian wife, Sugihara called himself Sergei and spent most of his time in the Russian quarter of Harbin. There he befriended Russian exiles, and recruited them for espionage missions within the Soviet Union. The drama of the Soviet-Japanese duel in east Asia attracted the attention of Gareth Jones, who traveled to Manchuria that same year. The Welshman, with his uncanny instinct for news, was right to see this region as the crucial theater in the global conflict between “fascism” and “anti-fascism.” In somewhat mysterious circumstances, he was abducted by bandits and murdered.24
Stalin had to be concerned not only with a direct Japanese attack on Soviet Siberia but also with the consolidation of a Japanese empire in east Asia. Manchukuo was one Japanese colony taken from historically Chinese territory; perhaps more were to come. China had the longest border with the Soviet Union, and an unstable polity. China’s nationalist government had the upper hand in an ongoing civil war with the Chinese communist party. In the “Long March,” Chinese communist troops, led by Mao Zedong, had been forced to withdraw into the north and west of the country. Neither side, however, seemed able to achieve anything resembling a monopoly of force in the country. Even in regions where the nationalists had the upper hand, they were reliant upon local warlords. Perhaps most importantly for Stalin, the nationalists and communists were unable to cooperate against the advance of the Japanese.
Soviet foreign policy had to balance between support for fraternal communist parties (less important) and concerns of Soviet state security (more important). While in principle the Communist International supported the Chinese communists, Stalin armed and funded the nationalist government, in the hope of pacifying the border. In the largely Muslim Chinese province of Xinjiang, which had a long border with Soviet Kazakhstan, Stalin took an equally unideological approach. He supported the local warlord Sheng Shicai, sending engineers and miners to exploit natural resources, and NKVD men to ensure security.25
Globally, the German-Japanese rapprochement could be seen as completing an encirclement of the Soviet homeland by Japan, Germany, and Poland. These were the three most important neighbors of the Soviet Union; they were also three states that had defeated the Soviet Union (or the Russian Empire) in the wars of Stalin’s lifetime. Even though Germany had lost the First World War, its troops had defeated the Russian Army on the eastern front in 1917. Japan had humiliated the Russian Army and Navy in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Poland had defeated the Red Army as recently as 1920. Now, after the German-Polish and the German-Japanese agreements, these three powers appeared to be arrayed against the Soviet Union. If the Anti-Comintern Pact and the German-Polish nonaggression declaration had indeed included secret protocols concerning an offensive war on the Soviet Union, then Stalin would have been right about encirclement. In fact, neither did; and an offensive alliance between Tokyo, Warsaw, and Berlin was highly unlikely, if not impossible. Although Poland’s relations with Japan were good, Warsaw wished to take no step that could be interpreted as hostile to the Soviet Union. Poland declined Germany’s invitation to join the Anti-Comintern Pact.26
Part of Stalin’s political talent was his ability to equate foreign threats with failures in domestic policy, as if the two were actually the same thing, and as if he were responsible for neither. This absolved him of blame for policy failures, and allowed him to define his chosen internal enemies as agents of foreign powers. As early as 1930, as problems of collectivization became apparent, he was already speaking of international conspiracies between supporters of Trotsky and various foreign powers. It was obvious, Stalin proclaimed, that “as long as the capitalist encirclement exists there will continue to be present among us wreckers, spies, saboteurs and murderers.” Any problem with Soviet policies was the fault of reactionary state
s that wished to slow the proper course of history. Any seeming flaws of the Five-Year Plan were a result of foreign intervention: hence the harshest of penalties was justified for traitors, and the blame always resided in Warsaw, Tokyo, Berlin, London, or Paris.27
In these years, Stalinism thus involved a kind of double bluff. The success of the Popular Front depended on a record of progress toward socialism that was largely a matter of propaganda. Meanwhile, the explanation of famine and misery at home depended upon the idea of foreign subversion, which was essentially without merit. Atop the Soviet party apparatus and atop the Communist International, Stalin was making these two bluffs simultaneously, and he knew just how they could be called: by a foreign military intervention by a state crafty enough to enlist Soviet citizens who had suffered under his policies. The power of the combination of foreign war and domestic opposition was, after all, the first lesson of Soviet history. Lenin himself had been a German secret weapon in the First World War; the Bolshevik Revolution itself was a side effect of the German foreign policy of 1917. Twenty years later, Stalin had to fear that his opponents within the Soviet Union would use a coming war to overthrow his own regime. Trotsky was in emigration, just as Lenin had been in 1917. During a war Trotsky might come back and rally his supporters, just as Lenin had done twenty years before.28
By 1937 Stalin faced no meaningful political opposition within the Soviet communist party, but this only seemed to convince him that his enemies had learned political invisibility. Just as he had during the height of the famine, he argued again that year that the most dangerous enemies of the state appeared to be harmless and loyal. All enemies, even the invisible ones, would have to be unmasked and eradicated. On 7 November 1937, the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution (and the fifth anniversary of his wife’s suicide), Stalin raised a toast: “We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts!—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!”29
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