Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  The next day Voroshilov smilingly told the British and French delegations that “in view of the changed situation there is no point in continuing these discussions.”

  The Boss personally thought up an explanation of the new alliance for the Soviet people. In army units, a comic drawing was displayed. It showed two triangles. The caption over one of them read “What did Chamberlain want?” At the apex of the triangle was the word “London” and at the two lower corners “Moscow” and “Berlin.” Meaning that Chamberlain wanted to bring the USSR and Germany into conflict. The caption over the other triangle was “What did Comrade Stalin do?” Now the word at the apex was “Moscow.” Stalin had brought Berlin and London into conflict, leaving the USSR on top.

  The country unanimously rejoiced, passing yet another obedience test. It was indeed a new country that he had created.

  SECOND WORLD WAR

  Hitler invaded Poland, and England and France declared war on Germany. Stalin’s tactics had proved correct: Hitler had, as expected, drawn Europe into a world war. The path to the Great Dream lay open. These were the first results of sacrificing his queen, the Comintern.

  But the match went on. He went into action himself, taking back parts of the empire of the Romanovs lost after the Revolution. On September 17 his troops entered Poland, which the Germans had already brought to its knees. “Since the Polish state has ceased to exist, Soviet troops have entered Poland to protect the rights of the Belorussian and Ukrainian minorities (against Hitler).” That was how Stalin announced the annexation of Eastern Poland to the country and the world. Hitler had no choice but to accept the new status quo, and, what was more, accept a doctored text of the Soviet-German communiqué. Hitler’s bellicose declarations were replaced with ideological phraseology of the sort Stalin favored: “To restore peace and order in Poland … suppress disorders caused by the collapse of the Polish state … and to give help to the Polish people …” In short, Poland had been occupied for Poland’s sake. Another example of “in-depth language.”

  The western Ukraine and western Belorussia, parts of the former Romanov empire, had returned to the bosom of Stalin’s empire. He took the opportunity to bestow a gift on Lithuania—the city of Vilnius. Lithuania rejoiced. But intelligent people were gloomy. “Vilnius belongs to us—but it looks as if we belong to Russia” summed up their feelings.

  When Ribbentrop reappeared in Moscow at the end of September, the Boss was now asking for the whole of the Baltic States, including Lithuania, previously in the Reich’s sphere of interest. He also asked for, and was given, the Polish oil fields around Borislaw and Drogobycz—which oil-starved Germany sorely needed itself. In return, Stalin promised to sell the Germans oil, and Hitler had to be satisfied with this. He was very much afraid that Stalin might desert him and join the Anglo-French alliance. Once again, there was a banquet in the Kremlin, and once again the Reichsminister had to endure the endless toasts—among other things to friendship between peoples and to peace throughout the world. The Boss never lost his sense of humor.

  A MEETING

  There were many rumors about a meeting between Stalin and Hitler, which was supposed to have taken place somewhere on the territory annexed from defeated Poland. In 1972, an old railroad man told a story about a train that drew into Lvov in October 1939. The station was closely guarded and no one was allowed into the area around it. Railroad traffic came to a halt. The man even remembered the date—October 16. I recalled this date with something of a shock when I read in the Soviet newspaper Comsomol Pravda a document said to have been found in the National Archives in Washington. The newspaper printed a photocopy of the document.

  Federal Bureau of Investigation

  United States Department of Justice

  Washington, D.C

  July 19, 1940

  PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL

  Honorable Adolf A. Berle, Jr.

  Assistant Secretary of State, Department of State

  Washington, D.C.

  Dear Mr. Berle:

  Information has just been received from a confidential source to the effect that after the German and Russian invasion and partition of Poland, Hitler and Stalin met secretly in Lvov. October 17, 1939. It is alleged that foreign governments have not yet become aware of this meeting. During these secret negotiations, Hitler and Stalin reportedly signed a military treaty to replace the previously consummated Non-Aggression Pact. It is reported that on October 28, 1939, Stalin made a report to the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which he furnished the seven members of the said Bureau, full details concerning his negotiations with Hitler. I thought you would be interested in these data.

  Sincerely yours,

  J. Edgar Hoover

  Yes, the document was signed by the long-standing chief of the F.B.I. Notes on the document indicate that it had been declassified in 1979.

  Even after having been convinced of the document’s authenticity, I continued to doubt its accuracy. After all, the report sent to Hoover may have been false. But publication of this document sent me back to the diary in which I had noted the railroad worker’s story. And once again, October! I understood that it was unlikely I could verify this. I knew that all documentary records of this meeting, if it had taken place, would have been carefully destroyed by Stalin. So I decided to consult what may seem a surprising source. The President’s Archive contains Stalin’s visitors’ book. I looked up the entries for October 1939. No, Stalin was in his office in Moscow on October 16. And on the 17th there was a long list of visitors. I was about to give up, but took a look at the 18th just in case and found that on the 18th he saw nobody. Stalin was missing from the Kremlin on that day. The 18th fell on a Thursday, an ordinary workday—the workweek then included even Saturday. He was also absent on the 19th until 8:25 P.M., when he returned to his office to receive visitors. I knew about his indefatigable work habits. He was a typical workaholic. His absence from the office in the middle of the week could only occur for one of two reasons: either he was severely ill, or he was absent from Moscow.

  The list of visitors on the eve of his absence is also interesting. The People’s Commissar for Defense, Voroshilov, and several of the military chiefs—Zhukov, Kulik, Kuznetsov, Isakov—came to see him. But it was the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Molotov, who spent the most time in his office on that day.

  In fact, something very important seems to have happened during his absence. For, according to the visitors’ list for October 19, after Stalin turned up in his Kremlin office late that evening, he was closeted for one and a half hours with the second man in the state, Commissar for Foreign Affairs Molotov. In the course of their discussion Zhukov (the commander who was to become the main hero of the Second World War) was summoned to Stalin’s office once again, and Kaganovich, third man in the state after Stalin and Molotov, was also called in.

  Can the meeting with Hitler really have taken place? It would have been the secret meeting of the century. Who could possibly describe it? They would have sat facing each other, the two Leaders, both Gods on earth. Strange doubles. So alike, and so different. If they did meet, Stalin must have realized all over again how much Hitler needed him. At the end of 1939 he already felt bold enough to spring a surprise on the Führer. He tried to conquer Finland. Hitler accepted that too. Stalin had read him correctly.

  Stalin had begun putting pressure on Finland even before concluding his pact with Hitler. K. Meretskov, who commanded the troops of the Leningrad Military District, was called in by the Boss. He described later how he “found in his office an important Comintern official and well-known activist of the world Communist movement, Kuusinen. I was told of the concern caused to our leadership by the anti-Soviet line of the Finnish government. Finland could easily become a bridgehead for anti-Soviet action, by either of the two main imperialist groupings—the German or the Anglo-French. If Finland should strike, various counteractions were open to us.… I was made responsible for drawing up a plan to p
rotect the frontier from aggression, and to plan a counterattack against the Finnish armed forces.”

  An amazing scene! Not one of those present, of course, seriously thought that little Finland would attack the immense empire. Nobody seriously believed that Hitler, with whom they were just concluding successful negotiations, or England and France, to whom they were also talking, would launch an “action against the Soviet Union” from Finland.

  The three men in conference all knew that they were really talking about preparations for the annexation of Finland. The “well-known activist of the world Communist movement” Kuusinen, a Finn, would be called upon to form a puppet government. That was how the obligatory “in-depth language” worked: “attack” would always be called “defense,” and “aggression” a “response to aggression.”

  The game was played to the end. The Finns were offered the usual unacceptable exchange of territory: they were asked among other things to cede areas of Karelia through which ran the defensive Mannerheim Line. Negotiations inevitably reached an impasse. Shortly afterward the Soviet government announced: “On November 26 without warning our forces came under artillery fire from the Finnish side … as a result of which four men were killed and ten wounded.” The Finns tried in vain to prove that the artillery fire had come from the Soviet side and that the Soviet forces had killed their own soldiers. The war had begun.

  For its “aggression against the Soviet Union,” Finland was expelled from the League of Nations.

  Kuusinen immediately formed a “government of the Finnish Democratic Republic” from the pathetic remnants of the Finnish Communist Party which had not vanished without trace during the Terror. Kuusinen himself, “well-known leader of the Communist movement,” had been told nothing about the fate of his comrades, or indeed that of his own family. He was just as ill-informed about the future proposed for Finland.

  Marshal Konyev noted in his memoirs that when they were beginning the Finnish war the Boss said in the presence of Admiral Isakov and Voroshilov, “We shall have to resettle the Finns.… the population of Finland is smaller than that of Leningrad, they can be resettled.” Poor Kuusinen may have been slated to vanish with his government and his people. The Boss was good at carrying out such grandiose projects. If God had planted them in the wrong place, the Boss would correct God’s mistake.

  God’s mistake, however, went uncorrected. The USSR expected to win the war by a blitzkrieg. “Our orders were to act on the assumption that the war would last twelve days,” wrote Molotov. Instead, crushing defeats followed. It cost the Red army an incredible effort to check the Finnish advance. “Two hundred thousand [Soviet soldiers] lie in snowdrifts staring at our overcast sky with unseeing eyes—and it is no fault of ours,” said the Finnish leader Mannerheim. Add to that 300,000 disabled or missing. Little Finland had stood its ground.

  The Soviet high command, headed by Voroshilov, had demonstrated its incompetence, much to Hitler’s relief. But in spite of its victory, Finland, with its meager resources, had to make peace and to cede territory. The coveted Karelian isthmus and the area around Lake Lagoda went to the USSR. Stalin had drawn his conclusions. He drove Voroshilov out of his Commissariat. The newly appointed People’s Commissar for Defense, S. Timoshenko, told the Finnish military attaché that “the Russians have learned a great deal in this hard war.”

  THE EMPIRE REESTABLISHED

  Meanwhile Hitler was reaping rewards beyond his dreams all through 1940. Denmark, Norway, Holland, Luxembourg, and finally France fell swiftly. After each act of aggression Stalin unfailingly congratulated Hitler on the Wehrmacht’s “brilliant success.” But with these congratulations he always called in a bill. One by one, he occupied the Baltic States. This was done, so he claimed, to “put an end to intrigues [in those countries] by which England and France are attempting to sow discord between Germany and the USSR.” The great humorist, as we see, had occupied the Baltic States solely in the interests of friendship with Germany. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—needless to say, “at the request of their peoples”—found themselves back in the Russian Empire.

  He turned hurriedly toward the Balkans. In summer 1940 he presented Romania with an ultimatum, demanding the return of Bessarabia, annexed by Romania in 1918, and of northern Bukovina. A powerful army group was concentrated on the Romanian frontiers. Romanian oil was feeding the whole German war machine, and Hitler, fearful of a possible military conflict on Romanian soil, was compelled to put pressure on that country’s government.

  Romania meekly consented to cede the disputed territory.

  While grabbing more than had been agreed upon, Stalin still tried to demonstrate his loyalty to Hitler. When the new British ambassador spoke to him of a possible alliance against Germany in the summer of 1940, he immediately sent Hitler the text of his reply: “Stalin has found no desire on the part of Germany to absorb other European countries.… He does not consider that Germany’s military successes present any danger to the Soviet Union.” Whom was he trying to fool? The British? Or Hitler? Or both?

  In the occupied territories he worked ruthlessly to create a “morally and politically unified society.” The NKVD purged the annexed areas of “alien elements.” Train after train carried fresh convicts—the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, well-off peasants. White émigrés, politicians—to swell his labor force in Gulag. They were carried in freight cars—two tiers of plank beds, with a discharge pipe for the sanitary bucket in the middle of the car, tiny barred windows which admitted little air. One such freight car carried into imprisonment a Jew arrested in Lithuania: Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel.

  Hitler was efficiently destroying the Old World. Was it time for Stalin to do one more about-face, and set out this time along the road that led straight toward the Great Dream?

  This change of direction was connected, in his mind, with the fortunes of Britain. Britain was holding out. Bleeding profusely, but holding out. The iron-willed Churchill, who had replaced Chamberlain, declared: “We shall defend our island whatever the cost. We will fight them on the beaches … we will fight them in the fields and on the streets.… We will never surrender, even if this island or a large part of it is enslaved and people begin to die of hunger. If that happens, our empire beyond the seas will fight on … until, God willing, the New World acts to liberate the Old.”

  Hitler planned his invasion of England. The British bombed his landing craft and frustrated the operation. Then the unexpected happened. In August 1940, the RAF bombed Berlin for the first time. The Germans had never thought it possible. It was a great shock to them. The war had come to Germany.

  Hitler, infuriated, launched air raids of unprecedented ferocity on London. Huge columns of fire rose over the city. But even this did not break the will of the British. Far from it—they were gradually beginning to win the war in the air.

  Meanwhile Hitler and Stalin regularly assured each other of their friendship. Molotov was sent to Berlin on a forty-eight-hour visit, to discuss future spheres of influence. The talks took place in an air-raid shelter, amid the din created by yet another British air raid. “England is finished,” Ribbentrop said firmly. “So why are we sitting in this place?” was Molotov’s curt reply.

  Stalin knew well enough that Hitler had not “finished with England.”

  A BAFFLING STORY

  The generally accepted version is that this was when Hitler finally decided to attack his unsuspecting ally. That the mad Führer began preparing for Barbarossa (code name for his invasion of the Soviet Union) precisely at this point. He put his signature to the plan in December 1940. In other words, he had made his final decision some six months before the declaration of war.

  Throughout that half-year not only Churchill but the Comintern spies who had voluntarily remained behind in Germany kept warning the Boss that Hitler meant to attack. Richard Sorge gave him the same message. This clandestine member of the German Communist Party. grandson of an associate of Karl Marx, was working in Japan at
the time, masquerading as a “Nazi journalist.” He regularly supplied Moscow with intelligence reports, and among other things managed to communicate the exact date of the German invasion.

  Stalin, however, did not believe Sorge, or any of the others. The sudden invasion took him completely by surprise. His first game in an international tournament ended in a debacle. That, at least, is what people have generally believed.

  But this version of events beggars belief.

  The wily Boss, a leader whose first rule was “trust no one,” whose whole strategy consisted in misleading the enemy, suddenly proves gullible in his dealings with the archenemy, is suddenly himself so easily gulled that he pays not the slightest attention to repeated warnings, but puts implicit trust in the liar Hitler, who has betrayed so many and broken his word so often.… It would be believable if we were talking about a different man, and not our Stalin. He had proved conclusively in the sixty years of his life that he was not a bit like that.

  What, then, did happen?

  As early as March 1941 his intelligence service had supplied him in effect with the full details of Barbarossa. The date set for the German invasion was somewhere between May 15 and June 15. But the Boss was a pragmatist and expected people to behave rationally. Hitler simply could not afford such a risky venture. As a Marxist, Stalin respected economic realities. It seemed incredible to him that Hitler would wage war simultaneously on several countries whose combined resources were incomparably greater than those of Germany. As for Churchill, he made a comic error with one of his predictions. He had warned Stalin of a possible German attack in May 1941, but in that month the Germans attacked the British on the island of Crete instead. The Boss could ask with his quiet smile why British intelligence, which showed such concern for the Soviet Union, was unable to help itself. The answer, as he saw it, was easy: Britain was losing too much blood in an unequal fight, and Churchill wanted to push Stalin into the war at any price. He could not, then, believe Churchill. Nor could he believe his own agent Sorge. Sorge had refused to return to the Soviet Union. How could the Boss believe a defector?