Anthony Eden, the British foreign minister, listens in stunned silence. The new Czech president, Edvard Beneš, is displaying a staggering confidence in his ability to resolve the question of the Sudeten Germans. Not only does he claim to be able to contain Germany’s expansionist desires, but, what’s more, to do so alone—in other words, without the help of France and Great Britain. Eden doesn’t know what to make of this speech. “I suppose that to be Czech in days like these, one must be an optimist,” he says to himself. It is still only 1935.
In 1936, Major Moravec, head of the Czechoslovak secret services, takes his colonel’s exam. One of the hypothetical questions reads: “Czechoslovakia is attacked by Germany. Hungary and Austria are also hostile. France has not mobilized her army and the Petite Entente is probably unworkable. What are the military solutions for Czechoslovakia?”
Analysis of the subject: with the Austro-Hungarian Empire having been carved up in 1918, Vienna and Budapest are now naturally eyeing up their former provinces—that is, Bohemia-Moravia, which had been an Austrian dependancy, and Slovakia, which had been under Hungarian control. Moreover, Hungary is led by a fascist ally of Germany, Admiral Horthy. A badly weakened Austria, meanwhile, is having trouble resisting the calls from both sides of the German border for the country to be united with its Germanic big brother. The agreement signed by Hitler, which promises that he won’t intervene in Austrian affairs, is not worth the paper it’s written on. If there was ever a conflict with Germany, therefore, Czechoslovakia would also find itself pitted against the two heads of the fallen empire. The Petite Entente, agreed to in 1922 by Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia to protect one another from their old Austro-Hungarian masters, is not the most convincing of strategic alliances. And France’s reluctance to keep its commitments to its Czech ally if a conflict arises has already been made clear. So the hypothetical situation proposed in the exam is completely realistic. Moravec’s response is only five words long: “Problem unsolvable by military means.” He passes with flying colors and becomes a colonel.
If I were to mention all the plots in which Heydrich had a hand, this book would never be finished. Sometimes in the course of my research I come upon a story that I decide not to relate, whether because it seems too anecdotal, or because there are details missing and I’m unable to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, or because I find the story questionable. Sometimes, too, there are several contradictory versions of the same story. In certain cases, I allow myself to decide which version is true. If not, I drop the story.
I had decided not to mention Heydrich’s role in the fall of Tukhachevsky. First of all, because his role struck me as secondary, even illusory. Next, because Soviet politics in the 1930s doesn’t really have much to do with the main flow of my story. Finally, I suppose, because I was afraid of getting involved on another historical front: the Stalinist purges, Marshal Tukhachevsky’s career, the origins of his dispute with Stalin … all of this called for both learning and meticulousness. The danger was that it would drag me too far from my subject.
All the same, I have imagined a scene, just for the pleasure of it: we see the young General Tukhachevsky contemplating the rout of the Bolshevik army at the gates of Warsaw. It’s 1920. Poland and the USSR are at war. “The Revolution will step over the corpse of Poland!” declared Trotsky. It has to be said that in allying itself with Ukraine, in dreaming of a confederation that would also include Lithuania and Byelorussia, Poland was threatening the fragile unity of the nascent Soviet Russian state. On the other hand, if the Bolsheviks wanted to take the revolution to Germany, they were bound to go through the region.
In August 1920, the Soviet counterattack led the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw, and Poland’s fate looked sealed. But the young nation’s independence would last another nineteen years. What Poland was unable to do in 1939 against the Germans, it did that day against the Russians: it pushed them back. This is the “miracle at the Vistula.” Tukhachevsky is defeated by an unparalleled strategist—Józef Piłsudski, the hero of Polish independence, and nearly thirty years Tukhachevsky’s senior.