Stalin полностью

In terms of counterintelligence, the secret police claimed that a Soviet spy in Chinese Harbin was a double agent who had helped Japan roll up part of the Soviet espionage network in the Far East.²⁹⁹ Stalin demanded to know from Yagoda which Soviet operative had recruited the spy.³⁰⁰ A far more important case remains confounding. The OGPU had put the head of Red Army external relations, Colonel Vasily Smagin, under observation on the basis of intercepted deciphered telegrams from the Japanese military attaché Torashirō Kawabe. “We have precisely established that Smagin in January 1934, using the possibilities in his position, took from a rank-and-file operative in the Fourth Department [military intelligence] fifty-seven file cards of secret agent material about Japan and twenty-nine about China to his home for three days,” Yagoda wrote. “This had nothing in common with his official duties.” Stalin underlined this passage, and another about Smagin’s closeness to Kawabe. Smagin, however, was only sacked and left unemployed—and eventually given a teaching position.³⁰¹

LONG KNIVES

Hitler’s renunciation of the League of Nations had begun to lift the postwar taboo in France on the idea of any “alliance.”³⁰² Since Hitler’s takeover, Litvinov had been urging a regional pact against him, borrowing the phrase “collective security” from the League and arguing that “peace is indivisible” (i.e., either every country had peace or none had it). Lenin had sized up Litvinov as “the most crocodile-like of our diplomats,” who tore into and held on to people.³⁰³ Stalin, however, was not keen on a regional pact that, without Germany, would come across as anti-German while not even guaranteeing Soviet border security on the Baltic Sea. He also wanted to avoid giving a pretext for a Polish-German bloc on his immediate border.³⁰⁴ Still, he viewed talks with Paris as a useful instrument for his talks with Berlin, exactly as the French did.³⁰⁵

The USSR won diplomatic recognition on June 9, 1934, from Czechoslovakia and Romania, members of the Little Entente, and by the 27th the draft of a comprehensive Eastern Pact—France, the Soviet Union, the Little Entente, the Baltic states, Germany, Poland, Finland—was being circulated alongside a separate Franco-Soviet agreement.³⁰⁶ On June 29, Stalin received an OGPU intelligence report (“from a serious Polish source”) asserting that, by having invited Goebbels to Warsaw, Piłsudski was showing Paris he had options to discourage the latter’s bruited alliance with Moscow.³⁰⁷

The counterpart to a Soviet security deal centered on France was a Comintern shift toward a united front with Social Democrats against fascism. Dimitrov wrote cryptically in his diary (June 29), “Stalin: I never answered you. I had no time. On this question, there is still nothing in my head. Something must be prepared!” (Dimitrov also wrote to himself, “So lonely and personally unhappy! It’s almost more difficult for me now than last year in prison.” But then Dimitrov, despite being married to the cause, addressed his personal loneliness, resuming correspondence with Rosa Fleischmann, a Jewish Communist from Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland whom he had met in Vienna years earlier, and who would soon become his second wife and companion, something Stalin did not have.)³⁰⁸