Stalin полностью

Stalin had decided to devote a Central Committee plenum (June 5 and 7, 1935)—one of only two during the year that lasted more than a day—to the Kremlin Affair. He assigned the main report not to Yagoda but to Yezhov, who began not with Yenukidze but with Kirov, explaining that the “embittered” Zinovievite-Kamenevite-Trotskyite “group” had been driven “to the most extreme forms of struggle—namely, terror,” and charged the rightists with complicity, citing attempts to link up with the Zinovievites in 1932. Yezhov deemed Yenukidze “a corrupt and self-complacent Communist” who had unwittingly allowed White Guards to infiltrate the citadel of power. Yenukidze, given the floor on the second day, averred that all hiring in the Kremlin “was carried out with the participation of the NKVD,” prompting Yagoda to interject from the floor, “That’s not true.” Yenukidze insisted on the point, denied cohabiting with the arrested women, and seemed incredulous that helping former Menshevik families could be treason. Yagoda charged him with creating “his own parallel ‘GPU’” in the Kremlin and called for his expulsion from the party, going beyond Yezhov’s call for expulsion from the Central Committee.⁹⁰

Stalin had kept strangely silent, but he finally professed himself unable to abandon a good friend with whom he had spent many a holiday, so he suggested that Yenukidze be expelled from the Central Committee and the party but not handed over to the NKVD.⁹¹ Attendees voted unanimously for expulsion from the Central Committee and voted—with some hands raised in objection—for expulsion from the party for “political and personal dissoluteness.” The minutes for internal circulation and Pravda’s public report were falsified to conceal the objections.⁹² Yenukidze became the first Bolshevik who had joined the party before the revolution and who had never joined an opposition afterward to be expelled.⁹³

WISHFUL THINKING

Hitler was zealously driving a revision of the Versailles order; Stalin did not oppose revision, provided it did not come at Soviet expense. As the sequential visits in spring 1935 of Eden and Simon to Berlin and Eden to Moscow had shown, each dictator was central to the other’s grand strategy, but in differing ways. For Hitler, the Soviet Union was the principal evil, and Britain his principal wedge. For Stalin, Britain was the principal evil, and Germany his principal wedge. For France, the courting of the Soviet Union, a step that Britain disliked, was a way to woo a hard-to-get Britain. For Britain, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were both evil, but avoiding the costs of direct confrontation with Germany was paramount. Britain signed the proposed naval pact with Germany on June 18, 1935, which happened to be the anniversary of Waterloo.

Britain possessed the largest maritime force in world history, but it faced shipyard capacity limits and treasury austerity. The pact formally limited Germany’s fleet to 35 percent of Britain’s, while ostensibly locking Germany into a quality standstill. (Eden in Moscow had assured Stalin that Germany’s 35 percent demand was out of the question.) But Hitler’s special envoy, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had negotiated for Germany to have 45 percent as many submarines as the British did at that time, and to eventually reach parity, a giveaway of true intentions.⁹⁴ Hitler gave the go-ahead for two already planned super-battleships, the Bismarck and the Tirpitz, both exceeding the treaty’s quality limits.⁹⁵ Ribbentrop had been invited to lunch the day before the signing by an influential journalist at The Times and told him he was keen for prime minister Stanley Baldwin (who had just assumed that office for the third time) to meet the Führer, because he wanted “Baldwin to hear Hitler’s ideas about Western solidarity against Bolshevism.”⁹⁶

FRENCH CONNECTIONS