Stalin, sensing his leverage, had sent Kandelaki back to Berlin, and on July 15, 1935, according to Schacht, Kandelaki told him he had just spoken with Stalin, Molotov, and foreign trade commissar Rosenholz, and that German obstruction and price gouging had prevented the USSR from fully utilizing the existing 200-million-mark credit, but Kandelaki “expressed the hope that it might also be possible to improve German-Russian political relations. I replied that we had indeed already previously agreed that a brisk exchange of goods would be a good starting point for the improvement of general relations, but that I was not able to enter into political negotiation.”119
The much-delayed 7th Comintern Congress, the first in seven years, opened on July 25 in the House of Trade Unions with 513 delegates (371 with the right to vote), representing sixty-five Communist parties. The last party member at liberty in Japan had just been arrested. German Communists had dwindled to a tiny group.120 Wilhelm Pieck, a German in Soviet exile, delivered the opening report, but Dimitrov made the key speech, formally announcing a policy shift to “a broad people’s antifascist front.” Dimitrov explained that an alliance with non-Communist leftists was a temporary expedient in response to a special threat. “Fascism in power, comrades, . . . is the openly terrorist dictatorship of the more reactionary, more chauvinist, more imperialist elements of finance capital,” he observed. “The most reactionary variant of fascism is fascism of the German type.” He called Nazism impudent for claiming to be socialist when “it has nothing in common with socialism. . . . It is a government system of political banditry, a system of provocations and torture of the working class and the revolutionary elements of the peasantry, petit bourgeoisie, and intelligentsia. It is medieval barbarism and atrocity. It is unbridled aggression against other nations and countries.”
Dimitrov cautioned that “Soviet power and only Soviet power can bring salvation!” but exhorted the delegates to learn “the parliamentary game.”121 A photograph of Stalin with the Comintern delegates was published in
Beria delivered a sensation. He had sacked Toroshelidze as head of his Stalin project, in favor of Yermolai “Erik” Bedia, Georgia’s enlightenment commissar, who set to work on “The Rise and Development of Bolshevik Organizations in the South Caucasus.” Documents of the conspiratorial underground years were few, so people were invited to reminisce, sometimes writing their own texts, often allowing Beria’s apparatchiks to write or type them up. Those who participated were usually given envelopes of cash (“Comrade Stalin remembers you and asked me to convey this”). Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria’s top aide, shaped the final text, and on July 21–22, 1935, in a special meeting of the South Caucasus party active, with some 2,000 attendees, Beria read it aloud. The audience spent much of the five hours standing and applauding each mention of “the Great Stalin.”