Stalin полностью

Red Army maneuvers were held (September 12–15, 1935) in the Kiev military district, commanded by Iona Yakir.¹⁶² The exercises entailed a lightning counteroffensive supported by tanks, fighter aircraft, and artillery, directed both frontally and at the enemy’s rear, in a variant on “deep operations,” to employ speed and mobility to punch through enemy lines. The scale and armor were staggering: 65,000 troops, 10,000 tanks, 600 aircraft, and 300 artillery pieces, covering an area of nearly 150 by 120 miles on the western border.¹⁶³ Tanks were organized in mechanized corps for slashing attacks, while for the first time 1,188 parachutists were dropped from TB-3 bombers. Just 10 of the 4,000-plus motorized machines that saw action suffered any kind of breakage. “The French, Czechs, and Italians who attended the maneuvers felt our power, definitely, to the fullest,” Voroshilov boasted to Sochi (September 16). “Our commanders who have returned from French, Czech, and Italian maneuvers report that the difference in our favor is definitely very substantial.”¹⁶⁴

General Lucien Loizeau, deputy chief of the French general staff and head of their delegation, was quoted in Red Star (September 18) offering high praise. “I saw a mighty, serious army, of very high quality in terms of both technology and morale,” he stated. “I think it would be right to consider the Red Army first in the world in terms of tanks. The paratrooper drops of large units that I observed in Kiev I consider a fact that has no precedent in the world.”¹⁶⁵ In his secret summary for the French staff, Loizeau concluded, “This army appeared to me therefore capable of a great initial effort, which would permit it to retain on the eastern front important countervailing forces during the period so critical as the beginning of a conflict.”¹⁶⁶

Loizeau’s eyewitness assessment would be rejected at French staff headquarters by skeptics opposed to a binding military convention in the Franco-Soviet alliance. The proud Soviets would send films of the maneuvers to their embassies to be shown to foreign governments. The immediate official internal report praised the mechanized corps and three tank battalions, which had averaged a speed of 15 miles an hour and in some cases covered 400 miles. But later, in his final summary, Voroshilov would criticize the separate armored forces and praise the role of the unmotorized infantry.¹⁶⁷ This quiet reversal reflected the defense commissar’s threat perception—from his forward-looking subordinates, Uborevičius and Tukhachevsky, whose stature was rising even higher.

Nazi Germany was not invited to send a delegation to the Soviet maneuvers, but the consulate in Kiev sent Berlin a report, evidently based on informants, which highlighted the Red Army’s maneuverability.¹⁶⁸ Almost simultaneously, from September 10 through 16, 1935, the Nazis staged a party congress at Nuremberg. Hundreds of thousands celebrated the reintroduction of compulsory military service and emancipation from Versailles diktat. Leni Riefenstahl delivered her third annual documentary, Day of Freedom: Our Wehrmacht, which culminated in a montage of Nazi flags and German fighter planes flying in a swastika formation to the national anthem, with its refrain “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.” Hitler delivered seventeen separate speeches.¹⁶⁹ On September 15, the Reichstag unanimously passed hastily composed laws forbidding marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans, and establishing that only those of German or related blood could be citizens.¹⁷⁰ Hitler gave his first remarks expressly on the “Jewish Question” since becoming chancellor and called what became known as the Nuremberg laws defensive, congratulated himself for using legal means, and warned that if “Jewish elements” persisted in their agitation and provocations, the issue would have “to be transferred to the final solution of the National Socialist party.”¹⁷¹ Goebbels cited Bolshevism as motive and justification.¹⁷²