Stalin полностью

A Georgian delegation was received in the Kremlin, also on March 19, and Molotov greeted them in Georgian: “Amkhanagebo! (Stormy applause, turning into an ovation.)” When he noted that they had given the country Stalin, there was “an eruption of applause” that would not cease.³¹³ In the Grand Kremlin Palace between April 11 and 21, the Communist Youth League 10th Congress took place. “Stalin had yet to make an appearance,” the writer Konstantin Paustovsky wrote of the final day. “We want comrade Stalin, Stalin, Stalin,” the delegates shouted, stamping their feet. “And then it happened! Stalin emerged suddenly and silently out of the wall behind the Presidium table. . . . Everyone jumped. There was frenzied applause. . . . Unhurriedly, Stalin came up to the table, stopped, and, with hands linked on his stomach, gazed at the hall. . . . The first thing that struck me was that he did not resemble the thousands of portraits and official photographs, which set out to flatter him. The man who stood before me was stumpy and stocky, with a heavy face, reddish hair, low forehead, and a thick mustache. . . . The hall rocked with all the shouting. People applauded, holding their hands high over their heads. At any moment, one felt, the ceiling would come crashing down. Stalin raised a hand. Immediately there was a deathly hush. In that hush, Stalin shouted abruptly and in a rather hoarse voice, with a strong Georgian accent, ‘Long Live Soviet youth!’”³¹⁴

The children’s writer Chukovsky was close to the front (sixth or seventh row). “What took place in the hall! HE stood, a bit fatigued, engrossed in thought, titanic,” Chukovsky noted in his diary. “One sensed the immense habituation to power, the force, and at the same time something female, soft. I looked around: everyone had loving faces, kind, inspirational, and smiling faces. Just to see—simply see—was happiness for us all.” Chukovsky, too, had sensed the power. “Never,” he concluded, “did I think I was capable of such feelings.”³¹⁵

On May 1, 1936, the regime staged the massive military display on Red Square, and the next day the emotive Voroshilov once again served as a deft master of ceremonies. “Comrades, by the ancient Soviet custom, it is proposed that we fill our glasses,” he told a boisterous hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace, proceeding with toast after toast (for Stalin, Molotov, Kalinin, Orjonikidze, Kaganovich). Before each pronouncement, Voroshilov employed Soviet jargon, tongue in cheek: “Comrades, I do not doubt your vigilance in general, but in this case a check is needed. How’s the situation with glasses?” (Refills, quickly.) And on it went, until Stalin rose to toast Voroshilov, and Molotov rose to toast “the Great Stalin,” whereupon the entire room of cadets and officers stood as one.³¹⁶

The Red Army, across 1935 and 1936, acquired a staggering 7,800 tanks, 4,200 airplanes, 9,600 artillery systems, and 6.7 million rounds of ammunition, and soon reached 1.423 million men, on a par with the tsarist army in peacetime. The USSR’s spring 1936 war games again had Nazi Germany as the main enemy, but the exercises revealed that pre-positioning of massive forces on the frontier would not be enough: without a prior Soviet occupation of the independent Baltic states to seize the strategic initiative from Germany, victory could be elusive.³¹⁷ But Stalin would not countenance such aggressive preemptive moves. It was, in any case, doubtful whether the Red Army could even launch a preemptive war, even as its massive size and disposition made it seem poised to do so.³¹⁸ Such combat would have put to a severe test the Soviet rail network, known both at home and abroad to be a weak point.³¹⁹ Also, the military expansion, overly rapid and incoherent, had led to a critical dearth of well-trained junior officers.³²⁰ Stalin, who received Tukhachevsky nine times in the Little Corner in 1936, including on April 3 and May 28, with a slew of military brass and intelligence officials, had moved him from running armaments to a reorganized directorate for military training.³²¹

BLINDERS