Stalin полностью

In his speech, Stalin aimed to rebut criticisms in the “bourgeois” press, broadcasting damning views otherwise unavailable to the Soviet populace. Fascist critics, he revealed, dismissed the Soviet constitution as “an empty promise, calculated to pull off a well-known maneuver and deceive people.” Stalin further revealed that “bourgeois” critics on the left were asserting a Soviet shift to the right, away from a dictatorship of the proletariat and toward the same camp as bourgeois countries. He countered that there had been not a shift but a “transformation . . . into a more flexible, . . . more powerful system of leadership of the state by society.” Above all, Stalin said, “bourgeois” critics “talk about democracy. But what is democracy? Democracy in capitalist countries, where there are antagonistic classes, is, in the final analysis, democracy for the strong, democracy for the propertied minority. Democracy in the USSR, by contrast, is democracy for the toilers, that is, democracy for all.” Thus, he concluded, “the USSR constitution is the only thoroughly democratic constitution in the world.”²⁵⁹

EVERYTHING UNRAVELS

On the morning of the Congress’s launch, Pravda had proclaimed Stalin the “genius of the new world, the wisest man of the epoch, the great leader of Communism,” and then deemed his constitution speech a breakthrough for all humanity. While Stalin’s report to the 16th Party Congress (1930) had been published in 11 million copies (twenty-four languages) and the one to the 17th Congress (1934) in 14 million copies (fifty languages), his Congress of Soviets speech was printed in 20 million copies. “No book in the world,” Pravda added, “has ever been published in that kind of print run.”²⁶⁰

In Berlin, on the very same day Stalin delivered his spirited constitution speech, Joachim von Ribbentrop, German ambassador to the UK but also minister plenipotentiary, formally signed an Anti-Comintern Pact with Japanese ambassador Kintomo Mushanokōji. The signing took place not in the foreign ministry but in the Büro Ribbentrop, to stress the pact’s ideological salience.²⁶¹ Ribbentrop read a statement to the press (the eyewitness William Shirer called it a “harangue”) declaring Germany and Japan “unwilling to tolerate any longer the machinations of the Communist agitators,” and their pact “a turning point in the struggle of all law-abiding and civilized nations against the forces of disintegration.”²⁶²

For Japan, keen to contain the Soviet Union while obtaining a free hand in China, this was its first major accord with a European power since abrogation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, in 1920. Indeed, given the infighting, poor communications, deception, and jurisdictional ambiguity inside the Japanese government, the agreement constituted a mini miracle. Japanese newspapers conveyed a lack of enthusiasism (“making lukewarm friends at the expense of red-hot enemies,” wrote Nichi Nichi).²⁶³ Above all, Japan’s army had zealously sought firm military commitments against the USSR, but had gotten only “consultations.” Still, it did forge an intelligence liaison with the German staff, focused on the Red Army.²⁶⁴

Hitler relished the propaganda breakthrough, and hoped it would bring along Britain. According to Count Ciano, who had gone on his first official visit to Germany in October 1936, Hitler told him, “If England sees the gradual formation of a group of Powers which are willing to make common front with Germany and Italy under the banner of anti-Bolshevism, if England has the feeling that we have a common organized force in the Far East . . . , not only will she refrain from fighting against us, but she will seek means of agreement and common ground with this new political system.”²⁶⁵ For Stalin, the irony of such a pact was extreme, given how he had bridled the Comintern in both Spain and China.²⁶⁶

Stalin knew beforehand. Colonel Eugen Ott, the German military attaché in Tokyo, had learned in spring 1936, from his Japanese army contacts, of the secret negotiations under way in Berlin. Ott confided in Richard Sorge, the Soviet military intelligence spy in the German embassy in Tokyo, who had informed Moscow. The published text consisted of two short articles.²⁶⁷ But Sorge had been reporting that it contained a secret article. Wrongly, he initially thought this pertained to a military alliance. But he would manage to photograph the full text and get it to Shanghai, whence it was picked up by a Soviet courier.²⁶⁸ The secret section specified that, should either Germany or Japan “become the object of an unprovoked attack by the USSR,” each “obliges itself to take no measures that would tend to ease the situation in the USSR.” Most significantly, the secret clause also enjoined the two powers “to conclude no political treaties with the USSR contrary to the spirit of this agreement without mutual consent.”²⁶⁹