Stalin полностью

The warlord Zhang Xueliang, known as the Young Marshal, had traveled to Italy, then Germany, courting Mussolini, then Hitler and Göring, for help against Japan. In France he had met Litvinov, asking to be received by Stalin in Moscow; Stalin declined, concerned about not complicating his relations with Japan.²⁸⁷ Zhang had returned to China and eventually entered into negotiations with the Chinese Communists; one of his interlocutors was Zhou Enlai, who got the Young Marshal not only to cease operations against the Chinese Communists but to supply them with weapons. The Communists contemplated trying to secretly admit Zhang to the party.²⁸⁸ In November 1936, Zhang wrote to Chiang Kai-shek, imploring him to pursue a united front with the Communists against Japan in earnest. In December, Zhang traveled to Nanking in person to report about the mutinous moods of his troops in Shaanxi, who were supposed to pursue the Communists, and renewed his pleading. Chiang told him, according to Zhang, that if the government pulled back from fighting the Chinese Communists to take on Japan, the Communists would eventually win hold of the nation.²⁸⁹

Chiang ordered Zhang to intensify the “bandit suppression” campaign to finish off the Communists.²⁹⁰ But Zhang urged Chiang to go to Xi’an and talk to the Shaanxi and Manchurian soldiers. Chiang’s entourage warned against such a trip, but exposure to danger had typically enhanced Chiang’s stature, and he agreed to go. Back in Xi’an, Zhang reported on the conversation, in general terms, by radiogram to Mao, whose “party center” was holed up in dank caves (one bodyguard was stung by a scorpion).²⁹¹ Chiang flew off to Xi’an with an extra guard detail and contingent of officers, moving into a hot-springs resort, a small walled enclave ten miles outside the district town of Lintong. In an ancient one-story pavilion once used by the Tang emperor Xuanzong, Chiang received delegations of the Shaanxi and Northeast (Manchurian) armies.²⁹² At dawn on December 12, his scheduled day of departure, a 200-man contingent of Zhang’s personal guard stormed the walled compound. A gun battle killed many of Chiang’s bodyguards. He heard the shots, was told the attackers wore fur caps (the headgear of the Manchurian troops), crawled out a window, scaled the compound’s high wall, and ran along a dry moat up a barren hill, accompanied by one bodyguard and one aide. He slipped and fell, losing his false teeth and injuring his back, and sought refuge in a cave on the snow-covered mountain. The next morning, the leader of China—shivering, toothless, barefoot, a robe over his nightshirt—was captured.

Whether Zhang acted on his own or in a conspiracy with the Communists remains uncertain. He was an opium-addled playboy—one mistress was Mussolini’s daughter—but also an anti-Japanese patriot. Perhaps in his earnestness for a united front he had gotten caught up in the intrigues of Zhou and Mao. The wily Chiang, for his part, had been negotiating in bad faith with Zhou Enlai (Chiang’s former political commissar at the Soviet-financed 1920s Whampoa Military Academy).²⁹³ News of Chiang’s pending arrest—or admonishment—in Xi’an had reached Mao’s makeshift headquarters via the dilapidated village of Bao’an in the early-morning hours of December 12. His secretary passed him the radiogram. “After reading it, [he] joyfully exclaimed, ‘How about that! Time for bed. Tomorrow there will be good news!’”²⁹⁴

Chiang, upon being taken into custody, was speechless. (He has himself telling his captors, “I am the Generalissimo. Kill me, but do not subject me to indignities.”)²⁹⁵ Zhang’s head bodyguard carried Chiang to a car and set off for a government office in Xi’an. Zhang, standing at attention, addressed him as commander in chief. “I wish to lay my views before your excellency, the generalissimo,” Zhang said to his captive, pleading with him to work with the Communists in a patriotic coalition. Zhang had aides draft formal proposals for a united “National Salvation” government, an immediate end to the civil war, and a release and pardon of all political prisoners. He also requested that the Chinese Communists receive an invitation to send a delegation to Xi’an.²⁹⁶ Chiang repeatedly denounced him as a rebel. “Your bad temper,” Zhang replied, “is always the cause of trouble.”²⁹⁷