Stalin полностью

Chiang’s surprise capture would seem to have offered Moscow a chance to discredit him as incompetent in the anti-Japanese crusade and to exact revenge. After all, this was the same Chiang who had humiliated Stalin with a massacre of Chinese Communists in 1927 and, subsequently, had nearly destroyed the Chinese Red Army in a series of ruthless encirclement campaigns. Word reached Moscow that same day of December 13. “Optimistic, favorable assessment regarding Zhang Xueliang,” crowed the normally restrained Dimitrov, in his diary.²⁹⁸ Dimitrov’s Chinese assistant in the Comintern recalled that “you could not find anyone” who did not feel “Chiang must be finished off.” Manuilsky, he added, “rubbed his hands, embraced me, and exclaimed, ‘Our dear friend has been caught, aha!’”²⁹⁹ That same day, Mao was even more gleeful. “Chiang has owed us a blood debt as high as a mountain,” he was quoted as exclaiming at a meeting in his cave. “Now it is time to liquidate the blood debt. Chiang must be brought to Bao’an for a public trial.”³⁰⁰ Mao sent congratulations to Zhang, whom he called China’s “national leader in resisting Japan.”³⁰¹

Stalin, to a considerable extent, held the fate of China and, indeed, Asia in his hands.

CHINA IN THE BALANCE

Dimitrov, on December 14, 1936, held a meeting of Comintern hierarchs, after which he wrote to Stalin that the Chinese Communists had become close to Zhang, despite Comintern warnings about his unreliability, and that “it was hard to imagine Zhang Xueliang would have undertaken his adventurist action without coordination with them.”³⁰² Around midnight, Stalin phoned him: “Are these events in China occurring with your authorization? This is the greatest service to Japan anyone could possibly render. Who is this Wang Ming of yours? A provocateur? He wanted to file a telegram to have Chiang Kai-shek killed.” (Wang Ming, born Chen Shaoyu in 1904, headed the Chinese Comintern delegation in Moscow.) When Dimitrov claimed innocence, Stalin stated, “I’ll find you that telegram.”³⁰³ (There was likely no such telegram: Stalin was misinformed or trying to scare Dimitrov into pulling back.) Later still, Molotov phoned the Comintern head: “Come to Comrade Stalin’s office tomorrow at 3:30; we’ll discuss Ch[inese] affairs. Only you and Man[uilsky], nobody else!”³⁰⁴ Pravda (December 14) and Izvestiya (December 15) condemned Chiang’s kidnapping as playing into Japanese hands.

The Comintern officials were received on December 16, at 7:20 p.m., for fifty minutes.³⁰⁵ Dimitrov and Manuilsky, along with Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, and Stalin, hammered out a telegram for the Chinese Communists that condemned Zhang’s move, “whatever his intentions,” as inciting Japanese aggression and a united imperialist bloc against China, and ordered the Chinese Communists to stand “decisively for a peaceful resolution of the conflict,” while enjoining the Nationalists to cease their attempted destruction of the Chinese Red Army and to unite for the struggle against Japanese imperialism. This was precisely Zhang’s position (which went unmentioned).³⁰⁶ In Xi’an on December 16, Zhang addressed the public in the central square, explaining that he had served, and would continue to serve, under Chiang, but that the generalissimo must engage the struggle against the Japanese. “Chiang thinks that he is the government,” Zhang stated. “Since he refuses to turn the guns against the enemy, and turns them against us, I had no alternative but to . . . arrest him.”³⁰⁷ The Nationalist executive committee and political council in Nanking, meanwhile, directed its Central Army toward Xi’an.³⁰⁸

Had Stalin been driven predominantly by vengeance, he would have ordered Chiang killed (or just let it happen). But Stalin acted from his sense of strategy. The same applied to his domestic terror.