Mikhail Alexandrovsky, the just-named deputy of military intelligence, was arrested in July 1937. On August 1, Berzin—less than two months after Stalin had returned him as military intelligence chief—was replaced by his other deputy, Alexander Nikonov. Nikonov lasted a few days before his arrest. Under torture, each confessed and named more names. Stalin could have had their interrogations conducted to find out who (if anyone) had actually recruited them, what damage (if any) they had inflicted. Alternately, he could have kept them in place and had them shadowed to see what (if any) foreign contacts they had. None of that was done.135 Military intelligence was handed to an NKVD counterintelligence operative beholden to Yezhov, as if the main task at hand were a police operation against the country’s own intelligence.136 Altogether, at least 300 military intelligence officers would be arrested in Moscow alone.137 The head of personnel in military intelligence reported that half the allotted positions had become vacant. Maria Polyakova, an undercover operative in Switzerland who returned to Moscow in fall 1937, found no one to report to. “I could not understand what was going on, and I did not know whom to ask about it,” she recalled. “I met the department staff, who were primarily [recent] graduates of the military academy and did not know languages or the work of our agency.”138
Stalin explicitly rejected the notion that the arrests were cynical. In August 1937, at a gathering he attended of political functionaries in the military, the head of the Far Eastern Army’s political department complained. “We cannot tell the party mass, the commanding staff, or the Red Army men what [specific] wrecking activities these wreckers committed,” the man stated. “And by the way, the interest in this matter is enormous,” having been incited by the NKVD’s reading of excerpts of the interrogation protocols at Red Army party meetings. One official at the meeting interjected: “Would it not be sufficient just to say that they worked to restore capitalism?” Stalin: “All the same, the testimonies have significance.”139
FAR EASTERN “IMPERIALIST WAR”
Japanese ground and air forces in the Manchukuo puppet state had violated the Soviet border more than 150 times in 1935 and again in 1936.140 In 1937, a major incident took place over strategic islets in the Amur River.141 Islands along a river boundary were normally adjudicated by their positioning relative to the channel of the main current. But since the Russo-Chinese border treaties of 1858 and 1860, storms and other natural causes had caused a shift in the Amur’s main channel, so that a pair of small islets some sixty and fifty miles downstream from Blagoveshchensk, respectively, had moved to the Manchukuo side of the Amur’s main current. The Soviets argued that the border marker should now be the river’s deepest channel, which would put the islets back in Soviet territory. On June 19, 1937, the Japanese had reported that some twenty Soviet soldiers had landed at one of the two islets—known as Kanchazu in Manchu—on motorboats, removed buoys, and evicted Manchukuo gold panners, actions repeated at other Amur islets. Manchukuo government protests brought no resolution. The Japanese Kwantung Army was inclined to clear the Soviet troops by force, but Tokyo military brass decided, on June 28, 1937, that “the problem of these islands located so remotely did not warrant risking a major commitment of the national strength.” That very day, however, a high Japanese military intelligence officer recently returned from Moscow published a report in an Osaka newspaper suggesting that the Soviet Union’s executions of its own top military commanders threatened the Red Army with disintegration, meaning Japan had nothing to fear.142
Stalin’s terror—proclaimed as vital in the face of a coming “inevitable war”—was potentially inviting that very war. With Tukhachevsky and the others dead a mere few weeks and the Red Army in turmoil, on June 29, Soviet diplomats informed the Japanese that Moscow would remove the troops from the Amur islets.