Stalin полностью

On November 11, 1937, Stalin received Dimitrov and Wang Ming, a young rival to Mao, and told them, “Trotskyites [in China] must be hunted down, shot, destroyed. They are international provocateurs, fascism’s most vicious agents!” Stalin also instructed them that “the main thing now is the war, not an agrarian revolution, not confiscation of land,” and concluded, “neither England nor America wants China to win. They fear a Chinese victory because of their own imperialist ambitions.” (Wang would immediately leave Moscow, where he had lived for six years, and, in China, insist on mounting a party congress, where he would deliver the political report.)²⁰⁹ With the Comintern types, Stalin underscored how waverers in the party had faltered at every difficult moment: in 1905, in October 1917, Brest-Litovsk in 1918, the civil war, “and especially collectivization, a completely novel, historically unprecedented event. Various weak elements fell away from the party . . . they went underground. Powerless themselves, they linked up with external enemies, promised Ukraine to the Germans, Belorussia to the Poles, the Far East to the Japanese. They hoped for war and were especially insistent that the German fascists launch a war against the USSR as soon as possible.” He continued: “They were planning an action for the beginning of this year. They lost their nerve. They were preparing in July [1937] to attack the politburo at the Kremlin. But they lost their nerve.”²¹⁰

Preposterous: longtime Communists had no such opportunity to “link up” with foreign enemies or attempt a coup. And yet, time and again, when volunteering thoughts on the mass arrests and executions, Stalin returned to the party opposition to collectivization in 1932, and the plots against him. Time magazine (November 15, 1937), of all places, mentioned alleged assassinaton attempts. “Our Sun!” the magazine wrote semifacetiously of the celebrations of Stalin not only in Moscow but also in Madrid and, in a lesser way, at Carnegie Hall in New York, in connection with the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, comparing Stalin to Louis XIV. Time highlighted Romm’s new film, in which “it is not Lenin and Trotsky who make the revolution of 1917 but Lenin and Stalin,” adding, “With Sun Stalin eclipsing Trotsky in Spain as well as in Russia, the Dictator felt strong enough to permit the bringing to light in court last week of two attempts to assassinate him years ago.” This was a reference to two incidents, in 1933 and 1935, both in the Caucasus, neither (as we have seen) an attempt on Stalin’s life, but both recently detailed as such in Dawn of the East, the Georgian party newspaper under Beria’s control.²¹¹

STICKING WITH CHIANG

Stalin and his intermediaries continued to rebuff China’s entreaties for the Soviets to declare war on Japan, but Moscow was shipping arms a great distance and at great difficulty, mostly through Xinjiang, to keep the fighting going.²¹² Japan had forced Chiang into all-out war, which won him strong domestic support, perhaps the most for a Chinese ruler since the mid–Qing dynasty, but Chiang took considerable time to find a workable strategy of resistance. His frontal military battles led to catastrophe. In November 1937, the Japanese captured Shanghai, followed, on December 13, by Nanking, the Chinese Nationalist capital, where the Imperial troops proceeded to massacre up to 300,000 civilians. The Nationalist government fled to Wuhan, in the interior. Only now, after the devastation of even his crack troops, did Chiang turn from frontal engagements to a long war of attrition.²¹³

Stalin stuck to his strategy of a Nationalist-led united front against Japan, reasoning that Japan could fight either China or the Soviet Union but not both, and using Dimitrov and Wang Ming to tamp down the Communists to the extent possible. Wang Ming went to Wuhan as the Chinese Communist liaison to the Nationalists; Mao stayed at Yan’an, where the Communist base would expand significantly, from perhaps 40,000 members in 1937 to 200,000 by the next year.²¹⁴ The desperate Long March to desolate Yan’an to escape Nationalist encirclement was proving to be a boon for survivors, now buffering the Communists from the brunt of the Imperial Japanese Army. Japan’s war in China was unintentionally reordering the balance of power between Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists to the latter’s favor. In December 1937, Chiang—in yet another attempt to drag the Soviets directly into the war—publicly revealed that China was getting substantial Soviet military aid. “Chiang Kai-shek behaved not fully cautiously,” Stalin wrote to Molotov and Voroshilov. “Well, the devil take him.”²¹⁵ But Stalin held to him.

CELEBRATION AMID DEATH