Above all, opposition to collectivization had taken place. Stalin seems to have been haunted not by the millions of peasants and nomads who had starved but by the Communist officials who had dared to criticize his rule because of it.291 He repeatedly voiced his venom against them, charging that they had lacked the stomach to see through what was necessary. Opposition to collectivization became the leitmotif of the interrogation protocols he demanded and underlined, and of his private and public utterances. Stalin, interrupting Yezhov, had blurted out at the December 1936 plenum about the rightists, “They denied that they had any platform. They had a platform. What did it call for? For the restoration of private enterprise in industry, for the opening of our gates to foreign capital, especially to English capital. . . . For the restoration of private enterprise in agriculture, for the curtailment of the collective farms, for the restoration of the kulaks, for moving the Comintern out of the USSR.”292 It remained only to add a sense of the means for an internal putsch—the Red Army command (around Tukhachevsky), the NKVD leadership (around Yagoda), the Kremlin commandant and bodyguard directorate—to complete the narrative arc from criticism of collectivization to espionage, sabotage, coup.
Stalin presumed that the socialist system’s survival depended on him and that his former comrades desperately wanted to get rid of him. If, additionally, one assumed—as he did—that a foreign military attack was inevitable, and that in the event of war his former comrades could become eager collaborators with the fascists and other foreign enemies—not just out of spite, revenge, or ambition but because only his removal could undo collectivization—then all these people, and anyone who sympathized with or thought like them, had to be eliminated before war broke out. Did critics not understand that all opposition was objectively serving foreign enemies? Who could deny that the Soviet Union faced enemies? Who could deny that the capitalists had intervened against the USSR in the civil war and would do so again? Who could deny that imperialism was aggressive and would stop at nothing? In Spain, “fascists” had risen up in a putsch, and they were being assisted by the foreign fascist powers, and not opposed by the “democratic” ones. What more did anyone need to know? If counterrevolution supported by aggressive foreign intervention could take place in Spain, was it not still more likely to be attempted against the Soviet Union, a strategic country with a fully socialist system? His critics either failed elementary logic or had “lost their minds.”293
“SPIES”
Pravda had underscored, accurately, that both Japan and Germany were “anti-status-quo powers” and could attain their aims solely through a new world war, a flanking threat Stalin did not invent.294 Soviet intelligence reported that Japan and Germany shared intelligence information about Soviet military capabilities with each other as well as with Poland, which was true. Finland was sharing intelligence with the Japanese about Soviet military capabilities, too. Japan had sent military observer missions to countries encircling the USSR—Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Latvia—and Stalin regularly received reports, culled from decoded Japanese military attaché communications, of a possible Japanese attack on the USSR. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), had met the Japanese military attaché to Berlin (Hiroshi Ōshima) in 1936, and the next year he met an intelligence official of the Finnish general staff (Antero Svensson). The Abwehr also extended financial assistance to Estonian intelligence.295 Of course, all the powers in the interwar period were targeted by foreign espionage. The international situation in the 1930s posed a threat to every great power, but only one embarked on a wholesale domestic slaughter. Nazi Germany was crawling with spies, especially spies working on behalf of the Soviet Union, but again, Hitler did not put to death his own officials and intelligence officers.296 Stalin had even his policy critics charged as “spies.”
