Stalin полностью

Stalin did not invent the hoary trope of the “foreign hand” (externally assisted conspiracy to undermine the state). Allegations of a foreign hand at court had contributed mightily to the erosion of Nicholas II’s legitimacy during the Great War; Kerensky, nearly successfully, had leveled the foreign hand charge against Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It was a device straight out of the authoritarian handbook, playing to patriotic stirrings and insecurities—in Russia’s case, of a complex geography—and it was powerfully reinforced by the Bolshevik division of the world into two hostile camps, socialism and capitalism. For years, Stalin had been driving Soviet propagandists and the NKVD to find the foreign hand behind everything: in the 1928 Shakhty trial (French and German agents), in Ukrainian resistance to collectivization (Polish agents, relying on the British and the French), in the 1932 rebellion in the satellite Mongolia (Japanese agents), in the Kirov murder (German agents, even as he had discouraged investigation of the actual leads to the Latvian and German consulates). But 1937–38 was different.

Nothing had prepared the Soviet populace for the explosion of spy mania that now engulfed the country.²⁹⁷ Although Stalin’s November 1934 instructions to the Mongols had stated that critics needed to be charged as spies, and his politburo resolution of September 29, 1936, had insisted that the Zinoviev-Trotskyite conspirators be seen as “intelligence agents, spies, subversives, and wreckers of the fascist bourgeoisie,” in the second half of 1936—during the outbreak of the Spanish civil war and Stalin’s decision to intervene there militarily—there had been no full-throated public campaign of mass charges of spying. Then, under Stalin’s tutelage, Pravda carried a sensational article (May 4, 1937) across three pages, “On Certain Cunning Techniques of Recruitment by Foreign Intelligence,” which Stalin had edited and which was widely reprinted and assigned for discussion at meetings throughout the country. It asserted that inside the USSR, Nazi Germany possessed “a reserve that could be called upon for espionage work.”²⁹⁸ Stalin had inserted a page of material into the draft about an alleged incident concerning a Soviet employee in Japan who had met a female “aristocrat” in a restaurant. Once, during their rendezvous, a Japanese in military uniform arrived to announce he was the woman’s husband. Another Japanese man appeared and proposed that he could quiet the scandal by having the Soviet man sign a document promising to inform the Japanese about internal Soviet affairs. The truce maker, Stalin explained, was a Japanese intelligence operative. The Soviet man had unwittingly been recruited to spy for Japan. It could happen.²⁹⁹

But the number of accused spies was just too large for such a person-by-person recruitment. In 1935–36, the NKVD had arrested 9,965 foreign “spies.” (By comparison, in France, 300 foreign passport holders and 48 French nationals were noted as suspected enemy agents in 1936.) Then, in 1937–38, the NKVD arrested 265,039 spies.³⁰⁰ This included nearly 19,000 just for Latvia and 7,800 just for Romania. Who exactly could be running more than a quarter million spies among the Soviet populace? Who gave them their directives? To whom did they report? Stalin did not publicly address this issue of spy handlers, and it is easy to see why.

The small number of ordinary citizen foreign passport holders who remained resident in the USSR were registered and monitored.³⁰¹ As for accredited representatives of foreign governments, they numbered 1,129 at embassies in Moscow and some 400 at twenty-four consulates.³⁰² This foreign diplomatic community—as Stalin knew better than anyone—was under the most intense surveillance. The sixty-two employees of the German embassy in Moscow (as of 1938) were kept under unrelenting watch and nearly total isolation from the Soviet public.³⁰³ Even leaving aside the fact that every Soviet inhabitant knew the inevitable consequences of any contact with foreigners, let alone with foreign diplomatic personnel, the idea that these few German employees could have recruited and handled 39,000 accused German spies among the Soviet populace in 1937–38 beggars belief. True, Germany also had a few foreign consulates, but Stalin, in a tit for tat, had forced one German mission after another to close: Leningrad, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Novosibirsk.³⁰⁴ By spring 1938, not just Germany, but Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Britain, and Afghanistan had all lost their consulates in the Soviet Union.