Stalin полностью

Another of Lyushkov’s outsized problems was a man against whom he was supposed to be gathering compromising materials: Marshal Blyukher. Despite the German-sounding name (Blücher), evidently a nickname for his grandfather, Blyukher was an ethnic Russian, born to a peasant family, who had commanded the Soviet Far Eastern Army since its inception (1930), held the rank of marshal since its introduction (1935), and earned no fewer than five Orders of the Red Banner and two Orders of Lenin.¹⁶⁸ Following his complicity on the panel of judges in the 1937 in-camera trial and execution of Tukhachevsky and the other commanders, Blyukher had taken to drink, starting that very night in his room at the Hotel Moskva. Back in the Soviet Far East, his own top people were being arrested.¹⁶⁹ “Vasily Konstantinovich became more and more closed,” Blyukher’s young second wife, Glafira, would recall, “but he still believed Stalin would defend him, although, thinking out loud at home, he not infrequently said that the Master was too severe, idiosyncratic, at times wacky, and yet he believed in his party conscience.”¹⁷⁰ In January 1938, Blyukher had led the Far Eastern delegation to the USSR Supreme Soviet in Moscow and, furthermore, was among the select few elected to the body’s presidium. Lyushkov, for his part, knew that Stalin had lost confidence in Blyukher. “Blyukher is very ambitious for power,” Lyushkov would later observe. “His role in the Far East does not satisfy him; he wants more. He considers himself above Voroshilov. Politically, it is doubtful whether he is satisfied with the general situation, although he is very careful. In the army he is more popular than Voroshilov.”¹⁷¹

Blyukher, of course, knew that Lyushkov was gunning for him, and he went on the offensive, spreading rumors that Moscow had lost “political confidence” in Lyushkov.¹⁷² Thus did each man’s vulnerability contribute to the other’s.

Stalin had gotten lucky in the Far East: Japan had become bogged down. “The situation in China splendid,” Soviet deputy foreign affairs commissar Potyomkin remarked, as the French ambassador to Moscow Coulondre reported to Paris. Potyomkin “is counting on the resistance by this country for several years, after which Japan will be too enfeebled to be capable of attacking the USSR. This opinion appears to be shared by the Soviet leadership.”¹⁷³ Stalin himself told a Chinese special envoy (the son of Sun Yat-sen) that “China was fighting Russia’s battle as well as her own” and “that China would continue to receive all possible help from Russia in the form of munitions, airplanes, and other supplies.”¹⁷⁴ But he avoided direct confrontation with Japan, sternly warning (April 7, 1938) the party boss in Soviet Northern Sakhalin to quit harassing Japanese economic operations there, since any trouble over the foreign concessions could serve as a casus belli. Similarly, in connection with the Japanese ambassador in London, Stalin instructed his envoy Maisky “not to avoid a meeting with [Shigeru] Yoshida, and if you get such a meeting listen to him attentively. Ask him to outline concrete measures for improving relations between Japan and the Soviet Union. State that the USSR strives for improved relations. On these points, report to me.”¹⁷⁵

Predictably, though, Stalin was pursuing his own intrigues. On April 12, 1938, Moscow notified Blyukher of an imminent Japanese attack against Soviet positions, based on information from Chiang Kai-shek.¹⁷⁶ Stalin could not help but understand that such “intelligence” reflected Chiang’s indefatigable efforts to precipitate direct Soviet involvement in the war, but the despot could not resist using this Chinese provocation. Even as the Soviet Far Eastern Army was adding more than 100,000 troops from the Volga and Siberian military districts in 1938, as well as large numbers of planes and tanks, Stalin dispatched newly named deputy defense commissar Lev Mekhlis to Khabarovsk, with armed escorts and replacement military officers—referred to locally as the “Black Hundred” (like the vigilantes under tsarism).¹⁷⁷ It was the end of the line for the thirty-eight-year Soviet Far East NKVD boss, Lyushkov.