Richard Sorge, the Soviet military intelligence asset in Nazi Germany’s Tokyo embassy, confirmed the damage from the defection. Berlin had sent an intelligence officer to Tokyo to take part in debriefing Lyushkov, and Sorge obtained the German embassy’s copy of the classified report, which showed that Lyushkov had told the Japanese of deep internal dissatisfaction with Stalin, and asserted that the Red Army “might collapse in a day” if Japan attacked.187 Sorge reported that Lyushkov was laying bare for the USSR’s mortal enemy how the Soviet system actually functioned, as well as what Soviet officials and ordinary folk actually thought—even what Stalin thought. Sorge concluded that “Lyushkov was an inexhaustible treasure trove of information about the Red Army, the NKVD, the party, and the dynamics of the Soviet people at large.”188
And then it happened again: on July 9, 1938, the NKVD’s Orlov, in Catalonia, received a coded telegram from Yezhov ordering him to a Soviet ship docked at Antwerp for a rendezvous with an unnamed person who would be known to him. Orlov removed $60,000 from the safe, a colossal sum in those days, and fled. According to one NKVD insider, Orlov had guessed wrong: he was being recalled not to be executed but to be named the latest head of NKVD foreign intelligence. Be that as it may, he stole away, with wife and daughter, to Canada and then the United States. Yezhov hesitated to inform Stalin of this second major terror-induced defection. Orlov knew a great deal, from the details of Soviet involvement in Spain, such as the murder of POUM leader Andreu Nin, to the identities of Soviet undercover agents in Europe.189 But apparently he sent a personal letter to Yezhov about his desire merely to escape execution by his own side.190 Orlov, a Jew and a dedicated leftist, defected not to Nazi Germany but to oblivion.191 This was a stroke of luck Stalin did not deserve.
Even the most damaging defection Stalin had ever suffered, an act caused by his terror, did not induce him to relent. On the contrary, back in the Soviet Far East, Frinovsky and Mekhlis went on a post-Lyushkov rampage. If in 1937, 2,969 military officers in the Soviet Far East had been dismissed, of whom 383 had been arrested, in 1938 another 2,272 would be dismissed, of whom 865 would be arrested.192 Frinovsky now also had the task of “reinforcing” Soviet borders in the east. The NKVD began evacuating every single inhabitant within two miles of the border and established a shoot-on-sight zone, rendering infiltration of would-be Japanese agents suicidal, which became equally true of further attempts at defection from the Soviet side.193 But the Japanese already had the crown jewels. Sorge, in his reports with photographed documents to Moscow, underscored that, like German defectors from Nazism, Lyushkov exaggerated the extent to which the regime he deserted was ready to fall, but Sorge speculated that Japan and Germany, seizing upon the weaknesses that Lyushkov was spelling out, might take combined military action against the USSR.194 That, of course, constituted the single most frightening scenario for Stalin, a possible outcome of his own wanton terror.
“THE INEVITABLE WAR” (NEARLY)
On July 6, 1938, Japanese Kwantung Army signal operators intercepted and were able to decode a message to Soviet Far Eastern Army headquarters in Khabarovsk from a frontier commander who recommended that Soviet border troops secure unoccupied high ground on the western edge of Lake Khasan. The Japanese government, already incensed at Soviet military aid to China, had its eye on the strategic heights.195 The spot—near the confluence of the Soviet Union, Korea (a Japanese colony), and Manchukuo (a Japanese puppet state)—was known in Russian as Zaozernaya, meaning “Beyond the Lake” (in Chinese it was called Changkufeng, or “Tight Drum Peaks,” and in Japanese, Chōkohō). This ill-defined waste, ten miles inland from the Sea of Japan and perilously close to Vladivostok, comprised marsh and sandy hills and suffered daytime temperatures up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, with chilly nights. It was effectively uninhabited, but it overlooked the Korean port city of Rajin-Sonbong, as well as the strategic railways across northern Korea and into Manchukuo.196 On July 9, in the name of “preventing the Japanese from taking the hilltop, given its advantageousness for surveillance over our territory,” about thirty NKVD border troops seized Beyond the Lake, dug trenches, and strung barbed wire.197
Four days after the Soviet border action, Lyushkov gave an international press conference at the Sanno Hotel, in Tokyo, to refute the doubters of his bona fides, and further hammered at Stalin’s prestige. “What caused you to betray your country?” an English correspondent asked. Lyushkov replied, “We need to kill Stalin.”198