Stalin полностью

On July 15, Japan’s military attaché and chargé d’affaires in Moscow demanded the removal of the new pillboxes on Beyond the Lake, claiming that they stood on Manchukuo territory (based on the Japanese interpretation of the 1860 Convention of Peking, between imperial Russia and the Qing empire). Blyukher sent his own army commission to the heights and, based on its findings, accused the NKVD’s Frinovsky of having violated the Manchukuo frontier, dissension that the Japanese picked up.¹⁹⁹ Blyukher suspected a provocation by Frinovsky and Mekhlis to trap and bring him down by precipitating a war. His suspicions were far from crazy. The Soviet Far Eastern Army had not been involved in the action: Frinovsky had avoided coordinating anything with a soon-to-be enemy of the people. Blyukher angrily telegraphed Frinovsky, with a copy to Yezhov, warning that “some bastard might create a military conflict” and demanding that “all suspicious people who might intentionally aggravate the situation” be removed. Frinovsky, in turn, sent damning reports on Blyukher to Moscow.²⁰⁰ On July 27, unbeknownst to Frinovsky or Mekhlis, Blyukher secretly telegrammed Voroshilov that the border violators were the NKVD, not the Japanese. But on July 28, Voroshilov strongly rebuffed Blyukher, insisting that the Japanese were the culprits, while pointedly addressing himself also to Frinovsky and Mekhlis, thereby revealing Blyukher’s private communication. Voroshilov, behind both Frinovsky’s and Blyukher’s backs, directed Mekhlis to “investigate this case” and report on Blyukher.²⁰¹ This was how a great power conducted itself in the face of a potent military foe.²⁰²

By spring 1938, Japanese forces in Manchukuo numbered 300,000, which meant that, with a mobilization of reservists, the Japanese could now match the Soviet Far Eastern Army in numbers, if not in tanks and aircraft.²⁰³ Moreover, Stalin knew that Japanese troops were massing near Lake Khasan. How they would respond to the Soviet border “strengthening” remained unclear.²⁰⁴ Many officials in Tokyo viewed as inadvisable the launching of a second-front war against the Soviet Union before completing China’s conquest. But because Stalin had backed down over the Amur River border incident in June 1937 and had murdered so many Red Army officers as “foreign agents,” and because Lyushkov had just defected with a bonanza of information, others in Tokyo contemplated the benefits of testing Soviet resolve and reflexes.²⁰⁵ Lake Khasan fell within the jurisdiction of the Japanese Korean Army, but hawks in the Japanese Kwantung Army indicated that they would step in should their counterparts shrink from taking action. “We still were not particularly enthusiastic,” one Korean Army officer recalled, “but now the Kwantung Army came along and booted us in the ass.” This could have been it: the war Stalin feared, precipitated by minions following his orders to arrest and murder his own loyal military men.

Emperor Hirohito appeared to come to Stalin’s rescue: after a series of audiences in Tokyo on July 20, the emperor, finding himself unimpressed with the contradictory reports and wary of his military’s adventurism, withheld authorization for a full-scale war.²⁰⁶ Japanese soldiers were ordered to withdraw. Nonetheless, events spiraled: Soviet border guards occupied a second high point, referred to as “Nameless,” and on July 29 a local Japanese border unit commander—without formal approval from Japanese Korean Army headquarters (in Seoul) or supreme headquarters (in Tokyo), but with the connivance of his local division commander—used the pretext of these additional Soviet patrols to cross the Tumen River with three battalions. In a firefight, the Japanese units were repulsed.²⁰⁷ But citing this Soviet “provocation” and “buildup,” the local Japanese garrison launched a second frontal assault, called by them a “counterattack,” on the night of July 30–31, and this time they succeeded in driving off the NKVD border troops and capturing both Beyond the Lake and Nameless, with heavy losses on each side. Japanese headquarters accepted the fait accompli. Stalin perceived that Tokyo was deliberately testing his resolve and had Voroshilov issue an order, on July 31, to annihilate the enemy.²⁰⁸