Be that as it may, Stalin and the Red Army were ultimately spared not by Soviet resolve or Japanese circumspection but by China. Soviet-Japanese hostilities took place concurrently with the titanic Battle of Wuhan (June–October 1938), where the Chinese government had shifted its military industries and where more than 1 million Chinese troops, commanded by Chiang himself, massed against Japanese forces who aimed for a decisive showdown. In the event, the Imperial Japanese Army would manage to seize Wuhan, China’s second-largest city, but at a staggering cost of 100,000 Japanese casualties.217 Tokyo, which militarily was now both mired in China and engaged with the Soviet Union, continued to beseech Berlin for conversion of the Anti-Comintern Pact into a formal military alliance directed against Moscow. Hitler was interested insofar as such an alliance would apply to Britain and France as well, thereby bringing them to heel in Europe by threatening their colonial empires in Asia. Stalin was privy to these talks from Sorge, in detail, including the many sticking points.218
Stalin’s wager on Chiang had returned dividends. The Chinese leader had managed to stalemate Japan’s land army. Chiang had also firmly rebuffed the Chinese Communists’ demands to arm the workers for “revolutionary war” against the Japanese.219 It is easy to see why. “The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue of war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution,” Mao averred to a China Communist party plenum in the second half of 1938, adding that Chiang, whom the Communist leader deemed a counterrevolutionary, “has held firmly to the vital point that whoever has an army has power, that war decides everything. In this respect we ought to learn from him.”220 Stalin had no desire to see Chiang’s Nationalists fall to the Japanese because of Chinese Communist treason behind the lines. Nor did he want to provoke Tokyo and Berlin into overcoming their differences. Still, he proved unyielding with Japan over the disputed border at Lake Khasan, insisting on the status quo antebellum, and, for now, got his way. The Japanese political leadership took a step back. At the same time, Japanese military hawks of a self-fashioned “north strike” school became more emboldened in their zeal to test the Red Army.221 They would be back.
As Stalin well knew, it had taken the Red Army nearly ten days of ferocious combat to dislodge a limited number of Japanese troops, who, additionally, were fighting with their hands partly tied by their emperor. The Soviets lost 792 killed, 3,279 wounded; Japanese casualties amounted to 526 killed and 913 wounded—2,600 fewer.222 “We were not sufficiently quick in our tactics, and particularly in combined operations, in dealing the enemy a concentrated blow,” Voroshilov would observe, taking no responsibility himself. He added, again with no personal liability, “It was discovered that the Far Eastern theater was poorly prepared for war (roads, bridges, communications).”223 Voroshilov could have noted further that the Soviet officer corps, including almost every one of Blyukher’s deputies and aides, had been massacred and terrorized, and that Blyukher himself had been sandbagged and sidelined by his own side. Still, whether Blyukher, any more than those sitting in judgment of him, really was up to the challenges of modern warfare remained unclear.224 On August 16, 1938, Voroshilov summoned the marshal to Moscow for an accounting. Six days later, Lavrenti Beria was named to a new post in the capital. Beria’s and Blyukher’s paths would soon cross.
FIRST DEPUTY NKVD USSR
Why Stalin let Yezhov remain at the helm for so long remains mysterious. By summer 1938, the insanity in the NKVD had gotten to the point that at least one newly appointed provincial NKVD chief released large numbers of prisoners and wrote to Lubyanka about the outrageous falsifications.225 Vlas Chubar, the government deputy head, in a memo to Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov dated June 16, 1938, pointed out the glaring discrepancies between Soviet mobilization plans for war and the resources at hand.226 That same day, Chubar was expelled from the politburo (the resolution cited “testimony” of arrested politburo candidate members).227 The next day, he was demoted to the directorship of a pulp-and-paper factory construction site in Solikamsk, a Gulag camp. On June 25, Malenkov informed Stalin that Chubar, through the Central Committee book-ordering service, had requested copies of Trotsky’s