Stalin полностью

The Führer could mesmerize people. Winston Churchill, the Tory politician, had written in September 1937 that “one may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among nations.”¹³ Churchill would soon experience a drastic change of heart, coming around to the view that Hitler was serious about his martial and racialist aspirations.¹⁴ But many observers, perhaps most, would continue to assume that, like all politicians, the Nazi, too, would eventually “come to see reason.”

Hitler posed a profound danger to Stalin’s personal dictatorship as the Führer not only rearmed his country but raged ever more rabidly against “Judeo-Bolshevism,” transforming Germany from partner of convenience with the USSR during the Weimar years to menace. Stalin was bafflingly slow to come to grips with the centrality of ideology in the Nazi program. On the Soviet despot’s Asian flank, meanwhile, the long-standing threat of an expansionist Japan had only strengthened. The symbolic November 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan, which Italy joined the next year, and the relentless Soviet border clashes with Japan, including the summer 1938 limited war at Lake Khasan, meant that the Soviet Union faced the prospect of a two-front war—and without allies.¹⁵ Mongolia, the world’s only other socialist state, had a total population far smaller than the Red Army. Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Chiang Kai-shek’s China, but a decade of bitterness and distrust was not easily overcome, and China’s ability to continue holding off a Japanese military onslaught, while battling internal Communist subversion, remained uncertain. Could Stalin somehow achieve a military alliance with the Western capitalist democracies, even as he was conducting grisly mass executions at home and engaged in forms of Communist subversion of his potential partners abroad? Czechoslovakia provided the key test.

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CZECHOSLOVAKIA CALLED TO MIND the old Habsburg empire in miniature—Mussolini dubbed it Czecho-Germano-Polono-Magyaro-Rutheno-Romano-Slovakia. Of the new country’s approximately 15 million people, Czechs formed a bare majority, and the main minorities—3.25 million Germans, 3 million Slovaks, 750,000 Hungarians, 100,000 Ruthenians [Ukrainians], 100,000 Poles—chafed at real and perceived discrimination. Politically, the country remained a parliamentary democracy, but in some ways it was too divided, too nationalist, and even too small to sustain the limited stability that old Austria-Hungary had fitfully managed.¹⁶ Hitler preyed upon these vulnerabilities, taking advantage of Czechoslovakia’s democracy to subvert it: spreading lies to discredit its democratic institutions while claiming the protections of laws to defend freedom of expression; covertly funding pro-Nazi political groups while irately denouncing the evidence of its complicity fake, even inciting armed revolt by Czechoslovakia’s German speakers, who were concentrated mostly in the horseshoe-shaped Sudetenland, contiguous with Germany. With regional tensions high, on February 24, 1938, the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Red Army, the Soviet embassy in Prague threw a glittering reception for 350 guests. (The German, Italian, and Polish ambassadors stayed away.) General Ludvík Krejčí, chief of the Czechoslovak general staff, stated in the presence of journalists that if Germany were to attack, “We will fight and we will never fall to our knees.” He added that the Czechoslovak general staff wanted relations with the Soviet general staff to be on a par with those it had with the French. Still, doubts existed in Prague about whether the USSR was really prepared to defend Czechoslovakia.¹⁷

Events moved very rapidly. On March 12, a different Habsburg successor state vanished when the Wehrmacht, unopposed, seized Austria, a country of 7 million predominantly German speakers. It was the first time since the Great War that a German army had crossed a state frontier for purposes of conquest, and, in and of itself, it constituted an event of perhaps greater import than the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which had helped spark the Great War mobilizations in 1914.¹⁸ The Versailles and Saint-Germain treaties of 1919 expressly forbade a forcible annexation of Austria by Germany, but Berlin deemed what it called Anschluss a “reunification” with the German speakers whom Bismarck had left out of his unified Germany. Even Germans not enamored of National Socialism rejoiced. Hitler overcame the stain of his failed 1934 putsch, and this time Mussolini, estranged from Britain and France and judging a deal with Hitler more prudent than paying the cost of opposing him, allied Italy to Germany’s expansionism even as the latter threatened Italy’s own territorial interests.