Stalin полностью

CZECHOSLOVAKIA, AFTER AUSTRIA, became the second great collective missed opportunity of 1938. Very late on the night of October 2, 1938, after Germany and now Poland had carved up Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union—diplomatically silent for more than thirty-six hours—delivered an affirmative response to the Czechoslovak president’s request for unilateral Soviet military support. Moscow’s absurdly tardy response, the pinnacle of cynicism, even rebuked Beneš for having failed to fight Germany.¹²⁵ Japan’s military brass were crestfallen that Munich had defused a European war, which they had hoped would diminish European backing for Chiang Kai-shek and compel his capitulation.¹²⁶ As for Hitler, despite the windfall of territory, population, and industry, he had been denied a battlefield triumph, settling for his ostensible aim (the Sudetenland), as opposed to his real one (all of Czechoslovakia).¹²⁷ France’s perceptive military attaché in Berlin rightly reported to Paris that the Führer viewed Munich as a defeat, and that the Nazis wanted to ramp up propaganda to combat “the profound lassitude which the German people demonstrated when faced with the prospect of another war.”¹²⁸

Back in London, Chamberlain, appearing in front of exuberant crowds on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with the king and queen, and again outside his official residence at 10 Downing Street, hailed the Munich Pact as “peace for our time.”¹²⁹ Izvestiya (October 4, 1938) acidly wrote, “It is the first time we know of that the seizure of someone else’s territory, the shift of borders guaranteed by international treaties to foreign armies, is nothing less than a ‘triumph’ or ‘victory’ for peace.” How often did the Soviet press carry the truth? But for Stalin, too, Munich was a defeat. The German ambassador to the Soviet Union had correctly reported to Berlin the sour mood in Moscow.¹³⁰ Soviet inaction—however the Kremlin justified it—damaged the country’s international standing. Munich also starkly demonstrated Soviet international friendlessness while militarily opening a clear path eastward for Hitler. “History tells us,” Stalin himself had observed in an interview with Roy Howard back in 1936, “that when a state wishes to attack a state with which it does not share a border, it begins to create new borders until it neighbors the state it wishes to attack.”¹³¹

Hitler had aggressively shifted his borders farther eastward, in Stalin’s direction, and the Western powers had acquiesced. “The second imperialist war has already started,” reemphasized the twelfth and final chapter of the Short Course. “The characteristic aspect of the second imperialist war is that it is carried on and widened by the aggressive powers, while the other powers, the ‘democratic’ ones, against whom the war is being waged, pretend that the war does not concern them.”¹³² Shrewdly, the Polish ambassador to London, Count Edward Raczyński, likened the 1938 Munich Pact to a football match wherein Chamberlain had defended the British goal and shifted “play” to Stalin’s side of the pitch. Litvinov was said to have exclaimed, according to the NKVD, that the deal handing Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to the Nazis portended “an attack on us. . . . War is coming. The one small hope is that Germany somehow rethinks. Perhaps someone will persuade Hitler.”¹³³

Stalin’s murderous rampage, however, had put out of action his nonpareil spy network in Germany. Zelman Passov (b. 1905), the recently appointed head of the NKVD intelligence, who had completed three grades of primary schooling, wrote that “during such sharpening of the international situation, such as the [German] preparations for the seizure of Austria [and] Czechoslovakia, the foreign department [espionage] did not have one agent communication, not a single piece of information, out of Germany.”¹³⁴

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