HENRY KISSINGER, IN his magisterial Diplomacy (1988), deemed Stalin “the supreme realist—patient, shrewd, and implacable.”146 That is not the Stalin readers have encountered in this book. He often showed himself to be a shrewd operator forced to make difficult choices to defend the interests of his country, but he was never that alone. Just as often, the hard choices that confronted him had been created by his own blunders and gratuitous mayhem. Stalin cannot plausibly be portrayed as a clear-eyed realpolitiker abroad and unhinged mass murderer at home; he was the same calculating, distrustful mind in both cases. Throughout the massacres, he remained thoroughly, passionately engaged in foreign policy, devoted in his way to the cause of the Soviet state and the cause of socialism. He was an ideologue and would-be statesman who forced socialism into being through massive violence—the only way complete anticapitalism could have been achieved—and this building of socialism, in turn, made him the full sociopath he became. Now collectivization was behind him, and the mass terror against his own elites and others mostly behind him, but Hitler was in front of him. Stalin was defiant toward the Western powers and solicitous toward Germany, but fearful of an all-imperialist anti-Soviet coalition incorporating Nazi Germany, too. The resulting pas de trois—Chamberlain, Hitler, Stalin—became, in effect, a Chamberlain-versus-Stalin contest to win over Hitler. Stalin would be put to the supreme test. The stakes were the survival not just of his regime but of the country.
CHAPTER 10HAMMER
They arrested my first secretary, then they arrested the second. . . . They arrested my first aide. A Ukrainian, also from the workers. He was not especially literate, but I could rely on him as an honest person. They arrested him, it seems they put a lot of pressure on him, but he did not want to say a thing and threw himself down the elevator shaft at the NKVD. That’s the way it was with all my staff.
VYACHESLAV MOLOTOV (“Hammer”) 1
THE FORMER AVIATOR NIKOLAI SHPANOV, in his novella The First Blow: A Story About the Future War, published in early 1939 in the thick journal Banner, then as a book in the Library of a Commander series, named Nazi Germany as the country’s principal foe.2 The action revolved around Soviet Air Force Day (August 18) in an unspecified future year. People are observing a Soviet pilot’s exploits at an air show when suddenly, over loudspeakers, at precisely 5:00 p.m., they hear that Luftwaffe warplanes have violated the Soviet frontier. Within one minute, Soviet fighters are challenging the Germans in the skies. Only twenty-nine minutes later, the last surviving German plane has fled Soviet airspace. The Red Air Force then mounts a lightning counterattack with 700 state-of-the-art planes into Germany’s industrial rear. As bombers reach an aircraft factory at Nuremberg, German workers break out into “L’Internationale” in solidarity. Already the next morning, Soviet ground troops have smashed across the frontier. Quick victory comes with little loss of Soviet life. Vsevolod Vishnevsky, in a review, deemed the book “valuable, interesting, profoundly germane,” and explained that “it entertainingly speaks about how the Soviet people will fight a just war against aggressors, a war that will be fatal for the enemies of socialism.”3
Outside this dream palace, Stalin faced a harsher, ideology-inflected version of the security dilemma that had bedeviled his tsarist predecessors: a now even more aggressive German power on the European continent and a now even more aggressive, militarist Japan moving onto the Asian mainland—two flanking powers that were now formally allied. In Europe, he could keep trying to secure a deal with anti-Communist France and Britain, in order to try to deter Germany, or keep pursuing a deal somehow with Nazi Germany to try to redirect German ambitions westward. In the Far East, no such deal with the United States or Britain seemed even theoretically possible. Stalin had kept Litvinov in place, despite Yezhov’s predations against the foreign affairs commissariat (which Beria would continue).4 “We sometimes prefer to be isolated rather than to go along with the bad actions of others,” Litvinov had written to Maisky in London, “and that is why isolation does not frighten us.”5 But such a retreat into “fortress Russia”—a temptation also indulged by the party’s chief ideologue, Zhdanov—afforded Stalin little comfort: the British and the Nazis could join in a deal against the Soviet Union, turning Soviet “isolation” deadly. Had that not been the significance of Munich?6
