Stalin полностью

Stalin had shattered his own remarkable spy network: of the 450 secret police officials stationed abroad, at least 275 had been arrested by his regime.⁴³ In January 1939, the despot was informed that “the USSR NKVD does not have a single spy coordinator [rezident] abroad and not one proven agent. The work of the NKVD foreign department practically is destroyed and in essence needs to be organized from scratch.”⁴⁴ Similarly, the acting chief of the key western department of the separate agency for military intelligence reported that “the Red Army is essentially without an intelligence arm. The agent networks, which are the basis of intelligence, have almost all been liquidated.”⁴⁵ In truth, recruited foreign agents and underground informants were still out there, but, with a few key exceptions, such as the German embassies in Warsaw and Tokyo, they lacked handlers to receive information. Beria would work to reconstitute espionage.

Even with good espionage, Hitler remained difficult to gauge: how far would he actually go? How far could he really go? He had started from tremendous relative weakness. Germany had lost a war, it lacked an army, navy, air force, or financial prowess, and Hitler’s actions were necessarily full of zigs and zags, opportunistic, hard to read. He decried unfair treatment of his country, made “concessions,” talked ceaselessly of nonaggression pacts and peace. His vision was vague enough to allow people to see it as just an overheated version of long-standing German nationalism.⁴⁶ Indeed, the Nazis’ ultimate goals—eradicating a supposed global Jewish conspiracy; complete German racial dominance of Europe—seemed so improbable that even some minions in the know could scarcely believe Hitler actually meant them in full.⁴⁷ The Munich-born Konrad Heiden had published, in exile, the first serous biography of Hitler, in two volumes in 1936–37, arguing that Germany’s raw materials and food base would be insufficient for taking on the European continent, especially because any new conflict, like the previous one, would be long. Heiden also predicted that Hitler’s rearmament would provoke counter-rearmament and alliances against Germany.⁴⁸ But by early 1939, no such blocking coalition had formed.

For Stalin, rapprochement with the Western imperialists had always been a dangerous game full of illusions: the capitalists could never be trusted because they could never permanently accept the existence of Soviet power. Like Lenin, he held in contempt any promises the imperialists might make. Just as Poland’s Piłsudski had once used the Soviet Union’s courtship to obtain a nonaggression declaration with the supposedly anti-Polish Nazi regime, the British would play the same game, using negotiations with Stalin to obtain a deal with Hitler. If Britain and Germany had joined forces before 1914, they could have destroyed Russia as a world power.⁴⁹ Preventing just such a mésalliance between London and Berlin had become Stalin’s fixation. He had received a continuous flow of intelligence about the relentless British efforts to cozy up to Germany and divert it in the direction of the USSR almost from the moment of Hitler’s accession to power.⁵⁰ British officials harbored the exact suspicion in reverse, perceiving Stalin’s interest in negotiations with them as a ploy to win his own deal with Hitler while “stealthily and cunningly pulling all the strings behind the scenes to get us involved in war with Germany,” as Chamberlain had privately remarked to one of his sisters), when the real quarrel, to British thinking, was between Nazism and Communism.⁵¹

Many members of the British establishment detested the Bolsheviks as incubators of colonial revolutionaries who threatened the British empire, and they viewed Russia as semibarbarous, run by people of the wrong sort. In the early 1930s, Reader Bullard, British consul general in the Soviet Union, described Litvinov—who had been born Meir Henoch Mojszewicz Wallach-Finkelstein, in 1876, to a well-off banking family in Białystok—as a “Warsaw Jew” and “shameless liar.”⁵² Beyond well-grounded suspicions of Russia and ingrained anti-Communism flavored by anti-Semitism, an alliance with the Soviet Union effectively constituted an admission that war could not be avoided.⁵³ Most ordinary Brits, in what was a democracy, were of a mind that the Great War slaughterhouse had claimed nearly 1 million subjects for naught. The war had increased the national debt tenfold in four years.⁵⁴ Most British conservatives—not just those in the Tory government—to a degree shared Chamberlain’s preferred policy of negotiation with Hitler as a way of exerting influence over him.⁵⁵ A majority of the opposition Labour party remained pacifist throughout Nazi aggrandizement, opposing rearmament.⁵⁶ “Lose or win,” one influential British journalist had observed, catching the general view, “a world war would be for England the end of everything.”⁵⁷