Stalin полностью

Through it all, Hitler remained Stalin’s most complicating factor. “One thing I should like to say on this day which may be memorable for others as well as for us Germans: In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it,” Hitler raved, deep into a speech on January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of his becoming chancellor. “Above all the Jewish people only laughed at my prophecies. I believe that such gales of laughter now stick in the throats of Jewry in Germany. ” He continued: “Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”⁹² This revealing resentment-cum-threat was partly a belated response to Roosevelt and U.S. criticisms of the anti-Jewish pogrom Kristallnacht, as well as to bogged-down negotiations over restrictions for Jewish immigrants from Germany and Austria, and an equation of the United States with “the headquarters of world Jewry.”⁹³ The Reichstag erupted in acclamation.

Hitler had achieved more than anyone—perhaps even he himself—had imagined, and he wielded his increasing power and confidence to raise the stakes. On February 13, 1939, he placed a laurel on the grave of Otto von Bismarck, and the next day he presided over the launching of the Bismarck, Germany’s grandest new battleship. “As Führer of the German people and Chancellor of the Reich,” he told the assembled crowd, “I can give this ship no finer name.”⁹⁴ Of course, Bismarck, unifier of Germany, had proceeded from a sense of limits and a need for balance, not unlimited expansion, and had refrained from swallowing the Habsburg empire, while Hitler had already annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. At the same time, the prohibitive costs of Hitler’s ongoing rearmament and military actions, as well as anxiety over raw material supply, were mounting. The national debt had tripled since his takeover.⁹⁵ Hitler ordered a reduction in the Wehrmacht budget for the first quarter of 1939. But the army, knowing the Führer, ignored the limit. Hitler did not make strategic decisions on the basis of economic considerations.⁹⁶ Still, more affordable supplies of raw materials for the war machine had to be found.⁹⁷ Germany had submitted to Moscow a request for formal trade talks, and Mikoyan handed the German ambassador two new shopping lists for industrial goods in February 1939.⁹⁸ The USSR and the Capitalist Encirclement, a book published that same month, asserted that the “ruling class” in Britain and France desired not an alliance with the USSR against “fascism,” but a war between the Soviet Union and Germany.⁹⁹

PURSUING REWARDS

Soviet prisons now held an estimated 350,000 inmates, while Gulag labor camps and colonies held 1.665 million. But the recorded proportion of prisoners who did not work in the period 1937–39 ranged from 16.6 percent to 27.1 percent. The camp complexes had accumulated ill, invalid, and idle “laborers.”¹⁰⁰ The slave labor productivity exception had always been the gold-mining trust in the Kolyma River region of the far northeast. Stalin sent a telegram (January 24, 1939) praising Karp Pavlov, Dalstroi’s head: “Let us reward all, starting with Pavlov, without embarrassment or false modesty.” A two-decade veteran of the secret police, with service from Crimea to Krasnoyarsk, Pavlov had arrived two years before to replace the long-serving head of Dalstroi, who was executed as the head of a counterrevolutionary spy-diversionist Trotskyist organization.¹⁰¹ On February 2, 1939, Pavlov received the Order of Lenin. That winter, thousands of gold diggers would again perish.

New influxes would double the Dalstroi population to 160,000 by the end of the year. (Soon Pavlov would be promoted to chief of mining and metallurgy for the entire Gulag.)¹⁰² Dalstroi had acquired enough performers to form a local symphony and a musical comedy troupe, both of which entertained the bosses in the local “capital” of Magadan, a jumble of log cabins and transit prisons known as the Athens of Okhotsk.¹⁰³ Magadan could claim a higher concentration not just of musicians and actors, but of doctors, scholars, poets, novelists, photographers, and painters, than any urban center east of the Urals, and many to the west, but the terror had killed off the trust’s technical specialists and lowered productivity.¹⁰⁴ Magadan officials begged to see Union-wide arrest lists so they could scour them for geologists, hydrologists, and other desperately needed “wreckers” and “Trotskyites.”