Stalin полностью

When Stalin finished—congratulating the victorious working class, the victorious collective farm peasantry, the Soviet intelligentsia—the entire Andreyev-Alexandrov hall stood in thunderous applause. Editorials in Izvestiya, the government newspaper, did not elaborate Stalin’s statement that “collective security” was effectively dead or his hints that Moscow might even turn to Nazi Germany, as if that were an option.¹⁵³ Goebbels’s propaganda ministry had instructed the German press (March 13, 1939) that “you can comment on the congress of Communists in Moscow as a still greater strengthening of the Stalin-Kaganovich clique.” (Kaganovich was Jewish.)¹⁵⁴

The German ambassador, Schulenburg, was the son of a Prussian officer, tall, elegant, pious, an aristocrat of long pedigree, with a balding pate, white mustache, and impeccable manners. The childless, genial count had developed exceptionally good relations with the Soviets, as with his own staff.¹⁵⁵ He had also developed a rivalry with his predecessor in Moscow, Dirksen, now in London. They engaged in a parallel competition to normalize Soviet-German and Anglo-German relations, respectively.¹⁵⁶ Still, Schulenburg doubted that Stalin’s speech signaled a policy shift, although he did note the absence of the customary denunciations of the fascist states.¹⁵⁷ Hitler’s foreign minister showed the Führer a German translation of Stalin’s speech, but the Nazi leader remained skeptical, and, in any case, he was preoccupied: right in the middle of Stalin’s party congress, on March 15, 1939, the Wehrmacht seized the rest of truncated Czechoslovakia, making a mockery of the Munich Pact and Hitler’s pretense of merely wanting to incorporate ethnic Germans. Among the prizes were the Czechoslovak army’s advanced mechanized divisions and the famous Škoda Works, in the city of Plzeň (Pilsen), one of Europe’s premier military factories. “Give me a kiss, girls!” Hitler told his secretaries. “This is the greatest day of my life. I shall enter history as the greatest German of them all.”¹⁵⁸ The Führer annexed the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia) as a Third Reich “protectorate”; Slovakia became nominally independent, under a Nazi puppet. Czechoslovakia’s eastern Subcarpathian Rusyn (Ruthene) province became an independent state—for thirty hours, until March 16, when Hungarian troops invaded and annexed the southern part; Polish troops seized the northern part and established a common border with Hungary.¹⁵⁹

Hitler had intruded on Stalin’s affirmation of Soviet unity and might. The despot had Litvinov convey to Schulenburg that “the Soviet government cannot recognize the inclusion of the Czech lands in the German empire, or that of Slovakia in any form.”¹⁶⁰ An aide to the Soviet military attaché in Berlin reported, rightly, that Hitler had already achieved a windfall: advanced Czech weapons plants, advanced Czech mechanized divisions, storehouses of grain. Less positively for Germany, the attaché noted that the Nazis had absorbed a large non-German population that could create risks in Germany’s rear if the Führer pushed still farther out. On that latter score, the Soviet military aide was unequivocal: Germany was gearing up for further expansion. The question was: in which direction, “east or west?”¹⁶¹

FIXATION

Trotsky had been writing about the creation of a Fourth International since at least 1933, but the founding congress had only taken place on September 3, 1938, and was attended by fewer than two dozen delegates, at a private home outside Paris. In October 1938, he had fantasized, in a speech in Mexico he recorded on a gramophone, that “in the course of the next ten years, the program of the Fourth International will become the program of millions, and these revolutionary millions will be able to take heaven and earth by storm.”¹⁶² However absurd his “movement,” Trotsky’s pen was another matter. Commenting the day after Stalin’s political report to the 18th Party Congress, Trotsky scandalously surmised, like Krivitsky before him, that “Stalin is preparing to play with Hitler.”¹⁶³ Around the time of the party congress, Stalin ordered renewed efforts to assassinate Trotsky.¹⁶⁴