Stalin was well informed about the brouhaha that had erupted in Britain over Hitler’s seizure of all of Czechoslovakia. The despot also likely knew that the British cabinet had discussed the possibility of asking the Soviet Union to join a coalition against Hitler but that the Poles were refusing to countenance such a move. With the guarantee, Chamberlain had effectively chosen Poland over the Soviet Union.196 But to make his guarantee credible, he needed a military commitment to the defense of Poland from the Soviet Union.197 Suddenly, unintentionally, Chamberlain, who left day-to-day management of Soviet affairs largely to his foreign secretaries, had placed Stalin and the USSR at the center of European power politics.198 Some British foreign policy officials ignorantly predicted that Stalin would now “stand aloof,” failing to grasp the despot’s fear of a Western-German alliance behind his back.199 At the same time, Chamberlain’s guarantee to Poland had given Hitler a powerful incentive to seek some sort of deal with the USSR, to secure his rear. London’s turn to Poland, in other words, unintentionally heightened the British need to talk to Stalin—lest Hitler do so.200
A BELATED DEMISE
Beria’s extreme urgency notwithstanding, the operation to murder Trotsky took time, and success was hardly assured. In the meantime, the NKVD commissar had ways of ingratiating himself: in the wee hours of April 6, 1939, Mikhail Frinovsky, Yezhov’s former first deputy of the NKVD, was arrested, just after he had requested to be relieved as naval commissar, “in view of my ignorance of sea matters.”201 The regime sailed on. Friendship of Peoples, the first issue of an annual almanac, was issued in a print run of 10,000, for translations of the belles lettres of the Union republics into Russian. “The Soviet people sing,” the editor’s note observed. “Their songs speak of the joy of labor and victories, the successes of socialist construction. They do not know borders and are heard round the world. They talk of the miraculous flowering of the great constellation of eleven Union republics, each of which has become a bright, shining pearl. . . . The Soviet people have something to sing.”202
Stalin’s reading now extended to biographies of Ivan the Terrible and foreign affairs, including Yevgeny Tarle’s Talleyrand (1939), published in the series Lives of Remarkable People.203 In April 1939, not long after the Nazi occupation of rump Czechoslovakia, Stalin read an intercepted ciphered communication from the Japanese representative in Buenos Aires to Tokyo: “Taking into account that in a European war some 75 submarines of Germany would temporarily seek to paralyze England, what would happen if such powers as Japan, Germany, Italy, and Spain united?” Stalin underlined every word in this fantasy and wrote on it a quick count of the combined divisions (250) such an alliance would yield.204
On April 7, Lenin in 1918, Mikhail Romm’s sequel to his Lenin in October (1937), premiered to acclaim in Moscow.205 The film would be shown at Cannes and nominated for the Palme d’Or. The celebrated Shchukin again played Lenin, with what was regarded as even greater fidelity to his life.206 Gelovani again successfully played Stalin, who despite the title was the central man of action, sent in 1918 to obtain grain in Tsaritsyn, where he shows himself to be a great military commander who feeds the two capitals in the north and saves the Soviet republic. Stalin had dictated changes to the original cut. Originally entitled Assassination, for the near-fatal attempt on Lenin’s life that year, the film opens with Lenin asking Gorky, “What should we do with our enemies?” Gorky worries about “excessive severity,” but Lenin retorts, “Severity nowadays is an essential condition of battle. Such severity will be understood.”207
