Stalin полностью

A number of those now arrested in foreign affairs were Jewish. Their deliberate removal in 1937–39 did not signify a special anti-Semitism, any more than their original mass promotion into the foreign affairs commissariat, or into the Cheka, had signaled a special Judeophilia.²⁶⁸ The removal of Jews was aimed at altering the image of the regime and making way for promotion of the young, the humble, and the Slavic, as in the NKVD. Typical of the new men was twenty-four-year-old Vladimir Pavlov, an ethnic Russian who had graduated in spring 1939 from the Moscow Energy Institute and, already a candidate member of the party, found himself a top aide to Molotov. Pavlov soon became one of Stalin’s interpreters.²⁶⁹ Another example was Andrei Gromyko (b. 1909), a working-class militant from Belarus who had been trained as a Marxist economist and suddenly entered diplomatic service in spring 1939 as the new head of the foreign affairs commissariat’s American department. (He had “virtually no knowledge of foreign affairs,” American diplomats in Moscow surmised after a luncheon.)²⁷⁰ Molotov would recall that Litvinov “was an intelligent man, an outstanding personality, but one did not trust him.” By contrast, Molotov viewed Gromyko as “still young and inexperienced, but loyal.”²⁷¹

When Hitler had asserted control over his foreign ministry, which he had called an “intellectual garbage dump,” by appointing the Nazi parvenu Ribbentrop to replace the old-line aristocrat Baron Konstantin von Neurath, the takeover was said to resemble a fight of the jackboots against the striped trousers.²⁷² The Soviet foreign affairs commissariat was rocked not just by the brawling over political orientation—Britain/France versus Germany—but by class and cultural antagonisms. Litvinov had once been a young firebrand, the man Lenin had called upon to fence the money that Kamo and Stalin had heisted from the mail coach on Yerevan Square in 1907. But Victor Serge, in France, characterized the dismissed sixty-three-year-old Litvinov as “a large diplomat with a lined face resembling a very wealthy diamond merchant from Antwerp or a City banker related to the Rothschilds.”²⁷³ No love was lost between the Litvinov caste of “bourgeois” Soviet diplomats of Western three-piece suits and clubby gestures—the very features that made him acceptable in the Western world—and the latest young appointees, who often came from the workbench or the plow, such as Pavlov and Gromyko. But Pavlov aside, the newly promoted were often monolingual (as Litvinov had complained to Stalin) and out of their depth.²⁷⁴ A former textile plant manager would soon be appointed Soviet envoy to Berlin.

A POLISH HINGE?

On April 20, 1939, when Hitler celebrated his fiftieth birthday, he playfully wrote to Ribbentrop, “Please invite a series of foreign guests, among them as many cowardly civilians and democrats as possible,” adding that he wanted these foreigners to see “a parade of the most modern of armies.”²⁷⁵ Some 20,000 guests were accommodated in the grandstand alone. Celebrations were also held in other German cities, and the Free City of Danzig. The birthday festivities had actually begun the day before, when Hitler rode at the head of a fifty-white-limousine cavalcade along Speer’s newly constructed East-West Axis, the central boulevard of what was to be the transformed capital, decorated with Nazi banners and lit by torches. For the military parade, the Führer stood on the reviewing stand, flanked by generals, admirals, field marshals, and bodyguards. Arm extended in Nazi salute, he took in the largest display in Nazi Germany to date of goose-stepping columns—nearly 50,000 uniformed troops—along with tanks, artillery, antiaircraft guns, and Messerschmitt fighters and Heinkel bombers roaring overhead. According to one foreign eyewitness, Hitler “never took his eyes from the immense army on the march.”²⁷⁶