Stalin полностью

Molotov demanded nothing less from Britain and France. On May 14, he responded to the British by reiterating the Soviet insistence on reciprocal security obligations, and on including trilateral guarantees for the territorial integrity of the Baltic states, too. But Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia did not seek “guarantees” of their sovereignty, least of all from the Soviet Union, which they feared as much as or more than Nazi Germany, and Britain did not want to force them. At the same time, it remained highly uncertain whether Britain or France could persuade Poland and Romania to add the USSR to the British and French guarantees of their sovereignty or even grant unequivocal transit rights to the Red Army.³⁰³ In this context, a secret Soviet memorandum of May 15, “English Diplomacy’s Dark Maneuver in August 1914,” recounted how London had promised Berlin it would stand aside, and even secure France’s neutrality, if Germany attacked Russia but not France. Molotov underlined several passages, as if the British were engaged in the same maneuver now.³⁰⁴

ULTIMATUM

Stalin’s regime remained an exceedingly awkward potential partner for the Western powers. Mikhail Bulgakov, who had once again requested permission to leave the country and once again been refused, organized a private reading of his secret manuscript, The Master and Margarita, to his close circle of friends. “When he finally finished reading that night, he said: ‘Well, tomorrow I am taking the novel to the publisher!’ and everyone was silent. . . . Everyone sat paralyzed,” Yelena Bulgakova wrote in her diary (May 14, 1939). “Everything scared them.”³⁰⁵ On May 15, in the middle of the night, Isaac Babel was arrested at his dacha in Peredelkino. His most recent short story collection had been published in fall 1936; now the NKVD confiscated some two dozen folders and notebooks of his unpublished manuscripts, translations, and other materials. Babel suffered from his association with Yezhov, who, under interrogation, had named him as a spy. According to the interrogation protocols, Babel implicated Eisenstein (“The organizers of the Soviet film industry were preventing gifted individuals from revealing their talents to the full”), Solomon Mikhoels (“constantly dissatisfied that the Soviet repertoire gave him no chance to demonstrate his talents”), and Ehrenburg (“In Ehrenburg’s view, the continued wave of arrests forced all Soviet citizens to break off any relations with foreigners”).³⁰⁶ Babel would also sign a bloodstained protocol confessing to membership in a Trotskyite espionage organization on behalf of France, linked to Malraux.³⁰⁷

Babel’s association with the Cheka had extended beyond bedding Yezhov’s wife, Yevgeniya Gladun, the hostess of a literary salon, whom Babel called a “featherhead,” an allusion to Chekhov.³⁰⁸ “He told us how he spent all his time meeting militiamen and drinking with them,” Nadezhda Mandelstam would recall. “The word ‘militia’ was of course a euphemism. . . . M. asked him why he was so drawn to ‘militiamen’; was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers?” Babel replied that he just wanted to have a sniff.³⁰⁹ Now he was in Lubyanka’s inner courtyard, for good.

Stalin made some moves to indicate that terror against his own people would not govern all decision making.³¹⁰ That spring of 1939, after two years of short-lived acting directors, he had finally named a new chief of Soviet military intelligence: air force commander Ivan Proskurov, a decorated veteran of the Spanish civil war and the son of a railroad worker. Proskurov’s first deputy held the lowly rank of major, as did almost all the heads of the departments and subdepartments, and he himself was a mere thirty-two years old. They had to find and reengage the many foreign agents, who remained willing to risk their lives to serve the cause against fascism.³¹¹ NKVD foreign espionage, too, was working to reestablish its networks, straining every nerve to ascertain the intentions of Britain as well as France. Donald Maclean (code-named “Homer”), one of Moscow’s Cambridge Five spies, had been promoted to the British foreign office; another Soviet spy in the foreign office, John Herbert King, a walk-in, delivered cipher books to the NKVD. Yet another Soviet spy worked inside the French general staff, and another in the Czechoslovak foreign ministry.³¹² All these high-placed clandestine sources provided information that reinforced Stalin’s preexisting doubts about the intentions of the Western powers ever to align with the Soviets, or stand up to Hitler.