Stalin полностью

But progress in the formal talks Molotov had opened with the two Western powers in May 1939—a dozen sessions would be held altogether—was halting. Even British officials not adamantly averse to exploring a security deal with the Soviets were hard pressed to overcome the severe practical obstacles. On May 21, Halifax told Maisky again that the Baltic states outright refused a tripartite security guarantee and that the British government “cannot impose guarantees on others by force.” The foreign secretary added that “many in Britain think that a tripartite pact may push Hitler to unleash a war straight away, and therefore, rather than preventing war, the pact would hasten it.” Maisky countered by evoking “Al Capone as a model,” in the sense that “only force will make (Hitler or Mussolini) doff their cap!”³²⁰

France’s ambassador to Berlin, Coulondre, sounded a more alarming note than his British counterparts, warning Paris on May 22 that Ribbentrop was apoplectic over Polish minister Beck’s rejection of Hitler’s “generous” offer and had come around to favoring a rapprochement with Moscow as “indispensable and inevitable.” Among Germany’s objectives, Coulondre listed “the possibility of persuading Russia to play the same role in the dismemberment of Poland that the latter country had played with regard to Czechoslovakia. The ultimate object appeared to be to make use of the material resources and manpower of the USSR as a means to destroy the British empire.” He noted that “it is possible that up to the present the Führer has resisted these appeals or at any rate hesitated to commit himself to such a policy, for ideological reasons. But, even admitting that such is his present attitude, there is nothing to indicate that he will not change his mind.” Coulondre advised that “at this moment, when the Anglo-Franco-Russian negotiations seem to have entered upon a decisive phase, we should . . . bear in mind that the Reich would do its best to take advantage, to the detriment of France and Great Britain, of any failure . . . in the conversations now taking place with Moscow.”³²¹

Also on May 22, 1939, Stalin addressed a Central Committee plenum on its second day, reiterating his conviction that if it had not been for forced collectivization, “there would be no new major industry, no army and culture,” and complaining, apropos of his own concession of small household plots seven years earlier, that “the peasant on his own plot will always scheme to enlarge his interests.” He added, “If we are going to lag behind events this way in future instead of leading, then . . . we shall obtain the result of collective farms falling apart and hamlets and new individual farms being formed.” A decree followed (May 27) that circumscribed household plots, to combat the “bazaar-ification of collective farm lands,” the only document of the plenum made public.³²² Here was an empire of enslavement and political murder, founded on hostility toward private initiative and markets. That same day, the British and the French nominally acceded to Soviet demands and submitted a draft for reciprocal guarantees of security, but their response still excluded the Baltic states. Still more fundamentally, in the event of an attack on the USSR, the French and the British were promising only consultations—and through the League of Nations, to boot—not immediate military action. Molotov would angrily reject their proposal as betraying a lack of seriousness.³²³

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