Stalin полностью

Molotov, too, was an Anglophobe. He was also a Germanophile, who had publicly differentiated between the “ideologues of National Socialism” and “the German nation, as one of the great nations of our times.”⁸ He doggedly insisted that a deal could be done with that swine Hitler. This view was, or had become, Stalin’s inclination, as Molotov knew. He would seem to be a fitting partner for Ribbentrop, and the two together, in turn, fitting representatives for their respective masters in the complicated game of finding the elusive rapprochement. But Molotov was negotiating with the British and the French; there were no political negotiations per se with Germany, other than the on-again, off-again trade talks. And the Far East seized center stage in the late spring and summer of 1939. There, against Japan, the Soviet Union had not even a whiff of possible “collective security” with the British or the United States (which was a supplier of strategic materials to Japan). On the contrary, with Japan armed in the east and Hitler armed to the teeth in the west, Stalin worried not only about a two-front war against the two powers that had defeated Russia in separate major wars earlier in the century, but about how Britain, opportunistically, might join one or even both.⁹

FAR EASTERN SKIRMISH

Back on May 10–11, 1939, as some twenty Mongol cavalry were grazing horses on the banks of the Halha River (Halhin Gol in Mongolian), near a cluster of huts (the village of Nomonhan, in Japanese), a Manchukuo force drove them off; the next day, the Mongols returned in numbers. Unlike the bloody clash over uninhabited hills at Lake Khasan near the Soviet-Korean-Manchukuo frontier the year before, this one concerned valuable pastures along the river, which served as a boundary.¹⁰ The Tokyo high command’s failure to impose unambiguous directives on Japan’s Kwantung Army, despite the latter’s record of high-handedness, reflected a multicenteredness in the Japanese political system that frustrated the Germans and the Soviets alike. It also allowed hotheads inside Japanese institutions to seize the initiative. The Kwantung Army had devised a new contingency war plan against the Soviet Union involving an all-out offensive toward Chita and Lake Baikal, to cut off the entire Soviet Far East. This bold design to seize a spectacular victory would expose the Kwantung Army to possibly devastating Soviet counterattack from the Mongolian salient, a vulnerability that argued for evicting the Red Army from Mongolia.

The Kwantung command, in this context, had recently issued inflammatory new guidelines, which Tokyo headquarters had rubber-stamped, for border skirmishes. “If the enemy crosses the frontier, . . . annihilate them without delay,” the new rules stated. “It is permissible to enter Soviet territory, or to trap or lure Soviet troops into Manchukuoan territory.”¹¹ The new rules even allowed local commanders to establish boundaries “on their own initiative” where ambiguity reigned (in effect, everywhere). When, during a briefing on the new rules of engagement, the latest grazing incident was reported to the Kwantung Army division commander responsible for the border, he decided, on May 13, to implement them.¹² Japanese reconnaissance discovered a pontoon bridge across the Halha to the right bank and decided to cut off this escape, entrap the “intruders,” and annihilate them. On May 19, Stalin had Molotov warn Japanese ambassador Tōgō that the Soviets possessed information concerning Japanese and Manchukuo forces violating the Mongolian frontier at the Halha River, and that “there is a limit to all patience, and I ask the ambassador to relay this to the Japanese government: that there will be no more of this.”¹³