Domestic political pressures did compel Chamberlain to send someone to Moscow to “accelerate the negotiations.” Maisky, the Soviet envoy, had suggested on June 12 that the British send Foreign Secretary Halifax, who seemed favorably disposed to a deal, but nothing had come of it. Nor would Chamberlain consent to sending Anthony Eden, the former foreign secretary, who had met Stalin and offered to go. Instead the PM dispatched William Strang, who, during Eden’s Moscow visit, had also met Stalin. “Of all the dictators, Stalin was, in personal intercourse, seemingly most like a normal human being,” Strang would write. “In conference as we saw him, . . . his voice was low and even, his manner serene, his delivery unemphatic, his sense of humour quietly playful, his exposition concise in form, conciliatory in tone but unbending in substance. He had a rock-like quality which made him appear to be more securely founded than his rival dictators.”37 But Strang was a mere foreign office functionary, and he was sent not as a special plenipotentiary, but only “to assist” Ambassador Seeds. Zhdanov, on June 29, published an essay in
Molotov, for his part, referred to his capitalist counterparts as “crooks and cheats” internally, and to their faces he demanded that any obligations be spelled out in detail, telling Seeds that the 1935 Franco-Soviet pact “had turned out to be merely a paper delusion.” The Soviet Union’s top “diplomat” also made a point of sitting at his desk while raised on a proscenium, forcing his Western interlocutors to remain below in deskless chairs, their notepads uncomfortably perched on their laps. (Neither Molotov nor his deputy Potyomkin, who did the interpreting, took notes, according to the British side, but Molotov seemed to them to be pressing a button on his desk, perhaps to record the conversation.)38 Seeds and French envoy Naggiar were also unnerved by the door behind Molotov that always seemed to be open, suspecting that Stalin was eavesdropping. (Kremlin logbooks record no meetings in the Little Corner during the time Molotov was negotiating.) Molotov introduced new demands at will, and he failed to perceive the differences in French and British proposals. Such incomprehension of nuance, on top of the disdain for diplomatic convention, might have mattered had the British government been interested in a deal. “I am so skeptical of the value of Russian help,” Chamberlain wrote privately to his sister (July 2, 1939), “that I should not feel our position was greatly worsened if we had to do without them.”39
WAR
Vsevolod Meyerhold, the USSR’s most renowned theater director, who had traveled to Leningrad to finalize the choreography of a mass spectacle of physical culture involving 30,000 young athletes moving in unison to glorify the regime, was rewarded by being arrested. At Moscow’s infamous Butyrka prison, he would be tortured into confessing to espionage for Britain as well as Japan. “The investigators began to use force on me, a sick, 65-year-old man,” he wrote in a letter to Molotov. “I was made to lie facedown and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap. . . . When those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again began to beat the red-blue-yellow bruises with the strap, and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling hot water was being poured on those sensitive areas. . . . I began to incriminate myself in the hope that this, at least, would lead quickly to the scaffold.” Meyerhold’s interrogators had urinated into his mouth and smashed his right (writing) hand to bits.40 Right around the same time, his second wife and lead actress, the Russified ethnic German Zinaida Reich, was brutally stabbed to death, including through the eyes, in their home.41 None of her valuables were taken.42 Meyerhold knew nothing of his wife’s murder; his colleagues knew nothing of his fate, only that his photographs had been taken down or cut out.