Stalin полностью

Lenin had condemned treaties with secret protocols and spheres of influence as “agreements between robbers behind people’s backs.” Not a mention of the Pact negotiations, even obliquely, was recorded in politburo minutes.¹⁴³ The basic text was published in Pravda (August 24, 1939), with stunning photos of Stalin and Molotov alongside the Nazi foreign minister, but without the secret protocol, of course.¹⁴⁴ The Hitler-Stalin Pact lacked a clause of invalidation in the event that one of the signatories attacked a third country. Litvinov had been trumpeting the inclusion of such a provision in Soviet bilateral nonaggression pacts as evidence of moral superiority, thundering that its absence in capitalist nonaggression pacts “means that a state which has secured by such a pact of nonaggression its rear or flank obtains the facility of attacking with impunity third states.”¹⁴⁵ On the German side, the fourteen members of the embassy in Moscow signed an oath never to reveal the secret protocol’s contents. Hans “Johnnie” Herwarth, the second secretary of the German embassy, on August 24, 1939, divulged to American ambassador Charles Bohlen the full contents of the Secret Additional Protocol signed earlier that morning.¹⁴⁶ On the Soviet side, only Stalin, Molotov, and Shaposhnikov, as well as the twenty-four-year-old interpreter, Pavlov, knew. Molotov, when asked publicly, replied that the imperialists used secret protocols all the time—an evasion that was accurate but placed the Soviets in dubious company from their own point of view.¹⁴⁷

Hitler had secured his eastern flank for his attack on Poland, preempted a possible broad anti-German coalition, and obtained insurance against the anticipated Western blockade. And then there was the sheer shock value. “That will hit like a bombshell,” he remarked to those in the Berghof—for once, an understatement.¹⁴⁸

Immediately after the signing, Molotov had repaired with Stalin back to the Little Corner between 2:15 and 3:35 a.m.¹⁴⁹ From there, in the wee hours of August 24, the two headed out to the Near Dacha. Voroshilov and the other cronies had returned there with their ducks from the military’s exclusive Zavidovo Hunting Preserve, seventy miles outside Moscow. Stalin dropped word that he had signed the Pact with the Nazis, which would allow the Soviets to determine the fate of the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Finland and to obtain a chunk of Poland, a strategic Soviet sphere of influence and a buffer to protect the socialist homeland. Unlike what had been proposed with the Western powers, moreover, the Pact imposed no obligations on the Soviet Union to fight a war; it was not a military alliance. The treaty also drove a wedge between Germany and Japan: not only had Hitler failed to complete the negotiations with Tokyo to convert the Anti-Comintern Pact into an anti-Soviet military alliance, but he had violated the Anti-Comintern Pact’s provision that its signatories would conclude no political agreements with the Soviet Union without first consulting one another. Stalin (as Zhukov later recalled) “was sure that he had twisted Hitler around his finger.”¹⁵⁰

CRUSHING MILITARY DISPLAY

On the Mongolia-Manchukuo border, denouement approached. Grigory Stern, at district headquarters in Chita, Siberia, had drawn up a plan for an offensive involving a double envelopment, encircling the Japanese while pinning them frontally. Zhukov, who would execute the plan on Mongolia’s desert steppes, in a salient forty-five miles wide and twelve miles deep, had prepared meticulously. Logistics were nightmarish in the USSR’s expansive, underpopulated, physically challenging Asian territory, extending into Mongolia, remote from Soviet industrial centers, but 4,000 trucks had bridged the 400-mile gap from the nearest railhead to support what would be the Soviets’ first massive battlefield application of tanks and aircraft. Japan’s full-scale invasion of China had altered the strategic calculus to Soviet advantage, a fact that the Kwantung Army, which was not fighting in China, ignored. China absorbed far more of Japan’s strength—28 of the 36 Japanese divisions on the Asian mainland—than Spain had of Nazi Germany’s (which had supported an indigenous insurgency, not fought a war of conquest).¹⁵¹ That was one reason the Tokyo high command had blocked the Kwantung Army’s plan for a massive offensive, approving operations merely for evicting the Soviets from the Halha, a fact that became known to Soviet military intelligence: Hotsumi Ozaki, the leftist functionary in the Japanese cabinet who belonged to Sorge’s spy ring, had learned that Japan’s leaders, consumed with China, were adamant that the conflict with the Soviets not escalate. Whether this further emboldened Stalin cannot be established, but the despot, and the Red Army, were already thinking big.