Stalin полностью

The Japanese suffered 18,000 casualties (8,000 killed, 8,800 wounded, 1,200 sick), but the Red Army, in victory, lost even more—9,703 killed and 15,952 wounded, nearly 40 percent of its deployment.¹⁶³ Still, the entire Halha River had been cleared of Japanese by industrialized brute face, applied with no regard to costs. The thirty-nine-year-old Stern, as the senior-ranking commander and a Central Committee member, headed the list of newly named “Heroes of the Soviet Union.” The forty-three-year-old Zhukov, in his hero citation, was recognized as “a brilliant organizer, a person of unbending willpower and boundless courage.”¹⁶⁴ The text could have added a burning desire to clear his name from the scurrilous denunciations during the terror, and win Stalin’s favor.¹⁶⁵

SHOCK WAVES

Zhukov’s thrashing of the ineptly led Kwantung Army delivered a trove of captured Japanese operational documents and codes, and a blow to its reputation.¹⁶⁶ “We were quite shocked by the results,” the influential Asahi Shimbun would concede.¹⁶⁷ The Japanese, as Stalin heard from his ambassador, as well as from the military intelligence spy Sorge, were also shell-shocked by Hitler’s Pact with their enemy.¹⁶⁸ The disgraced government in Tokyo fell. The outgoing prime minister, who had misinformed the emperor, called the German-Soviet deal “intricate and baffling.”¹⁶⁹

But the Soviet Pact also produced shock waves right at home. Some proletarians wept at news of the agreement.¹⁷⁰ Thanks in large measure to the civil war in Spain, antifascism (understood globally), not just anticapitalism, had become a pillar of the Communist idea, Soviet identity, and domestic and global loyalties. Veterans of the Spanish civil war wondered why they had fought and left so many fallen comrades behind if the USSR was only going to go on to sign a pact with Nazism. Ehrenburg, who was still in Paris as a correspondent for Izvestiya, claimed he had lost his appetite—for eight months.¹⁷¹ Tukhachevsky and other top Soviet military men and intelligence agents had been shot for alleged links to the German military, while the vivid caricatures of Boris Yefimov had memorably depicted Trotsky as dancing arm in arm with Hitler. “Destroying the party and decapitating the army” as alleged agents of Hitler, Trotsky wrote, “Stalin is now openly advancing his candidacy for the role . . . of Hitler’s main agent.”¹⁷²

Stalin did not stage a Central Committee plenum to rubber-stamp the Pact or have the press blare the usual mass affirmations at factories and collective farms. The Comintern absorbed yet another moral and psychological blow. “The publication of photographs of Bolsheviks smiling at Nazis and the announcement that Germany and the USSR had signed a pact stupefied us,” wrote Jesús Hernández, who had joined the Spanish Communist party in 1922, at age fifteen, and spent more than five years in prison for it.¹⁷³ A stunned Georgi Dimitrov had sent Stalin, Zhdanov, and Molotov a summary of Western Communist reactions, cherry-picking anything supportive of Moscow’s position, but pleaded for an audience with Stalin to help him with the “exceptional difficulties” in instructing Communist parties globally.¹⁷⁴ Stalin would receive him in the Little Corner on September 7, in the company of Molotov and Zhdanov. “A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries—(poor and rich as regards colonies, raw materials, and so forth)—for the redivision of the world, for the domination of the world!” the despot gloated. “We see nothing wrong in their having a good fight and weakening each other. It would be fine if at the hands of Germany the position of the richest capitalist countries (especially England) were shaken.”¹⁷⁵

Stalin further stated in the Little Corner that “the division of capitalist states into fascist and democratic no longer makes sense.” Such a division had never held much meaning for him even when, in 1935, he had allowed the Comintern to announce a popular front against fascism, which, in the form of Nazi Germany, had become objectively progressive: “Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system.”¹⁷⁶