Stalin полностью

Ribbentrop’s requests for the USSR to invade Poland became “urgent,” but Stalin needed to be sure of the battlefield and of German intentions, not to mention the need to publicly justify Soviet participation in a new partition.²³⁶ On September 5, the USSR rejected a request from Poland for military supplies and transit of war matériel, citing a desire not to be dragged into war. Two days later, directives for the initial Red Army mobilization in the Belorussian and Ukrainian military districts, bordering Poland, were issued.²³⁷ On the afternoon of September 9, Stalin had Molotov vaguely inform Schulenburg that the Red Army would be moving into Poland in a matter of days. The next day, a vast Soviet mobilization began. It produced a panicked run on shops, which was not altogether unintended: it let the Germans know the Soviets were moving to a war footing. Also on September 10, Molotov told Schulenburg that the rapidity of the German advance had surprised the Soviets, but that the Red Army had more than 3 million soldiers ready. Molotov’s initial draft of a Soviet declaration of a Red Army move into Poland, which he shared with Schulenburg, referred to the supposed disintegration of the Polish state and the resulting urgent need to aid Ukrainian and Belorussian brothers “threatened” by the German advance. Perhaps it was an unintentional slip. Schulenburg reported this calmly (the final joint communiqué would remove the offending implication), but he informed Berlin that the Soviets were in a quandary over the imminent German victory.²³⁸

On September 11, Voroshilov and Shaposhnikov wrote an order for an invasion to commence on the 14th. But this directive did not go into effect.²³⁹

That Stalin somehow trusted Hitler was laughable, as Hitler himself noted.²⁴⁰ Stalin trusted no one (other than perhaps Abram Isayevich Legner, his Jewish tailor and one of the very few people he deferentially addressed by first name and patronymic).²⁴¹ The despot had tasked one of his aides, Boris Dvinsky, with assembling a reading packet. Stalin did not travel among adoring masses in an open-top car, as Hitler did, or issue impulsive decisions. When not receiving personnel for sessions in the Little Corner, he sat there alone and read. Like Hitler, he commented or doodled on whatever he was reading. One of his most frequent marginal scribblings was “teacher.”²⁴² With Hitler, however, he had been reduced to pupil, and he had better get the lesson right. Perusing the Dvinsky-assembled dossier on Nazism that summer of 1939, Stalin examined the Russian translation of a book by the Englishwoman Dorothy Woodman, Hitler Rearms: An Exposure of Germany’s War Plans (London, 1934), which contained a blistering chapter on the sweeping scale of Nazism’s “ideological preparation for war.” She wrote of Hitler’s bathing an entire country in national hysteria and psychological exultation: molding the general will, transcending the individual. The power of those techniques had to be familiar.

Stalin also consulted an internal Russian translation of Mein Kampf.²⁴³ The Soviet population could not read Hitler’s book, which by now had sold more than 10 million copies internationally. (The Japanese public could read it, but the translator had censored many passages so that Japanese readers would not know that in Hitler’s racial hierarchy, the East Asians were subhumans, too.)²⁴⁴ Stalin directed his inner circle to read Hitler’s text as well.²⁴⁵ Whether they made it through remains unknown, but some at least grasped the existential threat Nazism posed beyond traditional German imperialism. “I forget how many pages I read, but I was unable, morally, to get through the whole thing,” Khrushchev would later recall. “I could not read it because it literally wrenched my gut; I could not look calmly at such delirium; it disgusted me, I did not have the patience, and I put it down without having finished it.”²⁴⁶ Members of the general staff and the foreign affairs commissariat evidently could not manage to finish the text, either, and some did not take Hitler’s ravings at face value.²⁴⁷