Stalin полностью

Stalin took one of his thick colored pencils and underlined frothy passages in Hitler’s tract about the Nazi Drang nach Osten (“drive toward the east”). For example: “And when we speak of new lands in Europe, we can think only of Russia and her borderlands. . . . The future goal of our foreign policy must be . . . acquiring the territory we need for our German nation.” Stalin further underlined passages in the Russian translation (1935) of Konrad Heiden’s exposé A History of National Socialism (Zurich, 1934). To wit: “Hitler, unable to control himself, simply does not know what he promises; his promises cannot be considered the promises of a solid partner. He breaks his promises as soon as it is in his interest to do so, and all the while continues to view himself as an honest person.”²⁴⁸ Heiden’s singular point was that Hitler’s opponents, as well as his (temporary) allies, dangerously underestimated him. Dvinsky also delivered to Stalin Soviet military intelligence estimates of Nazi German strength: a land army of 3.7 million men, almost half mechanized, 400,000 air force personnel, 60,000 naval personnel, more than 3,000 tanks, 26,000 guns and mortars, 4,000 planes, and 107 warships.²⁴⁹

The Wehrmacht, taking advantage of the Polish army’s lack of mobility and weak communications and control, reached Warsaw’s outskirts in just the second week of fighting. “The operation was carried out like a theatrical performance,” recalled Khrushchev. “The Germans had set up movie cameras ahead of time. The battles were filmed from both land and sea, and they sought to distribute this film as widely as possible in all countries of the world.” Hitler “proposed that Stalin take this film and have it shown through our network of motion picture theaters, to show our audiences how the Germans dealt with Danzig, with Poland, with all of Europe.” Stalin agreed to do so, provided Hitler promised to show an equivalent Soviet film to a mass audience in Germany; Hitler refused. “Nevertheless,” Khrushchev concluded, “this film was sent to us by the Germans, and we took a look at it together with Stalin. It really did have a depressing effect.”²⁵⁰ Although Pravda (September 11, 1939) contrasted Germany’s organizational and technological prowess with the “laughable mouse-like fuss” of Britain and France, scenes of Germany’s military romp in Poland were kept out of Soviet newsreels. Stalin got his own firsthand taste. On September 15, an unidentified airplane crossed into Soviet territory above Olevsk, in Ukraine. It was fired upon by Soviet forces and forced to land; it turned out, Izvestiya reported, to be a German bomber.²⁵¹

WHO WANTS WAR?

Also on September 15, after intense internal bickering and foot-dragging in Tokyo, the Japanese acceded to a cease-fire in the border war. Signed by the ambassador with Molotov, it took effect at 2:00 a.m. on September 16 and was to be followed by a boundary demarcation commission.²⁵² Japan’s military defeat at Nomonhan village had compounded its severe loss of face over its German ally’s nonaggression pact with the USSR.²⁵³ On September 17 at 2:00 a.m., exactly twenty-four hours after the truce had taken effect, Stalin gave German embassy personnel four hours’ notice of a Red Army advance into Poland. “In order to avoid incidents, Stalin urgently requested that we see to it that German planes as of today do not fly east of the Białystok-Brest-Litovsk-Lemberg [Lvov] Line,” Schulenburg reported to Berlin. “Soviet planes would begin today to bomb the district east of Lemberg. I promised to do my best with regard to informing the German Air Force but asked in view of the little time left that Soviet planes not approach the abovementioned line too closely today.” Stalin declined, but he did allow Schulenburg to edit the text of the Soviet statement on Poland for German sensitivities.²⁵⁴