Stalin полностью

Trotsky deemed Stalin’s invasion progressive, despite the Soviet leader’s own supposed counterrevolutionary inclinations. “In the regions which must become a component of the USSR, the Moscow government will take measures to expropriate the big property owners and to nationalize the means of production,” he explained. “Such action is more likely not because the bureaucracy is true to the socialist program, but because it does not wish to and is unable to share power and the privileges connected with it with the old ruling classes of the occupied regions.” Trotsky evoked Napoleon: “The first Bonaparte brought the revolution to a halt with the aid of a military dictatorship. But when French forces invaded Poland, Napoleon signed a decree: ‘Serfdom is abolished.’ This action was dictated not by Napoleon’s sympathies for the peasants, nor by democratic principles, but by the fact that the Bonapartist dictatorship rested not on feudal but on bourgeois property. Since Stalin’s Bonapartist dictatorship rests not on private but on state property, the Red Army’s invasion of Poland must essentially bring with it the liquidation of private capitalist property, in order thereby to bring the regime of the occupied territories into line with the regime in the USSR.”²⁸⁹

Soviet dishonesty and spite were epic. Scenes for the film The First Cavalry Army, adapted from the play by Vishnevsky about the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, were being shot on location just as the Red Army had smashed across the border into Poland on September 17. It depicted the Poles, not the Ukrainians, as the perpetrators of the civil-war-era pogroms against Jews. On September 21, the film Burning Years, directed by Vladimir Korsh-Sablin, which also portrayed the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, premiered to wide acclaim (“not in terms of its artistic merits, but in terms of its political significance,” one critic sniffed).²⁹⁰ The Soviet-Belorussian film July 11, by Yuri Tarich, which would premiere October 20, similarly took up the 1919–20 events of that war, showing drunken Polish soldiers forcing Belorussian girls to dance and entertain them, in the ashes of their occupied village, until Soviet partisans fight back and unite with the Red Army to recapture Minsk on July 11, 1920.²⁹¹ Polish POWs in Soviet camps were shown July 11, rubbing salt in their wounds.²⁹²

Eastern Poland in a way constituted Stalin’s Sudetenland, an analogy that resonated in some quarters of London and Paris, too: the new frontiers, after all, corresponded to the line once proposed by Britain’s Lord Curzon. From the despot’s point of view, Poland had refused years’ worth of probes for bilateral security cooperation. And once the Wehrmacht was on the move, if he had not annexed these eastern Polish regions, Hitler would have seized all of Poland. That would have made possible the creation of a puppet Ukrainian state in eastern Poland, which, in turn, could have been used as a pressure point against Moscow to yield Soviet Ukraine in a “unification.” Of course, this was the argument that Poland had used when participating in Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia (preventing Germany from dominating the entire territory).²⁹³ Now, instead of German troops waltzing right up to the vicinity of Minsk, significantly closer to Moscow, Stalin, as he observed privately, had managed “to extend the socialist system onto new territories and populations.”²⁹⁴ The annexation also delivered a windfall of captured Polish intelligence archives—pleasure reading for the despot, who could sift through what the Poles had made of him and his regime.²⁹⁵ In the confiscated Polish archives, the NKVD claimed to have discovered 186 secret agents—real ones—who had carried out or were carrying out missions against the USSR, and began to neutralize them.²⁹⁶

POLITICAL ECONOMY