Stalin полностью

During all the foreign policy gamesmanship, Stalin remained in constant private conversation with Lenin, rereading his teacher’s texts, inserting strips of paper to mark his place, writing marginal comments. For example, on his copy of the 1939 reissue of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), a philosophical work that had attacked the non-Leninist Bolshevik Alexander Malinovsky, known as Bogdanov, Stalin wrote: “1) Weakness, 2) Idleness, 3) Stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue.”²⁹⁷ But Stalin was experiencing inordinate difficulty executing a Marxist-Leninist textbook on political economy: the labor theory of value, the proper role and significance of money, wage differentiation, trade, prices. In 1939, he received the second version of the text (out of six between 1938 and 1941), which he marked up extensively.²⁹⁸ In his estimation, the draft did not supersede the old handbook that he continued to consult, A Course on Political Economy (1910), last issued in 1925, and written by Bogdanov (1873–1928). The perceived need for an updated treatise on Marxist political economy based on the now twenty-two years of Soviet experience demonstrated again Stalin’s fundamental commitment to ideology and putting phenomena in theoretical terms.

Real-world political economy also pressed upon the Little Corner. Economic preparation for war demanded every ounce of labor power, no matter how low its relative productivity. Back on June 10, 1939, Stalin had ended most early releases from the Gulag. Inmates could still be released before term by special boards, but solely on a case-by-case basis. No longer would slave laborers automatically obtain sentence reductions for fulfilling work quotas. The Gulag held around 3 million prisoners, but it probably took more than two camp inmates to perform the labor of one regular worker, which meant forced laborers amounted to just 2 percent of the labor performed in the Soviet economy.²⁹⁹ But in July 1939, some 160,000 Uzbek and Tajik collective farm “volunteers,” watched by NKVD guards, were drafted to build a nearly 200-mile Great Fergana Canal, to move water from the Syr Darya for irrigation of cotton fields. It had been pronounced complete after a mere forty-five days of construction, without mechanization—another propaganda feat.³⁰⁰ The canal would devastate the inland Aral Sea.

Gulag labor was a Beria responsibility. Since his transfer to Moscow, he had been meeting with Stalin in the Little Corner at least twice weekly and, during some stretches, even every day. By spring 1939, Beria’s audiences were lasting two hours or more. He well understood the place of Molotov in the hierarchy, but on August 10, 1939, Stalin had permitted the airing of accusations of “enemy spy elements” in the entourage of Molotov’s wife, Zhemchuzhina, one of the few women leading a government agency. As the Red Army was seizing Poland and clashing with the Wehrmacht, her “case” was reviewed at the “politburo.” Stalin pronounced the accusations against her “slanderous,” but he had her removed as fishing industry commissar “for imprudence in her contacts.” After a month of uncertain fate, she was named head of textiles in the light industry commissariat of the RSFSR. The close call, whatever the intrigues behind it, conveyed a message to Molotov and the entire inner circle.³⁰¹

FRIENDSHIP AND THE BORDER

Stalin had second thoughts about Poland. Even before Warsaw had fallen, he had Schulenburg summoned to the Kremlin, on September 25, 1939, to receive a message indicating that the Soviets wanted to trade their share of ethnically Polish Poland for Lithuania, which, except for two ice-free ports, the Pact had assigned to Germany. Stalin’s precise motivations remain unrecorded. He had Molotov inform the Germans that the foreign affairs commissar could not reciprocate Ribbentrop’s visit to Moscow with one to Berlin, because on the Soviet side the negotiations would require the involvement of “the highest personage,” who “could not go abroad.”³⁰² Ribbentrop and his entourage had to fly to Moscow a second time. He arrived on September 27 at around 6:00 p.m.³⁰³ This time, swastika banners, alongside hammer-and-sickle flags, as well as a phalanx of Red Army men and a guard of honor, greeted him.