A month earlier, Stalin had brushed aside Ribbentrop’s desire for a preamble to the Pact on the “friendly” character of Soviet-German relations. In connection with their economic agreement, a Soviet commission of almost fifty members was touring German production facilities and constantly upping its appetites, seeking—and, in many cases, getting—the best that Germany had to offer, from naval cruisers to fighter aircraft.319 Mikoyan, following Stalin’s instructions, was driving a hard bargain, demanding specific machines, ships, and chemical processes, at rock-bottom prices.320 Many Nazis suspected that the Soviets would not live up to their promises to supply critical raw materials, a suspicion that proved false, while German industrialists whined that they were being forced to give away their secrets, which was true. Equally important, because Stalin had held firm, using armed force, over the Galician oil fields at Drohobycz, he was in effect trading Hitler oil that the Wehrmacht had effectively seized.
KINDRED INTERESTS
In the Little Corner on September 30, 1939, not long after Ribbentrop and the Nazi delegation had departed, Stalin heard a report on lengthening the workday at military factories. To compensate for the extra hours, wages were supposed to be raised. The despot, several times, asked those present about the parameters of the wage hikes; unsatisfied with their answers, he said he would not vote for their proposal until it had been clarified. “Stalin,” according to the government notetaker, “turned to Shvernik”—head of the trade unions—“and, jokingly, said, ‘What about you, the representative of the workers? You do not defend the interests of workers.’ But I, a ‘bureaucrat,’ defend them, and you are silent!’ and he laughed.”321 Of course, the great friend of the workers had just cut a second, even deeper deal with the Nazis. The intelligence defector Krivitsky, who had predicted the Hitler-Stalin Pact, along with Trotsky, went further than the latter and suggested that the agreement had arisen from regime affinity.322
Each was a dictatorship with administered mass organizations, an institutionalized ideology, mass state violence against purported enemies, and a leader cult. But salient differences existed, and not just in their irreconcilable worldviews. Nazi party membership stood at 5.3 million by 1939, at a time when the German population was close to 80 million, thus representing approximately 6.5 percent of the population.323 In 1939, the Soviet Communist party ranks regained some strength, rising to 2.3 million (1.51 million full members and 793,000 candidates), up from 1.9 million the previous year, but, given that the population stood at around 170 million, this represented just 1.3 percent.324 At the same time, however, Communist party cells were far more ubiquitous. Nazi party “cells” did not exist in every single institution. Hitler abjured a party-state, concerned that an over-empowered Nazi movement could revolt and choose a different leader. German military officers were not allowed to join the party. To be sure, symbolically, the Nazi party spectacularly dominated the German public sphere.325 But the Nazi party had not victimized itself and the state in enemy hunting.