Had the Führer accepted the British PM’s entreaties to once again “negotiate” a handover of someone else’s territory, it likely would have fatally undermined the talks between Nazi and Soviet intermediaries. Hitler’s snubbing of Chamberlain did not signify that the Führer would necessarily cut a deal with Stalin, however. Japan had drawn back from a military alliance with Germany on the latter’s terms, influencing Hitler’s moves. But the bottom line was that, even if he could obtain a great deal of Polish territory for free, Hitler had thirsted for a war—and Stalin, over many years, had positioned the Soviet Union to reap the rewards of that action.334 Stalin’s Pact with Hitler had not been inevitable, especially the specific content. In the circumstances of the time, the Pact constituted a significant achievement for Soviet state interests. Whereas in the 1938 Munich Pact, Nazi-Western collusion had excluded the Soviets from European affairs, now the Soviet Union had reemerged as an arbiter of European power politics. In the bargain, the revolutionary expansionist fantasy outlined by Mekhlis had begun to be realized.335
Burning with animus toward Britain, Stalin appears to have suspected that the Western “imperialists” would, at some point, declare war on him over Poland.336 In the meantime, editing the draft of an Izvestiya editorial, “Peace or War?” (October 9, 1939), he inserted a remarkable passage about the inadmissibility of any war to “destroy Hitlerism.” “Each person is free to express his relation to this or that ideology, and has the right to defend or repudiate it, but it is a senseless and stupid brutality to exterminate people for the fact that someone does not like certain opinions and a certain worldview,” Stalin warned of Western opposition to Nazi Germany. He added, “One can respect or hate Hitlerism, as in the case of any system of political views. This is a matter of taste.” (So much for the “popular front” against fascism.) Launching a war in opposition to Nazi Germany, Stalin concluded, “returns us to the dark times of the Middle Ages, when devastating religious wars were conducted in the name of eliminating heretics and those who thought differently.”337
The First Blow, the bestselling novella by Nikolai Shpanov about an easy Red Army victory over Nazi Germany, was quickly withdrawn.338 But a nonaggression pact founded on mutual state interests would last only as long as those interests did not fundamentally clash. The multisided machinations were in many ways just beginning. Back when the Nazi war machine had been gearing up to launch the assualt on Poland, the German diplomats at the Warsaw embassy had been ordered to evacuate to Germany. This included those secretly working as Soviet agents: Rudolf von Scheliha (“Aryan”) and Gerhard Kegel (“X”), as well as the high-placed journalists Ilse Stöbe (“Alta”), Kurt Welkisch (“ABC”), and Margarita Welkisch (“LCL”). Stöbe headed to Berlin, but her husband and handler, Rudolf Herrnstadt (“Arbin”), was Jewish and could not be posted to the Nazi capital; he headed for Moscow. (The couple would never see each other again, their dedication to antifascism trumping their dedication to each other.) Instead, Captain Nikolai Zaitsev (b. 1895), a relatively recent recruit to the bloodied ranks of military intelligence, would become the principal handler of the Soviet spies in Berlin, under the cover of the Soviet trade mission and code name of “Bine.” A graduate of an artillery academy, Zaitsev had learned German from Volga Germans he grew up with in his native Saratov; they had since been internally deported. His first boss during an earlier posting in Berlin, Soviet trade representative Kandelaki, had been executed. After familiarizing himself, in Moscow HQ, with the top-secret mission files generated by Herrnstadt, Zaitsev took up residence in Berlin as the new handler for Stöbe in the field. She, in turn, reestablished contact with Kegel, who was hired into the German foreign ministry economics department for the east, and Scheliha, who would be hired into the German foreign ministry press bureau, a prime crossroads of secret information.339
