Stalin полностью

All the while, significant interruptions were occurring in German deliveries of contracted military weapons as called for in the new commercial agreement. Stalin began demanding a new short-term trade agreement with Germany to ensure compliance. Mikoyan, in mid-April 1940, complained to his German interlocutors that he could “no longer afford to make a fool of himself, in practice conducting a bilateral exchange of goods but unilaterally delivering goods to Germany.” Stalin had been retaliating for the German shortfall: out of a contractual 1 million tons of grain for Germany, fewer than 150,000 had been delivered.²⁸⁰ Soviet oil deliveries had barely reached 100,000 tons, just one ninth of the contractual amount and less than 15 percent of German stocks.²⁸¹ But Romania was supplying huge multiples of that in oil, while Swedish iron ore shipments dwarfed Soviet supplies to Germany. The major Soviet contribution would come in feed grain and legumes. The original 1 million tons of grain would be raised to 1.5 million, and the Germans soon sought yet another 1 million.²⁸² In the face of Germany’s nearly insatiable demand, Stalin raised prices.

RED ARMY RESURRECTION

At the conclusion of the Finnish war military reckoning, on April 17, 1940, Stalin formalized the appointments of three new deputy heads of the Council of People’s Commissars: Mikhail Pervukhin (b. 1904), the chief engineer and then director of the Moscow Energy utility, who had rocketed to first deputy commissar of heavy industry in 1938; Alexei Kosygin, who had been a shop foreman on a factory floor as late as 1937 before becoming textile industry commissar in 1939; and Vyacheslav Malyshev, a locomotive designer and the recently named commissar of heavy machine building. They joined Molotov’s six other deputies: Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Nikolai Bulganin (b. 1895, chairman of the state bank), Nikolai Voznesensky (b. 1903, head of state planning), Vyshinsky, and Rozaliya Zemlyachka. The latter was an old revolutionary terrorist (b. 1876), but otherwise these were predominantly economic managers.

Notwithstanding these promotions, the terror continued to cast its shadow. In May 1940, no annual reception took place at the Kremlin for the young graduates of military academies, where arrests and executions during the terror had damaged the level of instruction. On May 4 and 5, Stalin, the immediate retinue, and surviving military elite were gathered in the form of a commission of the Main Military Council to codify the lessons from Finland.²⁸³ No one on that commission, or at the various meetings with Stalin present, blamed the tough going in Finland on the terror, but the thought was on people’s minds. At a separate May 1940 meeting on military ideology, Dmitry Pavlov, a Spanish civil war veteran and high-ranking tank commander in the Finnish war, stated, “We had so many enemies of the people that I doubt that all of them could have been enemies.” He added, “Here it is necessary to say that the operations of 1937–38, before Beria arrived, so compromised us that, in my opinion, we would [otherwise] have easily had our way with an adversary like the Finns.”²⁸⁴

Military personnel changes were the most consequential since 1925. On May 7, 1940, Stalin named Timoshenko defense commissar and kicked Voroshilov “upstairs” to the post of deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars—making him the tenth.²⁸⁵ The despot also promoted Timoshenko to the rank of marshal. Stalin had always been taken by Voroshilov’s gifted sociability and doglike loyalty, insurance against a Bonapartist coup, but the price of his military shortcomings had become too high and the despot had hit upon a replacement. The peasant boy Timoshenko had won Stalin’s trust in a way that the brilliant aristocrat’s son Mikhail Tukhachevsky never could.²⁸⁶ Returning the number of marshals to five, Stalin also promoted Shaposhnikov and the dense Kulik.²⁸⁷ Two days before, Stalin had colluded with Beria to have Kulik’s beautiful Jewish second wife, Kira Simonich, kidnapped. The despot then pretended he had no idea where she might be, advising Kulik to remarry and forget the “nympho female spy.” She was the daughter of the former okhranka chief in Helsinki who had been executed by the Cheka in 1919; her first husband had been a NEPman with foreign connections; her two brothers, one of whom had been an officer for the Whites, were arrested for espionage; her mother left for Italy in 1934. Nonetheless, Kulik had refused Voroshilov’s entreaties to divorce the fetching Kira.²⁸⁸ Such compromising associations would have been more than enough to bury any Red Army officer; Kulik, in addition, had been a Socialist Revolutionary, not a Bolshevik, before the October Revolution. He supplied a steady stream of denunciations on the other military men.