Stalin also authorized Beria to release more than ten thousand Red Army officers from the Gulag.297 Colonel Konstanty Rokossowski, who had been arrested as a Polish spy, had been released on March 22, 1940, without explanation, after thirty months in confinement. He had served under Timoshenko back in the Volga military district. Rokossowski, aged forty-four, had refused to sign confessions to crimes he had not committed, but his toes had been smashed to bits with a hammer and nine of his teeth knocked out.298 He was promoted to general. The regime feared its own returning soldiers who had seen the capitalist world. The Finnish general staff had organized an occasional newspaper for Soviet POWs. Under the rubric “Truth is dearer than everything on earth,” the first issue stated, “We consider that your main misfortune and the misfortune of the entire Russian people consists in the fact that you do not at all know the truth about the life that surrounds you. Your authorities kept you isolated from the whole world and told you only what they thought you needed to know. Fate had it that by falling into captivity in a free country, you got the chance to know the truth about how other nations live. . . . You will learn the truth and will be able to compare your life with the life of other countries.”299
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STALIN EMERGED from the war he launched against Finland with both a crushing victory and a severely impaired military reputation, emboldening the country’s potential enemies, maybe even more than he had with his executions of his own military. He also undermined further the Soviet Union’s international standing as a supposed bulwark of peace. “My anti-Communism, half suppressed by my friendships and the need for Soviet support against the Third Reich, burst forth,” noted the French intellectual Raymond Aron of the fall of 1939. “Those who did not denounce Stalin and the German-Soviet pact became unbearable for me.”300 In Philadelphia on November 17, 1939, Professor Carlton Hayes, of Columbia University, noted the convergence of German, Italian, and Soviet “force against Czechs and Albanians, Poles and Finns.”301 Hayes spoke at the first academic conference devoted to the concept of “totalitarianism,” which would provide a cudgel for principled opponents of the Soviet regime, both on the right and on the left.302 On April 25, 1940, Rudolf Hilferding, the Austrian Marxist luminary and author of
The Red Army, in 1940, would acquire five times as many weapons as it had as recently as 1935.304 Stalin also appeared to have caught a stupendous break: on May 10, 1940, Hitler attacked the Low Countries and France. The despot could scarcely have hoped for more.305 Previously, during what now, in retrospect, became the First World War, the Russian general staff had shuddered at the thought that a quick German rout of the French would lead to a separate peace on the western front, which in turn would give Germany a completely free hand against Russia in the east.306 But their fears were misplaced: the fighting had lasted four stalemated years. Surely France, assisted again by Britain, even with the Soviet Union on the sidelines, could again stalemate Germany?307 Like the British, Stalin seemed to have a high opinion of French military capabilities.308 With a presumed protracted war in the west, he seemed set to gain all the time needed to correct his mistakes, and force-modernize the massive Red Army.
CHAPTER 13GREED
Stalin takes advantage of the hour. . . . All from our success. We make victory easy for the others.
JOSEPH GOEBBELS,
If the Germans propose a partition of Turkey, then you can reveal our cards.
STALIN,