Stalin полностью

The despot needed to find a mirror. Besides him, there had been a total of thirty-two members and candidate members of the politburo between inception (1919) and 1940. Three of them (Lenin, Dzierżyński, Kuibyshev) had died of natural causes; two (Kirov and one on Stalin’s orders) would be assassinated; two (Tomsky, Orjonikidze) had killed themselves. Fourteen had been executed as enemies: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin, Uglanov, Krestinsky, Kosior, Baumanis, Syrtsov, Chubar, Eihe, Postyshev, Rudzutaks, Yezhov. One (Petrovsky) had been expelled but spared. The remaining ten—Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Kalinin, Zhdanov, Andreyev, Shvernik, Khrushchev, Beria—were alive, at his forbearance. Such despotism smothered policy give-and-take. Stalin summoned them when he saw fit; they fed him the information he sought. The conduct of Soviet foreign policy, unlike that of most great powers, was significantly less subject to the usual vagaries of internal regime jockeying among interest groups, but it was utterly hostage to Stalin’s misconceptions.⁴¹

Right after he made the deal with the Nazis, Stalin had privately observed that “the nonaggression pact is to a certain degree helping Germany. Next time we’ll urge on the other side.”⁴² This looks like a blustery lie to soften the political damage of the Pact. Molotov, on June 17, 1940, offered German ambassador Schulenburg his “warmest congratulations . . . on the splendid successes of the German Wehrmacht” (according to the German notetaker), while adding (according to the Soviet notetaker) that “Hitler and the German government could scarcely have expected such rapid successes.”⁴³ It was, of course, Molotov’s and Stalin’s expectations that had been upended.⁴⁴

Stalin had staked Soviet security on France’s fighting capabilities, then contributed mightily to France’s defeat: the 1940 economic agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany was four times larger than the 1939 one. Altogether, in 1940, the Soviets would supply 34 percent of German oil, 40 percent of its nickel, 74 percent of phosphates, 55 percent of manganese ore, 65 percent of chromium ore, 67 percent of asbestos, and more than 1 million tons of timber and of grain.⁴⁵ True, big new Soviet shipments from the February 1940 agreement did not arrive in time for the offensive against France, but, knowing that Stalin’s shipments were coming, German military planners were confidently depleting stocks. “Hitler conducts his military operations, and Stalin acts as his quartermaster,” Trotsky had quipped.⁴⁶ The Wehrmacht’s actual quartermaster general remarked, “The conclusion of this treaty has saved us.”⁴⁷ Stalin’s Pact also allowed Hitler to confidently retain a mere 10 divisions in the east. The Soviet contribution to German logistics was crucial as well. British sea power had once blockaded Napoleon’s bid for continental empire, but now, thanks to Stalin, Nazi Germany managed to circumvent a British naval blockade with the transshipment of goods from the Near and Far East through Soviet territory. Thus could a Central European country take on a global empire.⁴⁸

To be sure, Stalin was also making out like a bandit. Berlin dragged its feet over shipments, but he got samples of artillery, tanks (along with the formulas for their armor), chemical warfare equipment, a naval cruiser, the plans to the battleship Bismarck, heavy naval guns, locomotives, turbines, generators, diesel engines, machine tools. Stalin evidently was not going to risk that German bounty—and Hitler’s wrath—by playing both sides of the conflict. But his overwhelming support of the Nazi war machine, when he was counting on the French land army, smacks of miscalculation and pettiness.

With France’s defeat, the strategic ground shifted radically.⁴⁹ In the very early morning of June 23, 1940, for the first and only time in his life, an exultant Hitler toured Paris, accompanied by two of his favorites, the architect Albert Speer and sculptor Arno Breker. The Führer was driven first to the neobaroque Opéra, which he examined in light of the architectural plans he had studied as a young man. Later he posed for photographers in front of the Eiffel Tower and took in Napoleon’s tomb. “It was the dream of my life to be permitted to see Paris,” he remarked. He had been expected to preside over a German victory parade, and in anticipation, some staff inside the British security establishment proposed bombing the reviewing stand, but their suggestion was rejected. In the event, Hitler opted not to stage a parade, evidently because of the danger of a British air raid, and already by 9:00 a.m. on June 23 he was back at the airfield for the return to Berlin. He would tell his entourage, “I am not in the mood for a victory parade. We aren’t at the end yet.”⁵⁰