Stalin also needed to reckon with the circumstance that his own value to Hitler was declining in relative terms. German-annexed Silesia and the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia were major industrial centers. (Austria had minimal industry, but it gifted Germany an underemployed labor force.) France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands all possessed significant industries as well, from steel and autos to aircraft and electronics, as well as railway locomotives and freight cars that exceeded the stock of the Reich. France and Norway produced chemicals and aluminum, too. The combined population of Greater Germany and the occupied lands, along with Italy, was now 290 million, and in terms of territory it was almost as large as the United States. This vast potential remained to be consolidated (Denmark refused a move toward a customs-and-currency union), but the direction was clear.79 And the coup de grâce? Following his self-destructive bloodbath to extirpate phantom enemies, Stalin now acquired an actual fifth column on Soviet territory: resolute anti-Soviet saboteurs in the newly annexed territories of western Ukraine, western Belorussia, and the Baltic republics. In 1940, these regions, which contained a mere 10 percent of the Soviet population, would account for some 60 percent of the arrests by the NKVD. At the same time, thanks to the multiple German economic and trade delegations Stalin was allowing onto Soviet territory and into Soviet factories in 1940, direct German intelligence gathering, which had been almost nonexistent, became significant.80
TOYING WITH THE BRITISH
Stalin was presented an opportunity for a strategic shift, thanks to Sir Stafford Cripps, a high-profile, wealthy vegetarian and leftist whose agitation for an anti-fascist united front against Germany had gotten him expelled from the Labour party. The day before the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, Cripps had urged his friend Foreign Secretary Halifax to send a mission to Moscow to negotiate a nonaggression pact with Moscow, paralleling the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The idea had gone nowhere, but in February 1940, en route to the UK from war-torn China, Cripps had been received by Molotov in Moscow, where he drew the conclusion that the countries could work out a bilateral trade agreement, and possibly more than that. Maisky, in London, had also proposed reviving discussions on trade, but the foreign office had questioned Soviet motives and worried about Soviet reexport of British goods to Britain’s enemy Germany. Then, in May 1940, with France about to fall, Churchill, now PM, had acceded to the suggestion by Halifax, perhaps initiated by Maisky, to send Cripps to Moscow as a special envoy to spur trade talks. Molotov refused to accept Cripps under special envoy status. On June 3, 1940, the Soviet spy Gerhard Kegel (“X”), now in the economics section of the German embassy in Moscow, reported to Soviet military intelligence that the Germans were concerned about the pending Cripps visit and a possible Anglo-Soviet trade agreement.81 At Soviet insistence, London appointed Cripps as a normal ambassador.82 He arrived in Moscow on June 12.
Britain’s imposing embassy, the former residence of a sugar magnate, was located on the embankment directly across the Moscow River from the Kremlin, with a spectacular view. Inside, its condition was appalling: not merely tasteless—sickly looking silk brocade of hideous colors (as Cripps observed)—but dilapidated. The embassy tableware consisted of bits and pieces—no dishes, no glasses, no silver—and the facility lacked a butler or maid, making diplomatic receptions that much more of a challenge. The small staff was unable to keep up with the volume of cipher work, let alone the diplomatic rounds in the complex city. Most British embassy staff were Russians and Soviet ethnic Germans, making German the dominant language.83 That was British grand strategy: everything on the cheap—you fight my war, you staff my embassy.
Two days after his arrival—the very day Paris fell to Hitler—Cripps saw Molotov in the Kremlin for an hour and expressed a desire to improve relations. That same day, Molotov and his deputies sent birthday cards for the king (George VI) for the first time. But Molotov was not forthcoming with Cripps: also on June 14, the Soviet government head signed off on the Soviet ultimatum to the Lithuanians, a prelude to the occupation of the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina. These aggressive Soviet actions proved to be an indirect boon to Cripps, though: soon, more than a hundred crates of ill-matched furniture and furnishings were evacuated from shuttered British missions in the three Baltic states and sent to the embassy in Moscow. Still, the moves exacerbated anti-Soviet sentiment in London.