Stalin полностью

Not everyone in the British establishment was hostile. On June 16, 1940, old David Lloyd George, who had once been an ardent partisan of appeasement, calling Hitler “the George Washington of Germany,” told Maisky—during a discussion about a possible evacuation of the British government to Canada, if necessary—that “peace between England and Germany is impossible.” When Lloyd George inquired whether the Soviets might finally stand up to Hitler, Maisky demurred. Lloyd George raised his finger: “Watch out that it does not turn out to be too late!”⁸⁴

The British government, for its part, had both minimalist aims—induce the Soviet Union not to increase its largesse toward Nazi Germany—and maximalist ones: attain significant Soviet exports to Britain. Cripps believed it was possible to go beyond even the latter and get Britain and the Soviet Union to join forces against Germany, notwithstanding the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression and trade pacts, the dismemberment of Poland, the aggression against Finland, and now the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states.⁸⁵ A lawyer rather than a diplomat, Cripps was capable of criticizing Soviet realities, but he had defended Stalin’s arrests of British nationals as spies in fabricated trials, as well as the Soviet Union’s 1939 seizure of eastern Poland. Unlike Churchill (or Chamberlain), Cripps harbored no anxieties about Soviet penetration of Europe as a catalyst for spreading socialist revolution; he saw Stalin as security-minded and defensive. But Cripps met a wall of skepticism from the British foreign office, whose officials warned against enabling Stalin to exact better terms from Hitler by using “negotiations” with London. Surprisingly, at least to Cripps, the Soviet side was no more receptive.⁸⁶ He waited and waited to be received a second time after his first chilly audience with Molotov.

Finally, on July 1, bearing a message from Churchill (dated June 24) on “the prospect of Germany establishing hegemony over the Continent,” Cripps was received by none other than Stalin—and in the Little Corner, in the presence of Molotov, between 6:30 and 9:15 p.m.⁸⁷ Among the difficult matters aired during what Cripps described as a “severely frank discussion” was that of British sanctions on Soviet imports of nonferrous metals. (The British suspected they would be rerouted by Stalin to Hitler; in fact, Germany needed these raw materials to produce the goods it owed to the Soviet Union.) “I could of course give a promise that not a single pound of metal would go to Germany,” Stalin stated acidly, “but that would be dishonest. A promise is of no use which is not fulfilled.” He went on to categorize Churchill’s message about German expansionism as reactionary. “If the prime minister wants to restore the old equilibrium,” he told Cripps, “we cannot agree with him.” On the contrary, the despot remarked, “We must change the old balance of power in Europe, for it has acted to the USSR’s disadvantage.”⁸⁸

Stalin was still preoccupied with British “imperialism” even now. He could not fail to have noticed that Hitler had become uppity following the conquest of France, but seared into the despot’s mind was the debacle of the Western-Soviet military talks in summer 1939 and the enmity over the Soviet-Finnish War. Churchill’s private communication calling for “harmonious and mutually beneficial” bilateral relations had a concrete aspect—encouraging strong Soviet actions in the Balkans, beyond even Bessarabia, to deny their strategic exploitation by Nazi Germany—but to Stalin this looked like the usual scheming to embroil the USSR in the war, allowing the British to escape. After the session, Cripps soberly wrote, “If anything is to be accomplished here, there is a very difficult past to be got over, and it’s going to be slow work at the best.”⁸⁹