Stalin полностью

178. Kasahara and his Polish contacts were clearly trying to spur Tokyo. Stalin underlined passages in the text suggesting a need to study the technical development of the Red Army, and wrote on the document: “From hand to hand. To the members of the politburo (to each individually). With the obligation to return to the politburo.” Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie, 298–308 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 185, l. 15–36), 807.

179. Blyukher had given orders to fire at the overflights, and Stalin vented his anger when he found out. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 43, l. 116. Voroshilov had instructed Blyukher in a secret order (Feb. 28, 1932) to annihilate anyone who violated the Soviet border. Stone, Hammer and Rifle, 187 (citing RGASPI, f. 74, op. 2, d. 88, l. 9–10).

180. The regime also created a special collective farm corps “to reinforce Soviet Far Eastern frontiers,” and directed seven tank battalions with infantry escorts, armored trains, antiaircraft machine guns, and antitank weapons to the Soviet Far East. Stone, Hammer and Rifle, 187–8 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 11, l. 196–7); Grechko et al., Istoriia vtoroi mirovoi voiny, I: 110 (March 16, 1932); Dmitriev, Sovetskoe podvodnoe korablestroenie, 71, 240–55; Isaev, “Meropriiatie KPSS po ukrepleniiiu dal’nevostochnykh rubezhei”; Zakharov, “Krasnoznamennomu Tikhookeanskomu flotu”; Dmitriev, “Stroitel’stvo sovetskogo podvodnogo flota.”

181. For monitoring and subverting the USSR, the Kwantung Army had already deployed a vast intelligence apparatus through Manchuria (Harbin, Manchouli, Mukden, Jilin), which they expanded (to Qiqihar, Hailar, Heihe) after the formation of Manchukuo. Japanese intelligence personnel were also deployed at their consulates in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Novosibirsk, and at the Manchukuo consulate in Chita (and soon, a Manchukuo consulate in Blagoveshchensk). The Japanese legation in Tehran was also used against the Soviet Union. Kuromiya and Pepłoński, “The Great Terror,” citing, among other works, Tsutao Ariga, Nihon riku kai gun no jōhōkikō to sono katsudō (Tokyo: Kindai Bungeisha, 1994), 84–100. Japanese police in Manchuria enlisted local bandits for assassinations and kidnappings, set up rings for prostitution and drug trafficking, and concocted subterfuges to fool a League of Nations fact-finding mission. Vespa, Secret Agent of Japan.

182. The original plan dated to 1927, and had been reworked (to Stalin’s approval) in summer 1930: RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 490, l. 19–23.

183. Puyi was converted to “emperor” in 1934. Most of Japan’s conquests, beginning with Taiwan (1895) and followed by Korea (1905), had not been driven primarily by economic concerns—trade between China and Japan, for example, dwarfed that between Korea and Japan—but Manchukuo was seen as a vast settler colony, a solution to Japan’s rural poverty.

184. Lensen, Damned Inheritance, 210–1; Izvestiia, March 22, 1932.

185. Lensen, Damned Inheritance, 225–6; RGSAPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 12, l. 36, 68 (March 26, 1932), 94 (April 6), 107–8 (April 17). Into summer 1932, international observers noted Moscow’s “extreme forbearance” toward Japan bordering on “pusillanimity” (in the words of the British consul in Harbin). Lensen, Damned Inheritance, 373 (citing FO 371/16173–665: Garstin to Ingram, Harbin, June 11, 1932); Haslam, Soviet Foreign Policy, 81.

186. It was Romania, not the Soviet Union, that refused to sign the bilateral pact. Lungu, “Nicolae Titulescu.” The Soviets refused to recognize Bessarabia’s annexation by Romania. According to Louis Fischer, however, Litvinov was long ready to relinquish Soviet claims to Bessarabia to normalize relations with Romania. Elleman, “Secret Soviet-Japanese Agreement”; Fischer, Men and Politics, 135. When Tukhachevsky had reported on the 1932 Poland war plan to Voroshilov, he had noted that “a similar operation would be very easy to prepare against Bessarabia.” D’iakov and Bushueva, Fashistskii mech kovalsia v SSSR, 131–2 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 342, l. 179–80), 132n2 (d. 400, l. 14–29). See also Ken, Mobilizatsionnoe planirovanie, 127–8.

187. Le Temps, Nov. 30, 1932; Haslam, Soviet Foreign Policy, 98.