96. Kaganovich had opposed Koltsov’s request to travel to Paris for the reportage, but Stalin had approved it. The trial would end on Dec. 23, 1933, and the Dutch Communist Marinus van der Lubbe would be guillotined in Jan. 1934. Litvinov wrote to Stalin, regarding Soviet personnel in Berlin, “In the opinion of the foreign affairs commissariat, given the current political situation in Germany, it would be inconvenient to have a single-race composition of the upper stratum of the embassy.” In 1934, Khinchuk would be replaced by Jacob Surits, who, however, was also Jewish (he had a law degree from the University of Berlin and had been a member of the Jewish Bund). Sluch, “Germano-sovetskie otnosheniia,” 106 (AVP RF, f. 05, op. 13, pap. 94, d. 78, l. 46).
97. DGFP, series C, I: 848–51 (Thomsen, Sept. 26, 1933), 851–3 (Bernhard von Bülow, Sept. 26). German government actions against Soviet citizens and property effectively provoked the Soviet cancellation. Weinberg, Foreign Policy, I: 81; Niclauss, Die Sowjetunion, 134–41. Going back to the nineteenth century, “the German and Russian economies were basically complementary so that there existed a broad basis for economic cooperation . . . in the absence of offsetting political factors.” For the Germans, the goal has always been to increase foreign trade, while for the Russians, it was to advance domestic industrialization. Shoemaker, “Russo-German Economic Relations,” 336.
98. In 1931, Hitler had proposed an Anglo-German partnership to British journalists invited to the Brown House in Munich, offering a free hand at sea in exchange for a free hand on the continent in the East. This was the beginning of a long bilateral courtship. Hildebrand, Foreign Policy, 25. See also Wagener, Memoirs of a Confidant, 173–4. (Wagener worked closely with Hitler 1929–32 and wrote these recollections in 1946 in British captivity.) Hitler turned to Joachim von Ribbentrop, who visited London in Nov. 1933 as a special envoy to forge an entente against the Bolshevik menace. Hoover Institution Archives, Louis P. Lorchner Collection, Ribbentrop to Hitler original files, 1933–38: Nov. 20 and 26, 1933; Bloch, Ribbentrop, 41–4; Waddington, Hitler’s Crusade, 69 (citing House of Lords, Davidson papers, memo Nov. 20, 1933); Winterbotham, Nazi Connection, 53–4; Ernest William Dalrymple Tennant, True Account (London: M. Parish, 1957), 164–9; Davidson, Memoirs of a Conservative, 399–401; von Ribbentrop, Memoirs, 36–7.
99. Le Matin (Nov. 23, 1933).
100. Stalin’s fixation on Polish spies in Ukraine revealed his and the wider regime’s fears about Soviet vulnerabilities. See the tortured case of the head of the Polish section of the Chernigov province party committee, Bołesław Skarbek, executed for leading a fictive clandestine “Polish military organization” on Soviet soil. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i VChK, 460 (APRF, f. 3, op. 58, d. 240, l. 105–6), 467–8 (d. 243, l. 86–8), 525–6 (d. 245, l. 59–60), 530 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 16, l. 86); Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War, 116–7; Rubl’ov and Reprtinstev, “Repressii protiv poliakiv,” 121; Mitzner, “Widmo POW,” 22.
101. Negotiations had opened on June 26, 1933. Stalin, in the fall, instructed Kaganovich and Molotov to conduct a campaign against Japan in Pravda and to a lesser extent Izvestiya and to republish an internal-use anti-Japanese brochure for wide circulation. Lensen, Damned Inheritance, 237–334; Haslam, Threat from the East, 22–24; DVP SSSR, XVI: 573–5 (Sokolnikov to Yurenev in Tokyo: Oct. 17, 1933); Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 396–7 (RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 100, l. 131–4: Oct. 21, 1933), 401 (f. 558, op. 11, d. 741, l. 112–5: Oct. 24); Na prieme, 111–2. Roosevelt had promised Litvinov “100 percent moral and diplomatic support” against Japan, and even ordered Bullitt to study the possibility of a nonaggression pact. The U.S. State Department had no interest. Stalin, meanwhile, had used Sokolnikov to undercut Karakhan, a hawk on Japan: on May 25, 1933, the politburo had named Sokolnikov deputy foreign affairs commissar for Far Eastern Affairs (Japan, China, Mongolia); Karakhan was reduced to oversight of just the Near East. Genis, “Upriamyi narkom s il’inki,” 238. Ken and Rusapov, Zapadnoe zagranich’e, 596–7 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 923, l. 18). Sokolnikov was also placed on the politburo’s Mongolia commission (soon becoming deputy to Voroshilov on that body).
