260. Stalin wrote: “my archive.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 196, l. 54–62 (received at the foreign office on Feb. 5). RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 196, l. 131–7. In May 1934, Stalin received Phipps’s account of his meeting with Hitler and Neurath in Dec. 1933. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 196, l. 17–23. Stalin had told the 17th Party Congress that the termination of parliamentarism in Germany was a sign of “the bourgeoisie’s” weakness, its inability to maintain its rule by so-called respectable methods. Sochineniia, XIII: 283, 293. “Lots of foolishness, but still interesting,” he had written, without specifics, in green pencil on a report from a Soviet agent in Berlin forwarded by the OGPU (April 11, 1934).
261. Stalin also underlined another passage: “The single great achievement is the rather paradoxical success in the sphere of foreign policy . . . Inside the country, there is none of the socialism that he promised to impose . . .” Phipps also noted “empty theaters, bankrupt bookstores, starving writers, artists, and composers all remind one that the cultural life of Berlin is threatened with disappearance under the National Socialist regime.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 186, l. 68–9, 76–8 (sent to London Feb. 7, 1934).
262. These Nazi consulates, Balytsky claimed, also aimed to use German specialists working in the USSR to sabotage Soviet military industry. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i VChK, 494–500 (APRF, f. 45, op. 1, d. 172, l. 11–23: March 5, 1934). Throughout 1934, the OGPU had been secretly gathering information on all ethnic Germans employed in industry in the Soviet Union. Fleischhauer and Pinkus, Soviet Germans, 89–91 (citing Evgeniia Evelson, who had taken part in drawing up the lists of Germans before emigrating). On Nov. 5, 1934, the party apparatus sent a ciphered telegram to “all Central Committees of national communist parties, krai committees and oblast committees,” including Western Siberia (home to many Soviet ethnic Germans), warning that Soviet ethnic Germans “openly conduct counterrevolutionary work.” Hundreds of arrests followed. Shishkin, “Sovetskie nemtsy.”
263. Pravda, May 6, 1934; Biegański et al., Documents on Polish-Soviet Relations, I: 21–2 (extension until Dec. 31, 1945); Demski, “Pol’sko-sovetskie otnosheniia,” 191–218; Soviet intelligence had reported that Piłsudski was prepared to strengthen his nonaggression declaration with Germany in the event of a Franco-Soviet alliance, though he would be cautious not to stray too far from France. Soviet intelligence would note to Stalin that Poland was trying to mount two horses at once and would fail. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 187, l. 18 (May 9, 1934).
264. Germany was a disarmed state, yet a resentful and prideful one that British operatives knew would endeavor to create a military befitting its self-conception. An ad hoc committee of British intelligence designated Nazi Germany the “ultimate potential enemy” in a series of meetings across late 1933 and mid-1934. Undersecretary Vansittart’s April 7, 1934, memorandum for the cabinet on Mein Kampf and recent propaganda, added, as one Foreign Office contemporary noted of his essays generally, “the forlorn beauty of hopelessness to all their other beauties.” DBFP, 2nd series, VI: 975 ff; Lawford, Bound for Diplomacy, 270.
265. Britain had been cast as the main driver of a new imperialist war in a 1933 trial in Moscow of engineers of the British company Metropolitan-Vickers (“a frame-up,” as one of the arrested British citizens stated, “based on evidence of terrorized prisoners”). Mozokhin, VChK-OGPU, 284–90 (citing APRF, f. 3, op. 58, d. 363, l. 119; d. 364, l. 176–77; d. 368, l. 18, 62, 70–72, 87, 93; d. 367, l. 1–2, 9–10, 58–64; TsA FSB, no. PF-6740, t. 17, l. 175, 177; t. 12, l. 203); Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i VChk, 415–6 (APRF, f. 45, op. 1, d. 171, l. 84–5: interrogation of MacDonald, March 16, 1933). See also Morrell, Britain Confronts the Stalin Revolution. On April 2, 1933, Rozengolts, foreign trade commissar, had reported to Stalin and Molotov that of the 33 turbines supplied between 1925 and 1933, 24 experienced breakdowns, some multiple times. The contract with Metropolitan Vickers had been annulled. Litvinov negotiated the release and deportation of the engineers in exchange for termination of the embargo the British had imposed following their arrests.
266. DBFP, 2nd series, VII: 558 (June 4, 1933); Palme-Dutt, “Britanskii imperialism”; Pravda, Aug. 19, 1933.
267. XVII s”ezd, 305–22 (at 307–8); Ken, Mobilizatsionnoe planirovanie, 267–8. See also Pravda, June 1, 1934 (Mayorsky); and VII Kongress Kommunisticheskogo internatsionala, 383–4.
