250. In late Jan., Uborevičius traveled via Warsaw to Paris, ostensibly to link up with Tukhachevsky, and met an aide to the German military attaché in Poland, from whom he requested a meeting on his return from Paris with an authoritative German military official such as War Minister Blomberg. McMurry, Deutschland und die Sowjetunion, 320–1.
251. Tukhachevsky had never accepted German officers’ professions of friendship at face value. “I spoke especially long with Tukhachevsky,” Ambassador Dirksen had written to a friend (Oct. 17, 1931). “He is far from the direct and sympathetic person who speaks openly in support of a German orientation, as does Uborevičius.” In 1933, Tukhachevsky did profess profound friendship, to rescue the relationship. D’iakov and Bushueva, Fashistskii mech kovalsia v SSSR, 121; Bushueva and D’iakov, “Reikhsver i sovety, tainyi soiuz,” 183 (no citation).
252. Castellan, “Reichswehr et armée rouge,” 217–8 (citing Köstring); Gamelin, Servir, II: 196; Erickson, Soviet High Command, 412. The strongly anti-German French journalist Geneviève Tabouis, who was present at a farewell banquet at the Soviet embassy, would later allege that Tukhachevsky, while entertaining Édouard Herriot, the French foreign minister Joseph Paul-Boncour, and the Romanian foreign minister Nicolae Titulescu, among others, had rhapsodized about Nazi Germany (“They are already invincible, Madame Tabouis!”). Ambassador Potyomkin was present but appears to have reported nothing of the kind to Litvinov. Neither did French diplomatic sources. Tabouis, They Called Me Cassandra, 257; Erickson, Soviet High Command, 413. Tukhachevsky, seeking rubber-stamp approval for the military budget at the Central Executive Committee (Jan. 15, 1936), had stressed that Germany could attack the USSR even without a common border, as it had attacked France—smashing through Belgium—in 1914. Tukhachevskii, Zadachi oborony SSSR, 6, 14–5.
253. Sipols, “SSSR i problema mira,” 50–1 (citing PRO 418/81: 55, 78–79: Jan. 11, 1936). Maisky did not desist: DVP SSSR, XIX: 62–4 (Feb. 5, 1936), 206–11 (April 2).
254. Buryat-Mongol households individually held between twenty and seventy cattle. “The collective farmers’ relation to labor has changed fundamentally,” the leaders’ report boasted, praising the expansion of skilled personnel, schools, and theaters. Gatagova et al., TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i natsional’nyi vopros, II: 164–6 (RGASPI, f. 78, op. 1, d. 585, l. 25–8: D. Dorzhiev, Council of People’s Commissars, M. Yerbanov, party secretary).
255. The Mongol-Buryat pageant had been preceded by collective farmers of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kara-Kalpak, when Stalin, Molotov, and Kaganovich were photographed in the national costumes, including head covering, for the first time. At a Dec. 4, 1935, Kremlin reception for forty-three Tajik and thirty-three Turkmen collective farmers in national dress, honored for the cotton harvest, a ten-year-old girl, Mamlakat Nakhangova, presented Stalin with the Tajik translation of his Questions of Leninism, and a photograph was taken of her in her head shawl, her arm around a seated Stalin’s shoulder. Pravda, Dec. 6, 1935; Kun, Stalin, 220–1. See also Levushin, “Dokumenty VKP (b) kak istochnik po istorii istoricheskoi nauki,” 386–9; Nevezhin, Zastol’nye, 247–72; and RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 4314, l. 2–4. Whereas in Pravda’s coverage of the First All-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers, one-third of the photographs were of non-Russians, by the second gathering two years later in 1935, the ratio was reversed: Central Asians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians accounted for two-thirds of the photographs and illustrations. Brooks, “Thank You, Comrade Stalin!” 75.
256. “Comrades, there is one thing more valuable than cotton—that is the friendship of the peoples of our country,” Stalin was quoted as remarking during the Tajik-Turkmen reception. The tsarist legacy, “a savage, wolf-like policy,” had been overcome. “While this friendship lives and flourishes, we are afraid of no one, neither internal nor external enemies. You can have no doubt about this, comrades. (Stormy applause, all present stand and shout, ‘Stalin, Hurrah’).” “Rech’ tovarishcha Stalina na soveshchanii peredovykh kolkhoznikov i kolkhoznits Tadzhikistana i Turkmenistana,” Pravda, Dec. 5, 1935; Sochineniia (Hoover), XIV: 113–5. Molotov’s speeches at the many Kremlin national receptions were published as a pamphlet: Velikaia druzhba narodov SSSR (Moscow: Partizdat, 1936).
257. Pravda, Dec. 21 and 31, 1935; Jan. 24 and 30, 1936.
