12. Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 20–2 (Daladier warning, Potyomkin to Moscow, March 16, 1937); Artizov et al., Reabilitatsiia: kak eto bylo, II: 601. Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš supposedly was informed of secret negotiations between Berlin and Moscow for a rapprochement, as well as of a military coup to topple the Soviet regime, and passed word or documents to the Soviet regime, but there is no such information in records of conversations by Alexandrovsky in Prague. No documents from Heydrich via Beneš have ever been found in Soviet or German archives, either. Nor were the alleged documents ever mentioned in the innumerable internal interrogation protocols or at the trial. Stalin had no need for such documents: if they had existed and he had used them, the Gestapo could have crowed about its handiwork, fooling Stalin into executing one of his best military men. Polišenská and Kvaček, “Archivní dokumenty hovoří,” 29; TsRGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1028, l. 107–14; Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 5–6, 23–9; Lukes, Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler, 91–112. See also Watt, “Who Plotted against Whom?,” 49 (citing PRO, FO 371/21104, N 3287/461/38, Newton, June 21, 1937); Les Événements Survenues en France de 1933 à 1945, I: 129. There is a grievous mistake in the annotations to Stalin’s office logbooks connected to the myth of the Beneš role in passing on a Nazi file implicating Tukhachevsky: on May 21, Stalin received Mikhail K. Alexandrovsky, not the Soviet representative to Czechoslovakia (Sergei S. Alexandrovsky). Gorbunov, “Voennaia razvedka v 1934–1939 godakh” (no. 8), 93; Plimak and Antonov, “Nakanune strashnoi daty,” 151; Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 120–1 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 175, l. 82); Na prieme, 208; Naumov, Stalin i NKVD, 344.
13. Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 10–1 (citing the interrogation of I. M. Kedrov, May 25, 1939).
14. Reese, Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers, 134–46. From 1937 to 1938, 34,501 Red Army officers, air force officers, and military political personnel were discharged, either because of expulsion from the party or arrest; 11,596 would be reinstated by 1940. As Voroshilov noted, some 47,000 officers had been discharged in the years following the civil war, almost half of them (22,000) in the years 1934–36; around 10,000 of these discharged were arrested. Few were higher-ups, however. Confusingly, sometimes the totals include the Red Air Force, and sometimes not. “Nakanune voiny (dokumenty 1935–1940 gg.),” 188; Suvenirov, Tragediia RKKA, 137. In 1939, when Stalin turned off the pandemonium, 73 Red Army personnel would be arrested.
15. Alliluyeva, Tol’ko odin god, 334.
16. Pravda, Feb. 11, 1937: 3 (N. Tikhonov). See also the satire by Mikhail Zoshchenko, “V pushkinskie dni,” originally in Krokodil, 1937, nos. 3 and 5, reprinted in Zoshchenko, Sobranie sochinenii, II: 416–21. In the restored apartment at Moika, 12, in Leningrad, busts of Pushkin and Stalin appeared side by side. Mastenitsa, “Iz istroii muzeinoi pushkiniany,” 116; Tkhorzhevskii, “Cherez sto let,” 9–10. See also Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin, 107–16; and Molok, Pushkin v 1937 g.
17. Snow, Red Star over China, 474.
18. Taylor, Generalissimo, 143 (citing Chiang Diaries, Hoover Institution Archives, box 39, folder 8: Feb. 18, 1937). An analysis by Varga (April 20, 1937) began with the premise that “recent years in China, undoubtedly, are characterized by the process of the transition to a bourgeois social system,” but he called the conditions of transition unique (a combination of pre-capitalist agrarian relations, partial colonialism, and strong revolutionary forces). And although he noted an imperative to transcend feudalism, for the creation of a bourgeois economic and military superstructure on the feudally exploited peasantry would only worsen their exploitation, he cautioned that if a Japanese aggression was coming soon against China and/or the USSR, the Soviet Union would have to work to delay China’s agrarian revolution. Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1105–13 (RGASPI, f. 514, op. 1, d. 868, l. 20–32).
