335. See the cryptic notes on Sept. 1939 by Orlova, Vospominaniia, 101. This passage was omitted from the translation: Orlova, Memoirs, 90–1.
336. Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 178.
337. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 451, l. 37–40, 57. On Oct. 7, 1939, the actor Boris Shchukin died suddenly, at age forty-five; he had been in the company of the Vakhtangov since 1920, where he played more than one hundred roles, including Lenin, and been named a USSR People’s Artist in 1936. But he had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown, after which he had developed a heart condition.
338. Trying to take advantage of the Pact, Boris Pasternak approached the journal Znamia in early Nov. 1939 to try to publish his three-year-old translation of the German writer Heinrich von Kleist’s Prince of Homburg (1809–10). The play, about the necessity of unquestioning obedience to orders, was enjoying good runs in theaters in Nazi Germany. But Znamia (under Vishnevsky) rebuffed Pasternak. Still, the play was published in a collection of translations: Pasternak, Izbrannye perevody; Tarasenkov, “Pasternak.”
339. “Thus begins a politics resembling a fight between two wild animals,” the antifascist Vishnevsky recorded in his diary on Oct. 5, 1939. “Uncommon cunning, but diplomatic, military, and hunting tricks—a common phenomenon between wild animals. This is what our Russian person fears, when he hears about ‘friendship’ with fascism.” Vishnevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, VI: 298.
340. Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 37.
341. Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945, 262–71. In Nov. 1939, Halder did engage acquaintances in the officers corps, civil service, and counterintelligence in conversation about possibly arresting Hitler and putting Göring in power (who was known to oppose war with Britain and France), but the plotters panicked and abandoned their talks.
342. Moorhouse, Killing Hitler, 49 (citing Bundesarchiv, Elser interrogation file, BA R30001/310/106).
CHAPTER 12. SMASHED PIG
1. Biulleten’ oppozitsii, no. 79–80 (Aug.–Oct. 1939), 14–6.
2. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 124–5 (Jan. 21, 1940).
3. Monakov, “Zachem Stalin stroil okeanskii flot?”; Rohwer and Monakov, Stalin’s Ocean-Going Fleet. A key motivation had been the Anglo-German Naval Agreement that had abandoned Versailles Treaty restrictions on the size of the German fleet. Ivanov, Morskoe sopernichestvo imperialisticheskikh derzhav; Morskoi sbornik, 1937, no. 9: 114–25. Contrary to some analyses, the key prompt was not the Spanish Civil War. Voroshilov, as early as the 17th Party Congress, in Jan. 1934, had promised that, as a result of industrialization, “we shall be able to create our shipbuilding industry and soon produce our fleets.” Herrick, Soviet Naval Strategy, 38–45; XVII s”ezd, 230. Naval commander Vladimir Orlov had presented the initial draft of a big-fleet program in early Feb. 1936 and later detailed it publicly in a speech to the Congress of Soviets (Nov. 28, 1936). Gromov, Tri veka Rossiiskogo Flota, II: 340–3; Pravda, Nov. 29, 1936; Orlov, “Rech’ tov V. M. Orlova.”
4. The naval commissariat was approved Dec. 30, 1937. Pravda, January 17, 1938. Between May 1937 and Sept. 1938, more than 3,000 naval officers were executed. During the second Five-Year Plan (1933–37) Soviet naval academies graduated about the same number of green officers. Gromov, Tri veka Rossiiskogo flota, III: 358. Admiral ranks would be restored on May 7, 1940; Kuznetsov, Galler, and Isaakov became admirals.
5. Rohwer and Monakov, “Soviet Union’s Ocean-Going Fleet,” 855.
6. “Thus ended the conversation about battleships,” Kuznetsov commented, “whose construction was already going full speed ahead, while I as a Navy commissar was still not quite clear in my head why they were being built at all!” Kiselev, Admiral Kuznetsov, 105. As Hauner explains of the impossible fleet plans, in 1939 “the Soviets lacked much basic industrial infrastructure: their gun factories could not yet produce or test guns of sixteen-inch caliber; boilers for the powerful steam turbines could not have been manufactured until after the war; there was no sophisticated optical equipment for fire control.” Hauner, “Stalin’s Big-Fleet Program,” 106. In 1939, the Soviets remained a one-ocean power—i.e., the Arctic, frozen much of the year.
7. Aselius, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Navy; Philbin, Lure of Neptune.
