Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

On August 10, 1940, Stalin hosted a banquet in the Grand Kremlin Palace to celebrate his newest and expanded Union republics: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Moldavia (which included Bessarabia and northern Bukovina). He seated their Soviet-installed leaders at his own table, alongside marshals Timoshenko and Voroshilov.¹⁵⁴ Hitler’s directives and the accompanying feasibility studies for an attack on the USSR remained supersecret. Soviet military intelligence, on the basis of agent information, reported that, at a conference in Salzburg on August 9, Hitler had proposed to Romania joint regulation of all disputed issues with Hungary and Bulgaria; stated that all territorial changes in Eastern Europe up to that point were temporary; and “declared that current actions were the first stage in preparation for a war against the USSR, which would begin immediately after the end of the war with England.”¹⁵⁵ Five days later, Hitler handed out diamond-studded batons to his field marshals in the Reich Chancellery. “Russia has once shown an inclination to overstep the agreements made with us,” he remarked privately. “But she remains loyal at present. But should she reveal the intention of conquering Finland or attacking Romania, we shall be forced to strike. Russia should not be allowed to be the sole master of the eastern Baltic. Furthermore, we need Romania’s oil.”¹⁵⁶

Mikoyan reported on August 11 that for the first six months of 1940, the Soviets had received goods worth 80 million reichsmarks, while shipping goods worth 190 million.¹⁵⁷ (In the fourth quarter of 1940, Stalin would again shut off the export valves.) Molotov, on August 15, wrote a revealing letter to his wife, Polina, who was away on holiday in Crimea. This was his second letter to her in three days, divulging, in passing, that political negotiations had been launched with Japan (“I hope something serious will result”). He also complained that, “unfortunately, I cannot stay current in economic matters, but I do try not to lose sight of the most important of them, and it seems there is a turn for the better.” He broached the idea of holidaying together the next year in Sochi. “I wait impatiently for you in order to hug you tightly-tightly and kiss you all over, my dear, sweet love.”¹⁵⁸

Stalin had not written a letter like that in a decade. He could, at least, rejoice in the fact that Beria’s agents, finally, had proved better than Yezhov’s: Ramón Mercader managed to smash an alpine pick into the head of Trotsky on August 20, 1940. The exile survived in a coma for twenty-six hours before succumbing.¹⁵⁹ He was sixty years old. “The murder of Leon Trotsky at Mexico City,” The Times of London editorialized (August 23), “will relieve the Kremlin of not a few anxieties and will draw few tears from the majority of mankind.” When the celebrity’s open casket was driven through the streets of the Mexican capital, nearly a quarter million people turned out. Stalin edited the Pravda report on the “inglorious death of Trotsky” (August 24) and, among many insertions and cross-outs, he altered the conclusion to say, “Trotsky became a victim of his own intrigues, treacheries, and treason. Thus, he ingloriously ended his life, this despicable person, entering the grave with the stamp of an international spy on his skeleton.”¹⁶⁰

The draft was dated August 16, indicating Stalin’s sense of anticipation over the operation. The omnipotent despot had maintained a collection of everything written by and about Trotsky in a special cupboard in his study at the Near Dacha: Stalin School of Falsification, An Open Letter to Members of the Bolshevik Party, The Revolution Betrayed, The Stalinist Thermidor. These texts, published in dozens of countries, helped shape Stalin’s image in world opinion.¹⁶¹ Trotsky had taken to predicting that war between Hitler and Stalin would sweep away both, in social revolution, and that he (Trotsky) and his Fourth International would replace them. “Under cover of darkness, revolutionary elements in Berlin are putting up posters in the working-class districts saying ‘Down with Hitler and Stalin!’ and ‘Long Live Trotsky!’” he imagined in 1940. “It’s lucky Stalin does not have to black out Moscow at night, otherwise the streets of the Soviet capital would also be covered with equally meaningful posters.”¹⁶² When the spectral Fourth International, its meager archive pilfered and delivered to Stalin, had finally managed its founding congress, it was attended by a mere twenty-one delegates, who had met in secrecy in a village outside Paris for just a single day, the stateless Trotsky himself had not been able to attend.¹⁶³