Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

Hitler’s troop movements and the high tensions in Nazi-Soviet relations were playing out in Eastern Europe.¹⁶⁴ Stalin had begun inciting Hungarian irredentism over their conationals in Romanian-controlled Transylvania; Hitler unilaterally handed northern Transylvania over to Hungary in late August 1940. Stalin had a protest lodged with the German ambassador regarding what he considered to be a violation of their Pact’s clause on prior consultation.¹⁶⁵ Romania would also be forced to cede southern Dobruja to Bulgaria, losing the last of the territories it had gained as a result of the Great War and sinking the popularity of the Bucharest government and the monarch. “I was not an enemy of Your Majesty,” General Ion Antonescu (b. 1882), the former war minister and the leader of the pro-Nazi Iron Guard, wrote in protest to King Carol II. “I was a fanatic servant of this nation. I was removed through intrigue and calumny by those who have led this country to where it is now.”¹⁶⁶ Carol promptly had him arrested. Mass public demonstrations and Iron Guard shock troops known as Legionnaires got Antonescu released. In a quick coup, he would force the beleaguered king to step down in favor of his nineteen-year-old son, Mihai I (a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria). But most of the monarchy’s dictatorial powers would be transferred on September 5 to Antonescu, newly designated as “Conducător” (Führer).¹⁶⁷ He deepened Romania’s relationship with Nazi Germany.

ENEMIES RECAST

The writer Vishnevsky had managed to take over the executed Isaac Babel’s dacha in Peredelkino, then, in his diary, decried a lack of material incentives (“The stimulation by pay is lacking; we are well cared for, many of us writers fully so, for years to come”).¹⁶⁸ He was right only in respect to elite writers. In 1939, when the deputy boss of Central Committee agitprop, Georgy Alexandrov, earned an enormous salary of 27,000 rubles, Nikolai Pogodin, the playwright, had taken in 732,000 in royalties and payments.¹⁶⁹ Vishnevsky went on to lament the lack of attention from Stalin and other top political figures. “After the death of A. M. Gorky we have had fewer possibilities and places where we could speak with big people on big questions of life and our work,” he was recorded as stating by the writers’ union duty officer in discussion with a colleague. “The last big conversation in the Central Committee was spring 1938. It gave us a lot, but already two years have passed, and writers as a collective, as an ‘active,’ have not spoken with the Leaders.”¹⁷⁰

As it happened, on the evening of September 9, 1940, party leaders and cultural functionaries assembled to discuss a film, The Law of Life, by Alexander Stolper and Boris Ivanov, which had been released in early August. It portrayed a student Communist youth leader as corrupt, yet it had somehow managed to pass all the censorship authorities, from the studio (Mosfilm) through the state committee for cinema affairs (headed by Ivan Bolshakov) right to the Central Committee propaganda department. Pravda’s unsigned review, edited by Zhdanov, condemned the film as “insincere,” and after ten days, despite being the lead draw of the day, it was withdrawn.¹⁷¹ Stalin, in the course of extended remarks, reminded those present that workers were not ipso facto trustworthy; Tomsky had been a worker yet fell into conspiracy with Trotsky. Some workers were scum, he added. “It’s a law of life.”¹⁷²

When Fadeyev, head of the writers’ union, praised the ethnic Polish writer Wanda Wasilewska as “a genuine artist,” Stalin responded, “I do not know if she’s a genuine artist or not, but I do know that she writes truthfully, honestly. I read three of her works: The Face of the Day, which depicts the life of a worker correctly, honestly; then Motherland, which takes up the life of a farmhand working in bondage for a landlord—wonderfully, nicely, simply conveyed; Land Under the Yoke, which depicts the life of an individual poor peasant, middle peasant, and farmhand. Wonderfully well conveyed. But about her, for some reason, there is silence.”