The strain on the despot was hard to miss for the inner circle. In impromptu remarks at the end of the annual intimate banquet for the November 7 holiday, in Voroshilov’s Grand Kremlin Palace apartment, Stalin complained that during the major border war with Japan in 1939, he had discovered that “our aircraft can stay aloft for only thirty-five minutes, while German and English aircraft can stay up for several hours!” But when he summoned the aviation specialists for an account, they told him that no one had
On what was normally a festive occasion, the despot delivered an aggravated-assault speech. Against the background of recent publications reprising the mythology of his defense of Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) back in 1918, he saw fit to bring up the civil-war-era conflict with Trotsky over tsarist military officers, whom he contrasted with the “people loyal to the revolution, people connected to the masses, by and large noncommissioned officers from the lower ranks.” He also asserted that Lenin had supported him in those clashes with the now assassinated Trotsky. It went far beyond defensiveness, however. “You do not like to learn; you are happy just going along the way you are, complacent,” Stalin berated the men of his regime. “You are squandering Lenin’s legacy.” When Kalinin dared interject something, Stalin became especially menacing: “People are thoughtless, do not want to learn and relearn. They will hear me out and then go on just as before. But I will show you, if I ever lose my patience. You know very well how I can do that.” The group stood silently. Voroshilov’s eyes welled with tears, according to Dimitrov, who observed, “Have never seen and never heard J. V. [Stalin] the way he was that night—a memorable one.”234
The next night, at the grand banquet in the St. George’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, Stalin—unusually—was absent, provoking rumors among Western diplomats that a struggle for power might be under way.235 It was nothing of the sort, of course: he was working, likely at the Near Dacha, on his detailed instructions for Molotov’s meeting with Hitler. Point 1 would begin as follows: “
SOVIET-BRITISH FEELERS
Litvinov was living under a form of house arrest at a state dacha in the suburbs, making occasional trips to the Lenin Library, in the city center, to research a dictionary of Russian synonyms.237 Those in the know speculated that Stalin was keeping him as “insurance” against Hitler, for a possible reorientation to the West.238 But the intuitive, always prepared Beria had his most trusted minions, including the assassin Sudoplatov, prepare scenarios to make Litvinov disappear, in the event of an order to do so.239 When it came to the West, Stalin seemed unable to forgive and forget. He had observed (back in November 1939) that “in Germany, the petit-bourgeois nationalists are capable of a sharp turn—they are flexible—not tied to capitalist traditions, unlike bourgeois leaders like Chamberlain and his ilk.”240 By 1940 Hitler was at the height of his power, and Chamberlain and his ilk had been sacked. (On the eve of Molotov’s Berlin visit, Chamberlain died of bowel cancer.) A new, nontrivial gesture had come from Churchill that seemed to play into Stalin’s wheelhouse, but the despot had used an audience with Stafford Cripps to kowtow to Hitler. Not long after Hitler began stationing troops in Romania and making moves to station troops in Turkey, further threatening the British position in the Near East, the foreign office permitted Cripps to submit more formal proposals to Moscow for a British-Soviet pact.241
