Churchill was not a blind anti-Communist. “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” he had remarked in a radio broadcast not long after the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Treaty of Friendship and the Border. “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”242 He did not spell out how Britain, rather than just Germany, could appeal to those interests. Cripps remained deeply convinced that Nazi and Soviet interests were fundamentally inimical, in a way that British and Soviet interests were not. On October 22, 1940, after having been denied a meeting with Molotov, Cripps had handed the latter’s deputy Vyshinsky a revised offer from the British government. It vowed to treat the USSR on a par with the United States by consulting with Moscow about a postwar order, and in the meantime not to enter into an alliance against the Soviet Union, provided Moscow also refrained from hostile action (even indirectly through agitation). Cripps further communicated—exceeding his authority—that, pending a final postwar settlement, the British government could recognize de facto Soviet sovereignty in the Baltic states, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and “those parts of the former Polish State now under Soviet control.”243
Cripps relayed that Britain would sign a trade agreement as well, supplying the USSR with goods necessary for its defense. In return, Moscow had to promise to observe the same benevolent neutrality vis-à-vis Britain as the Soviets had adopted toward Germany. Britain was further prepared, if no complications arose with the Axis powers, to proceed to a pact of nonaggression, while asking that if Iran and Turkey became embroiled in war with Germany or its allies, the USSR would assist them in such defense measures as it had adopted toward China (against Japanese aggression) in the past.244 A few days later, on October 26, Cripps again saw Vyshinsky, who indicated that the Soviet government regarded the proposals as being of the greatest importance.245
Then, silence.
Stalin would appear at a reception on October 30, 1940, to culminate the Ten-Day cultural festival of the Buryat-Mongol autonomous republic, the ninth in the kitschy extravaganzas. “The Ten-Days cemented the friendship of peoples and gave it a deep and concrete concept,” enthused Alexander Solodovnikov (b. 1904), a former leather factory worker who had risen to overseeing all theaters for the USSR committee on artistic affairs. “The preparation for the Ten-Days facilitated the development of countless talents, hitherto hidden among the people. Members of Russian theaters actively assisted the establishment of the theaters of brotherly republics. . . . At the same time, they received the richest palette of colors and variety in artistic forms, devices, examples, and cultural traditions lavishly revealed by the peoples of Central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine, Belorussia.” Solodovnikov had led brigades to Minsk and to Ulan Ude, where he discovered that the local wooden theater had no heat, and that the Ukrainian-born party boss of the Buryat-Mongol republic, Semyon Ignatyev, who had survived the terror, kept a collection of bronze Buddha statues in his office cabinet.246
The reason for Soviet silence vis-à-vis Cripps had taken time to emerge: on November 10, Soviet newspapers suddenly announced that Molotov had accepted an invitation from Ribbentrop to visit Berlin. Cripps demanded to see the Soviet foreign affairs commissar but was again fobbed off onto Vyshinsky, with whom he exchanged heated words. When Cripps insisted that Britain’s offer could not wait indefinitely and asked whether the Soviet government had a decision to communicate, Vyshinsky told him the answer was still forthcoming.247
SPIES AND FOOLS
