Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

Eisenstein, the Jewish-born convert to Orthodoxy, revived his career with, of all things, a monumental Wagner opera production, which premiered in Moscow on November 21, 1940. The filmmaker’s masterpiece, Alexander Nevsky (November 1938), which depicted the medieval destruction by invading Teutonic knights, remained on ice, but in spring 1940 he had been commissioned to produce Wagner’s Die Walküre. The last staging at the Bolshoi had been in 1925, and it had been a revival of the prerevolutionary (1902) production. Eisenstein had not worked in theater since the heady “Proletarian Culture” movement (also 1925). He plunged into the task, reading up on Wagner and mythology, writing in Ogonyok that Wagner attracted him by his use of legend and folklore, vital ingredients of art.²⁹³ Eisenstein had found a kindred spirit.²⁹⁴ His staging, with an ample budget and the Soviet Union’s best singers, proved to be original, seeking a Wagnerian synthesis of the spatial, aural, and visual. “People, music, light, landscape . . . color and movement,” he explained, “all brought together by a single piercing emotion, a single theme and idea—this is what the filmmaker strives to achieve, and the producer finds the same when he becomes familiar with Wagner’s works.”²⁹⁵

Stalin sent a special envoy, Arkady Sobolev (b. 1903), foreign affairs commissariat secretary general, to Sofia, uninvited, ostensibly on a transit flight to Bucharest. The Bulgarians were informed only a few hours in advance of his arrival. “My impression,” the misled Bulgarian envoy to Moscow surmised, “is that they are prepared to do anything if only they could sign a pact with us.” On November 25, Sobolev was received by, first, the Bulgarian prime minister, Bogdan Filov—a professor of ancient art and president of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences—then King Boris, telling them, in elliptical language, that he sought an agreement for transfer of Red Army troops, via Bulgaria, toward the Turkish Straits in case of need, while pledging noninterference in Bulgarian domestic affairs. Sobolev noted that such a bilateral deal did not preclude Bulgaria’s also joining the Axis, because a Bulgarian-Soviet pact “might very probably, almost certainly” result in the USSR’s own entry into the Axis. Filov was stunned. He obfuscated about “Bulgaria’s complicated situation” but shrank from mentioning Nazi Germany by name.²⁹⁶

That same day, Dimitrov was summoned to the Little Corner, in the presence of Molotov and first deputy foreign affairs commissar Dekanozov. It was the Comintern head’s only audience in the Little Corner in all of 1940, and lasted a half hour.²⁹⁷ After confirming China policy with Stalin, Dimitrov dispatched an order to Mao not to attack the Nationalists.²⁹⁸ The main discussion concerned Bulgaria, Dimitrov’s homeland. “Historically, this is where the threat has always originated,” Stalin told him. “The Crimean War—the taking of Sevastopol, Wrangel’s intervention in 1919, and so forth.” Stalin added that Sobolev had already been received in Sofia by Filov and that, “in concluding a mutual assistance pact, we not only have no objections to Bulgaria’s joining the Tripartite Pact, but we ourselves in that event will also join the pact.” Stalin further indicated that he would seek to secure the Straits directly, by pressuring Turkey. “What is Turkey?” he continued. “There are two million Georgians there, one and a half million Armenians, one million Kurds, and so forth. The Turks amount to only six or seven million.” Amid the bluster, however, Stalin noted to Dimitrov, “Our relations with Germany are polite on the surface, but there is serious friction between us.”²⁹⁹

Fifteen minutes after Dimitrov’s visit ended, Molotov departed the Little Corner to hand Schulenburg the Soviet Union’s formal assent to join a pact of four—by now much expanded in members—but with major conditions: (1) German troops would have to leave Finland; (2) a pact would be signed between the USSR and Bulgaria for Soviet security on the Black Sea; (3) the Soviets would obtain a privileged position on the Turkish Straits and a “center of gravity” south from Batumi and Baku to the Persian Gulf; and (4) Japan would renounce its oil and coal concessions on Northern Sakhalin, with reasonable economic compensation.³⁰⁰ In other words, facing the threat of ever more German troops arriving on his borders, Stalin sought everything: not just Persia, which Hitler was offering, but Finland, the Baltics, the Balkans, and the Straits. (“As I was accompanying Schulenburg out, I was overcome with emotions,” recalled the Soviet interpreter. “Soviet bases in the Bosporus and Dardanelles!”)³⁰¹ Molotov told Schulenburg he hoped for “an early answer” to the Soviet conditions.³⁰²