Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

Stalin had expressed his readiness to deepen Soviet involvement in German aggression, and to join the aggression of Italy and Japan, which would have been a fateful step for the British empire and the United States. But the despot offered Soviet services to Berlin as if Moscow were, or would be, an equal partner. The depth of his global miscalculation was unintentionally laid bare in little Bulgaria. Evidently Dimitrov was instructed or under the impression that Sobolev’s confidential oral proposal to the Bulgarian prime minister and tsar should become known, to increase the pressure, and the next day he wired a written summary to the Bulgarian Communist party, informing Stalin that he had done so. The Bulgarian Communists printed up and distributed the summary as leaflets. The clumsy tactic failed to intimidate the Bulgarian government. Sobolev, the special envoy, had found the government “already committed to Germany to the hilt.”³⁰³ Meanwhile, copies of the Soviet demands were whisked to Hitler. “Our people in Sofia have been disseminating leaflets about the Soviet proposal to Bulgaria,” Molotov exploded at Dimitrov over the phone on November 28, 1940. “Idiots!”³⁰⁴

READING HITLER’S INTENTIONS

Bismarck liked to say that pacts must be observed so long as conditions remain the same (“Pacta sunt servanda rebus sic stantibus”), meaning they could be abrogated. His worldview had been predicated upon a sense of limits and international balance. He had refrained from conquering even all German speakers, despite the wherewithal to do so. Hitler possessed the ambition for a total continental conquest, but, unlike Bismarck, he had initially lacked the wherewithal. Over time, Hitler’s ambition had delivered the wherewithal, from the Rhineland remilitarization (1936) through the Anschluss (1938), the Munich Pact (1938), and, especially, the brazen violation of Munich with his unpunished seizure of all of Czechoslovakia (1939), followed by lightning conquests of Poland (1939) and the Low Countries and France (1940). None of this had been foreordained. Strength deters aggression, as Mussolini had shown with Austria in 1934, while weakness encourages it. By 1940, however, it was not clear that Hitler, given his strength and successes, remained susceptible to conventional deterrence. Britain posed no threat to Germany’s continental domination, but the crushing of France had failed to compel Britain’s surrender, a snub that the “invincible” Führer could not abide. Equally important, he feared dissipation of Nazism’s élan.³⁰⁵ In other words, Hitler had become both more capable of and more impatient for still greater conquest.

Hitler’s calculations are difficult to read even now. “The Führer hopes he can bring Russia into the anti-British front,” army chief of staff Halder, after a meeting with the Führer, recorded in his diary (November 1, 1940).³⁰⁶ Ribbentrop had explained to Mussolini on the eve of Molotov’s Berlin visit that the acid test would be Stalin’s position vis-à-vis the “dangerous overlapping of interests” in the Balkans: if the Soviets backed down, the Germans could have their way without war. Hitler himself told Mussolini that there would be no accommodation with Stalin beyond Turkey, certainly not regarding Bulgaria or Romania—indicating that some accommodation was possible.³⁰⁷ Of course, Hitler’s sincerity even with his own army, foreign ministry, and principal ally could never be accepted at face value. The Führer’s internally stated aim for meeting Molotov—“to entice Russia into participating in a grand coalition against England”—might have been disingenuous. The big play Molotov’s visit got in the Nazi press smacks of a transparent effort to drive the wedge still deeper between Britain and the Soviet Union. Hitler had already ordered internal explorations for an invasion of the USSR in fall 1940, a secret idea that remained operative for spring 1941. But then, on the very eve of Molotov’s visit to Berlin, Hitler’s army adjutant, Major Gerhard Engel, observed that a “visibly depressed” Führer gave the “impression that at the moment he does not know how things should proceed.”³⁰⁸