Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

Stalin’s larger objective remained to keep Hitler focused on the West and avoid entanglement in war himself. But the despot’s secret instructions to Molotov regarding a four-power pact indicate more than merely probing Hitler’s intentions. If Hitler had been willing to meet the despot’s key conditions in 1940—conceding Finland, southeastern Europe (the Balkans), and the Straits, so that Stalin could protect his entire western flank—the despot likely would have signed on to the Axis.³²³ Territorial annexations and spheres of interest, in Stalin’s mind, provided for security. At best, however, the Führer was offering Stalin only a junior partnership in this new world order dominated by a Germanocentric Axis.³²⁴ Ribbentrop had done his best to make the “continental bloc” against Britain attractive to the Soviets, but the Nazi foreign minister felt undercut by Molotov’s dogged insistence on expansive Soviet interests in Eastern Europe. Ribbentrop “could only repeat again and again that the decisive question was whether the Soviet Union was prepared and in a position to cooperate with us in the great liquidation of the British empire. On all other questions we would easily reach an understanding.”³²⁵ That statement, however, looks delusional. The 1939 Pact had promised a joint division of Eastern Europe, but the November 1940 summit made manifest that Hitler was going to take all of it for himself.³²⁶

Stalin was game to a new permanent division of Europe that excluded Britain and a vanquished France, provided it made Germany and the Soviet Union equals. He laid out his conditions to Hitler as if from a position of strength—but this was a different Germany now. The despot’s unilateral territorial seizures and his further demands had done nothing for those inside the Wehrmacht, the navy, the foreign ministry, or even some top Nazi officials who doubted the wisdom and necessity of war against the Soviet Union. On the contrary, his greed had played right into Hitler’s own long-standing anti-Bolshevik, anti-Slav worldview. Stalin’s air force, Hitler noted, could turn Romania’s Ploieşti oil fields, by far Germany’s biggest supplier, into “an expanse of smoking ruins,” choking the Axis war machine.³²⁷ Stalin had also held up Soviet compensation payments for Baltic property, contracts for oil deliveries (ostensibly over pricing), shipments of rubber from the Far East via the Trans-Siberian, and Afghan cotton. On top of all this came Molotov’s refusal inside the Chancellery to be hypnotized or bullied by Hitler. In the event, Stalin’s insistence on forceful tactics in the talks not only clarified Hitler’s aggressive intentions but seem to have helped solidify them.³²⁸ Ribbentrop later recalled that, in Hitler’s mind, Molotov was “pressuring” Germany, and Hitler “was not willing to be taken by surprise once he had recognized a danger.”³²⁹

After Stalin’s conditions for joining a four-power pact were conveyed through Molotov, Hitler did not respond. The Soviets would repeat their proposals; again, nothing from Berlin.³³⁰ The silence should have been all Stalin needed to hear. At the same time, the deafening whistles of the British bombs over Berlin during Molotov’s visit had offered their own resounding message: namely, that the Kremlin had a possible partner against Nazi aggression. But the bottom line, for Stalin as for Molotov, was that those bombs raining down on Berlin meant that Britain, not the Soviet Union, was at war with Germany.

In the Pact with Hitler, Stalin had been lucky but also shrewd. Now he remained adamant not to let the conniving imperialist Churchill drag him into war with Hitler. Any dramatic chess moves with Britain might provoke Nazi Germany to attack the USSR, while a nonaggression pact and trade agreement with Britain would not have done much for Stalin’s principal problem: the massing of scores of German army divisions on the Soviet border. And yet, what if Hitler proved ready to attack the USSR in response to the very idea of a British-Soviet rapprochement, even when that option appeared to have been rejected by both parties? This might be the worst possible circumstance: no actual Soviet deal with Britain to deter Hitler, but Hitler acting upon the fact that his enemies were in contact. Stalin had less to lose by giving London a try than he thought. A balancing relationship with Britain might have given pause to the German high command, the wider Nazi elite, and even Hitler.