Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

Stalin erred in not testing the real limits of a possible geopolitical pivot toward Britain. At the same time, that was not the only move that he might have tried but did not. He could have instructed Molotov, in Berlin, to say yes to a new deal with Germany, this time entirely on Hitler’s terms, conceding most of Eastern Europe, in exchange for a division of the spoils of a dismembered British empire. Acceding to German vassal status would have been an admission of weakness. But Hitler had acceded to Stalin’s terms in 1939, when he needed the Pact. What if Stalin had lived up to his reputation for supreme cunning and just accepted the offer of a junior partnership under Nazi Germany (the way Mussolini had done)? Of course, such a surprise embrace would not have removed the German land army from Finland, occupied Poland, or Romania. But might it not have thrown Hitler, his military men, and Nazi propaganda for a loop and, as Stalin wished, refocused them all on Britain?

We shall never know. Stalin confided to Dimitrov that at the end of the day, Hitler would have no choice but to recognize that the Soviets required a strong position on the Black Sea to make sure the Turkish Straits were not used against Germany.³³¹ Hitler, however, was not Bismarck; he did not recognize other states’ interests as a factor for stability. The combination of German power and Hitler’s person was something that neither Stalin nor the rest of the world had faced before. It was, however, most immediately the Soviet despot’s problem, given the contiguous geography. His room for maneuver had become ever more circumscribed as the outside world closed in on the Little Corner.

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FROM THE START, the Soviet-German rapprochement had been fraught—burdened with tensions and uncertainties. The path from the Munich Pact (September 1938) through the Hitler-Stalin Pact (August 1939), the joint partition of Poland and clashes over the oil fields, with Western declarations of war against Germany (September 1939), the Soviet-German Treaty of Friendship and the Border (September 1939), the Soviet Winter War against Finland (November 1939–February 1940), the German victory over France (June 1940), Soviet annexations of the Baltic states and parts of Romania (June 1940), and Molotov’s visit to Berlin (November 1940), had been a roller-coaster ride. Stalin’s apprenticeship in high-stakes diplomacy showed him to be cunning, but also opportunistic, avaricious, obdurate. His deal making with Hitler had played out one way in 1939 and altogether differently in 1940. Stalin’s strategy remained the same.

Soviet insiders continued to exhibit confidence bordering on arrogance. “The policy of a socialist government consists of using the contradictions between imperialists, in this case the military contradictions, in order to expand the position of socialism whenever the opportunity arises,” Zhdanov had crowed at a closed party meeting in Leningrad on November 30, 1940. “Ours is an unusual neutrality: without fighting, we are gaining territory. (Laughter in the hall.)”³³² Stalin’s bold seizure and Sovietization of Romanian territory, including Bukovina, as well as the Baltic states, including the strip in southwestern Lithuania that he had promised to Hitler, had ensured that these territories would not fall into Hitler’s hands, but the actions had also removed buffers between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and risked a clash, right when Berlin’s dependence on good relations with Moscow had been reduced. Most fundamentally, Stalin had failed to follow his own advice: even with France kaput, he had not taken the initiative to balance ever-growing German power. Instead, he had allowed the long-standing mistrust in British-Soviet relations to overshadow the escalating imbalance and tensions in German-Soviet relations. Once again, the initiative for a bilateral deal had come from Ribbentrop, and, in response, Stalin had once again revealed his exorbitant appetites, but this time the context was radically different.