Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

MOLOTOV, BACK FROM BERLIN, sacked the former textile manager serving as Soviet ambassador there in favor of his own deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov, the Beria minion who had briefly headed NKVD intelligence. Even Molotov did not know him well, thinking him an Armenian who pretended to be a Georgian.³ He seems to have been of mixed Russian (father) and German Jewish (mother) heritage, and had been born Ivan Protopopov in Estonia. Blond and blue-eyed, barely five feet tall, imperious and foul-mouthed with underlings, the forty-one-year-old was the youngest ambassador in the Nazi capital.⁴ He retained his status as a deputy foreign affairs commissar but could not manage to present his credentials to Hitler. On December 5, 1940, still awaiting an audience, Dekanozov received an anonymous German-language letter in the mail. “Hitler intends to attack the USSR next spring,” it read. “The Red Army will be destroyed by numerous powerful encirclements.” The details of pending bellicose actions impressed the thirty-four-year-old Soviet military intelligence station chief, Nikolai Skornyakov, and Dekanozov sent the letter to Molotov, who forwarded it: “Comrade Stalin—for your information.”⁵

Everyone was talking. They had “heard” that Hitler would attack. It would happen this way. It would happen that way. It would occur on this date. It would occur on that date. The encrypted reports flowed over the wires from Belgrade, Sofia, Prague, Bucharest, Budapest, and Warsaw; London, Paris, Geneva, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Rome; Tokyo, Washington, and Berlin. The noise was shattering. Observers reported rail lines, aerodromes, and weapons depots being laid, troops being massed on the frontier, Russian-language courses being taken. Hitler would seize Ukraine.⁶ Or he would demand that Stalin just hand Ukraine over. The Führer was going to invade. Unless he wasn’t. Amayak Kobulov, relying on his personal spy, the ethnic Latvian Berlings—code-named “Lycée-ist” by the Soviets, but a plant for the Nazis—reported through NKVD channels (December 14) that Hitler had declared Britain to be Germany’s “sole enemy,” and that Germany would do everything possible “to avoid a war on two fronts.”⁷

The Führer himself had become nearly inaccessible. On the afternoon of December 19, Dekanozov was finally able to present his credentials, in the same Chancellery room where Molotov had been received, but Hitler politely deflected the envoy’s effort to discuss Soviet conditions for joining the four-power pact. After a curt half an hour, two giant Nazi protocol officers bundled the diminutive Dekanozov out.⁸ Unbeknownst to the Soviet envoy, the previous day Hitler had signed the supersecret Directive No. 21, which ordered that “even before the end of the war with England, the German Armed Forces must be prepared to annihilate Soviet Russia in a swift campaign (Operation Barbarossa).” The target date was provisionally set for May 15, 1941.⁹

Nazi Germany was master of the European continent, stalemated with island Britain and economically enmeshed with the Soviet Union. Nazi ideologues railed at the “military buildup” of “Judeo-Bolshevism” on Germany’s new borders in the east. Most top Nazis, however, scorned the Red Army’s performance against Finland and, more broadly, the inferior Slavic race. SS Chief Heinrich Himmler had told Nazi party functionaries in fall 1940 that the USSR “cannot pose any danger to us at all.” Hitler himself had stated that the Soviet Union “will nevertheless make no effort to enter the war against Germany of her own accord” and took its expansive territorial appetites from the Baltic to the Black Sea as indicative of weakness.¹⁰ But in the aftermath of his November 1940 confrontation with Molotov, the Führer had taken to calling the Soviet Union a gathering threat that had to be preempted. That view had been Germany’s motivation for the Great War in 1914: its giant eastern neighbor had to be attacked before it got strong.¹¹ Hitler added the proposition that now Britain was not capitulating because it was counting on eventual help from the USSR. Thus did it transpire for the second time in the twentieth century that the road to German triumph over the world’s greatest power, Britain, was deemed to go through the east.