Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

Another interlude of relaxation mixed with menace occurred on February 4: a Kremlin banquet for Voroshilov’s sixtieth jubilee. The marshals, some generals, people’s commissars, Central Committee apparatchiks, Comintern officials, and others, a few with their wives, toasted one another until 4:00 a.m. “Stalin pronounced a number of toasts,” Malyshev noted. “He, in part, again returned to the idea of the old and the young. He said that ‘the old should understand that unless the young are admitted to leadership positions, then we will perish. We Bolsheviks are strong in that we boldly promote youth. The old should eagerly yield power to the young.’”⁴⁹

Stalin went on to attribute Soviet successes in foreign affairs to “two means: diplomacy and the army.” Dimitrov recorded the despot as stating that “with our foreign policy we have managed to take advantage of the goods of this world and to use those goods (we buy cheap and sell dear!). But the might of our army and navy have helped us conduct a policy of neutrality and keep the country out of war.” One of the reasons France fell, Stalin explained, was a failure to promote young cadres. “We have another approach: we promote our young cadres, sometimes even too eagerly. We promote them with pleasure, with joy. Old men cling to the old ways. The young go forward. Replacing the old with the young at the proper time is very essential. The country that fails to do that is doomed to failure.” Stalin also toasted Lenin (“We owe him everything”) and Soviet might. “We have been lucky. ‘God’ has helped us. Lots of easy victories. . . . Must not get cocky. . . . We now have an army of 4 million men on their feet and ready for anything. The tsar used to dream of a standing army of 1.2 million men.”⁵⁰

HITLER’S GRAND STRATEGY

Hitler’s radicalism confounded most contemporaries.⁵¹ Ever since his Second Book, written in 1928 but unpublished, he had exhibited envy for the unique vastness of the British empire and, ultimately, for American power. Germany under him had emerged as the world’s third-largest economy, but its overall productivity and living standards trailed those of the United States and even Britain. His acute awareness of Germany’s limitations relative to Britain’s global empire and America’s transcontinentality, not just his deeply held racist conceptions, spurred his aggressiveness. The Nazi regime proved to have an astonishing capability to marshal resources and a tremendous depth of domestic political unity, and into 1940 it was overseeing further surges of output and popular acclaim. But shortages of nearly everything, from steel to fodder, held Germany back, undermining the quality of the Wehrmacht’s armor and the Luftwaffe’s planes. Desperately seeking to break through to world-power status, in his inimical way, Hitler lacked the requisite economic and resource scaffolding.⁵² Japan suffered the same predicament: vaulting ambitions and limited raw materials or financial means to import them.⁵³ For Hitler, this was a matter of the survival of the German race. He held fast to a zero-sum calculus, believing that only one nation could dominate the world.

Hitler could be less impulsive than he seemed. He and his crude propagandists had slandered the United States at every turn for supposedly trying to interfere in European affairs, but once Hitler had precipitated the pan-European war over Poland, he had worked diligently to keep the world’s potentially most powerful country out of the hostilities. This was not rocket science: in 1918, on top of the British sea blockade that inhibited vital German imports of food and raw materials, America’s 2 million fresh troops and plentiful resources had brought the Germans to defeat. Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare, in turn, had gratuitously provoked America’s decision to take up arms, and Hitler ordered the navy not to repeat the mistake this time. Roosevelt, for his part, seemed to want just that: a Nazi-instigated confrontation. Meanwhile, many of Hitler’s efforts to bring Japan into the war centered not on opening a two-front war against the USSR but embroiling the United States in a Pacific war such that it would hesitate to get involved on a second front in Europe.⁵⁴ But Roosevelt’s reelection, by a substantial majority, to a third term on November 5, 1940, and the increasing scale of U.S. aid to Britain gave Hitler grave cause for concern. Even while still fighting Britain, he ordered continued preparations for an anticipated eventual clash with the United States.⁵⁵