Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

Stalin finished with the Tajiks around midnight and proceeded to host a banquet for the winners of the new Stalin Prize. There were some seventy-five in industrial processes and design, including Alexander Yakovlev and Sergei Ilyushin (aircraft design) and Alexei Favorsky (synthetic rubber), more than forty in science, including Nikolai Burdenko (surgery), Ivan Vinogradov (mathematics), Pyotr Kapitsa (physics), and Trofim Lysenko (agricultural sciences), and more than one hundred in the arts: Grigory Alexandrov, Isaac Dunayevsky, and Lyubov Orlova (for the musicals Circus and Volga-Volga); Sergei Eisenstein (for Alexander Nevsky, which was still not being shown on screens); Mikhail Romm and his collaborators (Lenin in October); the composer Aram Khachaturyan (a violin concerto); Mark Reizen, the opera singer; Shostakovich (a piano quintet); novelist Mikhail Sholokhov; Aleksei Tolstoy for Peter the Great; Olga Lepeshinskaya, for ballet; Vera Mukhina, the hammer-and-sickle sculptor; Uzeyir Hajibeyov, for the opera Koroglu; Alla Tarasova, the theater actress; the crooner Ivan Kozlovsky (“On a Moonlit Night”); Alexander Gerasimov, for the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin; and Mikheil Gelovani, the actor who played Stalin. The cash components were enormous (up to 100,000 rubles for Stalin Prize “first class,” 50,000 for “second”).¹⁶⁰

The celebration lasted until 7:00 a.m. “The whole time Stalin was unusually animated, cheerful, hospitable,” according to the court dramaturge Nikolai Virtá (Karelsky), who won a Stalin Prize for his novel Solitude. “No one escaped his attention; he spoke with this one and that, laughing and joking, sharing his cigarettes with the smokers, praising one of the guests who declared he does not smoke.” Films were shown, including Volga-Volga, which Stalin knew by heart; he sat next to a Tajik actress. Alexandrov, the director, in answer to Stalin’s query, revealed that Orlova, his actress wife, had had her voice dubbed for the singing. “She has a remarkable voice; we need to think about how to afford her wide possibilities for the realization of her talent,” Stalin said. Virtá wrote that the leader “proposed that everyone dance; he listened to a famous singer and applauded his rumbling bass.” Stalin “spoke about Hamlet with the actors of the Moscow Art Theater, about politics and literature, about the construction of one factory, about films and songs, about international affairs.”¹⁶¹

AMERICA’S WARNINGS

The Americans, too, had learned the world’s most important secret. A high German economic official from Weimar days, Erwin Respondek, who had been tasked with preparing the currency for the occupied Soviet Union, arranged meetings with the U.S. commercial attaché in a darkened cinema and passed him word of the invasion planning. In early 1941, Respondek had prepared the first of several detailed memoranda for the United States outlining the steps being taken for the destruction of the Soviet Union and “a rigorous liquidation of Bolshevism, all its political and other institutions, and, in particular, the ‘extermination’ of its leaders by the SS.” Respondek, whose key contact was General Halder, had proved a reliable source till now, but officials in Washington were beginning to suspect that he was a plant. After internal debate, Roosevelt had undersecretary of state Sumner Welles tell Konstantin Umansky, the Soviet envoy in Washington, that the United States “has come into possession of information which it regards as authentic, clearly indicating that it is the intention of Germany to attack the Soviet Union.” Umansky blanched. He promised to convey the information to Moscow—and promptly informed the German ambassador to Washington (whether under Moscow’s instructions or in order to score points by anticipating Kremlin wishes). On March 1, 1941, after further secret reports prepared by Respondek, Welles tried once more to warn Umansky about the coming invasion. His last effort took place on March 20.¹⁶²