For the fifth consecutive year, since his holiday decision to intervene in Spain, he had no plans to travel to his Sochi getaway. Young Pioneers were departing for summer camps, and a new aquatic center was set to open at Khimki, just outside the capital. Posters advertised the upcoming appearance at Moscow’s Hermitage summer theater of Leonid Utyosov and his jazz band, whose magical tunes the entire country could whistle, from the Baltic to the Pacific.13 Stalin paced and paced in his office inside the Imperial Senate, which had been built by the Teutonic empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, for “the glorification of Russian statehood.” A few decades after its opening, in early fall 1812, Napoleon had arrived with his invading forces. The French Grande Armée—full of Western Christian Poles, Italians, and Germans, too—had defecated in the Kremlin’s Orthodox churches and taken potshots at the holy icons. After cunning Russian resistance starved the occupiers, a retreating Napoleon had ordered the Kremlin blown to pieces. Heavy rains doused the fuses, limiting the damage, but explosives destroyed parts of the walls and several towers. The Imperial Senate suffered a fire.
Stalin’s Kremlin, too, had been violated, albeit not in the way that he long feared. Inside, the long, red-carpeted corridors to and from his Little Corner were attended by an army of sentries. “See how many of them there are?” he once remarked to a military commander. “Each time I take this corridor, I think, which one? If this one, he will shoot me in the back, and if it is the one around the corner, he will shoot me in the front.” The commander, Admiral Ivan Isakov, had been born Hovhannes Ter-Isahakyan, an Armenian who shared Caucasus heritage with Stalin but, like everyone else, was dumbfounded by such hypersuspicion.14 In fact, there had never been a single genuine assassination attempt against Stalin. But the “Man of Steel”—“deeper than the ocean, higher than the Himalayas, brighter than the sun, teacher of the universe,” in the words of the Kazakh national poet—was being stalked from afar by a onetime Austrian corporal and former house painter. The pair offered a study in contrasts: Hitler the undisciplined “artist,” Stalin the trained seminarian; Hitler the anti-Semite German nationalist, Stalin the Marxist-Leninist imperial Russian nationalist. Not just their different personalities, however, but their countries’ very different histories and geographies, and their different systems of rule, had produced clashing geopolitical aims.15
Hitler had won the Second World War. He had annexed his native Austria, the Czech lands, much of Poland, and a strip of Lithuania, creating the Greater Germany that in 1871 Otto von Bismarck had deliberately avoided forging during the wars of German unification (deeming Austria-Hungary’s existence vital for the balance of power). Hitler’s troops had occupied Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, the Balkans, and northern France. The Führer received obeisance from France’s World War I lion, Marshal Philippe Pétain (now the chief of state of rump Vichy), and other vassals, such as the Conducător of Romania (Ion Antonescu), “His Serene Highness” of landlocked Hungary (Admiral Miklós Horthy), the Catholic-priest ruler of Slovakia (Jozef Tiso), the fascist puppet of Croatia (Ante Pavelić), Bulgaria’s tsar (Boris III), the president of Finland, and the Italian duce, not to mention the generalissimo of Spain. The Führer essentially controlled all of Europe from the English Channel to the Soviet border, for only Sweden and Switzerland remained neutral, and both cooperated with Nazi Germany economically. True, the defiant Brits still refused to come to terms, but London could never overturn Berlin’s continental dominance. And Hitler had the nonaggression pact with Stalin. Would he
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