Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

Zhukov phoned in to report that yet another German soldier had defected across the frontier, warning of an invasion within a few hours.⁵⁸ This was precisely the kind of “provocation” Stalin feared. He ordered Zhukov to the Kremlin, along with the just-departed Timoshenko. They entered Stalin’s office at 8:50, accompanied by the old Stalin crony Marshal Budyonny, a deputy defense commissar.⁵⁹ Whereas the two pince-nez minions Molotov and Beria provided an echo chamber for Stalin’s denials that Hitler was going to attack, the two peasant commanders could see that Germany was coiled to invade.⁶⁰ Still, when Stalin insisted otherwise, they presumed that he possessed superior information and insight. In any case, they knew the costs of losing his trust. “Everyone had in their memory the events of recent years,” Zhukov would recall. “And to say out loud that Stalin was wrong, that he is mistaken, to say it plainly, could have meant that without leaving the building, you would be taken to have coffee with Beria.”⁶¹

Nonetheless, the pair evidently used the latest defector to urge a general mobilization—tantamount, in Stalin’s mind, to war. “Didn’t German generals send that defector across the border in order to provoke a conflict?” Stalin asked. “No,” answered Timoshenko. “We think the defector is telling the truth.” Stalin: “What do we do now?” Timoshenko allowed the silence to persist. Finally, the defense commissar suggested, “Put the troops on the western border on high alert.” He and Zhukov had come prepared with a draft directive.⁶²

Where was the ultimatum? Stalin had continued to try to engage Hitler after the TASS bulletin gambit fell flat. “Molotov has asked for permission to visit Berlin, but has been fobbed off,” Goebbels wrote in his diary (June 18). “A naïve request.”⁶³ Dekanozov had appeared at the German foreign ministry that same day without an appointment, mentioning nothing of a Molotov visit but inducing terror all the same.⁶⁴ “The main political worry here is not to afford Stalin the opportunity for some kind of generous gesture to upend all our cards at the last minute,” state secretary Weizsäcker, Ribbentrop’s deputy, had written in his diary, but then he noted that the inept Soviet envoy had “merely brought up a few current matters of lesser importance.” Weizsäcker had cleverly laid out a map of the Near East, as if Germany’s attention was on British positions. “The ambassador took leave of me without anything whatever having been said about German-Soviet relations.”⁶⁵ On the morning of June 21, Molotov had sent a telegram instructing Dekanozov to hand-deliver an attached diplomatic protest of German border violations to Ribbentrop, and to use it to elicit clarifications.⁶⁶ “Several times that day Moscow telephoned, pressing us to carry out our instructions,” an embassy duty officer recalled. But Ribbentrop had deliberately vanished from the capital and sent instructions to inform Dekanozov that he would be contacted as soon as the Nazi foreign minister returned, whenever that might be. The Soviet duty officer, remaining behind after other employees had departed at around 7:00 p.m., kept calling the German foreign ministry every thirty minutes.

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INSTEAD OF WAITING to see Hitler’s ultimatum, Stalin could have peremptorily declared his response to it. This was the last option he had left, and a potentially powerful one. Hitler feared that the wily Soviet despot would somehow seize the initiative and unilaterally, publicly declare dramatic, far-reaching concessions. Stalin appears to have discussed possible Soviet concessions with Molotov, but if he did, no record survives. Evidently he expected Germany to demand Ukraine, the Caucasus oil fields, and unimpeded transit for the Wehrmacht through Soviet territory to engage the British in the Near East and India. In June, In the Steppes of Ukraine, the procollectivization farce by the Stalin Prize winner Oleksandr Korniychuk, opened in Moscow, as if to signal that those steppes would not be handed over.⁶⁷ The despot used Prague in the Greater Reich and other points to disseminate his own disinformation, which made its way to Berlin, about a supposed split in Soviet ruling circles—Stalin for concessions, military brass for war—and how even if Germany did not attack but proceeded to demand Ukraine, Stalin would be overthrown in a putsch by a “Russian patriotic-imperialist movement” eager to fight, forcing Germany into a two-front war.⁶⁸

Stalin’s disinformation campaign, too, was captive to German disinformation. Unlike Germany’s, it was not based upon genuine insight into his adversary’s thinking.