Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

Winston Churchill, trailed by his wife and personal secretary, survey the damage in London from Luftwaffe bombing, 1940. Churchill interrupted the Molotov-Hitler summit with stepped-up Royal Air Force bombing raids.

Confrontation: Molotov-Hitler, with Gustav Hilger interpreting. Reich Chancellery, November 12, 1940.

Molotov and Rudolf Hess (right), deputy führer of the Nazi party. Hilger (left) and Vladimir Pavlov (back to camera) interpreting. Berlin, November 13, 1940.

The arrival of a new Soviet ambassador to Berlin, Vladimir Dekanozov, flanked by Ernst Woermann (German foreign ministry), Gustav Adolph von Halem (deputy chief of protocol), Friedrichstrasse train station, November 28, 1940. Behind Dekanozov is Amayak Kobulov, the head of Soviet intelligence in Berlin.

Stalin seeing off Japanese foreign minister Yōsuke Matsuoka (wearing glasses) at Moscow’s Yaroslavl train station, following the signing of a bilateral neutrality pact, April 13, 1941.

Semyon Timoshenko (left) and Georgy Zhukov, the new Red Army leadership, on fall maneuvers, September 1940.

Filipp Golikov, yet another head of Soviet military intelligence.

Pavel Fitin, a very young head of NKVD (then NKGB) intelligence.

THE TOP SOVIET SPIES

Rudolf von Scheliha (“Aryan”), German Foreign Ministry.

Ilse Stöbe (“Alta”), the contact for “Aryan.”

Richard Sorge (“Ramsay”), German embassy in Tokyo.

Harro Schulze-Boysen (“Elder”), German aviation ministry.

Arvid Harnack (“Corsican”), German economics ministry.

Stalin’s markings (in green pencil) on the cover letter accompanying an NKVD intelligence report, June 17, 1941, about the pending German invasion: “To com. Merkulov: You can send your ‘source’ from German aviation HQ to his fucking mother. This is not a ‘source’ but a disinformationist. I.S.”

NOTES

Full citations can be found in the bibliography.

PART I. EQUAL TO THE MYTH

1. Pravda, Nov. 7, 1935: 2. This quote would be reprinted later: Stalin: k shestidesiatiletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow: Pravda, 1940), 75.

2. Kumanev, Riadom so Stalinym, 387–9 (Yakov Chadayev).

3. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 665, l. 361.

4. Murin, Stalin v ob”iatiakh, 158 (Svanidze diary: Nov. 4, 1934).

5. Sergeev and Glushik, Besedy o Staline, 47.

6. Svechin’s conception entailed a war of attrition; Tukhachevsky, among others, would favor attack and preemption. Stone, “Misreading Svechin.” About 5,000 of Stalin’s books would be kept together (in the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute). There would be all told 397 books, pamphlets, and articles with his markings, 72 of which are writings by Lenin, another 13 by Marx and Engels in Russian translation, while 25 are works he wrote.

7. Sergeev and Glushik, Besedy o Staline, 23–4.

8. Vaiskopf, Pisatel’ Stalin, 17–22.

9. The drawing was by Valērijs Mežlauks. Vatlin and Malashenko, Istoriia VKP (b) v portretakh i karikaturakh ee vozhdei, 110.

10. Khlevniuk et al., Stenogrammy zasedanii politbiuro, III: 551.

11. Sergeev and Glushik, Besedy o Staline, 48.

12. Kurliandskii, Stalin, vlast’, religiia, 67–8.

13. In a 1931 interview with the German writer Emil Ludwig, Stalin would without irony denounce the seminary “fathers” for their “humiliating regime” and “Jesuitical methods” of “surveillance, espionage, penetration of one’s soul.” Sochineniia, XIII: 113–4. The picture of the seminary during Stalin’s youth would become more severe in 1930s memoirs. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 665, l. 184 (Nikolai Makhatadze, 1936).

14. Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragödie Georgiens, 23. One Gori classmate would imagine in 1932 that Stalin had rejected God because he had decided to be a god himself.

15. Ilizarov, Tainaia zhizn’ Stalina. In his copy of Lev Kamenev’s biography of the iconic Russian writer Chernyshevsky (1933), Stalin underlined a passage about the discipline instilled by observance of religious rites. (Chernyshevsky had also studied in a seminary.) RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 84, l. 11; Kamenev, Chernyshevskii.

16. Vaiskopf, Pisatel’ Stalin, 163; Ilizarov, Tainaia zhizn’ Stalina, 63, 66.

17. Segrè, Italo Balbo.

18. Elisabedashvili recalled that Stalin “was given this nickname [Geza] by Ambilarashvili, once a good friend of his, who died in 1911 and was buried in Gori. Apart from us no one knew this name, since otherwise he was called ‘Koba.’” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 665; the “Geza” reference was cut when these reminiscences were published in Molodaya Gvardiya, 1939, no. 12: 86–7.

19. Loginov, Teni Stalina, 116. Stalin had contracted smallpox at age seven.