Domestic politics, state security and foreign policy were knotted together in the late 1930s. Stalin arrested hundreds of thousands of harmless Soviet citizens who were of an awkward national ancestry. Poles, Finns, Chinese and Koreans resident in border areas next to the states of their co-nationals were routinely deported to other distant regions of the USSR. Even the Greeks living in the Soviet republics by the Black Sea, hundreds of maritime miles from Greece, suffered this fate.1 Soviet state security policy had a national and ethnic dimension. While promoting the press and schooling for non-Russians in the Soviet multinational state, Stalin showed an intense hostility to some among them. What has become known as ethnic cleansing was not new to the USSR. The Politburo had practised such a policy against Cossacks in the north Caucasus at the end of the Civil War.2 Proposals for cleansing on the basis of nationality resurfaced at the start of the Five-Year Plan.3 But Stalin’s deportations, arrests and executions during and after the Great Terror mounted to a higher scale of national and ethnic repression.
The application of this policy did not exclude card-carrying communists in the Soviet Union. Stalin’s zeal to make the country safe from subversion from abroad went to the point of the extermination of the Communist Party of Poland exiles in Moscow. Polish communists were especially suspect to him. Several of their leaders had sympathised with Soviet internal oppositions in the 1920s. Earlier still, many of them had sided with the Polish Marxist leader and theorist Rosa Luxemburg against Lenin before the Great War. Stalin had anyway always fretted about the menace posed by Poland to the USSR. He was easily convinced by reports from Yezhov’s NKVD that the Polish exile community had been infiltrated by the intelligence agencies of the Western capitalist powers. Stalin was in no mind in November 1937 to treat people on an individual basis: he demanded the entire party’s dissolution. Dimitrov, himself a Bulgarian exile in Moscow, docilely complied and wrote to Stalin for procedural advice. Stalin replied with the blunt demand that Dimitrov should show a sense of urgency: ‘The dissolution is about two years late.’4 Already several Polish communist leaders were in the Lubyanka. The NKVD swiftly picked up the remainder, and most of the prisoners were shot.
Dimitrov’s obedience did not save the Comintern from Stalin’s suspicions. Scores of functionaries in its Executive Committee as well as its various departments were executed. No exemption was given to emissaries serving in Spain who were loyally slaughtering the POUM. Stalin and Yezhov tricked many of them back from Madrid and had them killed. Stalin was blunt to Dimitrov, raging that ‘all of you in the Comintern are hand in glove with the enemy’.5 In Moscow he could carry out the purge he desired. Abroad he got Dimitrov to compel the freely operating communist parties – few though they had become – in France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the USA – to expel members who refused to support the official line or who had sympathised with Stalin’s opponents in the past. This punitive atmosphere pervaded the worldwide communist movement. Stalin wanted only such support abroad as was unmistakably loyal.
As the Republicans went down to defeat in the Spanish Civil War, Stalin’s interest reverted to the French Communist Party and its policy toward Léon Blum’s socialist government. French communist leader Maurice Thorez, like his counterparts elsewhere in Europe, had been wary of the turn towards the popular front; but, having accepted it, he proposed to join Blum’s cabinet in 1936. Permission had to be sought in Moscow. When Moscow demurred, Thorez obeyed Moscow.6 Always the Kremlin kept tight tutelage and Stalin was in command. The chief restriction on his manoeuvres was the quality of information reaching him from the Executive Committee of the Comintern as well as from France and other countries; and leaders such as Thorez, much as they strove to please Stalin, draped their messages in the cloth of their political preferences. Stalin had confidence in the system of decision-making he had established. He also functioned according to his general assumptions about global developments. While recognising the importance of international relations, he could not afford to spend most of his time on them if he was to secure the kind of internal transformation he sought – and in the late 1930s the carrying through of the bloody mass purges remained his first priority. Only an extraordinarily decisive Leader could operate as he did on the European and Asian political stage.
This was obvious in his intervention in the affairs of the Chinese Communist Party. Stalin continued to demand that Mao Tse-tung maintain the alliance with Chiang Kai-shek. Although Mao thought that Stalin overrated the Chinese nationalist movement – the Kuomintang – led by Chiang Kai-shek, he sorely needed financial and political assistance from Moscow. ‘United front’ tactics were demanded by Stalin, and Mao had to accede. Since being suppressed by the Kuomintang in 1927, the Chinese Communist Party had regrouped. The Long March had been undertaken in 1934 to the north of China, where Mao consolidated the party’s support in the villages. The Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party remained intensely hostile to each other. Mutual suspicion spilled over into sporadic violence. Civil war was prevented only by the external threat posed by militarist Japan. The Japanese, who had occupied Manchuria in 1931 and set up the Manchukuo puppet state, plainly contemplated further territorial expansion. To Stalin, who as usual thought in broad geopolitical categories and desired to enhance the immediate security of the USSR, it seemed best for Mao and Chiang to put aside their rivalry; this was the advice supplied by the Comintern to the Chinese communists throughout the mid-1930s.
Mao continued to wriggle away from the Comintern line. No foreign communist party leader before the Second World War displayed such contumacy (as Stalin regarded it). Mao’s men hated the policy of alliance with Chiang and wanted to free themselves from it as soon as they could. Yet when Chiang was captured by an independent Chinese warlord, they found themselves compelled to send Zhou Enlai to secure his release. They had to do this or else face losing crucial military supplies from the USSR. Communist discipline had prevailed.7
The situation changed in July 1937 when the Japanese invaded China proper. Beijing and Shanghai fell quickly to their forces. The Chinese Red Army resumed a more co-operative attitude towards the Kuomintang in the national interest. Yet China’s joint forces were no match for Japan. Down the country swept the conquering army, carrying out massacres of civilians in the cities. Stalin pledged weapons and finance to the Chinese communists. He also reorganised his own borderlands. It was in these years that Stalin ordered ethnic purges of Koreans and Chinese living in the Soviet Far East. The regional leadership of the NKVD was replaced and the Red Army was put on alert for any menace from Japan’s Kwantung Army in Manchukuo. The two sides, Soviet and Japanese, kept each other guessing about their geopolitical pretensions. Frequent border skirmishes aggravated the situation and on 25 November 1936 the Japanese signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany and Italy. Concern in the Kremlin was acute. Stalin saw no point in diplomatic concessions, and when the Kwantung Army clashed with Soviet forces in May 1939 at Nomonhan, he met fire with fire. War broke out. The Red Army in the Far East was reinforced by tanks and aircraft. Commander Georgi Zhukov was dispatched to lead the campaign.8
The maps in east, south and west were being redrawn by militarism. The League of Nations had proved ineffective as Japan overran first Manchuria and then China. International protests failed to save Ethiopia from Italian conquest; and Germany, after intervening actively in the Spanish Civil War, annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. Yet until Nomonhan the Red Army had seen more action against Soviet peasant rebels than against the foreign enemies of the USSR. The great test of Stalin’s industrial and military preparations was at last taking place.
Despite the lacerations of the Great Terror, the Red Army acquitted itself well. Just as the Russians had expected an easy victory over an inferior enemy in 1904, the Japanese expected a Soviet military collapse. Intelligent and adaptive, Zhukov had learned much from the German training programmes observed on the soil of the USSR until 1933. Like Tukhachevski, he identified tank formations as essential to contemporary land warfare. His arrival in the Far East energised the Soviet offensive strategy. He had witnessed Stalin’s destruction of the Supreme Command and knew that nothing short of comprehensive victory over the Japanese would keep the NKVD off his back.9 His sole advantage was that Stalin, as had been the case since the Civil War, did not stint in the granting of men and equipment to his commanders. Zhukov plotted to outmatch the enemy in resources before taking them on. By August 1939 he had amassed such a force and could start his planned offensive. Stalin watched warily through the prism of reports reaching him from army commanders and the military intelligence agency. While Zhukov needed Stalin’s trust, Stalin needed Zhukov’s success in the campaign.
Stalin himself was being courted by Britain and France as their governments sought ways to restrain Hitler by means of an agreement with the USSR. Yet there was little urgency in the overtures. The British Foreign Office sent out a middle-ranking official by steamship to Leningrad instead of flying him out, and the official was not allowed to take any diplomatic initiative. Stalin, hedging his bets in European diplomacy, took the drastic step of letting Berlin know that he would not be averse to an approach from the Germans.
He had already expended a load of precious resources on extending the internal state terror to foreign parts. The extermination of Trotskyists and anarchists in Spain was just part of his repressive zeal. Assassinations were carried out against anti-communist Russian émigrés in Europe. Individual communist critics of Stalin were also targeted. The greatest quarry of all was Trotski. Huge priority was accorded by the Soviet intelligence organs to funding and organising attempts on his life. Shunted from one country to another, he had finally found refuge in Coyoacán on the outskirts of Mexico City. No longer a fundamental threat to Stalin in the Kremlin, Trotski had infuriated him by publishing the Bulletin of the Opposition and organising the Fourth International. The first attack on him in Coyoacán was led by the mural artist David Alfaro Siqueiros. It failed, and Trotski reinforced his security precautions. But Stalin was obsessed with his wish to kill him. The second attack was more subtly arranged. NKVD agent Ramón Mercader managed to infiltrate the Trotski household by posing as a follower of his. On 20 August 1940 he had the opportunity he had awaited in the villa and plunged a mountaineering ice-pick into Trotski’s head.
The hunting down of Stalin’s mortal enemy had involved a large diversion of resources from other tasks of espionage.10 Nevertheless the Soviet spy network was not ineffective in the 1930s. Communism was seen by many European anti-fascists as the sole bulwark against Hitler and Mussolini. A small but significant number of them volunteered their services to the USSR. Stalin and the NKVD could also count on regular reports from communist parties in Europe and North America.
This provided the Soviet leadership with the information to formulate its foreign policy on the basis of sound knowledge about the likely response from abroad. In Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom the NKVD had high-level spies with extraordinary access to state secrets. The problem was not the provision of information but its processing and distribution. Stalin insisted on restricting the reports from diplomatic and espionage agencies to a tiny handful of associates. An inner group of the Politburo was established to monitor, discuss and decide. But such was his suspicion towards fellow politicians in the Kremlin that he often let no one else inspect the available reports. As crises in international relations multiplied and deepened before 1939, this meant that the actions of the USSR depended crucially, to a much greater extent even than in Germany, on the lonely calculations of the Leader. Simultaneously he was also examining reports on the entire gamut of internal policies on politics, security, economy, society, religion, nationhood and culture. His time for scrutinising the material flowing from abroad was finite. The reportage was always contradictory in content; it was also of diverse degrees of reliability. Stalin’s mistrust of his associates meant that he wasted the advantages supplied by his intelligence network.11
He was culpable too for reducing the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs to a shadow of its former self. The Great Terror had removed hundreds of qualified personnel. Jews in particular were repressed. The result was that after 1937–8 every functionary in Moscow and the embassies avoided saying anything that might conceivably cause trouble. Strong, direct advice to Stalin was eschewed.
Nerves of steel were required for Stalin and his Politburo associates as they followed events in Europe and Asia in 1939. His personal interventions in diplomatic affairs were becoming ever more frequent, and on 5 May 1939 he formalised the situation by changing the leadership of Sovnarkom. Stalin installed himself as Chairman for the first time. This was a step he had until then resisted; since 1930 he had been content to let Molotov run the government. The darkening picture of international relations induced a change of mind. Molotov, though, was not discarded but assigned to the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs. Maxim Litvinov was eventually, in 1941, appointed ambassador to the USA. His known preference for a system of collective security against the fascist threat in Europe had appeared to limit Soviet diplomatic options in mid-1939. The door was opened for a more flexible foreign policy towards Nazi Germany if the opportunity arose. (The fact that Litvinov was Jewish was a further impediment to conciliation with Hitler.) Molotov was Stalin’s senior henchman as well as a Russian. Yet another signal was being given that Stalin believed highly important developments to be in the offing.
This has led to speculation that he was playing a long-term hand with a view to a deal with Germany. This was a tradition in Soviet foreign policy. When socialist revolution failed to break out in Berlin after October 1917, Lenin persistently sought to regenerate the Soviet economy by means of German concessionaires. Without German assistance, whether socialist or capitalist, he saw little chance of restoring industry and agriculture across the country. The Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 went some way in this direction. Did Stalin have a similar orientation? It is surely most unlikely. He had introduced the First Five-Year Plan so as to liberate the USSR from dependency on all foreign support, even if, for a few years, imports of American and German technology had to continue.
Stalin’s observation of the world since the Wall Street Crash confirmed his set of ideas. To him, capitalism appeared inherently unstable. It was also, however, still dangerous. Until such time as the Red Army was an unchallengeable force on two continents it behoved Soviet diplomacy to manoeuvre towards agreements with foreign powers. Even Germany, despite being ranged on the opposite side in the Spanish Civil War, was not necessarily irreconcilable. Like Japan, Germany was a constant geopolitical factor to be taken into account in his calculations. But increasingly he felt that the USSR’s industrial and military achievements were allowing a more active foreign policy. In the 1920s, when military commanders Mannerheim and Piłsudski held power in Finland and Poland, the Politburo was perpetually worried about their depredatory intentions. In the following decade these fears diminished. The Red Army was a power to be reckoned with. In 1939 its forces were at war with Japan and holding their own. The People’s Commissariat of External Affairs could deal with bordering states – Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria – from a position of strength. Their potential to cause damage to the USSR would only be realised if they concerted their efforts. But after Hitler’s rise to power they were more concerned about being conquered by the Germans than exercised by thoughts of bringing down Bolshevism in Moscow.
Germany, though, could act independently. Its successive campaigns of expansion had been condoned by the United Kingdom and France. Soviet diplomatic attempts to organise resistance had been rebuffed. Stalin had offered assistance to Czechoslovakia before its destruction in March 1939. Whether he was seriously intending to commit the Red Army is doubtful. He was making a public statement of the USSR’s anti-fascism in the knowledge that the British and French were most unlikely to take a stand against Hitler. The Czechoslovaks themselves were reluctant to have Soviet armed units on their soil. In spring and summer 1939 Hitler increased the pressure on Poland. He evidently had his eyes on Danzig on the Baltic coast. Poland was under military threat, and yet its politicians refused to ally with the USSR. Soviet–Polish enmity was an irremovable feature of Warsaw’s calculations. In these circumstances it was hardly surprising that Stalin began to consider whether a deal with Hitler might be preferable to standing wholly outside developments in eastern Europe.
Stalin relied primarily upon military power, intelligence reports and diplomatic finesse to see him through. The Comintern was a weak source of assistance. The Chinese communists were incapable of defeating the Japanese and had yet to crush the Kuomintang. The German communists were dead or in concentration camps – and a few were émigrés in the USSR. Communism as a political force in central and eastern Europe was on its knees. In Spain and Italy too it was battered. In the rest of the world, including North America, it still counted for little. In the United Kingdom it was a minor irritant to the status quo, mainly to the British Labour Party. In only one country, France, did the communist party retain a mass following. But the French communists were but one party on the left. Although they could organise industrial strikes and political demonstrations, they were chiefly a disruptive factor in national politics. Stalin was often criticised, especially by Trotski’s Fourth International, for turning away from the Comintern in the 1930s. The reality was that the world communist movement offered little hope of making revolutions.
Even if a revolution had broken out, there would have been complications for Soviet military and security policy. The USSR had few options in the last years of the decade. Stalin, who had always been sceptical about forecasts of a European revolutionary upsurge, reposed his immediate confidence in the activity of the Soviet state. This did not mean that he had abandoned belief in the inevitability of socialist revolution around the world. The global ‘transition’, he thought, would eventually take place as had been predicted by Marx, Engels and Lenin. But he was realistic about the current weakness of the world communist movement; and being a man who liked to operate with a broad programmatic scheme at any given time, he put his trust in his army, in his intelligence agencies and – above all – in himself and his subordinate partner Molotov.
Stalin and Molotov, with their limited diplomatic experience, assumed dual responsibility; and although Molotov occasionally stood up to Stalin in matters of ideology,12 they never clashed about foreign policy. But this commonalty increased the country’s jeopardy. Stalin could scarcely have fashioned a more perilous arrangement in which decisions of state might be taken. He alone took the supreme decisions. On his mental acuity depended the fate of his country and peace in Europe and the Far East. Most leaders would have lost sleep over this burden of responsibility. Not Stalin. He was supremely self-confident now that he had liquidated those prominent intellectuals who had made him feel edgy and – deep down in his mental recesses – inadequate. He learned fast and prided himself on his mastery of detail. He had never lacked will power. The rest of the Politburo, terrified by the purges of 1937–8 and immersed in their other vast functions of governance, left foreign policy to the Boss. Steadily the inner group was left out of discussions. Yet its members remained impressed by his competence and determination. This was a situation which beckoned to disaster. Disaster was not long in paying a visit.