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.