276. Back in 1934, Stalin’s ambassador to Poland (Yakov Davtyan) had confided in the American ambassador his “doubt concerning the capacity of Poland to exist as an independent nation”—a widely held Soviet prejudice. The next year, Piłsudski, dictator of Poland, had died. “Piłsudski is the entire Poland,” Radek claimed he had heard Stalin say. Kuromiya, “Stalin’s Great Terror,” 8 (citing Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, I.303.4.3158, 235).
277. Wańkowicz, Po klęsce, 612.
278. Pikhoia and Gieysztor, Katyn’: plenniki, 77 (RGVA, f. 35084, op. 1, d. 8, l. 168), 78–83 (Tsentr khraneniia istoriko-dokumental’nykh kollektsii, f. 1/p, op. 1a, d. 1, l. 1–9), 89–92 (l. 63–7), 92–5 (op. 1e, d. 1, l. 17–18), 114–8 (APRF, f. 3 op. 5, d. 614, l. 228–30), and 118–9 (APRF, f. 3, op. 50, d. 410, l. 148–9).
279. Freidländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, I: 267–8; Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, 467–9; Melzer, No Way Out, 22, 43, 91; Milton, “Expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany”; Heller, On the Edge of Destruction.
280. Buell, Poland, 307 (General Stanisław Skwarczyński).
281. Westermann, Hitler’s Police Battalions, 124–8; Madajczyk, Die Okkupationspolitik Nazi-Deutschlands, 19–20.
282. Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, 41ff.
283. Fritzsche, Life and Death.
284. Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 48.
285. DGFP, series D, VIII: 77 (Schulenburg, Sept. 16, 1939). Stalin in Aug. 1923 had predicted the need for “a war against Poland, and possibly the other limitrofa states,” in connection with revolution in Germany. (“Naznachit’ revolutsiia v Germanii na 9 noiabria,” 133.) Tukhachevsky shared this view and his close friend, the Polish Communist Tomasz Dąbal, deputy general secretary of the fledgling Peasant International, in May 1925 had spoken openly in Red Star, the Red Army newspaper, of “a right to separate [the Ukrainians and Belorussians] from Poland and join them to the Soviet republics.” Krasnaia zvezda, May 7, 1925. According to French military intelligence, basing itself on a Polish source, the Soviet military commander Uborevičius, an ethnic Lithuania, had stated ingratiatingly at a banquet in Berlin with the German military brass on Feb. 1, 1930, “Have we not moved far enough in the past two years to be able to pose the question of a revision of the borders and a drubbing of the Poles? In fact, we ought to partition Poland again.” Castellan, Le réarmement clandestin du Reich, 185 (citing letter att. mil., Berlin, no. 152: 295, March 28, 1930).
286. Gross, Revolution from Abroad, chap. 1, 206. Sukiennicki, “Establishment of the Soviet Regime”; Vakar, Byelorussia, 164–5, 168–9. Perhaps ten thousand more Ukrainians were repatriated westward as labor power by Nazi intelligence under falsified German racial origin designations.
287. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia, 80–1.
288. Vernadsky also pointed out a lack of white bread even for those with the money to pay, a decline in the quality of black bread, queues for vodka, and general dissatisfaction and hardship. Vernadskii, Dnevniki, 1935–1941, II: 56. See also Nevehzin, “Pol’sha v sovetskoi propagande,” 69–88. Bolshevik, the party journal, in its Sept. 1939 issue called the Red Army’s crossing into eastern Poland “a liberation” of ethnic Ukrainians and Belorussians, while making no mention of the Pact. The same issue celebrated the first anniversary of the Short Course and the country’s pending progress in Marxist-Leninist training. Bol’shevik, 1939, no. 17: 6–11, 12–21. Identical treatment appeared in Ogonyok (no. 24 [1939]: 1–7), which had a thrice-monthly circulation of 300,000. On a poster by Viktor Korecki, printed in four languages and 800,000 copies, Stalin was quoted as declaring, “Our army is an army of liberators.”
289. “SSSR v voine,” Biulleten’ oppozitsii, no. 79–80 (1939): 8.
290. Iskusstvo kino, 1940, no. 1–2: 44. “In the heat of our work the radio brought news of the historic decision of the Soviet Government,” enthused the director Yefim Dzigan of First Cavalry Army. Kino, Nov. 7, 1939. Semyon Goldstab [b. 1906], who had debuted the Stalin role in Lenin in October, played him again. The real Stalin hand-corrected the screenplay. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 165, l. 1. See also Chernova and Tokarev, “‘Pervaia Konnaia’”; Vishnevskii, “Pervaia konnaia.” During the Nov. 7, 1939, commemoration of the October Revolution, Burning Years would be screened outdoors on Moscow’s Sverdlov Square, across from the Bolshoi Theater.
291. Krasnaia zvezda, Oct. 17, 1938.
292. Tokarev, “‘Kará panam! Kará,’” 49 (citing RGVA, f. 9, op. 36, d. 3792, l. 221), and Lebedeva, Katyn’: prestuplenie, 112.
293. Cienciala, “The Foreign Policy of Józef Piłsudski and Józef Beck,” 130–43; Kornat “Anna Maria Cienciala,” 37.
294. Stalin told the staunch antifascist Georgi Dimitrov, “Now [Poland is] a fascist state, oppressing Ukrainians, Belarussians, and so forth. The annihilation of that state under current conditions would mean one fewer bourgeois fascist state to contend with!” Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 116 (Sept. 7, 1939).
295. For example, Duraczyński and Sakharov, Sovetsko-Pol’skie otnosheniia, 67–70.
296. Primakov, Ocherki, III: 291.
297. Volobuev and Kuleshov, Ochishchenie, 157; Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, 22 (citing Pravda, Dec. 21, 1994). Before the revolution, of Bogdanov’s critique of Lenin (which continued to circulate underground into the 1930s), Stalin had written privately in a letter, “How do you like Bogdanov’s new book? In my opinion some of Ilich’s blunders are very tellingly and correctly noted. It is also correctly pointed out that Ilich’s materialism differs in many ways from that of Plekhanov, which in spite of the demands of logic (and for the sake of diplomacy?) Ilich tries to cover over.” Dubinskii-Mukhadze, Ordzhonikidze, 92–3, n1. Stalin also wrote something similar in a letter to Mikho Tskhkaya: Istoriia KPSS, 6 vols. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1967), II: 272.
298. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 257–63. Van Ree, Political Thought, 107–8.
299. Jasny, Soviet Economy, 418; Allen, Farm to Factory, 107–8. Some 77 percent of Soviet camp inmates at this time were ethnic Russians or Ukrainians.
300. Afanas’ev et al., Istoriia Stalinskogo Gulaga, 158 (RGANI f. 89, op. 73, d. 3, l. 1–2). A “labor day” was worth nothing in 15,700 out of 240,000 collective farms. Hosking, First Socialist Society, 169.
301. Khlevniuk et al., Stalinskoe politbiuro, 171–2 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 25, l. 156; f. 17, op. 3, d. 1015, l. 30; f. 17, op. 3, d. 1016, l. 33; f. 17, 163, d. 1237, l. 223–4); Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 242–4.
302. Fel’shtinskii, SSSR-Germaniia, I: 103–4; Sontag and Beddie, Nazi-Soviet Relations, 102; Ulam, Stalin, 515. Warsaw fell on Sept. 26.
303. “Upon his arrival in Moscow, von Ribbentrop was welcomed by a group of Soviet officials and by Count Schulenburg,” wrote Herwarth. “I was standing next to Gebhardt von Walther,” who “seized my arm and pointed to a group of Gestapo agents who warmly greeted their counterparts from the NKVD.” Herwarth, Against Two Evils, 165.