334. “I am certain that even if the Germans were given more than they ask for they would attack just the same, because they are possessed by the demon of destruction,” Ciano recorded in his diary after meetings with Ribbentrop and Hitler on Aug. 11–12. Ciano, Diary, 118–20 (Aug. 11–13, 1939).
335. See the cryptic notes on Sept. 1939 by Orlova, Vospominaniia, 101. This passage was omitted from the translation: Orlova, Memoirs, 90–1.
336. Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 178.
337. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 451, l. 37–40, 57. On Oct. 7, 1939, the actor Boris Shchukin died suddenly, at age forty-five; he had been in the company of the Vakhtangov since 1920, where he played more than one hundred roles, including Lenin, and been named a USSR People’s Artist in 1936. But he had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown, after which he had developed a heart condition.
338. Trying to take advantage of the Pact, Boris Pasternak approached the journal Znamia in early Nov. 1939 to try to publish his three-year-old translation of the German writer Heinrich von Kleist’s Prince of Homburg (1809–10). The play, about the necessity of unquestioning obedience to orders, was enjoying good runs in theaters in Nazi Germany. But Znamia (under Vishnevsky) rebuffed Pasternak. Still, the play was published in a collection of translations: Pasternak, Izbrannye perevody; Tarasenkov, “Pasternak.”
339. “Thus begins a politics resembling a fight between two wild animals,” the antifascist Vishnevsky recorded in his diary on Oct. 5, 1939. “Uncommon cunning, but diplomatic, military, and hunting tricks—a common phenomenon between wild animals. This is what our Russian person fears, when he hears about ‘friendship’ with fascism.” Vishnevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, VI: 298.
340. Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 37.
341. Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945, 262–71. In Nov. 1939, Halder did engage acquaintances in the officers corps, civil service, and counterintelligence in conversation about possibly arresting Hitler and putting Göring in power (who was known to oppose war with Britain and France), but the plotters panicked and abandoned their talks.
342. Moorhouse, Killing Hitler, 49 (citing Bundesarchiv, Elser interrogation file, BA R30001/310/106).
CHAPTER 12. SMASHED PIG
1. Biulleten’ oppozitsii, no. 79–80 (Aug.–Oct. 1939), 14–6.
2. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 124–5 (Jan. 21, 1940).
3. Monakov, “Zachem Stalin stroil okeanskii flot?”; Rohwer and Monakov, Stalin’s Ocean-Going Fleet. A key motivation had been the Anglo-German Naval Agreement that had abandoned Versailles Treaty restrictions on the size of the German fleet. Ivanov, Morskoe sopernichestvo imperialisticheskikh derzhav; Morskoi sbornik, 1937, no. 9: 114–25. Contrary to some analyses, the key prompt was not the Spanish Civil War. Voroshilov, as early as the 17th Party Congress, in Jan. 1934, had promised that, as a result of industrialization, “we shall be able to create our shipbuilding industry and soon produce our fleets.” Herrick, Soviet Naval Strategy, 38–45; XVII s”ezd, 230. Naval commander Vladimir Orlov had presented the initial draft of a big-fleet program in early Feb. 1936 and later detailed it publicly in a speech to the Congress of Soviets (Nov. 28, 1936). Gromov, Tri veka Rossiiskogo Flota, II: 340–3; Pravda, Nov. 29, 1936; Orlov, “Rech’ tov V. M. Orlova.”
4. The naval commissariat was approved Dec. 30, 1937. Pravda, January 17, 1938. Between May 1937 and Sept. 1938, more than 3,000 naval officers were executed. During the second Five-Year Plan (1933–37) Soviet naval academies graduated about the same number of green officers. Gromov, Tri veka Rossiiskogo flota, III: 358. Admiral ranks would be restored on May 7, 1940; Kuznetsov, Galler, and Isaakov became admirals.
5. Rohwer and Monakov, “Soviet Union’s Ocean-Going Fleet,” 855.
6. “Thus ended the conversation about battleships,” Kuznetsov commented, “whose construction was already going full speed ahead, while I as a Navy commissar was still not quite clear in my head why they were being built at all!” Kiselev, Admiral Kuznetsov, 105. As Hauner explains of the impossible fleet plans, in 1939 “the Soviets lacked much basic industrial infrastructure: their gun factories could not yet produce or test guns of sixteen-inch caliber; boilers for the powerful steam turbines could not have been manufactured until after the war; there was no sophisticated optical equipment for fire control.” Hauner, “Stalin’s Big-Fleet Program,” 106. In 1939, the Soviets remained a one-ocean power—i.e., the Arctic, frozen much of the year.
7. Aselius, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Navy; Philbin, Lure of Neptune.
8. Kuznetsov signed off on the new plan on July 27, 1940. Kuznetsov, “Voenno-Morskoi flot nakanune Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny”; Rohwer and Monakov, Stalin’s Ocean-Going Fleet, 71–106 (citing RGA VMF, f. 2, d. 39526, l. 1–33). Of the 25 billion rubles that would be earmarked for weapons systems in 1940, almost one quarter would go to the navy. The Soviets never completed the colossal battleships, but by the middle of 1941 they would have 267 submarines, more than any other country.
9. Stalin dispatched deputy commissar Admiral Ivan Isakov in May 1939 to the United States, but he proved unable to achieve a breakthrough in the negotiations (asking for the moon), and the attack on Finland ended them. FRUS, The Soviet Union, 1933–1939, 457–91, 670–707, 869–903; Davies, Mission to Moscow, 208. See also Maddux, Years of Estrangement, 86–8, 96–8. Stalin had unexpectedly appeared at negotiations with then U.S. Ambassador Davies in 1938, offering to settle repudiated tsarist-era debts in return for access to naval technology. The disadvantage of the Komsomolsk shipyard was the Amur’s lack of depth, forcing larger ships to be towed downstream after launch to be fitted out at Pacific Coast shipyards.
10. On Oct. 26, 1939, a sixty-person Soviet delegation led by shipbuilding commissar Ivan Tevosyan arrived in Berlin with a breathtaking wish list: complete materials for building four light cruisers; two hulls of heavy cruisers (Admiral Hipper class); ship and coastal guns (all calibers); torpedoes and mines; optical range finders, fire control directors, and hydro-acoustical devices; and entire blueprints for the battleship Bismarck, the Hipper-class heavy cruisers, Scharnhorst-class battle cruiser, and aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin. Hauner, “Stalin’s Big-Fleet Program.” Bezymensky, “Sovetsko-Germanskie dogovory.” Thanks to Göring’s intercession, Tevosyan managed to inspect the Krupp plants in Essen twice in Nov. 1939. Von Strandmann, “Appeasement and Counter-Appeasement,” 167 (citing HA Krupp, WA 7, F 1044, Sept. 7 and Nov., 1114–5, 1939).
11. See Stalin’s self-justifying remarks on April 17, 1940, analyzing the Finnish campaign, in Chubarian and Shukman, Stalin and the Soviet-Finnish War, 263–75 (at 263). Stalin repeated this point a year later: Naumov, 1941 god, II: 599–608 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 165, d. 77, l. 178–211).
12. Bernev and Rupasov, Zimniaia voina, 85–112 (at 85–6: July 13, 1939). In 1932, Helsinki signed a nonaggression pact with Moscow, initially for just three years at Finnish insistence, but reaffirmed in 1934 for ten years. After the Nazis came to power, moreover, German-Finnish relations cooled for a time. But anti-Soviet agitation persisted on the part of Finnish nationalist pressure groups, whose activists the NKVD assessed as mere cover for the Finnish government. Stover, “Finnish Military Politics”; Rintala, Three Generations; Bernev and Rupasov, Zimniaia voina, 17–55 (1934), 58–82 (April 12, 1936); Backlund, “Nazi Germany and Finland.” The treaty and its subsequent modifications can be found in Development of Finnish-Soviet Relations, 23–37.