What was Stalin’s reaction to the suffering of his fellow citizens? The historical record gives no clear answer to this question, but there is no evidence that he felt the slightest remorse or pity. Nevertheless, he could not entirely ignore political realities. Although he still despised imaginary enemies and feared imaginary conspiracies, he never repeated his experiment in large-scale terror. After 1938, repression continued on a smaller scale and in a more routine manner.
The Great Terror damaged the Soviet Union’s international reputation. Stalin undoubtedly understood that people in the West, especially on the left, were shocked to learn that prominent revolutionaries were being put to death. In an effort to minimize the impact on public opinion, the campaign of repression was paralleled by an energetic propaganda campaign. Accounts of the Moscow trials—at which Lenin’s comrades-in-arms and other Old Bolsheviks admitted plotting terrorist acts against Stalin and having ties with foreign intelligence agencies—were translated into European languages and widely circulated. Prominent Western intellectuals and cultural figures were invited to Moscow. The German writer Lion Feuchtwanger met personally with Stalin and then wrote a book casting the Soviet Union in a favorable light. Caught between the hammer of Nazism and the anvil of Stalinism, many were ready to delude themselves as to the regime’s true nature. The West’s political decision makers, however, had every reason not only to distrust Stalin, but also to see the hysteria over supposed enemies as evidence of weakness. The purge of Red Army commanders and the execution of well-known Soviet marshals in particular made the regime appear unstable. The West clearly saw the Terror in very different terms than Stalin. Obsessed with the idea of a fifth column, Stalin simply failed to understand that his moves to arrest and shoot so many of his own citizens looked more like weakness and instability than strength.
To some extent the Western observers were right. Signs of the Terror’s devastating impact on Soviet military might soon became apparent. In June 1938, the NKVD general in charge of the Far East, Genrikh Liushkov, crossed the Soviet border into Manchuria and offered his services to the Japanese. This was of course a traitorous act, but Liushkov was pushed in that direction by Stalin. After faithfully serving the regime and spilling rivers of other people’s blood, he realized it would soon be his own turn to bleed. When a summons came to report to Moscow, Liushkov decided that his best option was to defect. Given his years as a top NKVD official in Moscow, his experience working face-to-face with Stalin, and his role as secret police chief of the militarily critical Far Eastern region, he had a great deal to offer. He was well informed about military readiness in the Far East and the makeup and placement of Soviet troops—and he shared all this information with the enemy. Stalin further undermined military preparedness in the Far East by ordering another wave of arrests within the army. Meanwhile, in July and August 1938, the Red Army clashed with Japanese forces near Lake Khasan, an area near the borders with Korea and China. Stalin closely monitored this conflict and demanded decisive action. In a conversation with the commander of the Far Eastern front, Marshal Vasily Bliukher (who had expressed his reluctance to use aviation), Stalin issued the following order: “I don’t understand your fear that bombing might hurt the Korean population or your fear that aviation won’t be able to fulfill its mission because of fog. Who forbade you to hurt the Korean population in time of war with Japan? Why would you care about Koreans when the Japanese are striking at lots of our people? What do a few clouds matter to Bolshevik aviation when it wants to truly defend the honor of its Motherland?”34
While the Battle of Lake Khasan ended favorably for the Soviet side, the clash exposed significant shortcomings in the combat readiness of Red Army troops and command structures. As usual, Stalin assumed that the army’s poor performance was the result of treachery. Marshal Bliukher was arrested and died in prison after being brutally tortured.
Repression and the perception of Soviet weakness were not the primary causes of Stalin’s deteriorating relations with the West. The mass arrests just added to Western leaders’ list of reasons for mistrusting him. A warming of relations with France in the mid-1930s did not last, despite the threat posed to both countries by the rapid rise of Nazism. In the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union and Western democracies found themselves in frequent disagreement. Underlying this tendency toward poor relations, despite their common collective security concerns, was the fundamental incompatibility of Stalinism with “bourgeois” democracy. During the second half of the 1930s Western leaders preferred to appease Hitler rather than form an alliance with Stalin, a trend that reached its climax with the Munich Agreement. On 30 September 1938, the leaders of Great Britain and France, Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier, signed an agreement with Hitler and Mussolini handing over Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, an area primarily populated by German speakers, to Germany. Czechoslovakia was forced to accept this devastating pact. The Soviet Union was simply ignored, even though it and France had signed mutual assistance agreements with Czechoslovakia. Stalin was shut out of European great power politics.
Stalin undoubtedly took such marginalization as a personal insult. Munich only intensified his fear that the democracies and fascists were conspiring against the USSR and planning to channel Nazi aggression eastward. He could not respond from a position of strength. In addition to expressing his outrage, in late September Stalin ordered a Red Army troop buildup along the USSR’s western border, a purely demonstrative move that is unlikely to have worried the Germans. In any event, just days later, in mid-October, the Politburo decided to disband the reserve units that had been mobilized in response to the events in Czechoslovakia. A total of 330,000 troops, 27,500 horses, and 5,000 vehicles and tractors were released from active duty.35
In practical terms, Stalin could do little about the Munich Agreement beyond trying to drive a wedge between the Western democracies and Hitler. To this end, he made a series of statements condemning Great Britain and France, while opening the door to improved bilateral relations with Germany. The most significant overture to Germany came during a speech at the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, in which Stalin warned the English and French that he had no intention of “pulling the chestnuts out of the fire” for them (a line that earned this address the nickname “the chestnut speech” in the West) and accused them of attempting to provoke conflict between the USSR and Germany. He told Germany that the Western powers had not succeeded in “enraging the Soviet Union against Germany, poisoning the atmosphere, and provoking conflict with Germany on no apparent grounds.”36 These pronouncements took on special significance several days later when Europe’s fragile peace was broken. Hitler, confident that no one would stop him, seized the entire territory of Czechoslovakia. Even the most optimistic observers now realized that Munich had made world war all but inevitable. As a third party to the growing conflict, Stalin and the Soviet Union were in a position to choose sides.
The spring and summer of 1939 were a time of urgent diplomatic maneuvering and negotiation. Understanding the nature of these efforts and the actual intentions of the parties involved was difficult enough for their direct participants, to say nothing of historians today. Nobody trusted anybody, and all were trying to outsmart their adversaries and partners alike. Such confusion was surely true of the talks between the Soviet Union and the Western powers of England and France. Progress was painfully slow, despite the efforts of Soviet foreign affairs commissar Maksim Litvinov, who staked his reputation on building cohesion among anti-Hitler forces.37 In early May 1939, Stalin relieved Litvinov of his duties and put Molotov in charge of foreign affairs. This change was undoubtedly intended as a gesture of friendship toward Germany, but it also radically reshaped foreign policy decision making. The new arrangement allowed Stalin to take full control of foreign affairs, not only in terms of their guiding principles (as he had always done), but also their day-to-day operations. Molotov, with whom Stalin was in almost constant conversation, was a more convenient foreign-policy right hand than Litvinov, who rarely visited Stalin’s office. Such practical details were important to the vozhd. At the top tier of Soviet power, government was adapted to Stalin’s habits and rhythms, and the choice of Molotov to oversee foreign affairs at this critical time is a prime example of this adaptation.