Part Six
THE GREAT GAME
Hitler and Stalin
1939–1941
28. THE CARVE-UP OF EUROPE
Molotov, Ribbentrop and Stalin’s Jewish Question
When Stalin concentrated on diplomacy, he first aimed his guns at his own diplomats. On the night of 3 May 1939, NKVD troops surrounded the Foreign Commissariat, bringing home the urgency of the countdown to war and the coming revolution of alliances. Molotov, Beria and Malenkov arrived to inform Maxim “Papasha” Litvinov, the worldly rambunctious champion of European peace through “collective security,” that he had been sacked. This was not a surprise to Litvinov: Stalin would pat his Foreign Commissar and say, “You see, we can reach agreement.”
“Not for long,” Papasha Litvinov replied.
The new Foreign Commissar was Molotov, already the Premier. Stalin emerged from the Terror more paranoid and more confident, a state of mind that made him, if anything, less equipped to analyse the dangerous international situation. Mikoyan noticed this new Stalin “was an utterly changed person—absolutely suspicious, ruthless and boundlessly selfconfident, often speaking of himself in the third person. I think he went barmy.” Kaganovich recalled that he hardly ever called together the Politburo now, deciding most things informally. Stalin does not “know the West,” thought Litvinov. “If our opponents were a bunch of shahs and sheikhs, he’d outwit them.” Nor were his two main advisers, Molotov and Zhdanov, any better qualified. Stalin educated himself by reading history, particularly Bismarck’s memoirs, but he did not realize that the Iron Chancellor was a conventional statesman compared to Hitler. Henceforth Stalin quoted Talleyrand and Bismarck liberally.
Molotov always said that Bolshevik politics was the best training for diplomacy and regarded himself as a politician not a diplomat, but he was proud of his new career: “Everything was in Stalin’s fist, in my fist,” he said. But he worked in his tireless, methodical way under immense pressure, arguing ideas through with Stalin, while terrorizing his staff in “blind rages.” Yet in his letters to his wife Polina, he revealed the vainglory and passion within: “We live under constant pressure not to miss something… I so miss you and our daughter, I want to hold you in my arms, to my breast with all your sweetness and charm…” More direct and less intellectual than Stalin, he told Polina that he was starting to read not about Talleyrand but about Hitler. Apart from the smouldering desire for Polina, the most amusing part of these letters was the unabashed delight Molotov took in his new fame. “I can tell you, without boasting,” he boasted, “that our opposite numbers feel… they deal with people that know their stuff.”
Stalin and Molotov developed into an international double act of increasing subtlety, masters of the old “good cop, bad cop” routine. Stalin was always more radical and reckless, Molotov the stolid analyst of the possible, but neither saw any contradiction between imperial expansionism and their Marxist crusade: on the contrary, the former was the best way to empower the latter.
Europe in early 1939 was, in Stalin’s own words, a “poker game” with three players, in which each hoped to persuade the other two to destroy one another and leave the third to take the winnings. The three players were the Fascists of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the Capitalists of Neville Chamberlain’s Britain allied with Daladier’s France—and the Bolsheviks. Though the Georgian admired the flamboyant brutality of the Austrian, he appreciated the danger of a resurgent Germany militarily, and the hostility of Fascism.
Stalin regarded the Western democracies as at least as dangerous as Germany. He had matured politically during their intervention during the Civil War. He instinctively felt he could work with Hitler. As soon as the “Austrian corporal” took power, Stalin began probing gently, advised by Karl Radek, his German expert, and using as personal emissaries Abel Yenukidze and David Kandelaki. The sensitivity of these discussions was absolute since Stalin was simultaneously shooting thousands as German agents, with the country in a frenzy of Prussophobic war preparations. The legates were shot.
Hitler kept Stalin at arm’s length as long as the democracies continued to appease him. But the Munich agreement convinced Stalin that the West was not serious about stopping Hitler. On the contrary, Stalin was sure that they were willing to let Hitler destroy Soviet Russia. Munich rendered Litvinov’s “collective security” bankrupt. Stalin warned the West that the Soviet Union would not be left to “pick their chestnuts out of the fire.” The way forward was a division of the world into “spheres.” This was an oblique signal to Germany that he would deal with whoever would deal with him. Berlin noted the change. Afterwards, at the Plenum, Stalin attacked Litvinov.
“Does that mean you regard me as an Enemy of the People?” asked plucky Litvinov. Stalin hesitated as he left the halclass="underline" “No, we don’t consider Papasha an Enemy. Papasha’s an honest revolutionary.”[149]
Meanwhile, Molotov and Beria were terrorizing a meeting of their worldly diplomats, many of them Jewish Bolsheviks at home in the great capitals of Europe. Beria glanced around at them.
“Nazarov,” he said. “Why did they arrest your father?”
“Lavrenti Pavlovich, you no doubt know better than I.”
“You and I will talk about that later,” laughed Beria.
The Foreign Commissariat was almost next door to the Lubianka and the two ministries were nicknamed “the Neighbours.” Molotov’s deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov, forty-one, another of Beria’s intelligent Caucasian henchmen, supervised the purge of diplomats. This red-haired midget, with a taste for English movies (he called his son Reginald) and teenage girls, was a failed medical student who had known Beria since university when they both joined the Cheka. He was a Russified Georgian. Molotov joked that he was an Armenian pretending to be Georgian to please Stalin, who nicknamed him “Slow Kartvelian” after his region of origin. At Kuntsevo, Stalin mocked his ugliness. When he appeared at the door, Stalin said sarcastically to general laughter:
“Such a handsome man! Look at him! I’ve never seen anything like it!”
The press officer of the Foreign Commissariat, Yevgeni Gnedin, himself a piece of revolutionary history as the son of Parvus, Lenin’s financier and middle man with Kaiserine Germany, was arrested by Dekanozov and taken to Beria’s office where he was ordered to confess to spying. When he refused, Beria ordered him to lie on the floor while the Caucasian “giant” Kobulov beat him on the skull with blackjacks. Gnedin was a “lucky stiff.” In July, Beria ordered Prince Tsereteli to kill the Soviet Ambassador to China, Bovkun-Luganets, and his wife, in cold blood in a faked car accident (the method of killing those too eminent to just disappear).[150]
Stalin’s diplomatic Terror was designed to appeal to Hitler: “Purge the ministry of Jews,” he said. “Clean out the ‘synagogue.’” “Thank God for these words,” Molotov (married to a Jewess) explained. “Jews formed an absolute majority and many ambassadors…”1
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This sort of courage counted for something with Stalin. Litvinov, who was three years older than Stalin, could never curb his tongue. That cosmopolitan curmudgeon complained to his friends of Stalin’s “narrow-mindedness, smugness, ambitions and rigidity” while he called Molotov “a halfwit,” Beria “a careerist” and Malenkov “shortsighted.” Molotov said that Litvinov remained “among the living only by chance” yet Stalin always just preserved him, despite Molotov’s hatred for the much more impressive diplomat, because he was so respected in the West that he might be useful again. There was a story that Litvinov had saved Stalin from being beaten up by dockers in London in 1907: “I haven’t forgotten that time in London,” Stalin used to say.
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They planned to do the same to Litvinov but his English wife, Ivy, was terrified of imminent arrest and when she confided this to some American friends, the letter ended up on Stalin’s desk. He phoned Papasha: “You’ve an extremely courageous and outspoken wife. You should tell her to calm herself. She’s not threatened.”