*
It went on like this almost day after day during that winter of 1938-9. "The Red Army is Invincible," Pravda wrote on Red Army Day, February 23, 1939, and E. Shchadenko, Deputy Commissar for Defence, declared that, under the leadership of Comrade
Voroshilov, the Red Army was ready to "answer any attack by the militarists with a smashing blow of treble force". N. S. Khrushchev also joined in this chorus exalting the invincibility of the Red Army. Below a large picture of Khrushchev, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Pravda of March 4, 1939
published this message to Stalin from the Party Conference of the Kiev province:
The Kiev Party Organisation has spared no effort to turn the province of Kiev into an impregnable advance post of Soviet Ukraine. We are living here in a frontier
zone, on the border of two worlds... The Fascist warmongers have not ceased to
think of attacking Soviet Ukraine. We swear to you, dear Comrade Stalin, that we
shall always be in a state of military preparedness, and shall be fully capable, with all the strength of Soviet patriotism, of dealing with any enemies and of wiping them off the face of the earth... Under the guidance of your closest brother-in-arms, N. S.
Khrushchev, the Bolsheviks of the Kiev Zone will carry out with honour the tasks
with which they have been entrusted... Long live our wise leader and teacher, the genius of mankind, the best friend and father of the Soviet people, great Stalin!
Only a few days later a patriotic speech on the same lines was made by Khrushchev at the unveiling of the Kiev monument of Shevchenko, the Ukraine's national poet, ending with
"Long live he who is leading us from victory to victory, our dearly beloved friend and teacher, the great Stalin."
[ Pravda, March 7, 1939.]
The references to Kiev, both in the Kiev Party Organisation's address to Stalin and in Khrushchev's speech, as a "frontier zone" threatened by the "Fascists" are typical of the nervousness that existed in Russia at the time about Hitler's designs, despite all the bluster about "invincibility" and "impregnability". The press campaigns in the West (especially in France) about a "Greater Ukraine" which was to be detached from the Soviet Union and was to provide Germany with her much-needed Lebensraum, had clearly caused a profound impression in Russia. It was to be one of the principal themes in Stalin's survey of the international situation in his Report to the 18th Congress of the Communist Party which opened in Moscow on March 10.
The "personality cult", as we would now say, was at its height. On the opening day of the Congress, Pravda published a poem by Djambul, the veteran Kazakh bard, aged nearly a hundred:
Tenderly the sun is shining from above,
And who cannot but know that this sun is—you?
The lapping waves of the lake are singing the praises of Stalin,
The dazzling snowy peaks are singing the praises of Stalin,
The meadow's million flowers are thanking, thanking you;
The well-laden table is thanking, thanking you.
The humming swarm of bees is thanking, thanking you.
All fathers of young heroes, they thank you, Stalin, too;
Oh heir of Lenin, to us you are Lenin himself;
Beware, you Samurai, keep out of our Soviet heaven!
Perhaps the only excuse for publishing this rubbish was that it had a "folklorish" and
"exotic" flavour, and was the work of an illiterate old Asiatic. Even so, many members of the Congress must, on the quiet, have thought it frivolous and inappropriate to splash this kind of thing over the front page of Pravda on so solemn and serious an occasion. For Stalin's foreign policy statement was awaited with both eagerness and a touch of anxiety.
It should be remembered that Europe was already full of danger signals and that the
Congress opened, and that Stalin's report was delivered, five days before the German march into Prague.
Stalin divided the capitalist powers into "aggressive" powers and "non-aggressive"
powers, but suspected the latter of wanting "others to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them", suggesting that they might not be averse to seeing the Soviet Union involved in a war with the "aggressors". He dealt in some detail with the economic crisis in the capitalist world, a crisis which had begun in 1929, and which, since then, had only been partly overcome by the armaments race. Stalin said that the grabbing of Manchuria and Northern China by Japan and the Italian invasion of Abyssinia already pointed to the acute struggle among the Powers. With the new economic crisis (since 1937), this
imperialist conflict could not but grow in intensity. It was no longer a case of competition for markets, trade war or dumping. These weapons were no longer considered sufficient.
What Russia was now facing was a redistribution of the world, of spheres of influence and colonies by means of war.
The "have-nots" were now attacking the "haves". Japan now claimed to have been tied hand-and-foot by the Nine-Power Treaty; this had prevented her from enlarging her
territory at China's expense, while Britain and France possessed vast colonial territories; Italy had recalled that she also had been cheated of her share after the first imperialist war, whereas Germany was now demanding a return of her colonies and an extension of
her territory in Europe. In this way a bloc had been formed among the three aggressive powers, and now the question had arisen of a new share-out of the world by military
means.
The new imperialist war, Stalin said, had already begun. Since Italy's capture of
Abyssinia, both she and Germany had organised their military intervention in Spain. In 1937, after grabbing Manchuria, Japan had invaded Northern and Central China, and had driven its foreign competitors out of these new occupied zones; in 1938 Germany had
grabbed first Austria and then the Sudetenland, while Japan had occupied Canton, and, more recently still, Hainan.
After the first imperialist war, Stalin recalled, the victorious powers had created a new international régime of peace; this was based on the Nine-Power Treaty in the Far East and on the Treaty of Versailles and other agreements in Europe. The League of Nations was expected to regulate international relations on a basis of collective security... To give themselves a completely free hand, the three aggressor states had left the League. To cover up their treaty violations, the three aggressor states had proceeded to work on public opinion with the help of devices like the Anti-Comintern Pact. "It was a clumsy game, because it seems a bit absurd to look for Comintern breeding-grounds in the
deserts of Mongolia, the mountains of Abyssinia or in the wilds of Spanish Morocco."
All these conquests were made by the aggressor states, quite regardless of the interests of the non-aggressor states. "This new imperialist war has not yet become a general world war. It is being conducted by the aggressor states against the interest of the non-aggressor states, but these, believe it or not, are not only retreating, but to some extent conniving in this aggression."
It was not, Stalin said, that the non-aggressive, democratic countries were weak; both economically and militarily these countries, taken together, were stronger than the Fascist countries; why then were they behaving in this odd way? It might, of course, be argued that they were afraid of the revolution that would follow a new war; but this was by no means the chief reason for their behaviour: