America surfaced in Yagoda’s reports, too. Gulag camps and colonies together held around 1.2 million forced laborers, while exiled “kulaks” in “special settlements” numbered around 900,000.290 Camps were releasing invalids, which burnished mortality statistics, and Yagoda pressed for financial accountability and better sanitation.291 Gold output in the Kolyma camps would jump to 36.77 tons in 1936 (from 15.94 the year before), which, an internal report stressed, beat California.292 Mass arrests by the NKVD in 1936 would decline to 131,168, as compared with 505,256 in 1933 (and with 205,173 in 1934 and 193,093 in 1935). In March 1936 Yagoda bragged at the Council of People’s Commissars that, because of increased professionalism, reorganization, and new methods, criminality had been sharply reduced, and the problem of mass social unrest (such as during collectivization) resolved. He conceded that organized hooliganism, robbery, and theft of socialist property persisted, and that ordinary police did not feel safe patrolling working-class districts in mushrooming industrial cities. He also admitted that crime rates were not diminishing as noticeably in rural settlements, where police were almost absent. Still, in the previous year, he gloated, there had been fewer reported murders across the Soviet Union than in the city of Chicago.293
HITLER, AGAIN
Hitler continued his manipulative mastery. On February 21, 1936, he granted an interview to Bertrand de Jouvenel for Paris-Midi, stressing his policy of peace, the unifying threat of Bolshevism, and the folly of Franco-German enmity. “Let us be friends,” the Führer pleaded, calling his Mein Kampf outdated and promising “correction of certain pages.”294 (Unlike Stalin, with his useful idiots, Hitler did not get to edit the transcripts.) A few days later, the Führer sought out Arnold Toynbee, a philosopher of history who was in Berlin to address the Nazi Law Society. “I want England’s friendship, and if you English will make friends with us, you may name your conditions—including, if you like, conditions about Eastern Europe,” he told the professor, who predicted to the foreign office that “any response from the British side . . . would produce an enormous counter-response from Hitler.”295 Göring, hunting in Poland again (February 19–24), proclaimed at a luncheon hosted by Beck, “in the name of the Führer and chancellor, that any rumors that Germany intended to enter into closer relations with the Soviet Union were unfounded.”296
In Mongolia on February 26, Choibalsan was named head of a new interior ministry (the NKVD equivalent) and, along with Demid, promoted to marshal. (Soviet personnel accounted for one quarter of Mongolian interior ministry personnel.) That same day, in Tokyo, young officers of the Imperial Japanese Army staged a putsch, intending to submit demands to the emperor for the dismissal of their rivals and the appointment of a new prime minister and military-dominated cabinet. They occupied central Tokyo and assassinated two former prime ministers and other high officials, but failed to capture the sitting prime minister or the Imperial Palace. The emperor opposed the action; on February 29 the rebels surrendered.297
On March 1, 1936, Stalin granted an interview to Roy Howard, president of Scripps-Howard News, which, unlike his earlier exchanges with foreigners, he allowed to be published in mass-circulation newspapers. Stalin observed that the situation in Japan after the recent putsch remained unclear, but that “for the time being, the Far Eastern hotbed of danger shows the greatest activity,” and issued an unequivocal public warning: “If Japan should venture to attack the Mongolian People’s Republic and encroach upon its independence, we will have to help.” Howard suggested that the Italian fascists and the German Nazis characterized their systems as state-centric, and the Soviets had built “state socialism.” Stalin rejected the term (“inexact”) and any comparison: “Primarily, this is because the private ownership of the factories and works—of the land, the banks, transport, and so on—has remained intact, and therefore capitalism remains in full force in Germany and in Italy.” Howard pressed Stalin about world revolution. Stalin: “We never had such plans and intentions.” Howard countered with examples. Stalin: “This is all the result of a misunderstanding.” Howard: “A tragic misunderstanding?” Stalin: “No, a comic, or, perhaps, a tragicomic one.”298
Stalin gestured toward Rome, telling Howard that fascist Italy’s much-condemned invasion of Abyssinia was a mere “episode,” but he noted that, even as Hitler spoke about peace, the Führer could not “avoid issuing threats”—Stalin’s first unequivocal public rebuke of Nazism. He added that Germany might join with Poland or the Baltic states against the USSR, just as it had in the Great War against Russia.299
Hitler excelled at the bold gesture. On March 7, 1936, which happened to be two days after Pravda and Izvestiya published Stalin’s interview, the Führer sent troops into a zone on the left bank of the Rhine River that bordered France and had been demilitarized for an indefinite period by the Versailles Treaty. His wooing of Britain had partially succeeded, getting him the Anglo-German naval pact, which fell short of the total acquiescence he sought but put some distance between Britain and France. His scheming to drive a wedge between Italy and France had failed—until Mussolini moved to realize long-standing designs by invading Abyssinia, opening a rift between Rome and the Western powers. True, Hitler’s maneuvering with Poland had helped provoke the Franco-Soviet pact, but that agreement seemed only to have spurred more Soviet approaches to him. In the Rhineland occupation, Hitler had overcome his foreign ministry’s opposition and his own usual last-minute attack of nerves.300 “Fortune favors the brave!” Goebbels had written in his diary the day Hitler informed him of the decision for the Rhineland action. “He who dares nothing wins nothing.”301
British officials were exasperated: they had been about to offer Germany remilitarization, but, as Eden told the cabinet (March 9), “Hitler has deprived us of the possibility of making to him a concession which might otherwise have been a useful bargaining counter in our hands in the general negotiations with Germany which we had it in contemplation to initiate.”302 London appealed pro forma to the League of Nations (March 12) and strenuously worked to restrain any French response.303 French ruling circles lacked the confidence to stand up to Germany alone.304 Only a small contingent of the fledgling Wehrmacht had entered the demilitarized zone, ostensibly so as not to give the impression of a Western invasion. One or two French divisions would have sufficed to drive them out.305 Instead, German industry could now be organized for war without concern for the security of the Rhine and the Ruhr. France was humiliated. “In these three years,” Hitler exulted at a hastily summoned session of the neutered Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House, “Germany has regained its honor, found belief again, overcome its greatest economic distress, and finally ushered in a new cultural ascent.” He cited the recently ratified Franco-Soviet alliance as justification for his remilitarization. “The revolution may take place in France tomorrow,” he added. “In that case, Paris would be nothing more than a branch office of the Communist International.”306