Göring wanted no more from the Soviets than raw materials in a strictly nonpolitical trade relationship, and he played a complex game. The day after meeting Kandelaki, he received Polish foreign minister Beck and informed him that the Soviet representative had been insisting on a meeting and, finally, had been granted one, during which Kandelaki had made “a concrete proposal for the purchase of several warships and armaments in Germany. The Soviet delegation gave us to understand that Stalin, in contrast to Litvinov, is positively inclined to Germany.” Göring claimed he had presented the Soviet enticements to “the chancellor,” who “energetically spoke against such suggestions.” That was what the Poles wanted to hear. Still, Beck had to understand that Soviet-German rapprochement was at least under discussion. Thus did Göring put pressure on Warsaw to improve Polish-German relations—on Berlin’s terms—while continuing to sabotage any possible Polish-Soviet rapprochement by dangling the possibility of German-Polish joint military action, should the Red Army attack.328
Inside the Soviet regime, the British remained the fixation. “Fascism’s strength is not in Berlin, fascism’s strength is not in Rome,” Kalinin, head of the Soviet state, said in May 1936, echoing comments by Molotov. “Fascism’s strength is in London, and not even in London per se but in five London banks.”329 Mussolini—infuriated by League of Nations sanctions over his Abyssinian invasion—had threatened to quit that body, but it hardly mattered. He publicly drew closer to Nazi Germany.330 On the battlefield, Italy had snatched victory from what briefly looked like possible defeat, and in early May 1936, Emperor Haile Selassie, although refusing to vacate the throne, fled into exile. Italy would merge Abyssinia with Eritrea and Somaliland, forming Italian East Africa; King Victor Emmanuel III would be proclaimed emperor. Mussolini was denounced as the worst of the dictators, a “mad dog act,” or, in the words of Britain’s Anthony Eden, a “gangster”—language that was not heard publicly from Whitehall about Hitler.331 A smiling Hitler told British ambassador Phipps, in regard to Mussolini’s aggression in Abyssinia (May 14), “With dictators, nothing succeeds like success.”332 Four days later, Germany’s foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, confidently told William Bullitt, now the U.S. ambassador in Berlin, that Germany would annex Austria at some point, and no one would stop it.333
CULTURAL TRIUMPHS, TROTSKYITES
Sergei Prokofyev’s Little Peter and the Wolf, commissioned by the Central Children’s Theater run by Natalya Sats, had premiered at the Moscow Philharmonic on May 2, 1936, before moving to the children’s venue.334 Although Soviet functionaries had failed to cajole the self-exiles Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninov to return, they had succeeded in retrieving Prokofyev, who lived among the constellation of émigré luminaries in Paris with his Spanish wife, Lina Codina, and their Paris-born children. He would receive a four-room apartment in an elite neo-constructivist building (Zemlyanoy Val, 14) and immediately set to work on a plethora of commissions. He had never gravitated to vaudeville or the Hollywood musical, and he took Shostakovich’s public humiliation as promising that there would be ample space for his own diatonic melodies, determined, as he was, to become a central player in what was a serious musical culture. Prokofyev underestimated the bureaucratic deadweight (approval committees made up of third- and fourth-rate musical talent would rewrite his works), but in the meantime the orchestral storytelling of his Little Peter and the Wolf enchanted young audiences.335
Alexandrov, Eisenstein’s former assistant, had done it again: his film Circus premiered on May 23, 1936. Alexandrov, who had once been a circus performer himself, based the film on the Ilf and Petrov play Under the Big Top, from the Moscow Music Hall. Circus lacked the disorganized zaniness of Jolly Fellows: the cameraman had been to Hollywood with Shumyatsky and introduced American storyboarding and Disney’s matching of sound and image. Circus followed the winning Hollywood formula of the transformation of a spunky underdog into a smash success. The female lead, Marion Dixon (played by Lyubov Orlova), a name evocative of Marlene Dietrich, is a performer in an American circus that comes to the USSR on tour. She had given birth to a son with a black lover and suffered racism in the United States; in the USSR, she falls for a Russian performer named Ivan and defects, which spurs the circus director to threaten to expose her illegitimate black child, but the Moscow audience embraces him, and Marion remains in Moscow with her Ivan. The film climaxes with a lullaby sung, in turn, by representatives of the various Soviet nationalities. (The final kiss cliché, characteristic of American comedies, between the little black boy, Jimmy, and a little white girl was cut.) Dunayevsky supplied six catchy songs, performed by Yakov Skomorovsky’s jazz band, including the colossally popular, easily memorized “Song of the Motherland,” with lyrics by Lebedev-Kumach (“I know of no other country where a person breathes this freely!”). The film’s final production number has Orlova dancing at the pinnacle of a multilayered cake structure. One million people saw Circus during just its first two weeks in Moscow. Orlova crisscrossed the country. In Chelyabinsk, she was awarded a piston ring from the factory foundry engraved with lyrics from the Jolly Fellows march: “Song helps us build and live.”336
Party Card, directed by Ivan Pyryev, had premiered in Moscow on April 7, 1936. In the film, the year is 1932 and Pavel Kurganov, from Siberia, the son of a kulak, signs on at a Moscow factory. Becoming a shock worker there, he seduces and marries a young woman, Anna Kulikova, an outstanding assembly-line worker and loyal party member. Unbeknownst to Anna (played brilliantly by Ada Voitsik), Pavel (Andrei Abrikosov) has murdered a Communist Youth League activist, to take over his identity, while secretly working for foreign intelligence, which assigned him the task of obtaining a party member’s card to commit sabotage. Despite her initial lack of vigilance, which Anna’s party colleagues at work denounce, she teams up with her former sweetheart to expose her husband as an embittered kulak enemy. The lesson: Pavel, a peasant lad, had looked trustworthy, but no one can be trusted. The most dangerous enemy is the one with a party card.337 In the initial draft of the screenplay (by Yekaterina Vinogradskaya), titled Little Anna, Pavel had not been a spy. Stalin helped recast it.338 Party cards, long a sign of status in the Soviet Union, allowing holders to attend secret meetings, receive secret information, and shoulder extra responsibilities, now endangered those who held them.
Yagoda had written to Stalin recommending that the multitude of “Trotskyites” in custody be executed, in accordance with the Kirov assassination anti-terror law.339 Some were said to have “ties” to the Gestapo. He reported that two arrested Trotskyites had been found to have thirteen issues of the Bulletin of the Opposition in a suitcase hidden in the wall—Stalin kept his in a cupboard—as well as a copy of the defector Grigory Besedovsky’s book On the Road to Thermidor. The NKVD had also found an address book—more “Trotskyites” to arrest.340 On May 20, 1936, pointing to “the unceasing counterrevolutionary activity of Trotskyites in internal exile, and of those expelled from the party,” the politburo stipulated that more than 600 “Trotskyites” should be sent to remote concentration camps, while those found to have engaged in terrorism were to be executed.341 Yagoda furnished Stalin with additional testimony about “Trotskyite-Zinovievite organizations” on June 1.342