A pseudonymous “letter from Moscow” published in Trotsky’s Bulletin abroad reported that at the party conference, Stalin had been largely silent. “After every sitting, delegates and visitors were asked, ‘What did Stalin say?’” the report claimed. “‘Nothing.’”168 True enough. Secretly, however, Stalin had embarked on energetic steps. Japan had changed his mind.
Whereas Tukhachevsky and the brass had long wanted to prioritize military production, Stalin prioritized heavy industry in general—the base of a modern economy, in his view—but now, just six months after having rejected Tukhachevsky’s wild spending requests, Stalin was himself demanding forced creation of 40 to 50 new divisions.169 Following the replacement (January 5) of the Supreme Council of the Economy by three commissariats—heavy industry, light industry, and forestry—the regime created a unified main mobilization directorate in heavy industry for the defense factories.170 On January 19, Stalin agreed to a commission on “tankification” of the Red Army, on which he placed Tukhachevsky, and rammed through a plan for 10,000 tanks in 1932. Fewer than 2,000 had been manufactured in 1931, but Stalin wielded the preposterous new target to force expansion of assembly lines and creation of systematic tank-building capability at tractor and automobile factories, too.171
Stalin needed advanced tank designs—and, amazingly, he got them. The Soviet trade mission in Britain had secured permission to purchase 15 Vickers-Armstrong medium (six-ton) tanks, 26 Carden Loyd light armored machine-gun carriers, and 8 Carden Loyd amphibious tanks, as well as a license for production and blueprints.172 In parallel, working undercover at the Soviet trade organization in New York, the OGPU had overcome the lack of diplomatic relations and a legal injunction to procure specifications for the Christie M1931 tank. (J. Walter Christie was an engineer, who sometimes tested his designs with race car driving, and his dual-drive tank designs were notable for their innovative suspension and speed; he had offered to sell the technology to the U.S. military, but it had declined.) Two “tractors” shipped out of New York were in reality Christie tanks without the turrets, which became the basis for production of the Soviet track-wheeled “BT” at the Kharkov Locomotive Plant.173 The imported designs demanded more sophisticated motors, gearboxes, chassis, caterpillar tracks, optics, traversing mechanisms, and armor plating than Soviet industry had been producing.174 Still, by the end of 1932, the Soviets, who had been incapable of producing a single decent tank, would manufacture 2,600.175 Soviet military spending would skyrocket in 1932 to 2.2 billion rubles, from 845 million—all of which Stalin kept concealed.176
OMINOUS SIGNS
Japanese troops entered Harbin, the main Soviet railway junction in China, on February 5, 1932, to the euphoria of anti-Soviet émigrés.177 In late February, Soviet intelligence delivered another intercepted Kasahara letter to Tokyo promising that “if we were to attack the USSR, Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states would join (but not immediately), supported actively by the French and the not inconsiderable force of White Russians along the border.”178 Japanese military aircraft were violating Soviet airspace; Stalin ordered Soviet forces not to yield to the provocations of warmongers.179 Still, the regime established the Far Eastern Fleet as a separate command and ordered up additional submarines.180 On March 4, 1932, Izvestiya published excerpts from the decrypted secret Japanese telegrams calling for seizure of Siberia and the Soviet Far East. (Evidently, the Japanese had discovered that the Soviets had broken their codes.) Izvestiya underscored that, while Moscow maintained neutrality in the Sino-Japanese conflict, “the Soviet Union will not permit anyone to violate Soviet borders, advance into its territory, and capture even a tiny parcel of Soviet soil.”181 Tukhachevsky revisited the “PR” war plan, with preemptive destruction of Poland by “heavy bomber strikes in the Warsaw region” and tank armies on the ground.182
Japan did not annex Manchuria, as it had the far smaller Taiwan and Korean Peninsula, but it orchestrated the proclamation of a puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchu Land) and, on March 9, installed Henry Pu-Yi, the deposed last Qing emperor (whom the Japanese had recently kidnapped), as head of state in what was the Qing ancestral homeland.183 Ten days later, Karakhan offered assurances of Soviet restraint to Japan’s ambassador Hirota, who secretly advised Tokyo that it could do as it pleased in Manchuria.184 Quietly, the Soviets were offering to recognize Manchukuo, sell Japan the Chinese Eastern Railway, and negotiate fishing rights, oil leases, and trade, in exchange for a Japanese halt to sponsorship of anti-Soviet émigré groups, but Tokyo displayed indifference. The Soviet envoy in Tokyo was instructed to convey that Moscow would not be intimidated.185 Stalin’s options were narrow, however. Negotiations for nonaggression pacts had been concluded with Finland (January 21, 1932) and Latvia (February 5), and one would be signed with Estonia (May 4), but talks with Romania deadlocked over its disputed annexation of Bessarabia.186 Negotiations with France were torturous and would not succeed until late fall.187
Stalin received fresh reports that Warsaw had not desisted from attempts to destabilize Ukraine or cooperate with Japan in a possible military strike against the USSR.188 Even so, negotiations with Poland would bear fruit in late summer, albeit in a pact valid for just three years. German fears were borne out: Stalin would bow to Poland’s insistence to insert a clause about the inviolability of the latter’s frontiers.189 But Voroshilov had complained bitterly in a letter (March 12, 1932) to the Soviet envoy in Berlin that only because of necessity were the Reichswehr high commanders “‘friendly’ with us (hating us in their hearts).”190 The pacts with Poland and France would effectively mark a break in the Soviet pursuit of the elusive special relationship with Germany predicated on Versailles pariah status. This posture had always been aimed at preemption of an anti-Soviet bloc, which the 1931 trade agreement with Berlin and the 1932 nonaggression pacts with Warsaw and Paris would manage to accomplish, for now.191 Still, Soviet intelligence, obsessed with the emigration, had difficulty discerning the motives of foreign governments.192 And the USSR had no alliances. Nonaggression pacts were signed between enemies.193
PRESSURE FOR RETREAT
A land commissariat internal report in early 1932 noted that peasants were quitting the collectives by the hundreds of thousands to roam industrial sites in search of food.194 The politburo shrank the bread allocation in cities for people on the lower-priority ration lists (numbers 2 and 3), affecting 20 million souls. There was little to ration.195 Stalin knew. But every time he conceded grain procurement reductions, every time he allowed strategic reserves to go unfilled, the already low rations for workers had to be lowered and grain was not exported, putting the military-industrial buildup at risk. The much delayed first blast furnace at the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine had been started up early 1932, in a furious rush in horrendous frosts, to coincide with the 17th party conference. Two giant chemical factories, the first aluminum factory, and a ball-bearing plant were started up, and the first four trucks rolled off the line at the Nizhny Novgorod auto factory. But these were political startups. At Magnitogorsk, the new blast furnace’s cone caved in; it had to be completely rebuilt. Industrial output began to stagnate or even decline in spring 1932.196