The OGPU, in any case, was consumed with forming local detachments to enforce a draconian decree, on January 22, 1933, ordering interdiction of peasant flight from grain-growing regions and blaming local authorities for allowing an exodus, which had helped spread epidemics and become a weapon for discrediting regime policies.383 Railway ticket sales were suspended and dragnets set up from the Caucasus to the Urals on one side and along the western borderlands on the other.384 Perhaps Stalin feared an unraveling of the collective farm order. In any case, the decree showed that he was very anxious to prevent the spread of further discontent to the urban socialist core. He also had to feed the cities, which could become death traps. Overall, the number of fleeing peasants captured and sent back would be relatively small (low hundreds of thousands, when there were 17 million peasants in collective farms in Ukraine alone). Many farmers were already trapped in regions without adequate food.385
Molotov, meanwhile, gloated to the central executive committee of the Soviet on January 23, 1933, that more and more capitalist states were recognizing the Soviet Union. “Some clever ones still consider further ‘study’ of the USSR necessary (i.e., to delay recognition),” he stated. “It should not be difficult to guess how Soviet might has increased, how our economy is expanding, how much the international weight of the USSR has grown. Those who are full of useless and empty phrases about further study of the USSR are the ones who have the most to lose from the absence of diplomatic ties.”386 Stalin sent a congratulatory note: “The confident-contemptuous tone with respect to the ‘Great Powers,’ the belief in our own strength, the simple spitting in the pot of the swaggering ‘Great Powers’—very good. Let them ‘eat it.’”387
GEOPOLITICAL CATASTROPHE
The Nazis had lost thirty-four seats in Germany’s November 1932 parliamentary elections, seeing their vote drop by 2 million—to 33.1 percent, from 37.4 percent in July 1932.388 The party, an amalgam of territorial organizations and divergent interests, was wracked by dissension and defections, partly triggered by Adolf Hitler’s refusal, even after the electoral reversal, of any post short of chancellor.389 A key driver of Nazi support, the Depression, had bottomed out, and a slow recovery was under way. And yet, traditional conservatives desperate for stability and order proved unable to fashion a parliamentary majority that achieved their goal of excluding the Social Democrats and defanging the trade union movement and the Communists.390 The maladroit octogenarian president, former field marshal Paul von Hindenburg, had appointed defense minister Kurt von Schleicher, another soldier turned politician, as chancellor in early December 1932, elbowing aside the ambitious archconservative Franz von Papen. But when Hindenburg refused to declare a state of emergency and allow Schleicher to dissolve the Reichstag to avoid a no-confidence vote, the chancellor resigned. Schleicher colluded with Hitler to try to stop the return of his nemesis von Papen, while the latter persuaded Hindenburg to appoint Hitler, even though the field marshal had trounced the Nazi in elections to the presidency and mocked him as a mere corporal.391 Traditional conservatives imagined that they could “tame” Hitler and the radical right while achieving a broadened anti-left coalition. On January 30, 1933, von Papen—having secured the vice chancellorship for himself—escorted the Nazi ruffian into the Chancellery, for the oath of office, through a rear door.392
“A stubby little Austrian with a flabby handshake, shifty brown eyes, and a Charlie Chaplin mustache,” wrote the world’s best-selling daily newspaper, the London Daily Herald. “What sort of man is this to lead a great nation?”393
Nazi ranks were electrified. “Hitler is Reich Chancellor,” marveled Joseph Goebbels. “Just like a fairy-tale.”394 Goebbels improvised a torchlight parade through Berlin, playacting a seizure of power, even though Hitler had come to power legally (just like Italy’s Mussolini).395 Success had not come out of nowhere, however. By 1929, the Nazis had 3,400 party branches around the country and were mounting countless public rallies, sponsoring concerts, putting up Christmas trees and maypoles, spotlighting local heroes. They spoke to German people’s fears and prejudices, but also to their aspirations and interests, promising a reckoning with the disgraceful recent past and a future of national unity and rebirth.396 Paramilitary Nazi Brownshirts, known as the SA, engaged in street brawling with the Social Democrats and the Communists (who fought each other as well). The Nazi leadership encouraged violence and lawlessness, just as the Bolsheviks had on their path to power, but the Nazis accused the Communists of fomenting the chaos and called for order.397 Organized opposition to the Nazis was either irresolute or at loggerheads.398 The Reichswehr was focused on rearmament.399
There was one political force that could compete with Nazi storm troopers in the streets—the Communists—but they proactively subverted Weimar democracy, even knowing that this facilitated Nazi aims. Through the Comintern, Stalin was enforcing a struggle to the death—with Social Democracy. “The Nazi tree should not hide the Social Democrat forest,” the German Communist leader Ernst Thälmann had warned.400 The catastrophe of the Comintern policy of “social fascism” was vividly brought home in the November 1932 elections, when German Communists had garnered nearly 6 million votes, and the Social Democrats more than 7 million, as compared with the Nazis’ 11.7 million. In no free and fair election did the Nazis ever win more votes than the Communists and Social Democrats combined.401
Many Communists imagined Nazism, which they labeled “fascism,” to be the terminal stage of the crisis of “monopoly capitalism,” so that the turmoil in Germany would eventually redound to them, which meant they needed to make themselves ready by outbattling their rivals on the left.402 Some Communists even welcomed the Nazi accession to power. Stalin did not.403 Still, he appears to have underestimated Hitler, as many—but not all—contemporaries did. He interpreted Hitler and Nazism as creatures of finance capital, a class-based analysis, and assumed that German militarists would continue to shape state policy.Secret German-Soviet military cooperation had been failing.404 But Stalin hoped it would be renewed.405 Werner von Blomberg, who had played a hand in Hindenburg’s appointment of Hitler and stayed on as war minister, would pass on to the Soviet embassy that “a change in Soviet-German relations is out of the question under any circumstances.”406 But Nazism’s appeal to German workers was manifest, and its intense ideological radicalism was directed at the Soviet Union.407
RADICAL REALIGNMENTS
As the Nazis reveled in Hitler’s chancellorship, Stalin’s regime staged the First all-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers (February 15–19, 1933), attended by more than 1,500 delegates, nearly 900 of whom held no bureaucratic office and half of whom were not party or Communist Youth League members. They were recognized for labor performance.408 Kaganovich addressed them in a folksy manner, reciting peasant proverbs, while praising the vicious injunction against theft of socialist property as a “great law.” He boasted of the creation of 200,000 collective farms and 5,000 state farms, asserting that only collectivization had made possible industrialization and the preemption of foreign military intervention.409 One collective farm brigadier, who had been asked by Kaganovich whether the collectivized system was better, answered, “Things are, of course, better now. Still, before I was master of my fate, and now I am not the master.”410