45. Schwendemann, Die wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit, 373. The German air attaché in Moscow, Lieutenant Colonel Heinrich Aschenbrenner, called upon the international liaison department of the defense commissariat back on May 21, 1940, and in a jolly mood attributed German successes in the West to Soviet support. “Before my departure for your country,” he told his Soviet interlocutor, “I was received by Hitler, who said to me: ‘Remember, Stalin did a great thing for us, about which you should never forget, under any circumstances. Remember this, and do not turn yourself into a merchant, but be a worthy representative of our army in a country friendly to us.’” Later that same day, Köstring, the German army attaché, visited the international liaison department and passed on photographs from the war with France. (The package was marked solely for Stalin.) When asked how events would now unfold, Aschenbrenner had made ostensibly definitive statements; the shrewder Köstring had answered, “only Hitler and a very narrow circle of people close to him know. I am given very limited information.” Aschenbrenner asked that his conversation not be reported to Köstring, for the latter “is jealous, like a girl, and might be offended that I got here before him.” Gavrilov, Voenaia razvedka informiruet, 315–6 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1305, l. 374s–375s; report of Colonel Grigory I. Osetrov [b. 1901]).
46. Trotsky, “Stalin—Intendant Gitlera.” Biulleten’ oppozitsii, 79–80 (Aug.–Oct. 1939).
47. Wager, Der Generalquartiermeister, 106. “All in all,” Karl Schnurre, the German economic official, had crowed on May 10, 1940, the day Germany struck France, “trade with Eastern Europe, as a result of the Economic Agreement with the Soviet Union, has attained a volume that it never reached in previous years.” Der Deutsche Volkswirt (May 10, 1940), in RGAE, f. 413, op. 13, d., 2856, l. 5–6, cited in Nekrich, Pariahs, 154; Ericson, Feeding the German Eagle, 116–7. Hitler had written (March 8, 1940) to mollify Mussolini that “the trade agreement which we have concluded with Russia, duce, means a great deal in our situation!” DGFP, series D, VIII: 876 (March 8, 1940); Ericson, Feeding the German Eagle, 111.
48. In addition, the Soviets lent Germany a submarine base near Murmansk for refueling and maintenance, as well as launching raids on British shipping. An oil tanker with Soviet oil arrived to refuel Nazi warships and landing craft during the attack on Norway in April 1940.
49. “Friendship with Germany, the Pact, and so on is all a temporary move, tactical devices,” wrote Vishnevsky in his diary in May 1940. “Will we win? Or will we only give the Germans time, a breathing space, supplies?” Golubev et al., Rossiia i zapad, 228–9 (RGALI, f. 1038, op. 1, d. 2077, l. 63, 64ob.).
50. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 172. Speer gets the date wrong. See also Reynolds, “1940.”
51. He had settled upon the novella after a long search for a vehicle, as he had once explained, to explore “the heroism of construction, the new [Soviet] man, struggle and the overcoming of obstacles.” Morrison, People’s Artist, 88 (citing RGALI, f. 1929, op. 3, ed. khr. 30, l. 1); Vecherniaia Moskva, Dec. 6, 1932.
52. Richter, “On Prokofiev,” 187–8.
53. Final approval had come only after Vyshinsky, deputy commissar for foreign affairs, saw it and the film’s depiction of the German occupation of Ukraine was toned down. Morrison, People’s Artist, 102–4 (citing RGASPI f. 82, op. 2, d. 950, l. 99); Perkhin, Deiateli russkogo iskusstva, 607–8n4. See also Shlifshtein, “Semyon Kotko,” 3.
54. Zubkova, Pribaltika i Kreml. A Greek diplomat speculated, in an intercepted and deciphered communication, that “Moscow would like above all to drag out the war [in the West], from which it is trying to extract advantages—which, by the way, it is achieving, as evidenced by the example of the new impositions on the Baltic states.” Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 256 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 7, d. 22, l. 106: June 1940).
55. DVP SSSR, XXIII/1: 350–2 (AVP RF, f. 06, op. 2, pap. 2, d. 13, l. 103–4, 127).
56. Sabaliunas, Lithuania in Crisis, 54.
57. Kirby, “Baltic States,” 27 (citing Third Interim Report of the Select Committee to Investigate Aggression and the Forced Incorporation of the Baltic States into the USSR [Washington, 1954], 315–6; File N 4794/803/59: Preston to Order, April 19, 1940).
58. Ocherki istorii kommunisticheskoi partii Latvii, II: 429. Stalin had murdered the entire Estonia Central Committee. Many of them had spent fourteen years in Estonian prisons following the 1924 failed coup, before being released in an amnesty in 1938 and emigrating to the USSR.
59. Gross, Revolution from Abroad. See also Kotkin, “The State.” Lithuania had emerged from Stalin’s gratuitous massacres with just 1,220 Communists.
60. Gross observes that “the Polish Military underground organization, the ZWZ, which thrived under the Nazi occupation in spite of persistent Gestapo efforts to destroy it, never had a chance under the NKVD.” Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 148.
61. Gross, “Nature of Soviet Totalitarianism.” Because Poland underwent Nazi and Soviet occupations simultaneously, it would seem the ideal (if that is the word) place to make the case for “totalitarianism” as a concept encompassing both regimes, yet Gross, a proponent of the term, also noted significant differences between the nature and consequences of Nazi and Soviet rule. Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 230–1. After a trip to newly acquired western Ukraine and western Belorussia as a Pravda correspondent, the writer Avdeyenko returned with a new Buick. (On Sept. 9, 1940, he would be taken to task for being a “serial goods pursuer.”) Babichenko, Pisateli i tsenzory, 22–31. The writer Vishnevsky, afforded a visit to the front in Finland, had written in his diary (Jan. 2, 1940), “I am ashamed to the point of horror to see how our people soiled many homes in Finland, how they carried off everything.” Golubev et al., Rossiia i zapad, 226–7 (citing RGALI, f. 1038, op. 1, d. 2076, l. 2).
62. Khabarovsk OGPU materials of the early 1930s (to which I was given access in 1993) contain extremely specific, comprehensive characterizations for the population, right down to dwellings drawn to scale, in the émigré settlements across the border in Manchuria, even as the Soviet authorities could not feed or clothe the population in Khabarovsk region.
63. In the 1940 Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language, the word sovetizirovat’ (to Sovietize) was defined as “To implant Soviet ideology, worldview, and understanding of the practical tasks of Soviet power.” Amar, “Sovietization as a Civilizing Mission in the West,” 31.
64. Beria wrote to Stalin that in the summer of 1940, the police archive in Kishinëv, seized from Romania, had been burned before the NKVD could seize it. Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 308 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 7, d. 22, l. 301).