Ambassador Bullitt, who had returned to the United States after his brief December whirlwind in Moscow, came back. “The honeymoon atmosphere had evaporated completely before I arrived,” he wrote to Roosevelt (April 13, 1934).256 That very day, the U.S. Congress passed the Johnson Act, which prohibited foreign nations in default from marketing bonds in the United States, effectively preempting Roosevelt’s government from underwriting loans to the Soviet Union as negotiations proceeded for belated repayment of tsarist and Provisional Government debt.257
For Stalin, in any case, the threat of an immediate Japanese attack had receded.258 Hitler’s Germany was the greater puzzle.259 On April 19, Stalin’s spies delivered a copy of a secret document sent by the British ambassador in Berlin, Eric Phipps, to London, quoting Hitler to the effect that “it’s better to be respected and unloved than weak and loved.” Phipps asserted that “in relation to Russia, however, Hitler is ready to leave personal feelings aside and conduct a policy of realism.”260 A follow-up intercepted assessment from Phipps stated, in Russian translation, “The [Nazi] regime is solid, and the storm troopers are so disciplined that [Hitler] can be endangered only as a result of a serious uprising or a slow process of internal decay.” Stalin underlined this passage.261 Balytsky, OGPU chief in Soviet Ukraine, sent Stalin a report on the German consulates in Kharkov, Kiev, and Odessa, which were now run by Nazi party members who were said to be recruiting Nazi youth and storm troopers on Soviet territory among the half million ethnic Germans in Soviet Ukraine. Balytsky initiated arrests of Soviet “fascists.”262
On May 5, 1934, Polish foreign minister Beck, as promised, signed an early renewal of the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union.263 But Stalin took talk of Poland trying to maintain neutrality vis-à-vis both its giant neighbors as disinformation, and behind Poland—indeed, behind every Soviet foe—he saw Britain. Stalin could not or would not grasp that “imperialist” Britain had the same enemies as the USSR: Nazi Germany in Europe and militaristic Japan in Asia.264 British-Soviet relations were poor.265 The British embassy official Sir William Strang had reported from Moscow that Pravda was calling the Nazi ideologue Rosenberg “a lackey of British imperialism.”266 Officials in London were also incredulous at Soviet assertions that the British were “the real force behind German and Japanese fascism,” as the Comintern’s Dmytro Manuilsky had put it at the 17th Party Congress. The son of an Orthodox priest from Ukraine, he had charged, in typical contradictions-of-capitalism fashion, that Britain was instigating these two powers against the Soviet Union to avoid a new intra-imperialist war over colonies.267 Even the tsarist-era military men Alexander Svechin and Boris Shaposhnikov wrote that Poland, Romania, and other limitrophe states were ultimately subordinated to the will of London and Paris.268
Internally, Tukhachevsky urged that, since Poland or Romania was sure to attack at some point, the Red Army ought to take advantage of the poor state of these implacable enemies’ railways to deliver a knockout blow before they could fully mobilize. The appeal of such preemptive war had been enhanced by a perceived shift toward military attacks without formal war declarations.269 But for all the talk about the inevitability of war, Stalin was not looking to fight one.270
Neither was Britain. Although Japan eyed British-controlled parts of Southeast and South Asia, it was preoccupied with China, but Germany under Hitler looked less contained—and British credibility was on the line.271 British society, however, was overwhelmingly desirous of avoiding another catastrophic war and mostly sympathetic to Germany’s grievances against the Versailles Treaty. Added to this was the political-ideological challenge of the Comintern and, behind it, the Soviet Union, whose industrialization—contrary to British expectations—had seemed to succeed. For London, no less than for Stalin, some sort of accommodation with Nazi Germany seemed the path to security.
POET TO POET
The poet Osip Mandelstam, outraged over the famine, had composed sixteen lines that blamed Stalin. The verses, which he read to a handful of intimates, did not mention the dictator by name, but mocked a “Kremlin highlander” with oily fingers, a criminal underworld past, and part Ossetian descent. In April 1934, Mandelstam saw fellow poet Boris Pasternak on the street—the two had known each other since 1922—and he recited the rhymed invective to him. Hearsay has Pasternak deeming the lines an act of suicide, responding, “I didn’t hear this; you didn’t recite it to me.”272 On the night of May 16–17, Mandelstam was arrested at his apartment, where the police confiscated manuscripts, letters, and his address book. The poet was allowed to take a few personal items and books. He was said to have selected Dante’s Inferno.273
The admission process to the new union of writers had commenced, and on May 15, Fadeyev, Bedny, Pasternak, and others were inducted.274 A devastated Pasternak now learned of Mandelstam’s arrest from Anna Gorenko (b. 1889), known as Akhmatova, who had arrived from Leningrad that evening. He went to see Mandelstam’s wife, Nadezhda, and they evidently tried to call Bedny, who had once promised to defend Mandelstam if necessary, but had ceased to have contact with Stalin and deemed intervention useless.275 Nadezhda managed to get into the Kremlin to see Yenukidze, but also with no results. It seems Pasternak went to Izvestiya and implored Bukharin to intercede. (Pasternak was doing literary translations for the newspaper as a source of income.)276 According to the woman who later would become Pasternak’s lover, he “raced frantically all over town, telling everybody that he was not to blame and denying responsibility for Mandelstam’s disappearance.” In fact, Pasternak did not know but Mandelstam, under interrogation, had not named all the people to whom he had recited the poem—only those already known to the interrogator—and omitted Pasternak.277 At the other extreme, the short-story writer Pyotr Pavlenko boasted to acquaintances that he’d been allowed to listen secretly to Mandelstam’s interrogation at Lubyanka, evidently from behind a door in an adjacent room.278
In a surprise, Mandelstam was sentenced not to death or even a Gulag camp, but exile in Cherdyn (northern Urals), and allowed to take his wife. In early June 1934, he attempted suicide, jumping out a window. Bukharin wrote to Stalin about the poet’s frail psychology, noting that “Boris Pasternak is utterly at a loss over Mandelstam’s arrest and no one knows anything.”279 Then, on June 13, Pasternak was summoned to the phone at his communal apartment on Volkhonka Street. The caller said Stalin would be getting on the line, but Pasternak, like Bulgakov some years earlier, thought it a prank and hung up. The phone rang again, the same voice stating the call was from Stalin’s office and, to eliminate disbelief, dictated a special number to call. Pasternak dialed it and soon heard, “Stalin speaking.”