LONG KNIVES
Hitler’s renunciation of the League of Nations had begun to lift the postwar taboo in France on the idea of any “alliance.”302 Since Hitler’s takeover, Litvinov had been urging a regional pact against him, borrowing the phrase “collective security” from the League and arguing that “peace is indivisible” (i.e., either every country had peace or none had it). Lenin had sized up Litvinov as “the most crocodile-like of our diplomats,” who tore into and held on to people.303 Stalin, however, was not keen on a regional pact that, without Germany, would come across as anti-German while not even guaranteeing Soviet border security on the Baltic Sea. He also wanted to avoid giving a pretext for a Polish-German bloc on his immediate border.304 Still, he viewed talks with Paris as a useful instrument for his talks with Berlin, exactly as the French did.305
The USSR won diplomatic recognition on June 9, 1934, from Czechoslovakia and Romania, members of the Little Entente, and by the 27th the draft of a comprehensive Eastern Pact—France, the Soviet Union, the Little Entente, the Baltic states, Germany, Poland, Finland—was being circulated alongside a separate Franco-Soviet agreement.306 On June 29, Stalin received an OGPU intelligence report (“from a serious Polish source”) asserting that, by having invited Goebbels to Warsaw, Piłsudski was showing Paris he had options to discourage the latter’s bruited alliance with Moscow.307
The counterpart to a Soviet security deal centered on France was a Comintern shift toward a united front with Social Democrats against fascism. Dimitrov wrote cryptically in his diary (June 29), “Stalin: I never answered you. I had no time. On this question, there is still nothing in my head. Something must be prepared!” (Dimitrov also wrote to himself, “So lonely and personally unhappy! It’s almost more difficult for me now than last year in prison.” But then Dimitrov, despite being married to the cause, addressed his personal loneliness, resuming correspondence with Rosa Fleischmann, a Jewish Communist from Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland whom he had met in Vienna years earlier, and who would soon become his second wife and companion, something Stalin did not have.)308
The Central Committee was holding a plenum, the first such full meeting since the party congress, devoted to meat supply and livestock.309 Early on the morning of June 30, 1934, Hitler arrested Captain Ernst Röhm, chief of staff of the street-fighting SA (Sturmabteilung), in a Bavarian resort town; as many as 2,000 more arrests ensued. Surly and overweight, with a prominent scar on his left cheek, and openly homosexual, Röhm was one of the few who used the familiar du (“thou”) with Hitler. He led some 3 million SA members, poorly armed and disorganized, but more than were in the Nazi party, and nearly thirty times the size of the Reichswehr (limited by the Versailles Treaty).310 His Brownshirt militia sought a permanent place in the Nazi order as a reward for helping bring Hitler to power and targeting Nazi enemies (leftists, Jews), but he had toned down his rhetoric of a continuing revolution and accepted Hitler’s request to go on medical leave and send the Brownshirts on leave as well (most were due to return in August). But Reichswehr generals—who reported to Hindenburg, not the chancellor Hitler—were adamant that the paramilitary SA be neutered. The Nazi Schutzstaffel, or SS (Heinrich Himmler), Sicherheitsdienst, or SD (Reinhard Heydrich), and Gestapo (also Heydrich) had no love for their SA rivals, either. Rumors of a pending crackdown against the SA had spurred the latter to yet another drunken rampage in Munich on the evening of June 29.311 At the same time, Hitler had been told that President Hindenburg was ready to declare martial law and receive the former conservative prime minister Franz von Papen on June 30. In the end, after much stalling, the Führer felt compelled to move against both the SA and the traditional conservatives.
The army brass put its resources in SS hands, and left the latter to fabricate the damning evidence of a supposed SA “putsch” with the aid of an unnamed foreign country.312 Still, it was awkward: the SA had been just as crucial (and just as dispensable) to the Nazi revolution as the Kronstadt sailors had been to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. In a two-hour, radio-broadcast speech to the Reichstag (twelve of whose members would be among those to be executed), Hitler highlighted storm trooper moral laxity and Röhm’s homosexuality and declared that he had acted patriotically to preempt a planned SA “Night of the Long Knives.”313 Stalin was said to have badgered his newly arrived envoy in Berlin for details of the “bloodbath.”314 Izvestiya dedicated four columns on its front page to Hitler’s Reichstag speech about the Night of the Long Knives.315 “What a guy [molodets],” Stalin exclaimed to his inner circle, according to Mikoyan’s later recollections. “Well done. Knows how to act!”316 A Comintern instant analysis, clueless about the dynamics of the Nazi regime, wrote that the “monopolist big bourgeoisie” had crushed the “petit-bourgeois strata.”317 Pravda (July 2, 1934) editorialized that “German fascism once again revealed itself as the agent of finance capital.” British intelligence did little better, misperceiving a triumph of the Reichswehr over the party and a “return of the Rapallo line” of closeness to the Soviet Union.318 In fact, the episode solidified a Nazi accord with the army and large-scale industry on Hitler’s terms, while clearing the way for him to merge the chancellorship with the presidency upon Hindenburg’s passing. The SS would be even more radical, ideologically, than the SA.
If the hearsay about Stalin’s enthusiastic reaction is correct, he was also wrong. This was the first (and would be the sole) violent regime purge of Hitler’s rule. The Führer had agreed to dispatch Röhm only under pressure from Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich, yet he still hoped Röhm could be persuaded to do the deed himself. (The Brownshirt fighter did not touch the pistol left for him in his prison cell and had to be executed.)319 For all the sensation, a mere eighty-five known people were summarily executed without legal proceedings, and just fifty of them even belonged to the SA. Some individual scores were settled.320 What Stalin and British intelligence most failed to grasp was the consolidation of the Nazi regime’s anti-Bolshevism.321
Stalin, however, was not ready to surrender on winning over Nazi Germany. On July 1, 1934, following the conclusion of the Central Committee plenum, Dimitrov sent him a draft of his political report for a proposed 7th Comintern Congress (scheduled for the fall). Dimitrov could defy Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels, but he remained inordinately deferential toward the Soviet dictator. Stalin, in turn, asked that Dimitrov “consider” his suggestions, and his marginal comments indicate that he was far from letting go of his thesis on Social Democracy as the left wing of fascism. Dimitrov’s text asked “whether it is correct to refer to Social Democracy indiscriminately as social fascism,” and “Are Social Democrats always and everywhere the main social bulwark of the bourgeoisie?” Stalin wrote in the margins, “As to the leadership—yes, but not ‘indiscriminate.’” Beyond this tiny concession, where Dimitrov gently tried to rehabilitate some Social Democrats as a basis for cooperation in the struggle against fascism, Stalin pointedly inserted, “Against whom is this thesis?”322 On July 5, the politburo was informed that Germany, still suffering the effects of the Depression, had raised the prospect of a 200-million-mark credit for the purchase of German machinery.323 Dimitrov, suffering from latent malaria, chronic gastritis, and other illnesses, departed for two months to Georgia on medical leave.