FALL MANEUVERS
Red Army maneuvers were held (September 12–15, 1935) in the Kiev military district, commanded by Iona Yakir.162 The exercises entailed a lightning counteroffensive supported by tanks, fighter aircraft, and artillery, directed both frontally and at the enemy’s rear, in a variant on “deep operations,” to employ speed and mobility to punch through enemy lines. The scale and armor were staggering: 65,000 troops, 10,000 tanks, 600 aircraft, and 300 artillery pieces, covering an area of nearly 150 by 120 miles on the western border.163 Tanks were organized in mechanized corps for slashing attacks, while for the first time 1,188 parachutists were dropped from TB-3 bombers. Just 10 of the 4,000-plus motorized machines that saw action suffered any kind of breakage. “The French, Czechs, and Italians who attended the maneuvers felt our power, definitely, to the fullest,” Voroshilov boasted to Sochi (September 16). “Our commanders who have returned from French, Czech, and Italian maneuvers report that the difference in our favor is definitely very substantial.”164
General Lucien Loizeau, deputy chief of the French general staff and head of their delegation, was quoted in Red Star (September 18) offering high praise. “I saw a mighty, serious army, of very high quality in terms of both technology and morale,” he stated. “I think it would be right to consider the Red Army first in the world in terms of tanks. The paratrooper drops of large units that I observed in Kiev I consider a fact that has no precedent in the world.”165 In his secret summary for the French staff, Loizeau concluded, “This army appeared to me therefore capable of a great initial effort, which would permit it to retain on the eastern front important countervailing forces during the period so critical as the beginning of a conflict.”166
Loizeau’s eyewitness assessment would be rejected at French staff headquarters by skeptics opposed to a binding military convention in the Franco-Soviet alliance. The proud Soviets would send films of the maneuvers to their embassies to be shown to foreign governments. The immediate official internal report praised the mechanized corps and three tank battalions, which had averaged a speed of 15 miles an hour and in some cases covered 400 miles. But later, in his final summary, Voroshilov would criticize the separate armored forces and praise the role of the unmotorized infantry.167 This quiet reversal reflected the defense commissar’s threat perception—from his forward-looking subordinates, Uborevičius and Tukhachevsky, whose stature was rising even higher.
Nazi Germany was not invited to send a delegation to the Soviet maneuvers, but the consulate in Kiev sent Berlin a report, evidently based on informants, which highlighted the Red Army’s maneuverability.168 Almost simultaneously, from September 10 through 16, 1935, the Nazis staged a party congress at Nuremberg. Hundreds of thousands celebrated the reintroduction of compulsory military service and emancipation from Versailles diktat. Leni Riefenstahl delivered her third annual documentary, Day of Freedom: Our Wehrmacht, which culminated in a montage of Nazi flags and German fighter planes flying in a swastika formation to the national anthem, with its refrain “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.” Hitler delivered seventeen separate speeches.169 On September 15, the Reichstag unanimously passed hastily composed laws forbidding marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans, and establishing that only those of German or related blood could be citizens.170 Hitler gave his first remarks expressly on the “Jewish Question” since becoming chancellor and called what became known as the Nuremberg laws defensive, congratulated himself for using legal means, and warned that if “Jewish elements” persisted in their agitation and provocations, the issue would have “to be transferred to the final solution of the National Socialist party.”171 Goebbels cited Bolshevism as motive and justification.172
Also on September 15, Kaganovich and Molotov wrote to Stalin of rumors among Berlin journalists that Germany would sever diplomatic relations. “Do not allow hysterical noise in our press, and do not succumb to the hysteria of our journalists,” Stalin advised. “Nuremberg is the answer to our Comintern congress. The Hitlerites could not not curse us if one takes into account that the Comintern congress poured latrine filth over them. Let Pravda criticize them on principle and politically, without street vulgarity. Pravda could say that Nuremberg confirms the Comintern assessment of National Socialism as the most primitive form of chauvinism, that anti-Semitism is the animal form of chauvinism and hatred of humans, that anti-Semitism from the point of view of the history of culture is a return to cannibalism, that National Socialism in that light is not even original, for it slavishly repeats the Russian pogromists of the tsarist period of Tsar Nicholas II and Rasputin.”173
STRATIFICATION
Fourteen-year-old Vasily Stalin was having a crisis. He had taken to smoking. Although he had enough wits not to touch his father’s cigarette box, his primitive efforts to hide the odor on his breath by sucking candy failed. His grades had sunk even lower. One day at school, several boys teamed up to thrash him. Stalin called the teacher and asked if Vasily had provoked his assailants; she reported that he had made them angry. “So be it,” he said. “I won’t bother you any longer.”174 Vasily played soccer after school, which became an excuse for him to skip homework (too tired), according to a note from the Zubalovo dacha commandant to Vlasik (September 22, 1935). “Vasily thinks he is an adult,” the commandant wrote, “and insistently demands we fulfill his wishes, which are often stupid.”175 Stalin gave his son two months to get his act together, threatening to replace him at home with other boys of exemplary behavior.176
A letter from seventy-year-old Fekla Korshunova, who lived on her husband’s pension from the “Leader of the Proletariat” peat plant, was forwarded to Stalin in Sochi. She wanted to give him one of her cows as a gift but was unsure that it was a good idea (“That will be clearer to you”). She signed off by noting that she used to receive 15 rubles 64 kopecks per month in pension, but now got 24 rubles. Stalin wrote back (September 30), “Thank you, mama, for your kind letter. I do not need a cow, because I do not have any farmland—I’m just a white-collar employee, I serve the people the best that I can, and white-collar types rarely do their own farming. I advise you, mama, to keep the cow yourself and maintain it in my memory. Respecting You, I. Stalin.”177
More than 10 million women were employed outside the home—in retail, local soviets, schools, traditional textiles—but they had also barged into industrial employment, a consequence, one trade union official said, of “massive desire.”178 On October 1, the regime abolished rationing for meat, fish, sugar, fats, and potatoes, portending price rises, but lowered the retail price of bread. The party mobilized agitators at workplaces to impart the “correct” understanding.179 One typical couple in Leningrad, he a hauler and she a teacher, lived in a room of 150 square feet, the husband and wife sleeping on the bed, the elder son on a cot, two younger daughters sharing another cot (foot to head), and the youngest girl on an ottoman. “That’s how we lived for ten years,” the son, who did homework in the magnificent prerevolutionary Saltykov-Shchedrin Library until midnight, would recall. “And we were happy in our way. The main thing: everyone was studying—even Mama at forty-five years old finished the pedagogical night school.”180
Amid the endemic shortages, the regime manipulated consumer goods as reward or punishment.181 Elites enjoyed privileged access to staples and luxuries such as restaurant meals or fashionable winter coats.182 Purchase of desirable goods usually required a special coupon as well as money, and a leather jacket bought for 300 rubles in a subsidized state store by those awarded coupons could be resold at the market for three times that or more—which technically was a crime, but also a way of life. Midlevel NKVD operatives were paid just 150–350 rubles per month (an overcoat cost 700 rubles in 1935), and they, too, had to buy “voluntary” government bonds, usually at a cost of a month’s salary. True, operatives received subsidized meals at work, but higher-ups made at least five times as much in salary and received nearly a thousand rubles extra per month in cash “bonuses.” Bosses’ high living was a constant refrain in secret reports. “That’s enough laughing at the workers, enough starving, enough teasing them like dogs” read an anonymous letter to Zhdanov in 1935. “Our enemies are our aristocrats who harm the working people.”