France managed to get Britain to sign a diplomatic note specifying that in the event of a German attack on France, the two Western powers would enter into general staff talks, which fell short of automatic military assistance but was a step.307 Stalin locked down his Mongolian vassals in a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, signed in Ulan Bator (March 12), which formalized the already imposed military alliance for a ten-year period.308 Some observers also expected Hitler’s action to deepen Franco-Soviet ties, but French officials complained that Stalin was more interested in provoking war between France and Germany than in cooperating with France to fight.309
Stalin just did not view the French as offering anything remotely comparable to Germany economically. (Thanks to a well-placed spy, Karl Behrens, the Soviets were receiving technical blueprints from AEG, Germany’s preeminent heavy electrical engineering firm.) Also, the Rhineland’s remilitarization indicated that the USSR might not be the principal target of German aggrandizement.310, 311 Molotov gave an extended interview in Moscow to the editor of the influential French newspaper Le Temps (March 19, 1936) stating that Germany might start a war—in the west. He did reaffirm the Franco-Soviet pact and admit that “a certain part of the Soviet people” felt implacable hostility toward Germany’s current rulers, but he volunteered, unartfully, that the “chief tendency, determining the policy of Soviet power, thinks an improvement in Soviet-German relations possible . . . yes, even Hitler’s Germany.”312
CHARISMATIC POWER
A Georgian delegation was received in the Kremlin, also on March 19, and Molotov greeted them in Georgian: “Amkhanagebo! (Stormy applause, turning into an ovation.)” When he noted that they had given the country Stalin, there was “an eruption of applause” that would not cease.313 In the Grand Kremlin Palace between April 11 and 21, the Communist Youth League 10th Congress took place. “Stalin had yet to make an appearance,” the writer Konstantin Paustovsky wrote of the final day. “We want comrade Stalin, Stalin, Stalin,” the delegates shouted, stamping their feet. “And then it happened! Stalin emerged suddenly and silently out of the wall behind the Presidium table. . . . Everyone jumped. There was frenzied applause. . . . Unhurriedly, Stalin came up to the table, stopped, and, with hands linked on his stomach, gazed at the hall. . . . The first thing that struck me was that he did not resemble the thousands of portraits and official photographs, which set out to flatter him. The man who stood before me was stumpy and stocky, with a heavy face, reddish hair, low forehead, and a thick mustache. . . . The hall rocked with all the shouting. People applauded, holding their hands high over their heads. At any moment, one felt, the ceiling would come crashing down. Stalin raised a hand. Immediately there was a deathly hush. In that hush, Stalin shouted abruptly and in a rather hoarse voice, with a strong Georgian accent, ‘Long Live Soviet youth!’”314
The children’s writer Chukovsky was close to the front (sixth or seventh row). “What took place in the hall! HE stood, a bit fatigued, engrossed in thought, titanic,” Chukovsky noted in his diary. “One sensed the immense habituation to power, the force, and at the same time something female, soft. I looked around: everyone had loving faces, kind, inspirational, and smiling faces. Just to see—simply see—was happiness for us all.” Chukovsky, too, had sensed the power. “Never,” he concluded, “did I think I was capable of such feelings.”315
On May 1, 1936, the regime staged the massive military display on Red Square, and the next day the emotive Voroshilov once again served as a deft master of ceremonies. “Comrades, by the ancient Soviet custom, it is proposed that we fill our glasses,” he told a boisterous hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace, proceeding with toast after toast (for Stalin, Molotov, Kalinin, Orjonikidze, Kaganovich). Before each pronouncement, Voroshilov employed Soviet jargon, tongue in cheek: “Comrades, I do not doubt your vigilance in general, but in this case a check is needed. How’s the situation with glasses?” (Refills, quickly.) And on it went, until Stalin rose to toast Voroshilov, and Molotov rose to toast “the Great Stalin,” whereupon the entire room of cadets and officers stood as one.316
The Red Army, across 1935 and 1936, acquired a staggering 7,800 tanks, 4,200 airplanes, 9,600 artillery systems, and 6.7 million rounds of ammunition, and soon reached 1.423 million men, on a par with the tsarist army in peacetime. The USSR’s spring 1936 war games again had Nazi Germany as the main enemy, but the exercises revealed that pre-positioning of massive forces on the frontier would not be enough: without a prior Soviet occupation of the independent Baltic states to seize the strategic initiative from Germany, victory could be elusive.317 But Stalin would not countenance such aggressive preemptive moves. It was, in any case, doubtful whether the Red Army could even launch a preemptive war, even as its massive size and disposition made it seem poised to do so.318 Such combat would have put to a severe test the Soviet rail network, known both at home and abroad to be a weak point.319 Also, the military expansion, overly rapid and incoherent, had led to a critical dearth of well-trained junior officers.320 Stalin, who received Tukhachevsky nine times in the Little Corner in 1936, including on April 3 and May 28, with a slew of military brass and intelligence officials, had moved him from running armaments to a reorganized directorate for military training.321
BLINDERS
In Berlin on May 4, the Soviet embassy hosted a banquet to celebrate a recently signed modest new bilateral trade protocol, without new credits—the existing 200-million-mark loan remained to be drawn down—but with procedures to fix short-term clearing of accounts (inhibited by currency regulations).322 Bessonov told a German foreign ministry official of Soviet readiness to do what was necessary to create the “preconditions of (Soviet-German) détente.”323 Hitler had appointed Herbert Göring head of a new office for raw material and foreign exchange, crucial for the rearmament economy.324 The indefatigable Kandelaki managed to obtain an audience with him (May 13) through a cousin of the Luftwaffe head, during which an amiable Göring promised to make inquiries about Kandelaki’s request for assistance in obtaining the military technology he sought, and professed delight at the recent trade protocol. Göring also pledged that “all his efforts were directed toward making closer contacts with Russia again, politically, too, and he thought the best way would be through intensifying and expanding mutual trade relations.” He added, “If the Russian gentlemen encountered difficulties in Germany or were faced with questions with which they were making no headway, he most cordially invited them to turn to him at any time. He was always ready to receive them and assist them by word and deed.”325 Schacht, the next day, tried to downplay Göring’s remarks, but Kandelaki departed immediately to report in Moscow.326 A few days later, Göring would agree with a group of German industrialists that business with the Soviet Union was important and promised at some point to bring the issue up with Hitler, “whose attitude to it, admittedly, was not very sympathetic.”327