Stalin knew beforehand. Colonel Eugen Ott, the German military attaché in Tokyo, had learned in spring 1936, from his Japanese army contacts, of the secret negotiations under way in Berlin. Ott confided in Richard Sorge, the Soviet military intelligence spy in the German embassy in Tokyo, who had informed Moscow. The published text consisted of two short articles.267 But Sorge had been reporting that it contained a secret article. Wrongly, he initially thought this pertained to a military alliance. But he would manage to photograph the full text and get it to Shanghai, whence it was picked up by a Soviet courier.268 The secret section specified that, should either Germany or Japan “become the object of an unprovoked attack by the USSR,” each “obliges itself to take no measures that would tend to ease the situation in the USSR.” Most significantly, the secret clause also enjoined the two powers “to conclude no political treaties with the USSR contrary to the spirit of this agreement without mutual consent.”269
Soviet-German relations sank to a nadir. Stalin had ordered arrest sweeps of German nationals in the USSR in November and seems to have contemplated a separate Moscow trial of some of them. Molotov, on November 29, told the delegates to the Congress of Soviets, “We have no feelings for the great German people other than friendship and genuine respect, but the gentlemen fascists would best be included in that nation, or ‘nation,’ or ‘higher order,’ which is called the ‘nation’ of modern cannibals.”270
Goebbels, the day before Molotov’s address, had crowed to a secret gathering of the Nazi press that Nazism and Bolshevism could never coexist: one must perish.271 “There is no going back,” he confided in his diary (December 1), apropos of Hitler’s thinking. “He outlines the tactics of the Reds. Spain is elevated to a global question. France the next victim. Blum a convinced agent of the Soviets. Zionist and world destroyer. Whoever is victorious in Spain secures the prestige for himself. . . . The authoritarian states (Poland, Austria, Yugoslavia, Hungary) are not secure. The only committed anti-Bolshevik states are Germany, Italy, Japan. Therefore, agreements with them. England will come over when the crisis breaks out in France. Not a love match with Poland but a reasonable relationship.”272
The British foreign office produced an internal memorandum in late November on the expropriation and collectivization of British firms in the Spanish Republic, concluding that it “shows quite clearly that the alternative to Franco is Communism tempered by anarchy; and . . . [it is] further believed that if this last regime is triumphant in Spain it will spread to other countries, notably France.”273 Blum’s Popular Front government, for its part, was engaged in heated internal debate about the future of the Franco-Soviet alliance, and Potyomkin, the Soviet envoy, cautioned patience to the foreign affairs commissariat. But Stalin’s spies had supplied him with General Schweisguth’s memorandum denigrating the Red Army. “On the basis of very reliable information in our possession, I have to inform you for your guidance that the French military authorities are vehemently opposed to a Franco-Soviet [military] pact and speak openly about it,” Litvinov had written to Potyomkin. “We in no way want to speed up negotiations, nor do we wish them to suspect that we are backing away.”274 An unsigned editorial—written by Molotov—in Izvestiya condemned the Anti-Comintern Pact and defiantly noted, “We must believe exclusively in our own strength.”275
ENIGMATIC PLENUM
In the face of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact, as well as the British and French efforts at accommodating Hitler, Mussolini, and now possibly Franco, on December 4, Stalin convoked a Central Committee plenum. It was, however, devoted not to the deepening challenges of foreign policy—something he almost never allowed to be discussed by the country’s nominal policy-making body—but to virulent charges of treason. The day before, Yezhov had delivered a lengthy address to a conference of NKVD operatives in the capital, itself a telling assembly, and noted ominously, “I think we have not investigated the military Trotskyite line to the fullest. . . . You well know the efforts of imperialist intelligence HQ to create agent networks in our army. . . . We are uncovering diversionary-wrecking organizations in industry. What grounds are there to believe that it is impossible to carry out diversionary acts in the army? There are more opportunities, not fewer, here than in industry.”276
Stalin assigned the main plenum report (“On Trotskyite and Rightist Anti-Soviet Organizations”) to Yezhov, and during his excoriation of the Zinovievites and Trotskyites, someone interjected, “What about Bukharin?” Yezhov took up the prompt, which in turn almost immediately provoked Stalin to interrupt, “We need to talk about them [the rightists].” Beria interjected, “There’s a scoundrel for you!” Stalin, in the July 29, 1936, secret circular, had denied any positive political program to the Trotskyites, but now he asserted that the leftist Trotskyites shared the rightists’ “program” of capitalist restoration.277 Bukharin plaintively asked how he could defend himself against such slanderers. “Do you really believe I could have anything in common with these subversives, with these saboteurs, with these scum, after thirty years in the party?” he exclaimed at Stalin. “This is nothing but madness.” When Bukharin pointed out that he physically could not have been at the alleged meetings with the Zinovievites and Trotskyites, Molotov countered, “You are acting like a lawyer.”278
When Yezhov referred to a transport official as “an enemy,” Stalin interrupted to specify that the accused was “a German spy—he in fact got money for information from German intelligence—he was a spy.” Addressing Bukharin, Stalin ridiculed suicide as opposition blackmail. “Here is one of the easiest means by which, right before death, leaving this world, one can spit in the face of the party, deceive the people, one last time,” Stalin stated, mentioning Tomsky.279 Another was the thirty-two-year-old apparatchik Veniamin Furer, who had committed suicide at a dacha in Osinki, outside Moscow, in fall 1936 after his friend Yakov Livshits—Kaganovich’s top deputy at the railroad commissariat—had been arrested as a “Trotskyite.” Furer, the rising star who had delivered a stirring ode to the Stalinist leadership style at the 17th Party Congress, left behind a long letter praising the Soviet leader while defending Livshits, who, like Furer, had briefly sided with Trotsky in 1923. Because Stalin was on holiday in Sochi, the letter had been brought to Kaganovich. “He walked up and down and then began to sob” out loud, Nikita Khrushchev, another Kaganovich protégé, would recall. “He was unable to collect himself for a long time after he read it.” Kaganovich ordered the letter circulated to all politburo members. Now, at the plenum, Stalin cruelly mocked Kaganovich. “What a letter he left behind,” he noted of Furer. “You read it and tears well up in your eyes.”280
Also on December 4, 1936, in a memo circulated to all politburo members, Stalin dressed down Orjonikidze for having hidden long-ago correspondence with Beso Lominadze, who had been pronounced a posthumous enemy after committing suicide, while party boss, in Magnitogorsk the year before. The accusation of having concealed information from “the Central Committee” was one of Stalin’s most threatening. What also rankled was that Lominadze’s suicide note had been read over the telephone to Orjonikidze by Lominadze’s deputy in Magnitogorsk, and that Orjonikidze was providing a pension to Lominadze’s widow and money to their son (named Sergo, in Orjonikidze’s honor). Stalin had reports that Orjonikidze was bad-mouthing him behind his back to his cronies Mamiya Orakhelashvili and Shalva Eliava.281 At the plenum, Orjonikidze joined in the vicious attacks against Bukharin.