On September 28, amid Soviet negotiations to sell the Chinese Eastern Railway to Manchukuo, the Japanese had Manchukuo authorities arrest six Soviet employees. The Japanese were evidently trying to force a sale at a rock-bottom price. The Soviets had requested 250 million rubles; the Japanese offered the equivalent of one tenth that sum: 50 million paper yen. Stalin terminated the negotiations. He also ordered up a propaganda offensive against Japanese “militarism”—not something he did vis-à-vis Nazi Germany.101
Yenukidze, a Germanophile and Stalin confidant, concocted a scheme with German ambassador Herbert von Dirksen to find a modus vivendi by sending someone with stature to Hitler, even without formal invitation. They decided that the Jewish Nikolai Krestinsky, a former Soviet ambassador to Germany who was fluent in the language and was taking a rest cure at Kissingen, was to stop over in Berlin on the way home. Litvinov advised against such a move, but Molotov and Kaganovich favored it. Stalin agreed. Hitler reluctantly acceded to his foreign ministry’s urgings to receive the “Judeo-Bolshevik” envoy.102 Right then (October 14, 1933), however, the Führer declared on the radio that Germany would pull out of the League of Nations.103 France erupted with loose talk of launching a preventive war.104 Molotov and Kaganovich wrote to Stalin (October 16), reversing their support for Krestinsky’s Berlin stopover. “It is incomprehensible why Krestinsky’s trip should be called off,” the dictator fired back that same day. “What do we care about the League, and why should we conduct a demonstration in honor of an insult to the League and against its insult of Germany?”105 But the foreign affairs commissariat had already backed out of the gambit.106
AMERICAN GAMBIT
Stalin had traveled again, a few miles south of the Pitsunda Cape, arriving on October 9, 1933, at Mysra (Myussera in Russian), site of a secluded seaside Romano-Greek estate recently owned by an Armenian oil magnate.107 Nearby, Lakoba had instigated construction of yet another luxury dacha for Stalin. (Only the urinals were of domestic make.)108 The next day, in New York, Henry Morgenthau Jr., acting treasury secretary, had brought a Philadelphia millionaire and Franklin Roosevelt confidant, William Bullitt, to a meeting with an unofficial Soviet representative. Roosevelt was eager to find common cause in containing Japanese expansionism, concerned about Hitler, and being lobbied by U.S. business for continued access to the Soviet market, after orders from that country had shrunk. Bullitt delivered a draft letter from the president, addressed to Kalinin (formal head of state), containing an invitation to Washington for a chosen representative. Stalin, who had hurried back to Gagra, instructed Molotov to accept and recommended sending Litvinov. The latter begged off in a cipher, but Stalin and Kalinin wrote to Molotov and Kaganovich (October 17) insisting on Litvinov and urging them to “act more boldly and without delay, since now the situation is favorable.”109
On November 2, 1933, Stalin finally left Sochi for Moscow.110 Yagoda soon reported to Voroshilov that, in connection with a “counterrevolutionary terrorist monarchist plot” to assassinate Stalin, twenty-six arrests had been made, almost all former gentry and a lot of them women. One was said to have “connections” through children to people living in the Kremlin.111 (During 1933, there would be at least ten serious attempts on Hitler’s life.)112
In mid-November Litvinov managed what he himself had doubted: U.S. recognition, after sixteen years of no relations. He had conceded nothing on repudiated tsarist and Provisional Government debts, other than a willingness to discuss them, and made an empty pledge that the Soviets would not interfere in U.S. domestic affairs by supporting American Communists.113 Molotov took to publicly praising Litvinov.114 Stalin awarded him a state dacha and a bodyguard detail, a mark of Litvinov’s rising value—and the need to keep him under 24/7 surveillance. Anxieties in Tokyo about U.S.-Soviet collusion in the Far East intensified.115 Japan, without allies and in violation of international covenants, pursued hegemony in its region, which entailed formidable simultaneous military burdens: defeat of the Red Army in a possible war; subjugation of mainland China; and attainment of home-island security against the U.S. Navy.116 But for now, the depth of any U.S.-Soviet cooperation remained uncertain.117
The Americans promptly dispatched their own Marx to the USSR, Harpo, on a pantomime goodwill tour. His act brought the house down. (After he convinced a Soviet family that he had not pilfered their silver, they shook hands, and 300 table knives cascaded to the floor from his sleeves.)118 Bullitt had arrived as ambassador on December 11, 1933, and Litvinov immediately dropped the bombshell that the USSR, in anticipation of war with Japan, wished to join the League of Nations.119 On December 20, at a banquet in Bullitt’s honor at Voroshilov’s apartment, Bullitt was taken by the charm of the “cherub” host; the pair danced a medley of Caucasus moves and American foxtrot.120 Stalin attended and asked Bullitt for 250,000 tons of steel rails to complete strategic double-tracking of the Trans-Siberian. “If you want to see me at any time, day or night, you have only to let me know and I will see you at once,” the dictator volunteered. “President Roosevelt is today, in spite of being a leader of a capitalist country, one of the most popular men in the Soviet Union.” Then Stalin planted a wet kiss on Bullitt’s cheek.121
At this very moment, the Comintern executive committee approved theses for the American Communist party’s upcoming convention in Cleveland (to be held in the spring). “The ‘New Deal’ of Roosevelt is the aggressive effort of the bankers and trusts to find a way out of the crisis at the expense of the millions of toilers,” the theses stated. “Under cover of the most shameless demagogy, Roosevelt and the capitalists carry through drastic attacks upon the living standards of the masses, increased terrorism against the Negro masses. . . . The ‘New Deal’ is a program of fascistization and the most intense preparations for imperialist war.”122
Granting an interview to the reliably pro-Soviet Walter Duranty (December 25, 1933), Stalin spoke publicly about his diplomatic coup with the United States. Sitting between portraits of Marx and Lenin, with a drawing of a projected 1,312-foot Palace of the Soviets that was supposed to eclipse the Empire State Building, the dictator lauded Roosevelt as “by all appearances . . . a courageous statesman.” He assured American business that the Soviets paid their debts (“Confidence, as everyone knows, is the basis of credit”). He put Japan on notice as well. Then, when Duranty, on cue, inquired of the Soviet stance vis-à-vis the League of Nations, Stalin responded, “We do not always and in all conditions take a negative attitude toward the League,” adding that “the League may well become a break upon or an obstacle to war.”123
The United States was not a member of the League. Any Soviet bid would have to be shepherded by France, and three days later the Soviet envoy in Paris communicated Moscow’s terms for joining the League as well as a regional alliance.124 Franco-Soviet talks would proceed glacially. Distrust ran deep.125 Édouard Herriot, who had signed the Franco-Soviet nonaggression pact and now wanted to counter Hitler, had demonstrated the price of rapprochement when, in summer-fall 1933, he had visited the USSR during the famine, disembarking at Odessa. Just before he reached Kiev, streets were washed, corpses removed, shops with windows stocked with goods (the populace was not allowed in), and a “festive crowd” assembled from OGPU and Communist Youth League personnel. In Kharkov, he was shown a “model” children’s facility, the tractor factory, and a museum devoted to the Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko. He asked to see the countryside and was taken to a collective farm where he again encountered activists and operatives, this time disguised as farmers. Everywhere, he ate his fill. Soviet Ukraine was “like a garden in full bloom,” Herriot observed in Pravda. “When one believes that the Ukraine is devastated by famine, allow me to shrug my shoulders.”126