At events like these, after the dictator and his retinue departed, the tables would be removed and functionaries and military officers in uniform approached the actresses and ballerinas to ask them for a dance.53 Before exiting, Stalin might duck into the kitchen to congratulate the chefs, after which they—like his bodyguards, drivers, or film projectionists—would walk through fire for him.54 But it was the artists at these events, often non-party members, whom he worked most to bend to his will. Stalin addressed them with the formal vy (“you”), paid attention to their performances amid the din, and invited some to drink at his table, inquiring whether they might have requests of him for themselves or their organizations. Relaxed, convivial, he engaged in freewheeling conversation.55
Earlier that same day of May 2, the Soviet envoy to Paris had signed a mutual assistance pact with France—the Soviet Union’s first formal alliance. Pravda hailed it as a triumph.56 It had taken nearly eight months of negotiations since the Soviet Union had been voted into the League of Nations. Article 2 stipulated “immediate aid and assistance” if either country became the victim of unprovoked attack and the Council of the League of Nations failed to reach a unanimous decision, but the “immediate” was diluted in an accompanying protocol that, at French insistence, left out any time limit to act while the council deliberated.57 The treaty dumbfounded many Soviet Communist party members.58 The Soviet press reported that Stalin approved of French imperialism’s military buildup “at the level consonant with its security.”59 French domestic audiences were better prepared, thanks to a drawn-out public discussion. France’s ally Poland was angry, even though it shared responsibility for catalyzing the treaty.60 In Hitler’s Chancellery, the reaction was incandescent rage. The Führer now obsessed over the “Bolshevization of France” and “Judeo-Bolshevik encirclement” of Germany the way Stalin obsessed over an “anti-Soviet imperialist bloc” and “capitalist encirclement.”
“CADRES DECIDE EVERYTHING”
On May 4, 1935, Voroshilov, with Stalin in attendance, was back presiding in the Grand Kremlin Palace amid a sea of dress uniforms, this time over the annual graduation of military academies. The defense commissar issued “an order” for everyone to fill their glasses, then toasted Stalin at length, stirring the standing hall to frenzy. The orchestra played a flourish. Molotov was next. “You already know, comrades, about our new success in the struggle for peace,” he said. “You already know from newspapers about the agreement on mutual assistance, which the Soviet Union has signed with one of the most visible powers of Europe—France. . . . The signing of the Soviet-French Agreement became possible because of the growth and strengthening of the power of our country and the force of our Red Army under the genius leadership of our party, comrade Stalin. Our enormous growth has become plain to our friends and to those whom it is impossible to call friends.” Molotov, along with Stalin, went up to Voroshilov and exchanged kisses.61 Stalin sounded his now habitual populism.
“Comrades, now, when our achievements are great in all branches of industry and governance—now it has become typical to speak a lot about leaders, bosses of the upper echelon, to credit the successes to them,” he stated. “This is incorrect.” The Soviet people had triumphed over backwardness, he continued, which had required “great sacrifices, great efforts, . . . and patience, patience.” Some had lacked stamina. “There is a saying, ‘Let bygones be bygones,’ but all the same, a person’s memory retains things.” Stalin rebuked those who, he remembered, had wanted to expend scarce resources on consumer goods and “all kinds of trifles,” instead of “tractors, automobiles, airplanes, tanks. . . . You will recall the declarations, from leaders of the Central Committee, that ‘you are embarking on adventurism’; you heard such speeches, indeed it was not only speeches. . . . Others threatened to kill some of us, they wanted to break apart the leadership. It’s plain as day we are people forged in fire, unbreakable, and did not retreat. (Stormy applause.)”
Stalin opened himself up: “It’s plain as day that, back then, we did not retreat; we are Bolsheviks, people, so to speak, of a special cut. Lenin forged us, and Lenin was a man who did not know and did not acknowledge fear; this man was our teacher, our educator, our father—this was a person who, the more enemies raged and the more opponents inside the party fell into hysterics, the more he gathered force and the more resolutely he went forward. We learned a bit from him, this person. . . . We did not retreat; we went forward to attack and smashed some people. I must admit, I also had a hand in that.”62
He could not let the thought go: the fork in the road, supposedly either a more comfortable life, with small-scale, backward agriculture and no security, or large-scale mechanized farms and a socialist great power. “There were victims—it is true—some of us fell by the wayside, others from a bullet.” The country overcame its “famine of technology,” he said, using a resonant word. “But now we have a new famine: a famine of people. . . . If, earlier, technology decided everything, now people decide everything, because now we have the technology. . . . Cadres are the most valuable capital. Not everyone in our country understands this, unfortunately.” He told a story about his exile days in Turukhansk, how at the time of the spring flood, when a group went out to pilfer some of the giant pine logs being floated down the Yenisei, one man went missing, but no one bothered to look for him. “If a cow had disappeared, they would have gone searching, but a person perished, a trifle. . . . We do not value people. People can always be produced, but a mare, go try. (Stormy applause.)” 63
Stalin, an avid gardener, had already been instructing officials to “cultivate people with care and attention, the way a gardener cultivates a beloved fruit tree,” a skill he had shown since his youth.64 As the hall quieted again, he continued: “I drink to you, to the higher cadres of our Red Army, and wish you every success in the organization of the defense of our country, in the practical leadership of this defense, because you will lead it. We, here, will lead the speechifying, but you will lead the practical work. (Stormy applause.)” His toast concluded: “Only those good cadres who are not afraid and do not hide from difficulties, but overcome them. Only in the struggle with difficulties can one grow genuine cadres who are not afraid of difficulties. Then our army will be invincible. (Stormy applause of the entire hall. Everyone stands and addresses comrade Stalin with loud shouts of Hurrah and applause.)”65
Stalin edited the above raw transcript with his stenographer on May 5, producing the version published in Pravda the next day, sharpening the key point, a shift in slogans from “Technology decides everything” to “Cadres decide everything.” 66 The newspaper version enjoined officials to “show the greatest concern for our functionaries, ‘great’ and ‘small,’ . . . help them when they need support, encourage them when they show their first success, move them forward,” and warned, “We have a whole series of instances of soulless, bureaucratic and outright scandalous attitudes toward workers.”67 On May 9, Stalin’s in-laws received permission to pay him a late-night visit at the Near Dacha. The dictator recalled his elder son Yakov’s attempted suicide and groused, “How could Nadya, condemning Yakov’s act, shoot herself. She did a very bad thing, she maimed me for life. Let’s drink to Nadya!” Those gathered got to reminiscing about the recent spontaneous metro ride, “the ecstasy of the crowd, the enthusiasm. Iosif again expressed his thought on the fetishism of the people’s psyche, on the striving to have a tsar,” Maria Svanidze noted. “Iosif was in a down mood; more accurately, he was preoccupied, something was occupying him to the depths, for which he had not yet found the answer.”68