Trotsky had predicted, almost immediately after his expulsion from the territory of the Soviet Union, that “there remains only one thing for Stalin: to try to draw a line of blood between the official party and the opposition. He absolutely must connect the opposition with assassination attempts, and preparations for armed insurrections.”89
Stalin had decided to devote a Central Committee plenum (June 5 and 7, 1935)—one of only two during the year that lasted more than a day—to the Kremlin Affair. He assigned the main report not to Yagoda but to Yezhov, who began not with Yenukidze but with Kirov, explaining that the “embittered” Zinovievite-Kamenevite-Trotskyite “group” had been driven “to the most extreme forms of struggle—namely, terror,” and charged the rightists with complicity, citing attempts to link up with the Zinovievites in 1932. Yezhov deemed Yenukidze “a corrupt and self-complacent Communist” who had unwittingly allowed White Guards to infiltrate the citadel of power. Yenukidze, given the floor on the second day, averred that all hiring in the Kremlin “was carried out with the participation of the NKVD,” prompting Yagoda to interject from the floor, “That’s not true.” Yenukidze insisted on the point, denied cohabiting with the arrested women, and seemed incredulous that helping former Menshevik families could be treason. Yagoda charged him with creating “his own parallel ‘GPU’” in the Kremlin and called for his expulsion from the party, going beyond Yezhov’s call for expulsion from the Central Committee.90
Stalin had kept strangely silent, but he finally professed himself unable to abandon a good friend with whom he had spent many a holiday, so he suggested that Yenukidze be expelled from the Central Committee and the party but not handed over to the NKVD.91 Attendees voted unanimously for expulsion from the Central Committee and voted—with some hands raised in objection—for expulsion from the party for “political and personal dissoluteness.” The minutes for internal circulation and Pravda’s public report were falsified to conceal the objections.92 Yenukidze became the first Bolshevik who had joined the party before the revolution and who had never joined an opposition afterward to be expelled.93
WISHFUL THINKING
Hitler was zealously driving a revision of the Versailles order; Stalin did not oppose revision, provided it did not come at Soviet expense. As the sequential visits in spring 1935 of Eden and Simon to Berlin and Eden to Moscow had shown, each dictator was central to the other’s grand strategy, but in differing ways. For Hitler, the Soviet Union was the principal evil, and Britain his principal wedge. For Stalin, Britain was the principal evil, and Germany his principal wedge. For France, the courting of the Soviet Union, a step that Britain disliked, was a way to woo a hard-to-get Britain. For Britain, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were both evil, but avoiding the costs of direct confrontation with Germany was paramount. Britain signed the proposed naval pact with Germany on June 18, 1935, which happened to be the anniversary of Waterloo.
Britain possessed the largest maritime force in world history, but it faced shipyard capacity limits and treasury austerity. The pact formally limited Germany’s fleet to 35 percent of Britain’s, while ostensibly locking Germany into a quality standstill. (Eden in Moscow had assured Stalin that Germany’s 35 percent demand was out of the question.) But Hitler’s special envoy, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had negotiated for Germany to have 45 percent as many submarines as the British did at that time, and to eventually reach parity, a giveaway of true intentions.94 Hitler gave the go-ahead for two already planned super-battleships, the Bismarck and the Tirpitz, both exceeding the treaty’s quality limits.95 Ribbentrop had been invited to lunch the day before the signing by an influential journalist at The Times and told him he was keen for prime minister Stanley Baldwin (who had just assumed that office for the third time) to meet the Führer, because he wanted “Baldwin to hear Hitler’s ideas about Western solidarity against Bolshevism.”96
FRENCH CONNECTIONS
In reply to Nazism, a group of French intellectuals who had attended the Soviet writers’ congress—André Malraux, André Gide, Louis Aragon—decided to mount an International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which was scheduled to open at the 3,000-seat Maison de Mutualité, in the Latin Quarter, on June 21, 1935, and run for five days. Around 250 invitations went out to writers in thirty-eight countries, including many political émigrés.97 Koltsov arrived early to assist in the organizing and deliver the secret financing (20,000 gold rubles). Thanks to Ehrenburg, Gide, and Malraux, Isaac Babel (who had once lived in Paris) and Boris Pasternak (whose poems were untranslated, but whose name was well known) got added as late as June 19. (They arrived late, in new suits specially sewn for them.) Gorky declined Stalin’s urgings to attend, citing poor health.98 About a week before the opening, outside a Paris café, André Breton encountered Ehrenburg—who was infamous for having denounced surrealism as “onanism, pederasty, exhibitionism, and even bestiality”—and smashed him in the face. Ehrenburg cut Breton from the speaker list.99
From the podium, Malraux declared that “the humanism we want to create . . . finds its expression in the line of thought running from Voltaire to Marx,” while Gide averred that “one can be profoundly internationalist while remaining profoundly French.” Aldous Huxley deplored the “endless Communist demagogy,” while E. M. Forster would write that he’d had “to hear the name of Karl Marx detonate again and again like a well-placed charge, and draw after it the falling masonry of applause.”100
During the congress, the leftist French writer, dramatist, and musicologist Romain Rolland traveled the other way—to the USSR, at Gorky’s invitation. After rounds of theater, cinema, and banquets, on June 28, he enjoyed a long audience in the Little Corner.101 Wispy, compulsive, puritanical, Rolland (b. 1866) had won the Nobel Prize in Literature “as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings.” His masterwork, a ten-volume novel cycle, Jean-Christophe, depicts a German-French friendship. He also harbored a long-standing fascination with the Russian Revolution and once observed that “this order is all bloody and soiled like a human baby just wrested from his mother’s womb,” but, “in spite of disgust, in spite of the horror of ferocious crimes, I go up to the child, I embrace the newly-born: he is hope, the miserable hope of the human future. He is yours in spite of you!”102
Rolland told Stalin that he saw him as the embodiment of the “new humanism.”103 He observed that Westerners shared the idealism inside the USSR but had trouble comprehending, for example, the news in the Soviet press that, as of April 7, 1935, criminal law was being applied to children twelve and up, and that minors could be executed. After letting Rolland speak for twenty minutes, Stalin requested permission to respond. “We had to pass this repressive law threatening the death penalty for child criminals, especially their instigators,” he answered. “In fact, we will not enforce this law. I hope that it will not be enforced. Naturally, publicly, we cannot admit this; the desired effect would be lost, the effect of intimidation.”104 The dictator deployed his customary flattery (“I am happy to chat with the greatest writer in the world”), but came across as genuinely enamored of the grand écrivain even while throwing dust in Rolland’s eyes.105 Stalin called in the “Kremlin photographer” to record the event for propaganda purposes. But he would refuse all of Rolland’s entreaties to publish the transcript.106