Stalin was the commander-in-chief and the high priest. His power knew no bounds. In 1937 the Polish poet Antoni Slonimski, a lover of practical jokes, published a "letter from Moscow" in a Warsaw literary magazine reporting on the coronation of Stalin. Many readers believed him. Undoubtedly, had Stalin wished to be crowned, he could have easily become the first socialist monarch. The party was willing to accept anything from him. Khrushchev, who in 1937 was one of the party's top "generals," says that when Stalin showed him and the other "leading cadres" the confessions of Tukhachevsky, Yakir, and the others, he did not question their authenticity, not even the statement of a close friend of Khrushchev's, "confessing" that during the civil war he had killed his commander, Nikolai Shchors, in order to replace him in his post.99 Aleksandr Fadeev, a "proletarian" writer who never lost faith in Stalin, wrote a message a few hours before committing suicide in May 1956: in it he grieved over the many Soviet writers "destroyed by the enemy hands of Ezhov and Beria."100 The men Stalin chose to lead the party, and to be his servants in every sphere, including literature, were well described by Arthur Koestler: "They believed whatever they could prove and proved whatever they believed." The only thing Koestler forgot to add was that any forgery served them as "proof."
Stalin had complete control of the machinery of terror. Anthony Eden, an admirer of Stalin's, told of a conversation in December 1941 (after Hitler had invaded the USSR) in which Stalin commented that Hitler was an exceptional genius who had been able, in a short time, to turn a divided and bankrupt nation into a world power and to make the German people obey him blindly. "But Hitler has shown that he has a fatal weakness," Stalin added. "He does not know when to stop." Eden could not hold back a smile. Stalin had been speaking seriously. He paused and asked what Eden found so amusing. Before he could answer, Stalin went on: "I understand why you're smiling, Mr. Eden. You're wondering if I will know when to stop. I assure you that I will."101
In 1938 Stalin showed he was capable of stopping. In July, Ezhov was transferred to the Commissariat of Water Transport (one of Stalin's jokes), and in December the "liberal" Beria took over the NKVD. Beria's advent was meant to signal a drawing back, a liberalization, but even Khrushchev admitted that, far from coming to an end, the terror simply became more subtle and discriminating.102
The totalitarian socialist state's most characteristic feature was its denial of the existence of terror. In 1918 Soviet power proclaimed the Red Terror openly, to all the world. In 1930 and after, the genocide against the peasantry was carried out under the somewhat veiled, but still sufficiently clear slogan: liquidation of the kulaks as a class. The mass terror in the second half of the 1930s proceeded under the slogan of "expanding democracy." Speaking at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939, Stalin himself described the close connection between the terror and the expansion of democracy:
In 1937 Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich, and other fiends were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR were held. In these elections, 98.6 percent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet government. At the beginning of 1938 Rosengolts, Rykov, Bukharin, and other monsters were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the supreme soviets of the union republics were held. In these elections 99.4 percent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet government.103
Socialism had been built, according to the official dogma. In fact, what had been formed was a society that took the Leader's words for reality and rejected the reality it lived in. A French song was very popular in 1937, "Tout va UЈs bien, Madame la Marquise" ("Everything's just fine, Madame Marquesse"). Written in 1935, it penetrated the Soviet Union with extraordinary rapidity. The Soviet authorities undoubtedly thought it reflected conditions in the land of socialism quite well. Another popular song of the time, which virtually became a second national anthem, contained these lines: "I know no other country/ Where people breathe so freely."
ON THE ROAD TO WAR
During the second half of the 1930s the international situation was marked by the emergence of several states that made no secret of their aggressive designs. In 1935 Fascist Italy invaded Abyssinia. In 1936 Germany occupied the demilitarized Rhineland, driving the final nail in the coffin of the Versailles system. In 1937 Japan, which had taken Manchuria in 1931 and turned it into the puppet state of Manchukuo, began a new war against China.
Stalin directed Soviet foreign policy, but from the shadows, rarely granting interviews to the foreign press and never meeting foreign diplomats. It was not until a few years later that he acquired the taste for such meetings. "Stalin does not hold any government office," Litvinov explained to the British ambassador, who wanted to meet the party's all-powerful general secretary. "He does not like to meet foreigners and has entrusted that task to me."104 The only exception Stalin made was for the American ambassador, William Bullitt, and for his successor, Joseph Davies.
On questions of foreign policy Stalin did not take a complicated approach. (This can be illustrated by a comparison of Stalin's views with those of Harry S. Truman.) In 1941 the Soviet press indignantly denounced the senator from Missouri for saying that the United States should wait and see which side was winning the war, Germany or Britain and France, and then support the winner. Unknowingly Truman was repeating a position Stalin had taken as early as 1925, although Stalin's words were not published until after the war, in 1947: "If war breaks out, we cannot stand aside with folded arms. We must enter in, but we will be the last to do so. And we will step in to throw a decisive weight on the scales, a weight that may tip the balance in our favor."105
The two main considerations in Stalin's foreign policy were Germany and Japan. In its relations with Japan the Soviet Union sought on the one hand to solve all conflict peaceably (for example, by selling the Chinese Eastern Railway, a source of tensions, to Manchukuo in 1935) and on the other hand to try to divert Japan into a war with China. Stalin had hoped that after 1933 the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, would more actively oppose Japan over China, but in that hope he was soon deceived. As for Germany, Stalin wished to base relations on the same kind of collaboration that had existed before Hitler's accession to power. Ideological differences did not seem to him to be an obstacle. On May 7, 1939, Boris Souvarine warned of the possibility of a Stalin-Hitler pact, one of the only voices in the West to foresee that. Why should Stalin take fascism and nazism more seriously than he did bolshevism? Souvarine asked. What was important to Stalin was strength.106 Germany was the strongest world power, Ezhov explained to Krivitsky in 1936, echoing Stalin. "We must come to an agreement with the great power that is Nazi Germany."107
The Soviet approach toward Germany had a dual aspect. On the public level, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations on November 19, 1934 (before that the League had been scornfully dismissed as a band of robbers), signed a mutual assistance pact with France on May 2, 1935, and introduced a "popular front" policy (favoring the Western democracies against fascism) to be carried out by the Communist parties and the Comintern. But Stalin had no real love for the "democracies" and no confidence in their power. The same Comintern congress that adopted the "popular front" policy, the seventh and last congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow in August 1935, stated in one of its resolutions that "the main contradiction in the imperialist camp" was, strangely enough, "the Anglo- American antagonism."108 The democratic countries were portrayed as being torn apart by internal contradictions, which the Communist parties were urged to intensify. These parties were instructed to fight against military spending and the "militarization of youth." An exception was made for France, however, since it had become an ally of the Soviet Union.