Stalin

Stalin was the sole bulwark against retreat from building socialism. On November 16, 1931, as he was walking the short distance between party headquarters on Old Square and the Kremlin, down Ilinka Street, a former White officer and presumed British agent, whom the OGPU had under surveillance, chanced upon him.¹⁴¹ The man, who used the alias Yakov Ogarev, was said to have been so startled that he failed to pull his revolver from under his heavy overcoat. In another telling, the OGPU operative shadowing him had grabbed the enemy’s hand. Either way, Ogarev was arrested. “I recognized [Stalin] immediately from the likeness to his portraits I had seen,” he would testify. “He appeared shorter than I expected. He was moving slowly and looked at me intently. I also did not take my eyes off him.” There was no trial, no mention in the press.¹⁴² The politburo issued another secret resolution forbidding Stalin from walking Moscow on foot. The chance encounter somewhat recalled that of Gavrilo Princip and Franz Ferdinand on a Sarajevo street outside Moritz Schiller’s Delicatessen in 1914. But the armed Ogarev was no Princip.

QUEST FOR NONAGGRESSION

Japan, with its invasion of Manchuria, had seized an industrial territory larger than Germany, France, and Austria combined, while losing just 3,000 killed, 5,000 wounded, and 2,500 frostbitten.¹⁴³ “Japan plans to seize not only Manchuria but also Peking,” Stalin wrote presciently to Voroshilov (November 27, 1931), adding, “It is not impossible and even likely that they will seize the Soviet Far East and Mongolia to soothe the feelings of the Chinese clients with territory captured at our expense.” He further surmised that the Japanese would claim to be safeguarding the region from “Bolshevik infection” while creating their own economic base on the mainland, without which Japan would be boxed in by “militarizing America, revolutionizing China, and the fast-developing USSR.”¹⁴⁴ Stalin supported “serious preventive measures of a military and nonmilitary character,” including additional units for the Soviet Far East, walking a fine line between showing weakness, which might invite attack, and overly strong measures, which might offer a casus belli.¹⁴⁵ He also reinforced Soviet efforts to conclude nonaggression pacts with countries on the western frontier. Such a pact had been signed with Lithuania (1926), but he sought them with Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Romania, and, above all, Poland.¹⁴⁶

Amid reports that the French government was encouraging Japan to launch a war against the USSR and trying to insert a clause into its draft bilateral pact with Moscow that would be invalidated by just such a third-party attack—all of which fit Stalin’s cynical view of the imperialist powers—he suffered an unpleasant surprise: fierce resistance to a nonaggression pact with Poland from inside the foreign affairs commissariat.¹⁴⁷

Stalin, finally, had replaced foreign affairs commissar Chicherin—a hypochondriac frequently absent abroad for treatment—with his deputy, Maxim Litvinov.¹⁴⁸ (In a bitter parting memorandum, Chicherin fulminated against Litvinov, the Comintern, and “the GPU, [which] deals with the foreign affairs commissariat as with a class enemy.”)¹⁴⁹ Litvinov, never a close associate of Stalin’s, became the face of the USSR abroad.

¹⁵⁰ Whereas Chicherin was aristocratic and urbane, Litvinov was rough hewn. He was also Jewish. He had lived in exile in the UK from 1907 through early 1918 and afterward as a midlevel embassy counselor, spoke fluent accented English, and had married an English writer, Ivy Low, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, whom he called his bourgeoise. He continued Chicherin’s orientation on Germany while seeking to make all of Europe his bailiwick, but Stalin subdivided the department and inserted rivals.¹⁵¹ Still, issues of Stalin’s control remained (foreign affairs personnel, about one third of whom were Jews, were better educated than functionaries of any other government body).¹⁵²

A Polish offer to Litvinov to resume talks for a nonaggression pact had been rebuffed—and Stalin had been informed only ex post facto.¹⁵³

The dictator was convinced that Poland’s ruler, Józef Piłsudski, was secretly working to undermine Ukraine, but also that, without Poland, a major imperialist attack on the Soviet Union would be far less feasible.¹⁵⁴ A Polonophobe himself, he nonetheless warned Kaganovich not to be taken in by the foreign affairs commissariat’s “anti-Polonism.”¹⁵⁵ Stalin discovered, however, that any decrease in tensions with Poland threatened bilateral relations with Germany: the Reichswehr chief of staff, on a visit to Moscow, expressed fears that a Soviet-Polish nonaggression pact would guarantee Poland’s existing borders.¹⁵⁶