Stalin

Litvinov was also working assiduously, alongside his deputy Lev Karakhan, for a nonaggression pact with Japan, hewing to Stalin’s line to stress Soviet noninterference and to make concessions.¹⁵⁷ On December 13, 1931, the OGPU decoded and forwarded to Stalin an intercepted transcript of a conversation between the Japanese military attaché in Moscow, Kasahara, and his superior (visiting from Tokyo), advocating for war before the USSR became too strong and underscoring that “the countries on the Soviet western border (i.e., at a minimum Poland and Romania) are in a position to act with us.”¹⁵⁸ The attaché added that the Japanese ambassador to Moscow, Kōki Hirota, thought “the cardinal objective of this war must lay not so much in protecting Japan from Communism as in seizing the Soviet Far East and Eastern Siberia.” Stalin circled these territories and circulated the intercept to the politburo and the military command, advising that the Soviet Union risked becoming, like China, a rag doll of the imperialists.¹⁵⁹

Also on December 13, Stalin sat for a two-hour interview with the German psychoanalytical writer Emil Ludwig. When Ludwig noted “a bowing before all things American” in the USSR, Stalin accused him of exaggerating. “We do respect American business-like manner in everything—in industry, in technology, in literature, in life,” the dictator allowed, adding: “The mores there in industry, the habits in production, contain something democratic, which you cannot say of the old European capitalist countries, where, still today, feudal aristocrat haughtiness lives.” Still, in terms of “our sympathies for any one nation, . . . I’d have to say it would be the Germans.” Stalin had been exiled in Siberia, and Ludwig delicately suggested a contrast with Lenin’s European emigration. “I know many comrades who were abroad for twenty years,” Stalin answered, “lived somewhere in Charlottenburg [Berlin] or the Latin Quarter [Paris], sat for years in cafés and drank beer, and yet did not manage to acquire a knowledge of Europe and failed to understand it.”¹⁶⁰ Ludwig inquired whether Stalin believed in fate. “Bolsheviks, Marxists, do not believe in fate,” he answered. “The very notion of fate, of Schicksal, is a prejudice, nonsense, a survival of mythology, the mythology of the ancient Greeks.” Ludwig pressed: “So the fact that you did not die is an accident?” Stalin: “There are internal and external factors whose totality led to the circumstance that I did not die. But utterly independent of that, another could have been in my place, because someone had to sit right here.”¹⁶¹

CONCEALED MILITARIZATION

Despite Soviet groveling, the Japanese government did not bother to reply through diplomatic channels to renewed offers of a nonaggression pact.¹⁶² Voroshilov, in a note to his deputy Gamarnik (January 13, 1932), parroted Stalin’s line of a likely Japanese invasion, yet added skepticism. “The creation of a Far Eastern Russian government is being projected and other claptrap,” he noted. “All of this is rumor, very symptomatic.”¹⁶³

On January 29, Artuzov forwarded to Stalin a secret report (obtained via a mole) by French military intelligence, which envisioned four scenarios for the outbreak of a war: German occupation of the Rhineland, following a possible Nazi revolution; an Italian strike against Yugoslavia, drawing in France; a grudge match between Poland and Germany; and “a conflict with the USSR agreed by many countries.”¹⁶⁴ The fourth scenario—Stalin’s fixation—was supported by other reports of France supplying Japan and Franco-German rapprochement.¹⁶⁵ Anti-Soviet circles in Paris were fantasizing that Japan would make available liberated Soviet territory for the émigrés’ triumphal return.¹⁶⁶

Molotov, at the 17th party conference (January 30–February 4, 1932)—lower in stature than a congress—warned that “the danger of imperialist attack has considerably increased.”¹⁶⁷

A pseudonymous “letter from Moscow” published in Trotsky’s Bulletin abroad reported that at the party conference, Stalin had been largely silent. “After every sitting, delegates and visitors were asked, ‘What did Stalin say?’” the report claimed. “‘Nothing.’”¹⁶⁸ True enough. Secretly, however, Stalin had embarked on energetic steps. Japan had changed his mind.