Stalin

Nazi ranks were electrified. “Hitler is Reich Chancellor,” marveled Joseph Goebbels. “Just like a fairy-tale.”³⁹⁴ Goebbels improvised a torchlight parade through Berlin, playacting a seizure of power, even though Hitler had come to power legally (just like Italy’s Mussolini).³⁹⁵ Success had not come out of nowhere, however. By 1929, the Nazis had 3,400 party branches around the country and were mounting countless public rallies, sponsoring concerts, putting up Christmas trees and maypoles, spotlighting local heroes. They spoke to German people’s fears and prejudices, but also to their aspirations and interests, promising a reckoning with the disgraceful recent past and a future of national unity and rebirth.³⁹⁶ Paramilitary Nazi Brownshirts, known as the SA, engaged in street brawling with the Social Democrats and the Communists (who fought each other as well). The Nazi leadership encouraged violence and lawlessness, just as the Bolsheviks had on their path to power, but the Nazis accused the Communists of fomenting the chaos and called for order.³⁹⁷

Organized opposition to the Nazis was either irresolute or at loggerheads.³⁹⁸ The Reichswehr was focused on rearmament.³⁹⁹

There was one political force that could compete with Nazi storm troopers in the streets—the Communists—but they proactively subverted Weimar democracy, even knowing that this facilitated Nazi aims. Through the Comintern, Stalin was enforcing a struggle to the death—with Social Democracy. “The Nazi tree should not hide the Social Democrat forest,” the German Communist leader Ernst Thälmann had warned.⁴⁰⁰ The catastrophe of the Comintern policy of “social fascism” was vividly brought home in the November 1932 elections, when German Communists had garnered nearly 6 million votes, and the Social Democrats more than 7 million, as compared with the Nazis’ 11.7 million. In no free and fair election did the Nazis ever win more votes than the Communists and Social Democrats combined.⁴⁰¹

Many Communists imagined Nazism, which they labeled “fascism,” to be the terminal stage of the crisis of “monopoly capitalism,” so that the turmoil in Germany would eventually redound to them, which meant they needed to make themselves ready by outbattling their rivals on the left.⁴⁰² Some Communists even welcomed the Nazi accession to power. Stalin did not.⁴⁰³ Still, he appears to have underestimated Hitler, as many—but not all—contemporaries did. He interpreted Hitler and Nazism as creatures of finance capital, a class-based analysis, and assumed that German militarists would continue to shape state policy.Secret German-Soviet military cooperation had been failing.⁴⁰⁴ But Stalin hoped it would be renewed.⁴⁰⁵

Werner von Blomberg, who had played a hand in Hindenburg’s appointment of Hitler and stayed on as war minister, would pass on to the Soviet embassy that “a change in Soviet-German relations is out of the question under any circumstances.”⁴⁰⁶ But Nazism’s appeal to German workers was manifest, and its intense ideological radicalism was directed at the Soviet Union.⁴⁰⁷

RADICAL REALIGNMENTS

As the Nazis reveled in Hitler’s chancellorship, Stalin’s regime staged the First all-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers (February 15–19, 1933), attended by more than 1,500 delegates, nearly 900 of whom held no bureaucratic office and half of whom were not party or Communist Youth League members. They were recognized for labor performance.⁴⁰⁸

Kaganovich addressed them in a folksy manner, reciting peasant proverbs, while praising the vicious injunction against theft of socialist property as a “great law.” He boasted of the creation of 200,000 collective farms and 5,000 state farms, asserting that only collectivization had made possible industrialization and the preemption of foreign military intervention.⁴⁰⁹ One collective farm brigadier, who had been asked by Kaganovich whether the collectivized system was better, answered, “Things are, of course, better now. Still, before I was master of my fate, and now I am not the master.”⁴¹⁰

On the final day, Stalin, putting on a folksy air, too, warned biblically that he who did not work would not eat, but promised that each collective farmer would have a cow (“prolonged applause”).⁴¹¹ He scolded those who underestimated women (“Women on the collective farms are a great force”). He acknowledged that “quite a number of people, including collective farmers,” had been skeptical of party policy, but dismissed the idea of a third way, individual farming without capitalists and landowners, because it would inevitably give rise to a “kulak-capitalist regime.” Silent on the famine, he asserted that “the multi-million-mass poor peasants, previously living half starving, have now become middle peasants in the collective farms, they have become well-off. This is an achievement that the world has not seen before.”⁴¹²