Stalin

At the Reich Chancellery on September 26, at a meeting of department heads, the state secretary (the number two) at the foreign ministry insisted that Germany had little to gain from a breach with the USSR, given the countries’ economic compatibility. Hitler concurred on avoiding handing Moscow a pretext to sever relations, but he warned officials not to indulge in delusions (“The Russians were always lying”) and predicted that the Soviet government would never forgive the smashing of German Communism and that the new order in Germany had crushed every hope of world revolution.⁹⁷ Hitler was furtively accelerating a military buildup set in motion by his predecessors, in violation of Versailles restrictions, and told every Briton he could reach that German expansionism would be at Soviet expense and that Germany’s purely continental interests did not conflict with Britain’s global empire. He disavowed wanting to annex Austria (a wish that pre-1933 German governments had not disguised).⁹⁸ He would also insist to an interviewer for Le Matin

that he wanted to live in peace with France.⁹⁹ Stalin followed the least hints of Franco-German as well as Anglo-German rapprochement, and of supposed British instigation of Poland and Japan and Polish-Japanese collusion.¹⁰⁰ He saw danger not in “superstructure” ideologies in any single capitalist country, such as Nazi Germany, but in the underlying “class interests” of all capitalist powers, led by Britain and France, which, axiomatically, strove to catalyze an anti-Soviet bloc.

On September 28, amid Soviet negotiations to sell the Chinese Eastern Railway to Manchukuo, the Japanese had Manchukuo authorities arrest six Soviet employees. The Japanese were evidently trying to force a sale at a rock-bottom price. The Soviets had requested 250 million rubles; the Japanese offered the equivalent of one tenth that sum: 50 million paper yen. Stalin terminated the negotiations. He also ordered up a propaganda offensive against Japanese “militarism”—not something he did vis-à-vis Nazi Germany.¹⁰¹

Yenukidze, a Germanophile and Stalin confidant, concocted a scheme with German ambassador Herbert von Dirksen to find a modus vivendi by sending someone with stature to Hitler, even without formal invitation. They decided that the Jewish Nikolai Krestinsky, a former Soviet ambassador to Germany who was fluent in the language and was taking a rest cure at Kissingen, was to stop over in Berlin on the way home. Litvinov advised against such a move, but Molotov and Kaganovich favored it. Stalin agreed. Hitler reluctantly acceded to his foreign ministry’s urgings to receive the “Judeo-Bolshevik” envoy.¹⁰² Right then (October 14, 1933), however, the Führer declared on the radio that Germany would pull out of the League of Nations.¹⁰³ France erupted with loose talk of launching a preventive war.¹⁰⁴

Molotov and Kaganovich wrote to Stalin (October 16), reversing their support for Krestinsky’s Berlin stopover. “It is incomprehensible why Krestinsky’s trip should be called off,” the dictator fired back that same day. “What do we care about the League, and why should we conduct a demonstration in honor of an insult to the League and against its insult of Germany?”¹⁰⁵ But the foreign affairs commissariat had already backed out of the gambit.¹⁰⁶

AMERICAN GAMBIT

Stalin had traveled again, a few miles south of the Pitsunda Cape, arriving on October 9, 1933, at Mysra (Myussera in Russian), site of a secluded seaside Romano-Greek estate recently owned by an Armenian oil magnate.¹⁰⁷ Nearby, Lakoba had instigated construction of yet another luxury dacha for Stalin. (Only the urinals were of domestic make.)¹⁰⁸ The next day, in New York, Henry Morgenthau Jr., acting treasury secretary, had brought a Philadelphia millionaire and Franklin Roosevelt confidant, William Bullitt, to a meeting with an unofficial Soviet representative. Roosevelt was eager to find common cause in containing Japanese expansionism, concerned about Hitler, and being lobbied by U.S. business for continued access to the Soviet market, after orders from that country had shrunk. Bullitt delivered a draft letter from the president, addressed to Kalinin (formal head of state), containing an invitation to Washington for a chosen representative. Stalin, who had hurried back to Gagra, instructed Molotov to accept and recommended sending Litvinov. The latter begged off in a cipher, but Stalin and Kalinin wrote to Molotov and Kaganovich (October 17) insisting on Litvinov and urging them to “act more boldly and without delay, since now the situation is favorable.”¹⁰⁹