Stalin

The United States was not a member of the League. Any Soviet bid would have to be shepherded by France, and three days later the Soviet envoy in Paris communicated Moscow’s terms for joining the League as well as a regional alliance.¹²⁴ Franco-Soviet talks would proceed glacially. Distrust ran deep.¹²⁵ Édouard Herriot, who had signed the Franco-Soviet nonaggression pact and now wanted to counter Hitler, had demonstrated the price of rapprochement when, in summer-fall 1933, he had visited the USSR during the famine, disembarking at Odessa. Just before he reached Kiev, streets were washed, corpses removed, shops with windows stocked with goods (the populace was not allowed in), and a “festive crowd” assembled from OGPU and Communist Youth League personnel. In Kharkov, he was shown a “model” children’s facility, the tractor factory, and a museum devoted to the Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko. He asked to see the countryside and was taken to a collective farm where he again encountered activists and operatives, this time disguised as farmers. Everywhere, he ate his fill. Soviet Ukraine was “like a garden in full bloom,” Herriot observed in

Pravda. “When one believes that the Ukraine is devastated by famine, allow me to shrug my shoulders.”¹²⁶

LAMAS AND WOLVES

Duranty had been followed into Stalin’s office by the co-chairs of the politburo’s Mongolia commission, Voroshilov and Sokolnikov, and two Mongolian officials, a deputy prime minister for finance and a leftist party scourge of the lamas. Mongolia served as a Soviet showcase and experimental laboratory for the colonial world and, even more important, a territory that supplied defense in depth for the southern Siberian border, meat and raw materials for the Soviet economy (paralleling Kazakhstan), and a link with China, should war with Japan break out.¹²⁷ Since imposing the “New Course” retreat stabilization, Stalin had worried that Mongolia’s NEP equivalent had allowed a revival of traders (NEPmen) and better-off nomads (kulaks), and persistent sway of the lama “class.” Voroshilov told the Mongols that, against a population of just 700,000, there were still 120,000 lamas with undue influence (“Beyond that, the lamas engage in homosexualism, corrupting the youth who return to them”). Stalin asked how the lamas supported themselves. The Mongols answered that lamas drew substantial income from the lamaseries and served as spiritual leaders, physicians, traders, and advisers to the arats (common people). “It’s a state within a state,” Stalin interjected. “Chinggis Khan would not have permitted that. He would have cut them all down.”

Soviet proconsuls were instigating a terror against fabricated Japanese spies, which destroyed the head of the Mongolian People’s Party and brought perhaps 2,000 arrests.¹²⁸ Stalin asked about the budget, and the Mongols replied that their GDP totaled just 82 million tugriks, while the state budget was 33 million; the Soviets extended a loan of 10 million, but the army alone cost 13 million. “A large part of your budget is being swallowed up by white-collar employees,” Stalin admonished. “Can it be impossible to get away with fewer?”¹²⁹

Sometime either before or after Stalin received these two Mongols, he met with Mongolian prime minister Peljidiin Genden, but in Molotov’s office. The dictator would write Genden in a courtesy follow-up note, “I am very glad that your Republic has, finally, taken the correct path, that your internal affairs are succeeding, that you are strengthening your international might and strengthening your independence.” He advised that Mongolia needed “full unity” in the leadership, full support of the arats,

and an army on the highest level, and promised continued fraternal assistance. “In that, you should have no doubts,” he concluded. “Voroshilov, Molotov, and I together thank you for the gifts you sent.” The Soviet Union was reciprocating with new automatic rifles. “They will come in handy in a battle against wolves of all types, two-legged and four-legged.”¹³⁰

WHITES AND REDS