Yezhov and I discussed various reports in our possession as to discontent in Germany, and possible opposition to Hitler from the old monarchist groups. Yezhov had discussed the same subject that very day in his conference with Stalin. His words were practically a phonographic record of the boss himself:
“What’s all this drivel about discontent with Hitler in the German army?” he exclaimed. “What does it take to content an army? Ample rations? Hitler furnishes them. Good arms and equipment? Hitler supplies them. Prestige and honor? Hitler provides it. A sense of power and victory? Hitler gives that, too. The talk about army unrest in Germany is all nonsense.
“As for the capitalists, what do they need a Kaiser for? They wanted to put the workers back in the factories. Hitler has done it for them. They wanted to get rid of the Communists. Hitler has them in jails and concentration camps. They were fed up with labor unions and strikes. Hitler has put labor under state control and outlawed strikes. Why should the industrialists be discontented?”
Yezhov continued in the same vein: Germany is strong. She is now the strongest power in the world. Hitler has made her so. Who can doubt it? How can anyone in his senses fail to reckon with it? For Soviet Russia there is but one course. And here he quoted Stalin: “We must come to terms with a superior power like Nazi Germany.”
Hitler, however, again rebuffed Stalin’s advances. By the end of 1937, with the collapse of the Stalin plans in Spain and the Japanese successes in China, the international isolation of the Soviet Union became extreme. Stalin then took, on the surface, a position of neutrality between the two major groups of powers. On November 27, 1937, speaking in Leningrad, Foreign Commissar Litvinov poked fun at the democratic nations for their handling of the Fascist nations. But Stalin’s underlying purpose remained the same.
In March, 1938, Stalin staged his ten-day super-trial of the Rykov-Bukharin-Krestinsky group of Bolsheviks, who had been Lenin’s closest associates and who were among the fathers of the Soviet Revolution. These Bolshevik leaders—hateful to Hitler—were shot by Stalin on March third. On March twelfth, with no protest from Russia, Hitler annexed Austria. Moscow’s only reply was a proposal to call a parley of the democratic nations. Again, when Hitler annexed the Sudeten areas in September, 1938 Litvinov proposed concerted aid to Prague, but made it conditional upon action by the League of Nations. Stalin himself remained silent during the whole eventful year of 1938. But signs have not been wanting since Munich of his continued wooing of Hitler.
On January 12, 1939, there took place before the entire diplomatic corps in Berlin the cordial and demonstrative chat of Hitler with the new Soviet ambassador. A week later an item appeared in the London News Chronicle reporting a coming rapprochement between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. And this item was immediately and prominently reprinted, without comment and without refutation, in Stalin’s mouthpiece, the Moscow Pravda.
On January twenty-fifth, W. N. Ewer, foreign editor of the London Daily Herald, leading British Labor paper, reported that the Nazi government was “now almost convinced that in the event of a European war the Soviet Union would adopt a policy of neutrality and non-intervention” and that a German trade delegation whose “objects are political rather than commercial” was on the way to Moscow.
Early in February it was disclosed that Moscow had made a deal to sell its oil only to Italy and Germany and nations friendly to the Rome-Berlin axis. For the first time in its history the Soviet government had stopped the sale of oil to private foreign corporations. This new policy would provide supplies vital to Italy and Germany in case of war with Great Britain and France.
Then, on Friday, March 10, 1939, Stalin at last spoke up. It was his first word since the annexation of Austria and the Sudeten lands by Germany, and he displayed such remarkable good humor toward Hitler that it came as a shock to world opinion. He excoriated the democracies for plotting to “poison the atmosphere and provoke a conflict” between Germany and Soviet Russia, for which, he said, there were “no visible grounds.”
Three days after Stalin’s speech, Hitler dismembered Czechoslovakia. Two days later, he extinguished Czechoslovakia altogether. Of course, this was the result of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. The world did not then realize that it was also the result of Stalin’s policy of appeasement. Secretly Stalin had been playing the Rome-Berlin axis against the London-Paris axis all along. He does not believe in the strength of the democratic states.
To Stalin it was clear that Hitler had undertaken to solve the entire problem of Central and Southeastern Europe, to bring the peoples and resources in those areas under his political and economic domination, and to extend there his military base for future operations.
Stalin has seen Hitler in recent years reach out and get a foothold for a leap in almost every direction. He has dropped an anchor in the Pacific, and put his hand in South America. He is coming within striking distance of the British Empire in the Near East. And he has, with the aid of Mussolini, driven a stake in colonial Africa.
Stalin wants to avoid war at any cost. He fears war most. If Hitler will assure him peace, even at the price of important economic concessions, he will give Hitler a free hand in all these directions. . . .
The above account of Stalin’s hidden policies toward Hitler’s Germany was written and published in the Saturday Evening Post several months before August 23, 1939, when the world was astounded by the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact. It is needless to say that the pact was no surprise to the author. Both Molotov and Von Ribbentrop assert that the Nazi-Soviet pact inaugurates a new epoch in German-Russian relations, which will have profound consequences for the future history of Europe and the world. That is absolutely true.
II. The End of the Communist International
THE Communist International was born in Moscow on March 2nd, 1919. It received its death blow in Moscow on August 23, 1939, with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact by Premier Molotov and German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. But its decay was apparent in many things that happened years before.
On a May morning in 1934, I was with Volynski, the chief of the counter-espionage section of the Ogpu, in his office on the tenth floor of the Lubianka building in Moscow. Suddenly, from the street below, we heard the sound of music and of singing men. Looking down we saw a parade going by. The marchers were three hundred members of the Austrian Socialist Army, the Schutzbünd, who had fought heroically on the barricades in Vienna against the Fascist Heimwehr. Soviet Russia had given refuge to this small battalion of Socialist fighters.
I shall always remember that May morning: the happy faces of the Schutzbündler as they marched, singing their revolutionary song, Brueder Zur Sonne, Zur Freiheit, the spontaneous fellowship of the Russian crowds as they joined the march. For a moment I forgot where I was, but Volynski brought me down to earth.
“How many spies do you suppose there are among them, Krivitsky?” he asked in the most natural tone of voice.
“Not one,” I replied angrily.
“You’re making a big mistake,” he said. “In six or seven months seventy per cent of them will be sitting in the Lubianka prison.”
Volynski was a good judge of the way the Stalin machine functioned. Of those three hundred Austrians not a single one remains today on Soviet territory. Many of them were arrested soon after their arrival. Others, although they knew what awaited them at home, came flocking to the Austrian embassy for their passports and returned home to serve long prison sentences.
“Better behind bars in Austria,” they said, “than at liberty in the Soviet Union.”
The last of these refugees were shipped by the Soviet government to the International Brigade in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Stalin was moving swiftly on the road to totalitarian despotism, and the Comintern had long since outworn its original purpose.