Chapter Ten – The Diplomacy of Rapprochement with Germany
On no subject was foreign opinion more inclined to err in the 1930s than on Stalin’s foreign policy. The apostle of socialism in one country was widely viewed as a nationalist leader who, in fact if not in theory, had jettisoned international Communist revolution as an aim of Soviet policy. This simplistic thinking, based on the antithesis of “Russian nationalism” versus “international revolution,” blocked an understanding of Stalin’s foreign policy as a subtle amalgam of both.
A preliminary version of this chapter appeared in The Slavic Review (December 1977) under the title “The Emergence of Stalin’s Foreign Policy.”
In charity to those who erred, it must be said that for reasons of Realpolitik Stalin encouraged the misconception. For instance, to a visiting American agricultural engineer whom he invited to his Kremlin office for an interview in 1929, he admitted, with what the visitor took to be “disarming frankness,” that under Trotsky there had been an attempt to spread Communism throughout the world, and said that this was the main cause of his break with Trotsky. In 1936, he spoke still more bluntly to the American newspaper executive, Roy Howard. He said, “The export of revolution is nonsense,” and dismissed the idea that Soviet Russia had ever harbored world revolutionary intentions as a “tragicomic” misunderstanding.
The exiled Trotsky eagerly seized upon such statements as evidence for his own view that Stalin’s foreign policy, being that of a Thermidorian bureaucracy, had in fact renounced world revolution. When Campbell’s book came out in 1932 with its account of the 1929 conversation, Trotsky wrote in the Bulletin of the Opposition: “The declaration of Stalin is no maneuver and no trick; basically it flows from the theory of socialism in one country.” Later, Trotsky sought to sum up Stalinist foreign policy in the phrase “From ‘World Revolution’ to ‘Status Quo’,” brandished Stalin’s remarks to Roy Howard as proof, and commented: “‘Your tragicomic misunderstanding,’ Stalin might have concluded, ‘lies in your taking us for the continuers of Bolshevism, when we are in fact its grave-diggers.’”
Those who saw the international revolution as a dead letter in Stalin’s foreign policy could point not only to such words but also to Soviet actions—and inactions—of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Bukharin said to Kamenev during their clandestine conversation of July 1928, “Externally Stalin is following a rightist policy.” Hypercaution was in fact the keynote of the policies pursued abroad at this time and after. Stalin’s regime showed an anxious concern for the maintenance of international peace.
When William Bullitt arrived in Moscow in December 1933 as American ambassador, following U.S. recognition of Soviet Russia, Foreign Commissar Litvinov informed him in their first official conversation that the Soviet government wanted to join the League of Nations, an organization long reviled in Soviet publicity as a tool of Anglo-French imperialism. He explained the shift of policy by the desire to secure Russia on its western borders at a time when a Japanese attack was believed imminent in the Far East. The nervousness felt on this score was reflected in Litvinov’s suggestion that an American squadron or warship be sent the following spring on a visit to Vladivostok or Leningrad as a gesture of support. At a Kremlin banquet in Bullitt’s honor, Stalin solicited 250,000 tons of American steel rails to complete the double-tracking of the Trans-Siberian railway in preparation for trouble with the Japanese, declared that “President Roosevelt is today, in spite of being the leader of a capitalist nation, one of the most popular men in the Soviet Union,” and ended by kissing the amazed envoy on the face.
But a foreign policy must be understood in terms of its longer-range perspective as well as the actions of the moment. Stalin was then preoccupied with the second revolution, knew that Soviet society was in no condition to fight, and feared any external complications that could lead to war. Yet preparation of the country for a future war was a primary purpose of his policies, and the war prospect was a revolutionary one as well.
An acute observer would have done well to look through a volume of previously unpublished Lenin writings that came out in Moscow in 1929. One of the documents, a set of notes written by Lenin in early 1918, contained the injunction: “First conquer the bourgeoisie in Russia, then fight with the external, foreign, outside bourgeoisie.” The editing of unpublished Lenin documents was considered a matter of such high state importance that the Lenin Institute was a constituent part of the Central Committee apparatus under Stalin. He was undoubtedly aware of the lines just quoted, and the whole record of his conduct of Soviet policy shows that he took them as authoritative guidance.
But before becoming powerful enough to fight the “outside bourgeoisie,” Stalin reasoned, Soviet Russia must align herself diplomatically with a section of it. By helping to keep the capitalist world divided against itself, such a policy would provide her with insurance against the dread possibility of having to fight a war for survival against an overwhelming coalition of enemy states. Moreover—according to Leninist theory—tendencies leading toward the outbreak of a new interimperialist war would be strengthened, and such a war, if properly exploited, could offer an opening for revolutionary advance. To prepare the way for moving into neighboring countries destined to constitute parts of the needed “socialist encirclement,” Moscow’s best bet from Stalin’s point of view, was a diplomacy of accord with Germany.
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The German Orientation
Interviewing Stalin in December 1931, the German biographer Emil Ludwig said that he had observed in Russia a general enthusiasm for everything American. “You exaggerate,” Stalin replied. Although American efficiency and straightforwardness were appreciated, he said, there was no special respect for everything American. If there was any nation toward which Soviet sympathies were strong, it was the Germans. “Our feelings toward the Americans bear no comparison with these sympathies!”
After inquiring why the Russians felt such ardent pro-German sympathies (to which Stalin archly replied, if only because Germany gave the world Marx and Engels), Ludwig said that recent Soviet-Polish talks about a nonaggression treaty had aroused alarm among German politicians. Should Poland’s present borders receive official Soviet recognition, it would be deeply disappointing to the German people, which had taken the USSR’s opposition to the Versailles system seriously. In his carefully worded response, Stalin stressed that a Soviet-Polish nonaggression agreement would mean nothing more than an undertaking by the two states not to attack one another. It would be neither a recognition of the Versailles system nor a guarantee of Poland’s borders. “We have never been Poland’s guarantors and never will be, just as Poland has not and will not be a guarantor of ours. Our friendly relations with Germany remain just what they have been so far. Such is my firm conviction. So, the alarm of which you speak is utterly unfounded.”
Stalin’s German orientation was not rooted in anything personal. His German experience was confined to the two or three months that—as he mentioned to Ludwig—he had spent in Berlin in 1907 while returning from a Bolshevik party congress in London, and he knew only a few words of German. The orientation derived from the legacy of Lenin. The Brest treaty, that primal act of Leninist diplomacy to which the Bolshevik Revolution owed its survival, was an accord between Moscow and Berlin.
Subsequently, Lenin visualized an alliance with Germany as an attractive option for Moscow’s divisive diplomacy. “Germany is one of the strongest advanced capitalist countries, and so it cannot put up with the Versailles treaty. Herself imperialist but pinned down, Germany must seek an ally against world imperialism,” he said in his speech of 6 December 1920. “Here is a situation we must utilize.” Lenin’s prevision of a Soviet-German alliance bore fruit in the Rapallo treaty of 1922 providing for full resumption of diplomatic relations, mutual cancellation of economic claims, and most favored nation treatment. This coup of Lenin’s divisive diplomacy opened the way for an anti-Versailles partnership between the Soviet and German governments during the 1920s. The relationship, though close, was also uneasy because of conflicting pressures on both partners. On the German side there was a division among influential circles and in the Foreign Ministry between men of Eastern orientation (the Ostlers ), who saw the Russian connection as vital for Germany’s revisionist goals, and those of Western orientation (the Westlers ), who felt that Germany’s interests, the territorial one included, could best be served by cooperation with the West. The German ambassador in Moscow, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, and the man who succeeded him in that post in 1929, Herbert von Dirksen, were prominent Ostlers , as were the military leaders who valued the clandestine use of Soviet soil for military training and testing in collaboration with the Red Army. The German Social Democratic party, on the other hand, was strongly wedded to the Western orientation.
The latter circumstance helps to explain Stalin’s extreme antipathy for the SPD. In February 1925 he told a German Communist journalist, Wilhelm Herzog, that a proletarian revolution was out of the question in Germany so long as the SPD had not been exposed, crushed, and reduced to an insignificant minority among the workers. Recalling that Lenin in the pre-October period had insisted on the Mensheviks’ elimination as a prime condition of victory, Stalin said that now no firm German revolutionary victory was possible even in the best of external conditions as long as there were, within the working class, two competing parties of equal strength. Stalin’s antipathy extended to German Communists of moderate persuasion who favored a common front with amenable left-wing Social Democrats against the fascist danger. One such person was the prominent German party leader Heinrich Brandler, who sought a united front with the SPD left wing looking to possible Communist participation in a coalition government. Later in the month of his interview with Herzog, Stalin numbered Brandler, along with his associate Thalheimer, among the “old” leaders who, like the Lunacharskys and Pokrovskys in Russia, were passing out of the picture now; and stressed the need to eradicate “Brandlerism” from the German Communist party. Brandler’s expulsion from party membership came in 1929, by which time it was an official Comintern policy to damn Social Democracy as “social-fascism.”
The German alignment was a star by which Stalin steered Soviet diplomacy in the later 1920s and early 1930s. The anti-Entente memories of the Russian Civil War were an enduring influence on his political thinking: the two great adversary poles of attraction in the contemporary world were the Soviet East and the capitalist West led by “Anglo-America.” The American-sponsored Dawes plan (regarding German reparations) he assessed in a speech of May 1925 as an American-British-French scheme for looting Germany; and he saw a sign of the unwillingness of “such a cultured nation as Germany” to bear that yoke in the “in essence reactionary fact” of Field Marshal von Hindenburg’s election to the German presidency in the previous month.
The now abundantly documented inner history of Moscow-Berlin relations in the later 1920s reveals the picture of a German government adhering generally to the Russian connection in the midst of a tug-of-war of pressures from West and East; and of a Stalin regime nervously fearful lest its German connection be lost due to a combination of the Westlers ’ influence internally and a determined effort by the Versailles powers to lure Berlin into their anti-Soviet camp with economic, political, and territorial concessions. From the talks on renewal of Rapallo that led to the 1926 Treaty of Berlin, through to the talks of early 1931 on the latter’s extension, the now available German Foreign Ministry correspondence shows the Soviet side regularly pressing the Germans to reaffirm their adherence to the Rapallo line and periodically taking initiatives to cement political, military, and economic ties with Berlin. Thus the 1931 talks found Litvinov offering the Germans a choice between straight renewal or a stronger treaty whereas the Germans favored simple renewal; and Moscow wanted a five-year extension as against the original Wilhelmstrasse proposal of only six months.
It is true that German dealings with the Russians were bedeviled by many frustrations and that for about a year in 1929–30—during the chancellorship of Herman Müller, the first Social Democrat to hold that post since 1923—severe tensions brought by developments on the Soviet side plunged the partnership into a crisis. The earlier Soviet arrest of five German engineers and placing of three on trial in the Shakhty case was one of the developments. Another was the descent on Moscow, during collectivization, of thousands of Mennonites of German extraction who were fleeing their villages in quest of a new home in Canada and whose plight greatly aroused German public opinion. Significantly, it was Soviet initiatives for better relations which caused the diplomatic crisis to subside in early 1930.
As Weimar Germany entered the time of its death agony, Moscow signed a nonaggression agreement with France in August 1931 with a view to defusing French anti-Sovietism; and in January 1932 it concluded a similar agreement with Poland. In doing so the Narkomindel (as the Foreign Commissariat was called) rejected the Poles’ long-standing demand for a clause specifically recognizing the German-Polish border. But it agreed to a general formula defining aggression as any action violating the territorial integrity or political independence of either side. To the worried Germans this looked like an “indirect guarantee” of the eastern borders they aspired one day to revise.
Stalin’s forthright statement to Ludwig in December 1931 that the Soviet Union would never be Poland’s guarantor was obviously intended to reassure the Germans that whatever phraseology was used in the impending treaty with Poland, they had no cause for alarm. He wanted to emphasize that Moscow’s German orientation was still in force.
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Stalin and the Nazi Revolution
The Weimar republic went down under the assault of the Great Depression and the Nazi movement, helped along by various political factors: the feebleness of the center forces, the absence of alert and vigorous political leadership on the part of those in authority, and, not least, the tactics pursued by the German Communists on orders from Moscow—from Stalin.
Unemployment in Germany rose steadily from over one million in late 1929 to over six million in 1931–32, the latter number amounting to something like a third of the wage-earning population. Masses of Germans grew responsive to the would-be savior leadership of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist party, and by the summer of 1932, the Nazis held about a third of the seats in the Reichstag. The stage was now set for the combined propaganda blitz and high-level political maneuvering that brought Hitler to the chancellorship on 30 January 1933. The ensuing “legal revolution” witnessed a wave of Nazi terror, the Reichstag fire of 28 February followed by the Enabling Act (“Law for Removal of the Distress of People and Reich”), and the overthrow of the constitutional order. By the summer of 1933, the Nazi dictatorship was firmly established.
With their mass worker and trade union constituencies, their combined total of close to 40 percent of the Reichstag seats in November 1932 (representing about seven million Social Democratic votes and nearly six million Communist ones), the two parties of the German Left were together a potentially powerful force for preservation of the constitutional order. Whether they could have prevented the Nazi victory by resolutely working in tandem and with other antifascist elements to this end is an unanswerable question. What is certain is that the absence of such cooperation, indeed the strife between the two parties during that critical time, facilitated the downfall of the constitutional order. Not all Communists were blind to the catastrophic character of this strife. As early as September 1930 Trotsky raised his voice from Prinkipo exile to urge the German Communist party (the KPD) to work with the SPD in a united front against fascism. He accurately forewarned that a Nazi victory would mean the crushing of the German working class and an inevitable war against the USSR. Many German Communists took a similar view.
But Stalin had different ideas. By forcing upon the KPD a policy of uncompromising belligerence against Social Democracy (“social-fascism”), he abetted the Nazi victory. A Comintern Executive Committee directive to the German Communists in February 1930 demanded “merciless exposure” of Social Democracy. Under Comintern direction, the German Communist leader Heinz Neumann in the summer of 1930 drafted a new KPD “Program of National and Social Liberation,” which promised to annul the Versailles treaty and the Young Plan and denounced the SPD as the treasonable party of Versailles. Competition with the Nazis for the mantle of German nationalism went along with a certain amount of collaboration. In the summer of 1931, for instance the Communists, on orders from Moscow, joined in a Nazi- and rightist-organized plebiscite against the SPD state government in Prussia.
The leaning toward a united antifascist front with the SPD was not entirely confined to the Communist rank-and-file; there were signs of it among the party leaders too. Ernst Thaelmann rebelled at first against the instruction to participate in the anti-SPD Prussian plebiscite. Then he, Hermann Remmele, and Heinz Neumann “were called to Moscow to learn at first hand that this instruction had been issued to the Communist International by Stalin personally.” Another former German Communist, who worked in the Comintern offices in Moscow in 1932 and survived a lengthy later incarceration in Soviet concentration camps, recalls that “. . . as early as 1932 there existed in the leadership of the KPD as well as in the Comintern machine a marked readiness to set up a ‘united front’ with the Social Democrats which would have prevented the victory of National Socialism. But their timid proposals were not adopted. The influence of Stalin—who held fast to his line, while any criticism of it was instantly branded as ‘antiparty heresy,’ if not as ‘provocation by agents of international capitalism’—was decisive.”
The SPD leadership, concerned over its ties with the Catholic and center parties, also held back from collaboration with the Communists. By the autumn of 1932, however, the depth of the crisis made the urgency of collaboration clear. An SPD leader, Friedrich Stampfer, obtained an interview with the Soviet envoy in Berlin, Lev Khinchuk, himself a former Russian Menshevik. “Would it be possible to expect the cooperation of Communism in the struggle against National Socialism?” Stampfer asked Khinchuk. Several interviews followed between Stampfer and Soviet Embassy attaché Vinogradov, who finally broke off the exchanges by saying: “Moscow is convinced that the road to Soviet Germany leads through Hitler.”
Stalin’s decisive personal role in the KPD policies that abetted the Nazi revolution is beyond doubt. Insofar as the possibility existed of heading off this event by encouraging a united front of the German Left and other anti-Nazi forces, he was chiefly responsible for its failure to materialize. To some his decision has seemed an act of monumental political ineptitude stemming from failure to grasp the revolutionary nature of National Socialism or a belief that its victory—as was said in Communist circles at that time—would be short-lived and pave the way to power for German Communism. Such interpretations are unconvincing. The then current version about a short-lived Nazi victory bears earmarks of a convenient rationalization put out by Stalin’s headquarters. However inadequate his understanding of Hitler and the Nazi movement may have been in 1930–33, Stalin knew enough about the staying powers of Italian fascism, not to mention Russian Bolshevism, to beware of assuming that the Nazis could not create a stable single-party system and extirpate resistance with ruthless terror. We must take into account that Stalin, for all his doctrinaire cast of mind, was reasonably well informed and given to acting with a carefully thought-out rationale. Although complex, the rationale in this instance is not hard to reconstruct.
First, elemental caution dictated that the German Communists be restrained from any attempt at a seizure of power, no matter how revolutionary the German situation. In the comparable circumstances of 1923, Stalin had argued in a letter to Zinoviev that the German Communists should be restrained on the grounds that their position was not so favorable as the Bolsheviks’ in 1917 in Russia and that “if power in Germany were, so to speak, to fall to the street and the Communists picked it up, it would end in failure and collapse.” He had ample reason to take the same view in 1932. Even if a coup should initially succeed, the German Communists could not possibly hold out on their own against combined internal and external counterrevolutionary forces. The Soviet Union for its part was in no position to come to their aid or to risk any international complications that might result in early war. Separated from Germany by hostile Poland, preoccupied with its piatiletka , stricken by famine, it would be condemned to stand by helplessly and ignominiously while German Communism was being overthrown and destroyed.
For different reasons, Stalin could not look with favor on a KPD bloc with the SPD and other amenable elements to prevent the fall of the Weimar system. Even this policy entailed some small risk of international anti-Soviet complications that had to be avoided at all cost. And supposing the policy succeeded and the Nazis were stopped from taking power, what then? The SPD politicians were inveterate Westlers , indeed the chief German force for a Western orientation in foreign policy. As probably the dominant partner in the anti-Nazi coalition, their foreign-policy orientation would be influential. No prospect could have been less pleasing to Stalin.
The only serious remaining possibility was the path that Stalin took. Accepting and even indirectly abetting the Nazi takeover was a course that offered promise along with dangers to the USSR (but in what direction were there no dangers?) and the certainty that German Communism would be repressed. Despite their shrill ideological anti-Bolshevism and anti-Slav racism (along with anti-Semitism, which would not grieve Stalin), the Nazis were no Westlers . Their movement was stridently nationalistic, revanchist, illiberal, antidemocratic, antipacifist, and anti-Versailles. They were plainly a bellicose force. Their accession to power might, then, be a harbinger of great tension, if not a new war, between Germany and the West. We have direct testimony that this was what Stalin thought. In a conversation with Heinz Neumann at the end of 1931 he said: “Don’t you believe, Neumann, that if the Nationalists seize power in Germany they will be so completely preoccupied with the West that we’ll be able to build up socialism in peace?”
Stalin’s line of thought and action—or inaction—at this critical juncture was consistent with his war-and-revolution scenario. By accepting if not actively facilitating the Nazi takeover, he was guiding events in the direction he had long wanted them to take—toward a war between opposed imperialist countries in Europe. This was not, as he knew, an early prospect, for it would be a matter of years before the Nazis could rearm Germany for war. But an early outbreak of war was not something for which Russia was prepared either. What the Nazi victory portended was the end of passivity in German foreign policy. A liberal democratic Weimar Germany perpetually poised between Ostpolitik and Westpolitik , wavering between the Russian connection and the Western alignment into which she was regularly being drawn by anti-Soviet politicians in America, Britain, France, and Germany herself, would never go to war against the West for German interests. A Nazi Germany might. There was of course the alternate possibility that it would march against Russia. But Stalin apparently reckoned that he could contain this threat by the devices of diplomacy.
As the Nazi takeover drew near, Moscow signaled its readiness for it, indeed its cautious hopefulness. In July 1932 the counselor of the German Embassy in Moscow, Gustav Hilger, had a talk with Doletsky, the head of the Soviet news agency TASS. Along with Soviet worries, Doletsky communicated to Hilger “his conviction that healthy political common sense would win out in a National Socialist government; even the Nazis would be sensible and continue a policy toward Russia that, in his opinion, was consonant with the long-range interests of Germany.” “His” conviction was unquestionably the view that Doletsky had been commissioned to convey informally. He assured Hilger that the Soviet press had been ordered to give no appearance of interfering in Germany’s crisis and even to avoid criticizing German policy. His only fear was that Hitler’s accession might be followed by a disturbed transition period before normal relations could be reestablished. “The general impression in the German Embassy,” adds Hilger in his recollections, “was that the Soviet government would have liked to establish contact with the National Socialists for the purpose of preventing such temporary difficulties.”
A former German Communist writes that a saying was current in antifascist German circles at that time, “Without Stalin, no Hitler,” and that Zinoviev said to him in early 1933: “Apart from the German Social Democrats, Stalin bears the main responsibility to history for Hitler’s victory.” Be that as it may, Stalin played a part in helping the Nazis to take power.
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First Overtures
Using terror to solidify their power, the Nazis seized on the pretext of the Reichstag fire to hound members of the KPD into exile, concentration camps, or underground. Initially, their relations with Moscow were clouded by a series of ugly incidents in which Nazi toughs invaded the premises of Soviet offices in Berlin. The new authorities hastened, however, to assure the Soviet government that their anti-Communist internal policies had nothing to do with their foreign policy.
Some men in Moscow were apprehensive about the Nazi takeover and inclined to respond in a stiffer way than Stalin wanted. Two top commanders, M. N. Tukhachevsky and Yan Gamarnik, are reported to have proposed right after Hitler’s accession that Red Army–Reichswehr relations be broken off, and to have been overruled by Stalin. They and others who shared their outlook were not in most cases anti-German or opposed to the German orientation. Ordzhonikidze, for example, was appreciatively aware of the contribution that the 5,000 or more German engineers working in the Soviet Union had made to the piatiletka . Tukhachevky and his fellow officers prized the Red Army’s connection with the Reichswehr . But the rise of the ferociously anti-Communist German radical right to power seemed to jeopardize the long-standing friendly links between the two outcasts of Versailles and show the need for new directions in foreign policy.
A leading figure who reasoned in this fashion was Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov. An old Bolshevik of wide foreign experience, who had spent ten pre-revolutionary years in England and returned to Russia in 1918 with an English wife, he was less attached to the German orientation than many other Soviet politicians. Since he was also a Jew, Litvinov could not but harbor extreme antipathy for a force like German National Socialism. Earlier, as the ties with Germany loosened in the prelude to Hitler’s taking of power, he had responded to a French initiative for better relations by negotiating the Franco-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1931. Similar accords followed with the border states of Poland, Finland, Latvia, and Estonia. These moves unquestionably had Stalin’s approval, and no significant realignment of policy was involved. Still, in the new atmosphere following January 1933, Litvinov and others were bound to be attracted to the idea of a new diplomacy of cooperation with those European states that had cause to fear Hitler’s Germany. Stalin, however, had other ideas, and Hitler gave him some encouragement.
On 23 March 1933, the Fuehrer declared the Reich ready to cultivate friendly and mutually profitable relations with the Soviet Union. “It is above all the government of the National Revolution who feel themselves in a position to adopt such a positive policy with regard to Soviet Russia,” he said further. “The fight against Communism in Germany is our internal affair in which we will never permit interference from outside. Our political relations with other Powers to whom we are bound by common interests will not be affected thereby.” In early May, Hitler’s government took the symbolic step of ratifying the protocol—signed in 1931 but left unratified by the Brüning and von Papen governments—on an extension of the 1926 Treaty of Berlin. More important, he received Khinchuk a few days before this and made reference to common interests of Germany and Soviet Russia. He said that they were both economic and political because the two countries had the same difficulties and the same enemies. The two countries could complement one another and render mutual services. Stalin must have read this with keen interest.
Moscow’s public posture was wary. Its chief commentator on German affairs was Radek, who also served as a behind-the-scenes foreign-policy adviser to Stalin. In articles printed in Bol’shevik and Pravda in May-June 1933, Radek construed Hitler’s conciliatory gestures as a means of gaining time and as a concession to German industrialists concerned to keep Soviet orders during the economic crisis. He also said that Alfred Rosenberg, whom he called “the inspirer of German fascism’s foreign policy,” had paid an unofficial visit to London to sound out British diehards on a possible deal against the Soviet Union. German fascism was combining its reassurances to Moscow with efforts to build an anti-Soviet coalition.
Stalin did not intend to stand idly by in face of the machinations Radek was describing. He knew that no attack could possibly be imminent at that early stage and was aware of holding strong cards of his own. Hitler had already indicated in his talk with Khinchuk that one common interest, hence potential basis of cooperation, between his Germany and Stalin’s Russia were their respective revisionist claims upon different portions of Poland. If Hitler, moreover, were disposed to pursue his revisionist aims in the West by means of war, Stalin was in a position to guarantee him against the specter inherited from 1914–1918—a two-front war. There was also reason to believe that Hitler’s policies might be influenced by those very Reichswehr, nationalist, and capitalist circles that had been proponents of the Eastern orientation all along. One of them, General Hans von Seeckt, had argued in a recently published pamphlet that it was useless for Germany to try and drive a wedge between Britain and France and that she needed Russia’s friendship for attainment of her revisionist aims. Radek approvingly quoted the pamphlet at length in one of his articles, clearly implying that the general was talking sense.
Finally, there was in National Socialism, itself a revolutionary movement, a current of admiration for revolutionary Russia. Among the Nazis there were some Rechtsbolschewisten (Bolsheviks of the right) who saw Stalin as a true man of power and exponent of Russian nationalism in opposition to the international Communism of those like Trotsky, whom they despised as rootless cosmopolitan Jews. Even Alfred Rosenberg’s organ Weltkampf spoke in 1929 of Stalin’s anti-Semitism and said Russia could not be called a Jewish state since Trotsky had been deposed and non-Jews like Stalin, Kalinin, and Rykov were on the rise.
Sedately, with no show of anxiety or alarm, Stalin signaled his interest in doing business with Berlin. Having reciprocated Hitler’s action in ratifying the protocol on extension of the 1926 treaty, the Soviet government published an Izvestiia editorial on 5 May 1933, which reaffirmed the Rapallo tradition, pointed out that past unfriendly German politics toward the USSR had only weakened Germany, proclaimed Soviet desire for peace and good economic relations with that country, and concluded that the now extended treaty “will have the significance given it by concrete actions of the parties that concluded it.”
Not long afterward Stalin began to communicate with Berlin via special channels, bypassing the Foreign Commissariat. In the summer of 1933 his old friend Abel Yenukidze, whose official post was secretary of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets, took a vacation in Germany. In August, after returning, he arranged an outing at his country house for Ambassador Dirksen and the minister-counselor of the German Embassy, Twardowski. They were joined by deputy foreign commissars N.N. Krestinsky and Lev Karakhan. The former had served in the 1920s as Soviet envoy to Berlin.
Yenukidze (described in Dirksen’s memoirs as “a fair-haired, blue-eyed, kindly Georgian with definite pro-German leanings”) suggested to Dirksen that the National-Socialist reconstruction of the German state could have positive consequences for German-Soviet relations by giving the German government the degree of freedom of action in foreign affairs long enjoyed by the Soviet government. He thought that a German “state political line” was little by little emerging as the “state” elements in the Nazi movement separated from the “agitational” ones. In both Germany and the USSR, however, there were many who put political goals of the party in first place, and these people must be checked by “state-political thinking.” Dirksen and Twardowski voiced the view that a modus vivendi could be worked out between the Soviet Union and the new German regime, and they suggested that an influential Soviet representative meet with Hitler in furtherance of that aim. It was arranged that Krestinsky, after taking a cure at Kissingen in Germany, should stop in Berlin en route home and seek an interview with the chancellor. Hitler subsequently agreed, after much persuading on the German side, to see Krestinsky. But the latter was directed to return home from Kissingen via Vienna rather than Berlin, and the meeting did not take place—very likely because Litvinov, who had to be brought into the plan, persuaded Stalin that the timing of the meeting would be inopportune.
By then—October 1933—Stalin was taking a further step in his secret diplomacy vis-à-vis Berlin. He opened a communication channel through an individual whom Twardowski, in telegrams to Berlin, called “our Soviet friend.” This go-between is believed by a knowledgeable source to have been Radek. Evgeni Gnedin, who served in the Narkomindel during the 1930s, also reports, from personal knowledge, that Radek around this time was placed in charge of a small foreign-policy section attached to Stalin’s secretariat. He would order various studies by foreign-affairs specialists and carry out special assignments for Stalin, with whom he was in direct contact.
In place of the Hitler-Krestinsky meeting that did not come off, “our Soviet friend” arranged for a meeting to take place in Moscow, but behind Litvinov’s back, between Dirksen and a man Stalin knew he could trust—Molotov. Dirksen, then on leave in Germany, was expecting to return to Moscow for a brief farewell visit whose precise timing was not yet decided. His successor in the Moscow ambassadorship was to be Rudolf Nadolny, a strong Ostler. Litvinov was to leave Moscow shortly for Washington and talks with President Roosevelt on U.S. recognition of the USSR. Molotov was scheduled to pay a visit to Ankara.
On 24 October Twardowski sent an urgent wire to Berlin for Dirksen. “Our friend” had brought about a conversation the day before. He considered the atmosphere toward Germany “so improved” that it was desirable for the opportunity of Dirksen’s farewell visit to be used “to pick up the threads again,” after which “perhaps Nadolny can bury the hatchet once and for all by signing a little protocol.” “Our friend” reported to Twardowski that Molotov had given up the trip to Ankara, alluded to Litvinov’s forthcoming trip to Washington, and “specifically offered his mediation.” Litvinov departed Moscow on 28 October, and Dirksen arrived the following day. Gnedin, the first to reconstruct this episode, which he accurately calls an “intrigue,” comments that the ground was thereby prepared, deliberately and behind the back of Litvinov, for rapprochment with Hitler’s Germany.
What transpired between Molotov and Dirksen in October 1933 is not known. But judging by the royal farewell that Stalin’s court gave to Hitler’s envoy, the results could not have been displeasing to the general secretary. Dirksen was given a grand farewell dinner that was attended by many dignitaries who normally avoided contact with foreigners. He received a beautiful onyx bowl as a parting gift, and “Voroshilov ordered one of his generals to hand me his gift of a writing-set in lacquer with a modern design but executed in the famous old technique.”