Stalin's Poker Game Begins

スターリンのポーカー・ゲームとユダヤ人問題。

… Stalin emerged from the Terror more paranoid and more confident, a state of mind that made him, if anything, less equipped to analyse the dangerous international situation…. (p. 267)

Stalin and Molotov developed into an international double act of increasing subtlety, masters of the old ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine. Stalin was always more radical and reckless, Molotov the stolid analyst of the possible, but neither saw any contradiction between imperial expansionism and their Marxist crusade: on the contrary, the former was the best way to empower the latter.

Europe in early 1939 was, in Stalin’s own words, a ‘poker game’ with three players, in which each hoped to persuade the other two to destroy one another and leave the third to take the winnings. The three players were the Fascists of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the Capitalists of Neville Chamberlain’s Britain allied with Daladier’s France – and the Bolsheviks. Though the Georgian admired the flamboyant brutality of the Austrian, he appreciated the danger of a resurgent Germany militarily, and the hostility of Fascism.

Stalin regarded the Western democracies as at least as dangerous as Germany…. He instinctively felt he could work with Hitler. As soon as the ‘Austrian corporal’ took power, Stalin began probing gently, advised by Karl Radek, his German expert, and using as personal emissaries, Abel Yenukidze and David Kandelaki. The sensitivity of these discussions was absolute since Stalin was simultaneously shooting thousands as German agents, with the country in a frenzy of Prussophobic war preparations. The legates were shot.

…. [After the Munich agreement] Stalin was sure that [Western democracies] were willing to destroy Soviet Russia…. Stalin warned the West that the Soviet Union would not be left to ‘pick their chestnut out of the fire’. The way forward was a division of the world into ‘spheres’. This was an oblique signal to Germany that he would deal with whoever would deal with him. Berlin noticed the change…. (p. 268)

Meanwhile, Molotov and Beria were terrorizing a meeting of their worldly diplomats, many of Jewish Bolsheviks at home in the great capitals of Europe….

The press officer of the Foreign Commissariat, Yevgeni Gnedin, himself a piece of revolutionary history as the son of Parvus, Lenin’s financier and middle man with Kaiserine Germany, was arrested by [Molotov’s deputy, Vladimir] Dekanozov and taken to Beria’s office where he was ordered to confess to spying. When he refused, Beria ordered him to lie on the floor while the Caucasian ‘giant’ Kobulov beat him on the skull with blackjacks…. In July, Beria ordered Prince Tsereteli to kill the Soviet Ambassador to China, Bovkun-Luganets, and his wife, in cold blood in a faked car accident (the method of killing those too eminent to just disappear). (p. 269)

Stalin’s diplomatic Terror was designed to appeal to Hitler: ‘Purge the ministry of Jews,’ he said. ‘Clean out the “synagogue.”’ ‘Thank God for these words,’ Molotov (married to a Jewess) explained. ‘Jews formed an absolute majority and many ambassadors…”

Stalin was an anti-Semite by most definition but until after the war, it was more a Russian mannerism than a dangerous obsession…. But after the war, the creation of Israel, the increased self-consciousness among Soviet Jews and the Cold War with America combined with his old prejudice to turn Stalin into a murderous anti-Semite.

…. [u]ntil the forties, Stalin was as Polonophobic as he was anti-Semitic.

He was always suspicious because the Jews lacked a homeland which made them ‘mystical, intangible, otherworldly’. Yet Kaganovich (a Jew) insisted that Stalin’s view was formed by the Jewishness of his enemies – Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. On the other hand, most of the women around him and many of his closest collaborators, from Yagoda to Mekhlis, were Jewish. The difference is obvious: he hated the intellectual Trotsky but had no problem with the cobbler Kaganovich.

Stalin was aware that his regime had to stand against anti-Semitism and we find in his own notes a reminder to give a speech about it: he called it ‘cannibalism’, made it a criminal offence, and regularly criticized anti-Semites. Stalin founded a Jewish homeland, Birobizhan, on the inhospitable Chinese border but boasted, ‘The Tsar gave the Jews no land, but we will.’ (pp. 269-270)