FATHER FROST: ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF GENERAL MILSTEIN

(The centerpiece of this entry is General Mikhail Abramovich Milstein, an intelligence officer and strategist of the highest magnitude and a very wise man. I had the privilege of knowing him personally long before I joined the USA Institute in Moscow, where he would become a senior colleague of mine. Milstein was also our neighbor in the country house community of Zhukovka near Moscow, where we occasionally took quiet walks in the woods together. Nothing of what I know about General Milstein has ever come from him. Men of Intelligence (in all senses of the word) never talk about themselves, and it would have been both rude and stupid to ask him any personal questions. But there were others, who knew things about him, and, luckily for me, I learned from them.

Talking about the Cold War, as to who exactly started it and when,-- here is the generally unknown and thus even more remarkable historical episode centering around the great military intelligence operative, strategist and scholar Lieutenant General/Professor Mikhail Abramovich Milstein.
Men, like Milstein, enjoyed the shade (I am purposely avoiding the expected word shadows). Publicity was a dirty word in his lexicon. Yet, he was by no means a hermit. He was a well-known and respected scholar in the international academic and political communities. But his most amazing accomplishments, and also his pivotal role in crucial historical events, were conspicuously left out of the limelight, which allowed him to chuckle with satisfaction, like some mighty sovereign king walking incognito among his respectful, but totally unsuspecting subjects.

On the eve of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, the thirty-year-old Milstein was a midlevel officer of the GRU/Soviet Military Intelligence, already with an exciting past, naturally kept under wraps even inside the GRU, except for the fact that he was perhaps the most knowledgeable man in everything that concerned the United States of America. The most revealing fact about Milstein’s preoccupation with the United States was his apparent obsession with the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville and his peculiar prophesy about the imminent rise of America and Russia as the two towering giants of the future world order… Everybody else having Germany on their mind, Milstein’s all-American hobby seemed occasionally annoying. But his little weakness could be easily forgiven, because of his brilliant mind and photographic memory.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s troops invaded the USSR with a lightning speed, savagely overpowering Soviet defenses, scattering Soviet armies and reducing Russia’s military hardware to smoking piles of scrap metal. This seemingly unstoppable onslaught broke down Moscow’s communications with the front and Moscow’s fate, after the first weeks of war, appeared in mortal danger.
The name of Field Marshal Kutuzov was now whispered around the Kremlin more and more often. Kutuzov was the Russian military genius who in 1812 had abandoned Moscow to Napoleon as the only way to defeat him.
Under such unpleasant circumstances, Stalin convened a meeting, in July 1941, in the Kremlin with his top military and intelligence officials.
What troubled Stalin the most in those days was not the loss of Soviet troops. In the nation of 150,000,000 he could afford the loss of a few million. Nor was it the destruction of Soviet military equipment, which had been outdated anyway. As a practical philosopher, Stalin had been struck by the realization of how, after so much calculated effort, so much was now hanging on the whim of chance...

…What was the pace of the German advance? How capable was the Soviet defense to hold on until Mother Nature would slow Hitler down with pouring rains and impassable roads? Where were the Germans right now, this very minute?
Comrade Stalin was asking hard questions, and his top brass felt like fools. The war room was like a scene of doom and gloom, where the telling sign of an impending catastrophe was the glaring ignorance of those whose business was to know.
"Has anybody anything else to say?" Stalin asked, not without sarcasm, at the end of this short and rather uninspiring session. “...Yes, Comrade Stalin. I have a report to make.”
The speaker was not one of Stalin’s advisers. He was a previously silent GRU auxiliary, whose sole purpose at this meeting was to carry papers for his GRU boss and to help him out with facts and figures, when asked. Quite a few participants of this meeting were flabbergasted by Milstein’s unwarranted enterprise. They now expected Stalin promptly to make mincemeat of this impudent little opportunist. And that was before any of them knew what he was going to say...
But Comrade Stalin seldom refused to give a man one chance to be out of line: “Yes, Comrade Milstein, go on!”
…Cold War would not begin at Fulton, Mo., in 1946, with the famous “Iron Curtain” speech of Sir Winston Churchill. Its opening salvo was made in the Kremlin in the desperate days of July 1941, when, amidst the horrific panic, caused by Hitler’s armies pouring into Russia toward Moscow, the obscure Colonel Milstein “declared a war” ...on the United States of America!
…The fate of Moscow was hanging in the balance. Everybody in his right mind had Hitler in his thoughts. What was this poor man thinking about?… Well, some people refuse to be normal, and break the barrier of common sense with a big bang. Such men, in their madness, transcend time and space, and start thinking in cosmic terms. Milstein was one of those.
He was taking an awful risk. Thinking big was by no means enough. You also needed to say what Comrade Stalin wanted to hear. As it turned out, Milstein’s four-hour presentation, which included Stalin's questions and Milstein’s answers, hit the bull between the eyes and struck gold. What must have appealed to Stalin the most, this Milstein allowed him to divert his attention from the depressing reality of the German offensive, to much brighter horizons. The Russians have a wonderful way of describing such situations, thanks to the title of a Pushkin play: A Feast During the Plague.

Milstein began with a modest, almost trivial, assessment of his mission: The role of the military strategist was not to defend a city, but to look ahead into the future, and there was no Hitler in the future. Hitler had overbid his hand, and he was bound to lose. Germany could not afford the war on two fronts and under the current conditions could not afford to make peace on either. So, Hitler might take a few more Soviet cities, but eventually he would run out of tricks, and find himself going under.
In the not-so-distant future there was a great Russian victory. The Russian troops would sweep Europe, as her liberators from the Nazi yoke. They would triumphantly enter Berlin... So what? More than a hundred years before, the scourge of Napoleon, Czar Alexander I of Russia, had gone even farther. He had entered Paris on a white horse, but had ended up as a loser anyway, when the grateful Europe ganged up on him and cheated him out of his laurels.
The challenge, therefore, was not to enter Berlin, but to stay there. To accomplish this task, Russia had to reckon with her greatest detractor in the modern world: the United States of America.
After this war, America should become Russia’s great rival in a bipolar world, where every nation on the face of the earth would have to choose sides. Russia’s role was not to defeat America (this would be both impossible and insane to suggest), but to achieve a respectable strategic equilibrium. In other words, Russia must do everything to prevent America from achieving a decisive military and political superiority! As for right now, judging from the experience of World War One (that the United States would enter this war some time anyway), Russia’s immediate task must be drawing America into a war with Germany and with Japan, as quickly as possible, using all available means.
Colonel Milstein proceeded to demonstrate that he had not been wasting all those years studying America. He gave Stalin his professional assessments of the principal figures in American leadership, his analysis of pertinent intelligence information, and some valuable insights.

Stalin’s old suspicion that in World War Two the Soviet Union was not fighting just Hitler, but the whole West, had met a welcome champion. From now on, Comrade Milstein would be in charge of all intelligence operations and covert action targeting the United States. In this capacity, Comrade Milstein had outgrown his GRU shoes. His immediate boss would now be Comrade Beria, whom Stalin had appointed Supervisor in Chief of all national security activities. (That did not mean, of course, that Milstein was to be removed from the here and now with Germany. Colonel Milstein’s advice would also be needed to outsmart Hitler’s team in the ongoing military operations.)

…General Milstein was a great man by any standards, and a veritable legend to all who knew about him sub rosa. Therefore, the folkloric name “Ded Moroz/Father Frost,” which I jokingly gave him a long time ago, as the principal architect of the Cold War with the United States, is not only an apt metaphor for him as a professional, but also one that well becomes him as a legend.
(On General Milstein’s later role in ending the Cold War on Russian terms, to which task he had devoted the last ten years of his life, see my later entry The Trojan Horse.)

ZHUKOV

There are two Marshal Zhukovs. One is the revered hero of World War II, the greatest Russian military commander of the twentieth century, whose glorious exploits have been honored by the establishment in 1994 of the highly prestigious Russian Order of Zhukov. The other is the reluctant postwar politician Zhukov, who was dragged into Khrushchev’s game and outwitted by the clever manipulator. The sad story of that lost game will be reluctantly told later, in the Khrushchev subsection, in the entry Politics And Marshal Arts.
It is much better to dwell on Zhukov’s erstwhile glory than on his later humiliation. After all, this man has been an authentic Russian legend, and only as such should he go down in history. My father's published memoirs of him are therefore completely appropriate in painting a glowing picture, for the benefit of Russia’s monumental history. In his treatment, a real hero receives a hero’s due.---

“…When the events at Khalkhyn Gol began, a commander was needed who, no matter what, regardless of inadequate preparation, inferior troop numbers, unfamiliar terrain, etc., not only would attack the Japanese and break them, but would instill horror in them, too. Stalin asked, “Who?” Timoshenko said, “There is one such cavalry man in Belarus, Zhukov.” Voroshilov seconded the motion, everybody else said yes, here was an audacious commander. So, Zhukov it was. Molotov (later) said: “Zhukov accomplished the mission better than anybody expected. And nobody ever forgot that.”

He was of course much more than a brilliant desperado who could ride a horse better than anybody else. He was also a great strategic thinker. General Mikhail Milstein (see my later entry Father Frost) tells the story of how, having received military intelligence during the war, Zhukov suddenly started asking questions, and when Milstein attempted to answer them, he told him to shut up: “I am not talking to you,” he said, “I am talking to clever Hans Kluge.” (Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, nicknamed der kluge Hans, clever Hans, commanded the Fourth German Army in the Operation Barbarossa.) Milstein explained Zhukov’s eccentricity by the latter’s desire to get into the head of his enemy and find out what the enemy thinks. “Kluge is smart, he is a master of the rules of combat. So, I’ll take those rules and shove them in his mug!” This was by no means bravado. It is a historical fact that in the desperate Battle of Moscow in the winter of 1941 Zhukov, indeed, outsmarted von Kluge.

Prior to the Battle of Moscow, in August 1941, Zhukov and Stalin had a famous confrontation over the fate of Kiev, which has led some historians to deduce that Zhukov fell out of Stalin’s graces right there and then. Nothing is farther from the truth, however. Stalin respected men who honestly and fearlessly expressed their opinion, that is, spoke truth to power. On the contrary, he deeply mistrusted, and ultimately destroyed, those who were disingenuously trying to flatter or placate him. So, here is the true story of their famous quarrel:
Zhukov insisted that the Soviet Army must abandon Kiev and regroup elsewhere, to avoid the imminent and massive encirclement of the Soviet troops by the Germans, which was bound to result in a colossal military catastrophe. Stalin firmly overruled him, and the result was exactly the catastrophe predicted by Zhukov. Stalin, however, made sure that Zhukov understood the reasons behind his decision. From the military standpoint, he said, Zhukov was absolutely right, and had the military factor been the only one under consideration here, Stalin would have deferred to Zhukov’s expert opinion. But Stalin was a statesman, and he had to consider the political factor in this situation. Abandoning Kiev, even if it was indeed the best military decision, would be sending a very wrong political message to Ukraine and to all other Soviet Republics. What would they all think? That the Russians were not willing to fight for the other nationalities of the USSR? That would be exactly our message, he said. No, he went on, let there be a catastrophe, and we should really welcome such a catastrophe now, to demonstrate to every non-Russian citizen of the USSR that the Russians are willing to spill their blood, even if it takes a million Russian lives, but they would rather die than abandon their non-Russian brothers and sisters in the hour of our common national tragedy.
They say that Zhukov genuinely teared up, and deferred to Stalin’s statesmanship, and they parted as friends and comrades.

Near the end of the war, in April 1945, Marshal Zhukov was given the honor of commanding the Armies of the First Belorussian Front, assigned to take Berlin, and after the capitulation of Germany, in June 1945, riding a white horse (and nobody looked better on a horse than he did!) he received the Victory Parade in Moscow on Stalin’s behalf. Whatever negative can be said about him, Comrade Stalin wasn’t petty. He was big enough to understand that there was no better man in Russia to receive the historic Parade on horseback than Russia’s great national hero Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov.

ROKOSSOVSKY

Stalin allegedly said once: “I have no Suvorov, but Rokossovsky is my Bagration.” I question the veracity of this attribution (after all, there is no record of when and to whom he said it), but there are two reasons why I am quoting this spurious phrase here. One is to note that this phrase is spurious (for the benefit of my reader, who is certain to find it attributed to Stalin in all English-language biographies of Rokossovsky), but the other, important one, is to acknowledge the exceptionality of this great soldier, whose amazing life deserves allotting him a separate entry, alongside with Russia’s greatest military hero of the twentieth century Marshal Zhukov.

Marshal Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky (1896-1968) was born in Warsaw as Kasimir Xavier to a Polish father and a Russian mother. Enlisting as a soldier in the Russian Army at the start of WWI in 1914, he converted from Catholicism to Russian Orthodoxy and changed his name to Konstantin Konstantinovich. A man of exceptional bravery, he exhibited natural military genius from early on, and distinguished himself as an outstanding, much decorated soldier. In December 1917 he joined the Red Guard, next the Red Army, and in early 1919 he became a member of the RKP(b). Trying to disassociate himself from any Polish ties, as Poland after 1917 had become an independent state hostile to Soviet Russia, and even at war with her, he falsified his birthplace as the town of Velikiye Luki in Russia, which, however, would never fool his future biographers.
Desperately trying to prove his Russian loyalties by such forgeries, but also by genuine feats of astonishing bravery, he was quickly rising in the ranks to the post of division commander, in 1935. But falsely accused of treason in 1937 (in those troubled times his admitted biographical forgeries alone were more than enough to raise suspicions, gleefully fueled and exaggerated by his ill-wishers), he was arrested, tortured, but then, in 1940, cleared and restored to the rank of Major-General. Despite his horrific experience, he attributed his misfortunes to the enemies of the Soviet State (his abusers were indeed all arrested, themselves tortured, and promptly shot as traitors) and would remain a sincere staunch Stalinist all his life, even when it had become most unfashionable.
Rising to the rank of Marshal of the USSR in 1944, he was one of the three commanders of the Soviet Army (Zhukov and Konev being the other two) pushing westward beyond the Soviet border. At the end of the war, on June 24, 1945, Stalin gave him the honor of commanding the Victory Parade on Red Square in Moscow, with Marshal Zhukov receiving the Parade. (It was customary in such parades for the commander and the receiver to ride on horseback. Both Zhukov and Rokossovsky were legendary horsemen.)
In 1949 Rokossovsky found out that his Polish heritage was not all that easy to renounce when he was made Marshal of Poland and installed as Poland’s Defense Minister. (This appointment was, naturally, his worst nightmare, but as a soldier he had to obey his orders.) He served in this position from 1949 to 1956 when he was dismissed during the de-Stalinization of Poland and returned to the USSR, where he was made Soviet Deputy Defense Minister. However, his military career came to an abrupt end in 1962, when he refused to obey Khrushchev’s order, (well, a friendly “request”!) to write an anti-Stalin article. “Comrade Stalin is a saint to me!” he reportedly told Khrushchev, and then proceeded to further snub his boss the Soviet leader by refusing to clink glasses with him. No, he wasn’t arrested or tortured this time. He was just fired from all his posts the very next day. “Quelle belle mort!” as Napoleon marvels, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace…

SMETONA'S CHOICE: THE BETTER OF TWO EVILS

(The untold story of the Stalin-Smetona secret 1938 pact, which offered Lithuania to the Russians for fear of a pending takeover of Lithuania by her archenemy Poland, with Hitler’s wink and nod.
Here is the history of Polish-Lithuanian “marriage,” and of their bitter historical enmity, culminating in the 1938 appeal of Antanas Smetona to Stalin, offering him a deal that Stalin could not pass on, boiling down to Lithuania’s annexation by the Soviet Union as the preferable alternative to being swallowed up by Hitler’s “greedy hyena” Poland (to use Churchill’s famous depiction of Poland after Munich). Smetona’s choice in this case may appear shocking at first, because of the sheer novelty of this revelation, but it must become clear to all (on second thought) who are aware of the fact that throughout her history of independence, between the two world wars, Lithuania was in a state of perpetual war with Poland, and to say that the visceral feeling of hatred for Poland in Lithuania was intense would be a gross understatement.
…Truly, history has a store of shocking secrets yet to come to light, and this entry is an attempt to throw yet another beam of light into one of her darkest corners…)

Very few people outside the secretive Polish and Lithuanian nationalities are familiar with the fact that an acrimonious historical enmity has existed between them since time immemorial, and that between the two world wars of the twentieth century there was an open state of war between the two nations, formerly, both provinces of the Russian Empire. Throughout their short history of independence, Poland was actually in possession of Lithuania’s cherished capital Vilnius, disgracefully renamed Vilna by the aggressor, whereas the embittered Lithuanians had to settle for the city of Kaunas as their temporary capital.
Previously, the pagan Lithuania had first become a united nation under King Mindaugas (1251), while the Catholic kingdom of Poland had already been in business for centuries, all the time eyeing the neighboring land of the Liths as its natural ground for expansion. Poland’s opportunity came in 1386, when both these countries were threatened by the powerful Teutonic knights. On Poland’s tempting suggestion, the ruler of Lithuania grand duke Jagailo ascended the throne of Poland as Wladyslaus II, bringing his country in tow. The two were thus united, and together successfully defended themselves against the aggressors, decisively defeating them in 1410, at Tannenberg/Grünwald. (Remarkably, with considerable Russian and Tatar help!)
In that 1386 deal, each side saw itself as the winner. Lithuania was actually led to believe that their Jagailo was thus winning Poland for his happening nation. The Poles, naturally, thought otherwise, and their share of the pie was indeed bigger and sweeter. Jagailo ended up accepting Poland’s Catholic faith, and another binding string attached: the Polish princess Jadwiga, as his wife and the Queen of their joint kingdom. A propitious event saved the Liths from a further aggravation of anti-Polish animosity, when in 1772, Poland was first partitioned between Russia and Prussia, eventually completing the disappearance of the kingdom by the end of the eighteenth century. In 1795, Lithuania, too, became a part of the Russian Empire (the bad news), but on the upside, it now received a welcome separation from the Polish nemesis and also its spirit of independence was given a giant boost.

Gaining, at last, its full independence from Russia in 1918, Lithuania sought, and received, some protection from Germany, which did not help her however to get her Vilnius back, after Poland had avidly grabbed the city, and an awful lot of Lithuanian land with it.
The first President of independent Lithuania was her longtime nationalist revolutionary Antanas Smetona, born in 1874. Elected to the post in early 1919, he was not reelected the next year, and resented the fact of such playing democracy in the face of a war with Poland. After an intense shuffling in the shadows, which included brief imprisonment, in 1926 he successfully conducted a coup d’état, declaring himself President, and in 1928 he went much farther, dissolving the parliament and adopting a new Constitution, which turned Lithuania into a full-blown dictatorship.
In the 1930’s, all three Baltic countries, formerly part of Russia, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, developed into fascist regimes, and were courting Hitler, in the hope of becoming Germany’s privileged satellites. The case of Lithuania was, however, very different from the other two, as, at the same time, Poland, also a quasi-fascist dictatorship, was steadily courting Hitler to allow the Polish re-annexation of Lithuania as part of the deal to establish a vibrant German-Polish partnership (only the irrationally arrogant Poles could expect their almighty neighbor to agree to anything but complete submission). Surely, Hitler had not a partnership at all in mind, but he was temporarily obliging the pesky Poles, such as “graciously” allotting them portions of a dismembered Czechoslovakia, after Munich 1938, for which Poland received the name of “hyena” from an utterly disgusted Winston Churchill. (For the record, the British declaration of war on Germany, on account of the 1939 invasion of Poland, did not happen on Churchill’s watch, but, in any case, such a concern about the “Polish hyena” would make no sense for the British, except for the considerations which I presented in my earlier posting The Stalin Hitler Pact.)
Terrified at the prospect that the Führer was leaning toward Lithuania’s archenemy Poland, Smetona sent his secret emissaries to Stalin, resulting in the super-secret 1938 treaty, pledging Lithuania into Moscow’s court, and, in substantiation of that pledge, revealing to Stalin the private communications between the three Baltic dictators, concerning their anti-Soviet activities and joint advances to Nazi Germany.
This whole layout became part of Moscow’s position in the negotiation of the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Pact, as a result of which the three Baltic states were chalked into the Soviet corner, and in 1940, ended up occupied by the Soviet troops. Smetona was encouraged to publicly oppose Stalin’s pre-occupation ultimatum, but it was apparently a staged play, and of the three Baltic dictators only two suffered the consequences of their love for Hitler: Karl Ulmanis of Latvia and Konstantin Päts of Estonia ended their lives in Soviet prisons, whereas Smetona was “allowed” to flee to the West, eventually settling down in 1941 in the United States, where Stalin had some plans for him, considering how many goods he had on him, which could always be used as leverage, in case the man should balk.
Unfortunately, however, Smetona was not to enjoy a long life in America. In January 1944, he was burned to death, under suspicious circumstances, in a fire at his son’s house in Cleveland, Ohio. Whether his death was an assassination (by a party unknown), or just a tragic accident, or even, perhaps, a benign American “eraser” effort to hide him from others’ watchful eyes, by giving him a new post-mortem identity (in case he had suddenly decided to cooperate with the authorities) is now a matter of personal detail, which has no relevance to the preceding story. Besides, I honestly have no idea what really happened to him in America, to be sure. This is certainly a matter, that merits further investigation by some interested enthusiast, perhaps, of Lithuanian descent…

RICHARD SORGE

The Best Spy Of All Time.

James Bond’s father Ian Fleming called him “the most formidable spy in history.” The eminent American spy novelist Tom Clancy seconded the motion: “Richard Sorge was the best spy of all time.” And also, the acknowledged master of the spy business Kim Philby issued this succinct professional opinion: “His work was impeccable.”
The list of accolades may go on and on, and yet no Hollywood movie has ever been made about his exciting life, and, aside from a small bunch of dedicated buffs of espionage , his name remains virtually unknown in the United States, despite its enormous entertainment value. There has to be a reason for it, and there surely is...

There are two aspects to the Sorge story, one obtainable through various information sources, but the other so covert that I doubt if any investigative scholar would ever be able or even dare to uncover it. First, let us have the overt one.
Richard Sorge was born in 1895 in Azerbaijan, which was then, of course, part of the Russian Empire, to a German father and a Russian mother. His father was an engineer-contractor, who moved back to Germany with his family when his oil contract had expired.
In 1914 the young Sorge volunteered for military service in World War I. He served in the Western Front, and in 1916 was badly wounded, loosing three fingers and suffering broken legs. He received an Iron Cross and a medical discharge. He spent the remainder of the war studying economics, and in 1919 he received a PhD in political science. He also declared himself a Communist, and fled to Moscow, where he became a Comintern agent, which immediately turned him into a Soviet spy.
In this capacity, he traveled around Europe, returning to Germany in 1929, where he had been instructed to join the Nazi Party and to become a newspaper reporter, as a cover.
From 1930 to the end of 1932 he lived in China, and then, via Moscow and Berlin, moved to Japan, where he was to become indispensable. From 1933 to 1934, he built an amazingly effective spy network, gaining access to senior Japanese politicians and becoming fairly close with the German Ambassador to Japan Eugen Ott (meanwhile starting an affair with the Ambassador’s wife).
In May 1941, he famously informed Moscow of the exact date of the Operation Barbarossa, which was no less famously ignored. (In fact, it has been established that the allegation about the exact date of the German invasion was a deliberate falsification by Khrushchev, to besmirch Stalin. Regardless of that, see the reason for Stalin’s doing nothing, in my earlier entry Preparing For War.)
Toward the end of September 1941, he transmitted to Moscow information that Japan was not going to attack the Soviet Union in the East. It was allegedly this information, which made possible the transfer of the bulk of Soviet divisions from Siberia and the Far East, although the presence of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria still made it necessary for the Soviet Union to keep a certain minimal number of troops on the eastern borders. (Which would not have made much difference, though, had Japan really decided to attack the USSR.)
There is a speculation that this particular information led to the events which allowed the Soviet Union to turn the tide of war against the Nazis. This alone should make Sorge the most important spy of World War Two. Thus, another connoisseur of international espionage Frederick Forsythe comments: “The spies in history, who can say from their graves, the information I have supplied to my masters, for better or worse, altered the history of our planet, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Richard Sorge was in that group.”
I am however convinced that Stalin had to have at least one more source, providing him with information regarding Japan's expected neutrality. My reader already knows, from previous readings, that Stalin was no spring chicken with regard to the Russian situation vis-à-vis Japan, and to presume that a single piece of secret information, or maybe two, on this vital subject, even if coming from Admiral Yamamoto through a master Soviet spy, could make such a difference as to alter the history of our planet, would be naive at best... The other source of Stalin's decision on pulling the Siberian divisions from the Eastern front had to be his intuition... And of course, the desperate state of Soviet defenses against the Germans made Stalin ever more willing to take risks...
Eventually, as the standard story goes, the Japanese counterintelligence wizened up to the special character of Sorge’s radio communications and started closing in. Sorge was arrested twice in October 1941, tortured, without revealing that he was a Soviet spy and eventually executed on November 7, 1944. (What symbolism must this have been, as this date coincided with the 27th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution! Even if the story of Sorge's execution is a lie, which, I suspect, it is, the date has been chosen with some flair!) Moscow was quick to disavow any knowledge of his actions, and Sorge himself was steadfast in disavowing any hint of his Soviet connection.
The Soviet Union did not acknowledge Sorge until 1964, when he was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Prior to that event, a 1961 French movie, Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Sorge? came out in Europe, in collaboration with West Germany, Italy and Japan, which became very popular in Russia as well. And so our overt story ends, except for the following detail having been added to it:
An interesting, but little-known conspiracy theory of the Cold War held that Sorge had only been “mock-executed” by the Japanese and had actually returned to the Soviet Union, where he continued to work for the KGB. Though many mysteries of the Cold War have been solved (dah!) since the fall of communism  in the USSR, no proof of this theory has emerged. In one of his novels, the American writer M.E. Chaber has his hero meet an unnamed Russian master-spy who, the book hints, is none other than Richard Sorge. (Taken from Sorge’s Biography at BookRags.com. I do not usually subscribe to Internet sources, except when they make good sense! The reason why I find the story of Sorge's alleged execution untrustworthy is to be explained very shortly.)
Well, enough of that. Here now is the hidden part of the Richard Sorge story, which sheds a new light on his large figure. Quidquid latet, apparebit!---

Such is the nature of the spy business that, paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw, only the stories of fictional spies are true, whereas those of the real spies are false by definition. Nations having to disavow their heroes as a matter of national interest cannot be expected to spill the truth at any time then or later on, for revealing the actual sources and methods of espionage has always been considered comme il ne faut pas.
Several parts of the overt Sorge story are true, of course, but they are actually the parts which do not really matter. It is also true that in 1964 Sorge was officially recognized as a Hero Spy of the Soviet Union, only it does not follow that this hero had ever been trusted by his country. As Stalin used to say, The better the spy, the less he must be trusted, because the best of them work not for their country, but for themselves.
Sorge is regularly depicted as a Marxist, seeped in Communist ideology, but in fact, he was an adventurer at heart and in spirit, first and foremost, seeking excitement in life, while all his personal façades, whether this was his penchant for Marxism, or his passion for Nazism, or his love for Western freedoms,-- all these were the masks of an habitual, yet sincere chameleon.
Like any good spy, he was always working outside the normal intelligence channels, but the supreme irony of his position was that several intelligence services knew that he was in their business, benefited from his help, and were essentially letting him be, to function as an independent operator. He did not even have to make a special effort to steal anybody’s secrets. The truth of the matter was that he was provided with these secrets, to pass on to others, in other words, he was an indispensable hub of topnotch intelligence information (often disinformation), and such was the environment in which he functioned, and thrived.
Even for the Germans, he provided certain delicate services, but his two primary activities were as a liaison between Moscow and Admiral Yamamoto (whom Sorge normally met in Japanese geisha houses, a strange, but effective manner of communication!) and as a spy for… the United States (about which---later!).
Now, finally, the circumstances of Sorge’s arrest and death are drenched in some muddy waters. Sorge was, indeed, arrested, presumably, for questioning, by the Japanese secret police at least a couple of times in 1941, but it is yet unclear how many times he was released and possibly rearrested since then. The fact that he was a well-established information facilitator helped him survive then and there, and ever since, he would continue his useful activities, only now keeping a very low profile. It was his later work, after his alleged incarceration in an undisclosed location in October 1941, which is particularly remarkable), and even Sorge’s overt biographers have pointed to his alleged 1942 report to Moscow that Japan may enter the war against Russia on Hitler’s side, should the Germans be successful in taking the city of Stalingrad. Needless to say, here is some fancy smoke from the legitimate fire of Stalin’s concern over Japan’s growing arrogance that required to be checked (at Midway?!), but this odd discrepancy about the date (how could he possibly report to Stalin about an event taking place in late 1942, when he was presumably tortured in a Japanese prison at that same time?) shows that the dates and events of the official Sorge story just do not compute.
As for whether he was indeed executed by the Japanese in 1944, or secretly returned to Russia, this, again, is one of those delicate secrets, prying into which is definitely not comme il faut. One thought stands out, though: Richard Sorge must have been an enormous bargaining chip for Japan, and the Japanese must have realized it all along. Such men as Sorge are never put to death for the mere reason of spying, and thus the official story does not make any sense at all to me. I expect that it does not make sense to my reader, either!

Two postscripts to this story.

One is that the often cited “fact” that Sorge informed Moscow in early June 1941 about the exact date of the German attack on the USSR (on June 22, 1941), has never been verified and eventually has been relegated to the junk pile of Khrushchev’s inventions, to dramatize, in this case, Stalin’s prewar incompetence.
The other one is the information which I have recently picked up from a credible Russian website on Sorge (completely absent from all English-language websites on Sorge) about the existence, in Harvard University library, of an official US document dating back to August 9, 22, 23, 1951, about an investigation, conducted by the Committee on Un-American Activities of the US Congress, under the title Hearings on the American Aspects of the Richard Sorge Spy Case. The hearings were prompted by the testimony provided by General MacArthur’s Chief of Intelligence during WWII and in Korea, Major General Charles Andrew Willoughby (born Adolph Weidenbach in Germany and affectionately called “my pet fascist” by his boss). The available document is just beginning to scratch the surface of the matter, as the Committee, not surprisingly, went into an executive session after August 23, 1951, and no further transcripts have been declassified. But the gist of the matter is already clear from what I have been able to find out. General Willoughby contended that it was through Sorge that the USSR encouraged and facilitated Japan’s attack on the United States in 1941!!!
I salute the late General Willoughby for his extraordinary perspicacity, even if he did not succeed in getting everything right. But, apparently, this investigation never produced any fruit for cold-war public knowledge, nor has it ever come to light in America after the collapse of the USSR. I suspect that the truth in this matter has been deemed more hurtful to American national interest than silence.

YAMAMOTO

Here is the untold story of Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku of Japan (1884-1943). I can compare it to the earlier discussed case of Rudolf Hess. Like Hess, Yamamoto was a nationalistic patriot of his country in his own right, but he was conspicuously empowered by Moscow, ever since his 1935 secret meeting with Stalin in Moscow, the reason for which was Stalin’s desire to facilitate the Japanese Navy’s getting the upper hand in its struggle for strategic supremacy over the Army, which was an urgent matter of national security for the USSR, as the Japanese Army’s military ambitions of a ground expansion in Asia, as opposed to the Navy’s naval expansionism, were putting Japan on a collision course with Russia.
(Once we are on this curious subject, my general observation about the recruitment of the best foreign agents of influence, disdainfully dismisses the intelligence services’ emphasis on the shaky pecuniary interests of a greedy turncoat. The greatest foreign agents are always encouraged to see themselves as benefactors of their own country, first and foremost. How many recruits of this rewarding, rather than rewarded, sort have been drafted by the United States anywhere in the world in the last few decades, I wonder? Indeed, this question is of huge practical political and intelligence value, but I am afraid that an honest answer to it will be most disappointing to America’s vanishing breed of patriotic intelligence veterans…)

In her preparation for a clash with Germany, the worst conceivable danger facing Soviet Russia would be a war on two fronts. Bearing this in mind, Stalin’s key task in the 1930’s was to pull Japan out of the negative column into the positive column, whatever the cost.
As I had a chance to mention before, Stalin’s strategy toward Japan was sitting on a rather unconventional two-pillar foundation: Prince Alexander Nevsky’s experience with the Tatar-Mongol invaders into Russia in the 13th century, and… Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly!
To be more precise, Saint Alexander Nevsky had taught Comrade Stalin to seek an alliance of convenience with the mighty Eastern power (in Stalin’s case it had to be Japan) while providing the war-hungry Japanese with an attractive “Western” target.
Stalin’s knowledge of Japan was extremely limited, but from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly he had learned enough about the love-hate relationship that must have existed between the two great powers, Japan and the United States of America, whom Stalin so much wanted to see up in arms against each other…
But first things first. For now he needed to address a worrisome problem at hand. The Japanese government had been taken over by the military, who all wanted one thing: an imperialist expansion. Comrade Stalin’s concern was not the expansion as such, but its direction. He didn’t like Japan’s 1931 move into Manchuria, which was too precariously close to the Soviet border. He needed to persuade the Japanese that any border silliness on their part would turn out unprofitable for them. Seeing Mongolia as the USSR’s back yard, and the probable next target for the Japanese land offensive, Stalin ordered some of the choicest Soviet troops to the area and gave them the task of responding to any possible provocation with excessive force. Such border clashes would indeed occur in 1938 and 1939, and they would be sweepingly repulsed by the most talented of the Soviet commanders who had survived the Purges General Georgi Zhukov, of whom I shall have a lot to say in a later entry. (By the way, it would be Zhukov’s Siberian Divisions, at the end of 1941, turning the tide against Germany in the Battle of Moscow at the price of completely baring the Soviet Eastern defenses: the daring gambit, which Japan passed on, considering Pearl Harbor a better option.)
Going back now to the question of Japan’s urge to expand, let her move South, East, and Southwest, but not to the North! Doing his best, to make his wish come true, Stalin believed that he had found himself a natural ally in the whole Japanese Navy, engaged in a domestic struggle for political supremacy with the Japanese Army commanders. In order to promote his strategic agenda, and to give some extra clout to the Japanese Navy clique in the process, Stalin improvised a secret and totally unanticipated meeting in 1935 in Moscow with a certain Yamamoto Isoroku, a mid-level Japanese official (promoted to vice admiral of the Navy just in the preceding year), who chanced to be traveling on some other business from Berlin to Tokyo through Moscow, by train. Yamamoto was an American-educated officer (Harvard 1919-1921), seriously suspected by his Japanese peers and also by superiors, of pro-Western sentiments, to the point of being put on a watch list for potential disloyalty. This was ostensibly not an encouraging credential, to win Stalin’s appreciation, but Stalin simply refused to believe it. Having attended yet another Bolshoi performance of Puccini’s anti-American tearjerker, for reassurance, Stalin purposely gambled on Yamamoto’s latent hatred for the United States, where he, a yellow man, must have been treated like an Untermensch by his white peers, and Stalin was not disappointed. In fact, having been seriously suspected in Japan of an excessive attachment to the West, Yamamoto needed some tangible proof to the contrary, and Stalin’s attention was a most propitious windfall for his fortunes.
As a result of their secret meeting, Yamamoto was quickly catapulted to prominence, since Stalin entrusted him with a personal letter to Emperor Hirohito, pledging Soviet friendship to Japan, in no uncertain terms. There appeared to be no hard feelings in Tokyo, with regard to Stalin’s choice of Yamamoto as more or less his “confidant” and his chief unofficial contact in Japan, over the official heads of Ambassador and Foreign Minister. What endeared Stalin the most to Japan’s top Navy and War Ministry brass, and what also made Yamamoto such an indispensable broker was Moscow’s promise to share Soviet military intelligence on the United States, Great Britain, and France, with Tokyo. Yamamoto’s role was not to be diminished in these transactions. On Stalin’s not-so-strange whim, Soviet agents were passing secret information to Yamamoto personally in the best of all places designed for such deals: geisha houses.
In the course of preparing the December 1941 attack on the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, the key part of the intelligence used by Yamamoto came from the Soviet Union…

In the long run, despite this wholly practical “friendship,” Stalin must have been most gratified to see Japan defeated in World War II. After all, throughout his life he was bearing an emotional grudge against Japan for having inflicted a humiliating defeat on Russia in the war of 1904-1905. It is truly mind-boggling how Stalin managed to use Japan against the United States in World War II, while getting his vengeance against Japan in the same war, at the end.

THE STALIN-HITLER PACT

We Fooled Them!!!
“...If tomorrow’s the war, if tomorrow we march, be prepared for the march today!”
This memorable song was being sung throughout the 1930’s by every unpurged man, woman, and child in Soviet Russia. Everybody was getting ready for war, from the least to the foremost.
In the spirit of this massive national effort, Stalin was reviewing the status of Soviet military hardware, and found it wanting. He called the top weapons designers, engineers, and manufacturers, and demanded from them a quick and comprehensive rearmament program which would provide the nation with superior fighter planes and bombers, superior tanks, and mobile artillery vehicles. In other words, with everything needed to ensure a victory over Hitler “in the air, on the ground, and on water” (which was yet another verse from the same song). After some tough scheduling and pledges of super-heroic effort on the part of his weapons builders, Stalin was assured that, some time by the end of 1943, the nation could be totally and radically re-equipped.
Stalin was a statesman, which means that he did not have the special skills to make an atomic bomb, or to build a tank. His job was to make sure that the nation’s military transformation into a superpower colossus would go unhindered and waste-free. Wherever physical labor was required, he had an unlimited supply of cheap labor force among the millions of gulag inmates. Wherever brilliant minds had to be put to work, he knew only too well how to bring out the best in his people. He was going to shorten the tightest deadlines by twenty percent, and place their talent under martial law, literally: deliver or perish! Yes, he was a very hard taskmaster. But he also knew how to be exceptionally generous, with the sweetness of the carrot matching the heaviness of the stick. While depriving his workers of all freedoms, often including that of seeing their families, he fed them well, with caviar, smoked sturgeon, and suckling pig.
In a separate meeting in 1938, Stalin gathered his top nuclear physicists, engineers and explosives experts, to ask them the most natural question on earth.--- How soon were they going to make the atomic bomb? The experts reassured Comrade Stalin that their research had by now gone beyond the hypothetical stage into the prospective stage, but it would still be a few years before a definite deadline could be set.
Stalin was a reasonable man. He chose not to push his scientists for a better answer, but later put Comrade Beria in charge of them instead. Still, he was quite anxious to know, whether any other power was capable of developing its own atomic weapons before Russia could. He was told that the Soviet Union was on the cutting edge of the nuclear program and that the other most advanced nations in the field were Great Britain and Germany, but that it was completely out of the question for them to beat the Russians to the bomb, as the Soviet nuclear program was farther advanced.
“What about America?,” Stalin asked. The consensus was that the level of interest in the atomic research in the United States was too low, at the time, to allow any substantial progress.
Now that Stalin had received some assurances that by the mid-1940’s his nation would be in proper shape, both conventionally and by becoming a nuclear superpower, he needed to concentrate on the most vital task at hand: stalling for time in his standoff with Hitler.

...As I said before, he had long been convinced that the West was deliberately pushing Hitler into a military confrontation with the USSR. His suspicion became a fire, burning out of control, at the end of September 1938, when the leaders of Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy sat down together at Munich, ignoring the USSR altogether.
The Munich Conference was immediately interpreted in Moscow as the West giving Hitler the green light to invade Czechoslovakia, and then Poland, in order to move next further east, into Russia!
(This scenario was so much on Stalin’s mind that in 1940, while World War Two was already in progress in Western Europe, he would be absolutely infuriated by the swift collapse of France, and suspect the same secret hand of anti-Soviet conspiracy as the chief motivation of the French government for not putting up a more respectable defense!)
Feeling a pressing urgency, in the wake of Munich, Stalin was now ready to resort to some pretty desperate measures. However, the ensuing Hitler-Stalin Pact would be much more than just a stopgap, or the last recourse. As I see it, it was Stalin’s historic triumph of fooling the West into a hasty declaration of a war on Hitler. Here is the line of thinking which certainly has solid logic and strategic merit behind it:

The West wanted Hitler to invade Russia. Stalin’s task was to persuade the West that Hitler was a double-crosser, who fooled them all, and re-defected from Mein-Kampf-Two back to Mein-Kampf-One. Whatever Stalin could do to provoke the West into punishing Hitler for his supposed treachery, would take the heat off Russia, and possibly reverse the odds in Russia’s favor.
Stalin would offer Hitler a sweetheart deal he could not refuse. Aside from the Non-Aggression Pact, which of course was not worth a penny, and a Secret Protocol, authorizing certain changes in the map of Eastern Europe, there was also an enticing Trade Agreement, guaranteeing among many things Soviet deliveries of large quantities of crude oil to Germany, a welcome food for Hitler’s war machine!
Stalin’s offer was designed to have still another attraction for Hitler: Poland. Planning to invade Poland, Hitler had to be much more worried about a hostile Soviet reaction to his provocative move, so dangerously close to the Soviet border, than about the British and French resolution to fight him over some phony peace treaty they may have signed with that despicable Polish “hyena” (to use Churchill’s unflattering contemporaneous metaphor for Poland). And now, see, Stalin himself was reassuring Hitler that the German hostile takeover of Poland would be accepted by Moscow in the spirit of friendship and cooperation!


Having been thinking over this so convincingly logical spin of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, I have long come to realize that should the German invasion of Poland have taken place in the absence of this brilliant ploy on Russia’s part, Britain and France would never have taken such a drastic action against Germany, as declaring a war on her. (Why would they do such a thing on Poland's behalf, the nation that was on Hitler's side at Munich, richly benefiting afterwards from Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia?!!)
...As a short postscript to this entry, it may be useful to remind the reader that Britain and France were by no means the only ones fooled by Stalin here. Hitler was certainly fooled as well. He failed to realize that this deceptively "easy" Treaty would make his future war with Russia a lost war for Germany.

WALLENBERG AS A POSTSCRIPT TO HESS

(There are obvious discrepancies of dates between my version of the Wallenberg story and the official ones. For instance, the news of Wallenberg’s “death” was made public on March 8, 1945, although in my account he remained active until May 1945. By now, however, all public accounts admit that too many lies were put in circulation at the time, and that Wallenberg was certainly alive long after the end of World War II. I have looked into those official versions and found nothing tangible to contradict the version that I have been told and which I am now relating to the reader.)
Rudolf Hess, on completing his flight, splendidly successful or foolishly unsuccessful, depending on whose point of view this would be, was dutifully imprisoned (in the Tower of London of all places!), and there he spent the rest of the war, later to face the War Tribunal at Nuremberg, and life imprisonment at the Spandau Prison in Berlin. Martin Bormann, on the other hand, was, allegedly, never found after the war, and only in the 1970’s his remains were, again, allegedly, found, and positively identified.
The story of their fates, which I have learned, is a considerably different one. (Once again, I cannot point to a paper trail in its support, yet I consider it important enough as an alternative version of history to enter the public domain.) To begin with, the Russians would never have allowed their prized agent Hess to spend the rest of his life in jail. But, in order to extricate him from such a fate, they needed two things: a willing dead-ringer double for Hess to make the substitution and a sufficient leverage with the British to make the switch.
As for the double, ever since 1919, when Hess was first approached by the Soviet agents, Russia had been cultivating seven nearly-perfect Hess doubles (plus four somewhat less credible Hitler doubles, added into their collection in the late nineteen-twenties), and each of these men was always ready to stand in for their “prototype” whenever it should become necessary. These men, the Hesses, the Hitlers, and others, were all kept in secret locations in Russia. For many years they were living the identities of the real Hitler and Hess, and the only thing remaining for them was when and how, and of course whether at all, such a switch was to be made.
As for the leverage with the British, the Russians had entertained several workable options, but the easiest afforded itself to them when, in the last days of the war, they successfully captured Martin Bormann. Now all they had to do was to exchange the British asset in their hands for the Soviet asset in the hands of the British.
But the technical how of the switch was still a serious problem. The high-profile identities of Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann carried an explosive risk in their secret exchange, should it ever be exposed, and the fewer persons were to be involved in it, the better. Even the most basic negotiation between the two parties, as to how the switch was to be conducted, presented the risk of a leak. Therefore, for this particular purpose the Russians and the Brits decided to use the most experienced negotiator of the time, who was already in, deeply in the game and physically in the theater--- the youthful Swedish diplomat and an adventurous spirit, Raoul Wallenberg, who had been, throughout the war, an indispensable go-between for the warring sides, the Russians, the British, the Americans, and the Germans, maintaining closest ties with their intelligence services, and known to be a reliable keeper of secrets.
Wallenberg eventually helped deliver the exchange, but his great usefulness once the deal had gone through, instantly turned itself into a liability: from now on he was going to be a man who knew way too much. The British side consequently signaled the Russians that, if Wallenberg were to disappear on the Russian watch, no hell would break loose. Conveniently for everyone concerned, except, perhaps, for Wallenberg himself, (although this last clause is highly arguable) the Swede did indeed disappear and was never seen (or, rather, identified as himself) again. Later on in the generous post-Soviet era of conspicuously meaningless non-stop firecrackers and historical revelations, which the Russians were churning out by the dozen at a time, a story about Wallenberg ending his short life in Stalin’s Gulag was obligingly circulated among many others, but I would not be giving it any credence whatsoever. It is far more likely that Wallenberg was condemned to be amicably pumped by the Russians for his priceless information, and, considering the nature of the business he was in, he had to be so full of it that his debriefings had to outgrow their normal course, evolving into a career. I am sure that he was treated well, and, although becoming a non-person in such a manner must not have particularly suited his extravagant taste, he was bright enough to realize early on that he had no choice in this matter, and made the best of his situation under the circumstances. I was trying to find out what had happened to him, however, but such cases are always treated with understandable delicateness, and, as soon as I finally understood that poking my nose into this, and other such cases, was considered an inquiry in bad taste, I gave up, and would be probing into these “endgames” no more.

HISTORY CONVENTIONAL AND UNCONVENTIONAL

I used to be told many stories of Russian and world history, which couldn’t be found in any published book, which were often in direct contradiction to the official accounts, East and West, and which in all probability were never intended to become public knowledge. Raised with the Cartesian intellectual principle to always doubt everything, except in matters of faith (where you either fully accept or fully reject, but never doubt), I was never tempted to trust what I was told just because I respected my source, or because I had received it sub rosa, or, of course, because it was so deliciously contrary to the conventional wisdom. It is indeed such a sinful delight to trust the unconventional just because it is unconventional and it fondles the rebel in you… But, as I say, I have always resisted that kind of temptation.
The only reason why I may have chosen to give conditional credence to any such story was because it made sense, because it explained what the official account failed to explain, because it threw additional bright light on the larger picture, which, so far, left much to be desired…
Still, are any of such stories, even when they make perfect sense, to be trusted?
Generally speaking, no historical account, established or unestablished, is ever to be trusted, except when it enters the realm of historical mythology, where it is judged primarily as edifying fiction. Otherwise, even in the “safe” case, when we have chosen to follow the industrious critical historian, with his one thousand and one unimpeachable original sources, we may well end up buying a very clever forgery, planted, perhaps, even before the event’s inception, and gaining credibility entirely on account of the impressive length of its false paper trail.
Which must not, however, prevent us from actively contemplating history, as long as we are prepared to think with our own head, keeping an open mind, regardless of ipse dixit.

THE REMARKABLE CASE OF RUDOLF HESS

The time has come when it is no longer sensible to hold off on the remarkable story of Rudolf Hess, already alluded to in several previous entries, but only now coming to the fore. The story begins immediately after the victorious Bolshevik Revolution, and it cannot be properly understood without putting it in perspective, provided in this case by my entry Lenin And Rosa. Here is a short recap.
Having effectively destroyed the German Communist Party (whose leaders saw themselves as the rightful heirs of Karl Marx and refused to be subordinated to Lenin, seen by them as a Marxist impostor), Lenin’s agents were scouting Germany in search of a nice new little party which would be much easier to patronize. The name National Socialist German Workers’ Party sounded about right. The Soviets were attempting to cultivate and then take control of the Nazi Party in a number of ways. Besides financing it indirectly, they inserted their people into Nazi membership. In the early days, those were a handful of Soviet friends, who were not so much crazy about Bolshevism, as convinced that a friendship with Soviet Russia was the right course for Germany. One of such friends of Russia was Rudolf Hess.
Being a friend of Russia in those years was not a crime for any patriotic German. That appalling Great War, in which Germany had been fighting Russia, among others, ended with a humiliating defeat, but Russia had no hand in that humiliation. The main foreign culprits, in German eyes, were primarily the French, partly the British, and, to a lesser extent, the Americans. For those thinking Germans who remembered recent history and drew lessons from it, their present defeat had to be the direct result of their leaders ignoring the wise precept of Prince Otto von Bismarck, who, not that long ago, had warned his countrymen not to quarrel with Russia, but, rather, to be her friend, lest Germany would be drawn into fighting a losing war on two fronts. Considering that France was Germany’s historical enemy number one, Bismarck’s fear of a two-front war, in case of a rift with Russia, was well justified.
There was, however, a serious threat of Bismarck’s words not being heeded yet again, marking Germany for a second crushing defeat in a potential second two-front war. The doctrine of Lebensraum, and its corollary, Drang nach Osten, amounted to setting Germany and Russia on a collision course one more time, and such a bleak prospect had to be avoided at all costs. Needless to say, in this peculiar situation, Bismarck’s friends were indirectly Russia’s friends, and their friendship was a matter of life and death for Russia as well.
After World War I, Soviet Russia deliberately cultivated a warm friendship with the defeated Germans, and, as I already mentioned before, helped them reconstitute and train their armed forces on the Russian territory in violation of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Thus, being a direct friend of Russia was not only acceptable, but in fact a very commendable and even natural thing to be.
Rudolf Hess was not a paid Soviet agent, although his career greatly benefited from the Soviet support. He was not only allowed, but essentially unequivocally encouraged, by the terms of his Russian relationship, to remain a dedicated German patriot, who, like so many others like him, was pursuing the legitimate German pro-Russian agenda, endorsed by the father of the Second Reich himself. Did this make him a Soviet agent of influence? Perhaps. But a Soviet spy he never was, and his always one-sided contacts with Moscow (he was on the receiving end of invariably very brief and cryptic Soviet instructions), between 1919 and 1941, which were his active years, were minimal.
Having been instructed to join the NSDAP, Hess immediately started to cultivate a close relationship with Hitler, and in 1923 took part in the historical Bürgerbräukeller Putsch. As the putsch failed, Hess escaped to Austria, thus, unlike Hitler, avoiding arrest. His initial reaction was that everything had been lost for the NSDAP and its Führer, but apparently, he was quickly advised to change his mind, after which he returned to Bavaria, surrendered himself to the authorities, and requested to be incarcerated together with Hitler, his request promptly granted. During those months in Landsberg prison, which had evolved into a Nazi legend, the first, pro-Russian and anti-Capitalist, version of Mein Kampf was born between the two of them. It was a far cry from the subsequent radical revision, supplemented by a new second volume, which emphasized the need for Lebensraum, and consequently, was drastically anti-Russian, this time influenced not by Hess, but by a certain Josef Czerny, a Czech, but an unmistakable promoter of the Western, anti-Russian agenda.
Although Hess’s agenda seemed to have lost in the final draft of Hitler’s global strategy, articulated in the second version of Mein Kampf, his staunch loyalty to the Führer was appreciated, and when Hitler came to power in Germany, Hess’s fortune rose with him, making Hess one of the top three or four (arguably) men in the State’s hierarchy. Needless to say, despite the setback of his pro-Russian agenda, Hess continued to pursue it, both in his role as Hitler’s adviser, and in his speeches at public gatherings.
Stalin treasured Hess, and anyone who has heard or read Hess’s speeches at the Nuremberg rallies ought to understand why. Nevertheless, being a supreme fatalist, he just did not believe in Hess’s capacity to deliver a miracle, and considered a war with Hitler’s Germany inevitable.
Although it may be true to say that Hess did continue to have some clout in Berlin, probably, as a result of Hitler’s appreciation of his old times loyalty,--- in the course of the years he was gradually and irretrievably losing his power and his influence, ironically, to his own old-time staffer Martin Bormann, whose own star was now rapidly rising. Unlike other Nazi leaders, Bormann himself remained virtually unknown in Germany, but, even more ironically, he was apparently not an honest broker at all. It was hilarious for me to read in a book recently published in the United States that Bormann was probably a crack Soviet agent (!!!), whereas from my own knowledge about him, it was quite the other way round: in fact, he was a crack British agent, promoting an explicit Western agenda and constantly suspiciously spying on his boss Hess, apparently, on British orders. (The rest of Bormann’s story will be told in my Wallenberg entry.)
Eventually, completely out of political favor, Hess was able to provide his last, vital service to Moscow, by daringly flying to Britain, in May 1941, to compromise the potentially deadly to Russia secret peace talks between London and Berlin, whose success could have shut down the Western front, enabling Germany to focus her war machine entirely on the Russians, assuring Hitler of the victory.
The trick which Hess used, was magnificent in its simplicity: all he had to do was to make public what was meant to be top secret. Drawing the limelight of the British press to himself by his amazing flight, he was quick to declare what was presumably his primary objective: a secret peace between Germany and Britain, causing an avalanche of public indignation, and effectively demolishing any prospects of such private deal in the foreseeable future.
...As everybody knows, there was no deal made then or later between Nazi Germany and the West. What very few know (and what these few are not telling!) is that the main reason why it was never made was the 1941 flight to Britain of Rudolf Hess.

PREPARING FOR WAR

The standard invective of diehard Stalinists, which must have haunted Khrushchev, was that he should have known that by bringing Stalin down he was bringing Russia down as well. But my reproach to Khrushchev is far more specific. I accuse him of sheer dishonesty. Using anti-Stalinism as a mere tool in his struggle for personal power, he deliberately made Stalin look like a fool, even though he knew better.
It would be unconscionable to deny the fact or the extent of Stalin’s atrocities in the 1930’s. However, these terrible events must not be seen out of their historical context, as if there had been no Hitler and the terrible war with Germany had not been imminent.
Mind you, I am not trying to whitewash Stalin’s brutality, but I am putting it into its proper context. My readers’ view of him may not change after this, but at least they will have more facts at their disposal, and form their opinion on a more solid foundation than underinformed judgment and common superstition.
It can be virtually taken for granted that the key to the dramatic change in Soviet domestic policies, starting in 1927, was Stalin’s reading of Hitler’s ominously revised Mein Kampf (see my earlier entry Stalin Reads Mein Kampf). With his pathological fear of telling the truth under any circumstances, even when the truth is helpful to your cause (nothing hurts you more than telling the truth, as truth exposes your vulnerabilities to the enemy, whereas lies conceal them), Stalin would never think of publicly stating the bottom-line rationale for his brutal policies even after the war had ended. But from 1927 on, Stalin considered it his sacred task as the leader of the nation to transform the USSR into a mighty war machine, capable of not only resisting the German Drang nach Osten, but prevailing as an emerging world superpower in the end.
The first to be scrapped was the NEP, the New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin in 1921. Instead, in 1928, Stalin would launch the fiendish five-year economic plans, throwing every available ruble, hand, and brain into heavy industry and war production. Stalin’s well-known wartime slogan “All for the front, all for victory!” ought to be applied, therefore, not just to the four years of war, from 1941 to 1945, but also to the preceding fourteen years of Soviet history.
Stalin’s brutal agricultural program of mass collectivization waged from 1928 to 1933, also stressed the war needs. It especially zeroed in on certain specific geographical areas, where potential saboteurs and potential German collaborators were preemptively, and most savagely, repressed. Even such grotesque monstrosities, as the MTS, the much-ridiculed machine-and-tractor stations which clustered all heavy farm machinery in a few strategically selected spots, thus making them excruciatingly difficult to borrow by any individual farms for their needs,--- even these should now start making sense, in the context of mass mobilization.
…Another mystery raised, but never properly explained by Khrushchev, was the extermination by Stalin of the old guard of the Soviet Army. There were apparently two logical reasons for replacing the whole Soviet military command structure with the new faces. The first one dates back to the time of the Civil War and the existence of two separate armies, as my reader may remember. Stalin never denied that those commanders whom he had wiped out had all been brilliant men, only, maybe, a bit too brilliant for their own good. In the coming apocalyptic war with Hitler, Stalin needed Voroshilov-like loyalty from his generals far more than their most exceptional military skills.
The other reason for Stalin’s purge of the military was terribly ruthless, but also practical. As the reader may remember, after the First World War, Soviet Russia was instrumental in building up the German Wehrmacht. Considerable numbers of German troops had been trained on Russian soil, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Professional and personal contacts between Soviet and German military officials had been numerous and intimate. Moscow had her spies and agents of influence in Germany and the reverse must be true as well. Under the emerging conditions of an inevitable war with Germany, one German spy in the Soviet military command could spell disaster. Stalin thought that he had enough untainted military talent in Russia, to allow him to get rid of all the officers compromised by their German ties, even though they had been compromised on Lenin’s and Stalin’s own orders!
…The harshest bashing of all was reserved by Khrushchev for Stalin’s behavior as the Commander in Chief on the eve of Hitler’s attack on Russia, in 1941. “Unbelievable blindness” and “gross incompetence” were among the nicer terms used. Khrushchev’s historians accused Stalin of turning a deaf ear to the numerous warnings from every corner about the impending German offensive. In his published memoir, Khrushchev says that Stalin had been so afraid of provoking a war, so stubbornly convinced that Hitler would honor the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and not attack Russia, that he had sacrificed all vigilance and allowed the Nazis to catch the Soviet Army unprepared, after which he himself fell apart.
Such criticism has been a demonstrably cheap shot. Stalin’s stalling for time was never more critical for the fate of the country than in the spring of 1941. Had Stalin put the Soviet troops on alert in March, or in April of 1941, Hitler would surely have taken notice, and he would not have committed the second worst and no-less fatal mistake of his whole political career (the first one was devising the Operation Barbarossa in the first place!), which had been to postpone the Operation Barbarossa from its original date of May 15 to June 22, just because Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941 looked to him more threatening than Stalin’s inept Russia. (For more examples of Stalin’s calculated incompetence see my later entry “We Fooled Them!” and several other places in my World War II subsection.)
Yes, it was precisely Stalin's “incompetence” which had relaxed the Führer into negligence and deprived the German Blitzkrieg in Russia of the critical extra thirty-eight days of good weather, essential to the success of the German Moscow offensive. According to German and subsequent Soviet analysis, only three to four extra weeks of tolerable weather conditions would have been sufficient for Germany to take Moscow, and if not to win the war against Russia before the end of 1941, as Hitler had planned, then at least to raise German morale quite substantially, instead of shattering it in the lost battle of Moscow.
Thus, Hitler’s critical blunder was less the result of his unbridled arrogance than of Stalin’s ability to fool him by the deliberate mismanagement of Soviet Western defenses, and it was that blunder--committed not by Stalin, but by Hitler, on Stalin's daring ruse!-- which would deny the Nazis in 1941 their only chance of winning the war.
…But no matter what, his massive preparation for a war with Germany was not an altogether desperate race for time, on Stalin’s part. He still had his ace in the German hole, apparently, alive and well. After Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933, Stalin, consequently, had not completely given up hope that, given some gentle persuasion, the Führer might still be able to reconsider his anti-Soviet posture in favor of the anti-French one.
And now that particular "ace in the hole" comes up front and center as the subject of my next entry. His name is Rudolf Hess.

STALIN READS MEIN KAMPF

(The narrative of this entry picks up where my entry Lenin and Rosa left off.)
Assuming that the newborn Nazi party in Germany would like to have a big brother in Soviet Russia, was an enormous historical misjudgment on Lenin’s part. Yet, had the Russians been able to go back to square one, what could they possibly have changed? Cultivating the Nazis was too consistent with Lenin’s thinking, to try doing anything differently, unless he was prepared to scrap Soviet Russia’s grand dream of superpower internationalism altogether, which, considering the way his mind worked, would have been totally absurd to expect. In other words, Lenin’s misjudgment about the Nazis was a logical and historical necessity. So was the rise of Hitler, too. (In his case, however, it was not la forza del destino, but, rather, Schicksal.)
From the beginning, Soviet Russia was able to influence the emerging Nazi Party only up to a point, but that part they seemed to have been aware of all along. There had to be a complex struggle for influence and, as a later entry in this section will demonstrate, they were ready to be in it for the long haul. Moscow had no say whatsoever in Hitler’s rise as the future Führer of Germany. Ironically, but hardly surprisingly, Lenin’s and Hitler’s careers had a lot in common. Both were launched into prominence by their jobs as police informers. And both had a mind very much of their own.
Hitler was by nature a militant ideologue. It means that his convictions could be influenced by his choosing among several incompatible extremes, and whichever extreme were to win the struggle of influences, would be espoused by him with sincere zeal. Thus, just like Japan in World War Two, Hitler had a choice between two major options, and this choice was a matter of life and death for the Russians.
Number One, the good one, was for Hitler to see the numerous advantages of the Russian friendship. The Bolsheviks and the Nazis with Bismarck’s blessing (about which see my Bismarck entry), could walk a long way together, emphasizing their common socialist ties, resolutely united in their opposition to World Capitalism. German historical enmity toward the French (which must have been going back at least eleven centuries, to the grandsons of Charlemagne, who had broken up their grandfather’s great Empire; and, just recently, had been punctuated by Germany’s humiliation at the hands of the French in World War I) fitted neatly with this option.
When Hitler sat down to write Mein Kampf in a Bavarian prison in 1923-1924, he had an invaluable Soviet agent of influence by his side and seemed to be steadily drifting into this first option. As long as France had remained on Hitler’s mind as Germany’s Enemy Number One, and as long as Rudolf Hess (selling out the store, but see my entry about him in this World War II subsection) was by his side, helping him write his master opus, the Soviet aspirations regarding the Nazis were in reasonably good shape.
By the time Mein Kampf was published in 1925, the Nazi Party had already been drawing some limited, but worried attention in the West. The so-called “second volume” of Hitler’s Buch, which came out in 1926 with a dramatic revision of German foreign policy objectives, must have been the product of an intense influence on the Führer by some powerful and generous sponsors from the West. In that same year 1926, a revised edition of the First Volume appeared also, with the revision bent on shifting from option one to option two, consistent with the content of the Second Volume.
Whether Hitler had indeed been persuaded to reverse his combative stance against France Eastward, Herr Führer, in the Second Edition of Mein Kampf, was now openly espousing the dreaded Option Number Two. It was making short shrift of Socialist camaraderie, calling for Germany’s expansion to the East to solve her problem of Lebensraum, the living space. Taking this stance made inevitable the eventual mortal combat of the two socialist gladiators, Germany and Russia, in the megacircus of the world, before a very unfriendly crowd of Western spectators shouting out, “Pox on you both!”
What an irony this must have been! The Russians had given Hitler a pair of feet, and he was walking away from them to a higher bidder!
When the Second Mein Kampf was published in late 1926, without any fanfare whatsoever, Soviet officials in Germany must have saved Hitler’s publisher from imminent bankruptcy by purchasing several copies of it, which they then promptly sent to Moscow like a secret treasure, by the sealed diplomatic pouch. On the reasoned recommendation of Stalin’s advisers, the best German-Russian translators were immediately put to work. The book’s text was divided into blocks of some fifty pages each. Two translators were then assigned to each block, doing their translations independently from each other. Then, the notes were compared, and judged by a panel of Russian/German linguistic experts, after which a cleanly typed text of Mein Kampf, in Russian, was submitted to Comrade Stalin with the most relevant pages and passages highlighted. Having a very limited knowledge of German himself, Stalin also had the original German version in front of him, and whenever he would come across a particularly interesting passage or still doubted the nuances of translation he would discuss such matters with a reliable linguistic expert on duty.
The curious role played by Hitler’s Das Buch in subsequent Soviet history would become a classic example of Stalin’s wisdom, for his apologists. According to them, it was the reading of Mein Kampf II, which gave Comrade Stalin the warning to start preparing Russia for a war with Germany six whole years before Hitler would come to power!

STALIN THE PRIEST

If I say that Stalin was a religious man, it may sound offensive to many Christians… What is this?! Isn’t it a fact that in Soviet Russia Christianity was persecuted, many churches closed, some turned into outhouses; children taught atheism at school?…
History knows many perversions of religion, such as the infamous Spanish Inquisition. The Soviet religious experiment was of a peculiar kind, and in Stalin’s person, it was revealed in his personality split between the public and private man.
As a student of theology at the Tiflis Seminary, he had learned many sacred passages by heart, and loved to quote them. “Then saith he [Jesus] unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” [Matthew 22:21]... So, what was the big deal about the Great Terror?! Stalin was acting as a statesman, not as a private individual. The public man is not accountable to God with his “tax money!”
Stalin repented a lot but had no remorse. Every time he knocked his forehead on the floor, he felt redeemed. His persecution of the Church? Come on! Ivan Grozny had Metropolitan Philip strangled for meddling in the affairs of the State. And how many more priests and monks had he Ivan murdered? How many beautiful Russian churches had he Ivan destroyed and desecrated? Yet nobody calls Ivan “Godless!”
Now, what about Peter the Great, who abolished the Russian Patriarchate, while Comrade Stalin welcomed its restoration shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution! When Patriarch Adrian was pleading with Peter I for leniency in his rough treatment of political prisoners and even brought with him the miracle-working icon of the Virgin Mother to intercede on their behalf, what did Peter do? He threw the Patriarch out, yelling this at him: “I worship God and His Holy Mother no less than you do, but it is my duty to protect my people and punish the enemies who plot against them!” Comrade Stalin was in good company.
History and theology were his genuine domains. Stalin liked when people were reminded of his theological background. When his mother, a very religious woman, once told how she always regretted that her son had not become an Orthodox priest, instead of politician, Stalin was genuinely pleased, and made sure that his mother’s story had a wide circulation… No wonder. Religion was giving Stalin legitimacy, in his own eyes, to rule over Russia.
He was a zealous Russian chauvinist. Being a native of Georgia was of tremendous help but not in the sense which people usually have in mind when they say that no one can be more zealous than an outsider trying to prove his legitimacy.
Stalin did not come in as an outsider. He descended on Mother Russia from above. Having visited Georgia a number of times, I know from personal experience that for every Georgian it is a matter of great pride that his little nation was among the very first few chosen ones, to receive Christianity in its earliest, purest form, almost seven centuries before the pagan Russia was baptized. (In fact, Georgia was the second country after Armenia to adopt Christianity as state religion!)
Stalin was terribly proud of his heritage, and never stopped being a Georgian. Most previous Russian rulers were of German, Scandinavian, and even Tartar descent. But he was from the race of the pioneers, the truly superior race.
Therefore he never stopped being an Orthodox Christian either. Without the Christian connection, his native Georgia would have been just a small and totally insignificant patch of territory within the Russian Empire! It was the Christian connection, that made her special and distinguished.

There is a most enlightening story about Stalin’s conversation regarding religion and Soviet power with the great Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov. Stalin admired Bulgakov’s genius and his rare courage and creative integrity in standing up for his views, and personally protected him from unavoidable persecution. He was particularly fond of Bulgakov’s novel White Guard, adapted by the author himself into the play Days of the Turbins, performed by the Moscow Arts Theater, and attended by Stalin over a dozen times. Here is what he said about Bulgakov’s unapologetically positive depiction of the enemies of the Red Army in Russia’s Civil War:
“In life there is no clear distinction between the good Reds and the bad Whites. There are good Whites too: good Russian patriots, who love Russia no less than the best of the Reds. It is just that life has put them on the opposite sides of the conflict, which is a great tragedy.”
On one particular occasion, in his conversation with Bulgakov, when the latter was bitterly complaining to him about religious persecution in the USSR, Stalin briefly commiserated with him, but then turned the tables on the writer in their historically memorable exchange. He reminded him how before the Bolshevik Revolution Bulgakov used to be a religion-spurning atheist, and now look “what our Revolution has done to you: It has turned you into a Russia-loving defender of Christian Orthodoxy!”
Bulgakov was quick to get the point, and registered his stunned agreement with Stalin then and there.

THE PAST AND FUTURE OF EGYPT

First, about the future. I cannot see how the current military rule in Egypt can hold. A ‘normal’ military coup has to be largely a “family affair” among the powerful elites, with the masses playing an oversized section of second fiddles. Not so in Egypt, where the masses have been too actively involved in the political process by now to agree to a situation that could easily have been achieved without their involvement at all. Moreover, I believe that should the army now try to convert its temporary position of power into another military dictatorship, it will find some extremely powerful and exceptionally well organized elements within the Egyptian society, which will start a civil war, with an eventual Islamic radicalization of Egypt becoming inevitable. Ironically, I think that it may well be that the best possible scenario for Egypt becomes a moderate Islamic rule, like that of the Moslem Brotherhood, which at least has a realistic potential of thwarting the ascent of Islamic extremism by offering a “kinder, gentler” version of a popularly acceptable form of government in Egypt for some time to come.
(In any case, even with the most palatable outcome, the current events in Egypt are very bad news for Israel, and a potentially insurmountable challenge for the U.S. policy in the Middle East.)
Now, regarding the recent past. The Mubarak regime of the past three decades has been described by many as a “totalitarian dictatorship.” In my view, this is sheer nonsense, demonstrating the lack of comprehension of the basic difference between an authoritarian rule and a totalitarian state. Mubarak was unquestionably an authoritarian dictator, who represented himself and his military base, but not the Egyptian nation and state as a whole. For more on this difference, I direct the reader to my entries on totalitarianism, several of which have been posted on this blog already, among the excerpts from my book Nunc Dimittis.

STALIN IN BAYREUTH

(There is something about Russia’s attitude to Germany that defies historical sense. Since an early age, I was told that Wagner was the greatest composer who ever lived, that Furtwangler was greater than  Toscanini himself, and that Nietzsche was the Everest of philosophy. Mind you, I was told this by the very men and women who had the horrific war against Nazi Germany vivid in their memory and acutely painful in the wounds and scars, both physical and psychological, which the war had left them with for the rest of their lives. My maternal uncle Gleb Timofeyevich Gamazin, a much decorated war hero, whose portraits were carried across Red Square alongside with Stalin's during public demonstrations at the end of the war, had this favorite phrase to register his highest praise for superior workmanship: “Clean German work.” All this could be the subject of a separate entry, and maybe it will be, one day, but in the present entry’s specific context, it serves as an apt introduction. Indeed, as all of my friends and relatives concurred, Hitler’s attack on Russia in 1941 [sic!] was a crime not just against Russia, but against Germany herself. No matter what, they said, Germany’s greatness endures…)

No, Stalin never was in Bayreuth, but I stand by my title, as an excellent figure of speech. After all, Wagner truly was his favorite composer.
Stalin had an acute appreciation of greatness in all its creative genres, and his appreciation knew no national borders or prejudices. He saw Russia as a great repository of world culture, and nothing of human genius was alien to a Russian. Paraphrasing Terentius, “Russicus sum et nihil magnum mihi alienum puto.” (Do not remind me that Stalin was an ethnic Georgian and not a Russian: to anybody who has ever understood him, he was no less Russian than, say, Russia’s beloved Empress-Matushka Catherine the Great… of Anhalt-Zerbst!)
In this context, it should not come as a surprise that Stalin was a great admirer of Richard Wagner, that is of both his music and of his drama, just as how the composer wanted it to be. Stalin’s love for Wagner’s operas was bordering on an obsession, and in the midst of the terrible war against Hitler’s Germany, when everything of German origin seemed to be soaked in evil, Stalin just couldn’t resist the urge of getting his daily dose of Wagner, even if only for the twelve minutes of the Tannhäuser Overture or Isolde's Liebestod. (But The Ring was, of course, his hands-down favorite.)
What is no less amazing about this story is that many Russians, Stalin’s detractor Nikita Khrushchev among them, knew this well, but none would say anything disparaging about Stalin on this particular account, even long after de-Stalinization, when criticizing Stalin for every mortal sin was politically safe, and even rather fashionable, and when each of them had lost someone dear both to Stalin’s purges and to the unholy invasion of Wagner’s compatriots, and so, one would assume, they had a big axe to grind, both with Stalin and with Wagner himself.
But nothing of the kind. Loving Wagner has been the pinnacle of music appreciation. Even Khrushchev must have understood that. You could attack Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and even the Soviet power itself, and somehow get away with it, but Richard Wagner was unassailable!

GOLODOMOR

(The English-speaking world is oddly accustomed to a different transliteration of this word, "Holodomor," which is both artificial and misleading, linguistically signifying “mass deaths from freezing cold.” The correct term for our subject in Ukrainian properly transliterated is “Golodomor 1932-1933 rokiv,” showing that the word itself is spelled identically as Golodomor, both in Russian and in Ukrainian. I guess that the only reason for its improper transliteration is to send the deliberate message to the West that the tragic famine of 1932-1933 was somehow different, in a certain sinister way, in Ukraine, as compared to the same tragic famine causing even greater casualties in several other grain-producing areas of the USSR.
One more important note addresses the specific meaning of the word “Golodomor” [I refuse to use its disingenuous misspelling as “Holodomor,” which is insulting to any linguist’s intelligence]. Its correct denotation must be “massive deaths caused by a famine” and not “a deliberate state policy of mass murder by means of famine” as is often alleged.” Generally speaking, it is revoltingly reprehensible to use a great human tragedy in order to play ethnic politics, when such a boorish tool as outright linguistic deception is being shamelessly employed to promote one’s political agenda.
And lastly, the concept of mass famines in Russia cannot be reduced to the tragedy of 1932-1933. Ten years before that, there was a great famine in the Volga region of Soviet Russia caused by poor harvest aggravated by the devastation of the deadly Civil War. Immediately after World War II there was yet another famine, caused by the devastating effects of the war, waged on the Russian territory. There were several deadly famines prior to the twentieth century as well, but we are obviously focusing here on one particular famine, which was the deadliest of them all.)

As a specific term, Golodomor ought to refer to the total phenomenon of the deadly Soviet famine of 1932-1933, which affected most major grain-producing agricultural areas of the Soviet Union, including Northern Caucasus, Volga Region, South Urals, West Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. An estimated six to eight million people perished during this terrible period of Soviet history, primarily because of starvation, but the causes of this tragedy are subject to wildly different interpretations, as this issue is being intensely debated today. (This debate has been actually inherited from earlier times, when it was limited to a small group of Ukrainian nationalist exiles in the West, and did not amount to much more than the fringes of an all-pervasive anti-Soviet propaganda.)
There are reprehensible efforts, on the part of the anti-Russian elements in modern Ukraine, to misrepresent Golodomor as a genocidal policy of Moscow deliberately targeting Ukrainians, which is of course wickedly manufactured fiction designed to instill anti-Russian sentiments in the ethnically Ukrainian citizens of today’s Ukraine and in the free countries of the Western World. An accusation of this nature is vicious demagoguery, considering the territorial distribution of the numbers of Golodomor’s victims within the USSR. The number of the dead in Central Russia was 2 million; in Kazakhstan it was 1.7 million; in Northern Caucasus it was around 1 million; and in Ukraine the number stood at 1.3 million. Take into account, however, that only a fraction of this number covers ethnic Ukrainians, as the majority of these agricultural lands is situated in Eastern Ukraine, populated largely by ethnic Russians.
There is a somewhat more sensible, yet still deficient, explanation of the causes of Golodomor, provided by the studies conducted by the EU community. These have concluded that Golodomor was not caused by a deliberate intent to exterminate the Ukrainians, but by the highly inefficient policies of the Soviet government, which was expropriating the grains from hungry populations in order to sell them to the West to finance the ongoing industrialization of the country. This explanation is only partially true, as, even though, indeed, a large amount of grain was sold to the West during this time, the nation had enough grain left to feed the people and avoid the tragic famine.
It is also true that the particular years 1932-1933 were characterized by lower than average harvest, yet this is not to say that the overall diminished yield of the harvested grain by itself could have produced such horrific results.
There was another factor involved here, which happened to be the real cause of the famine. It is overlooked today, perhaps, for political reasons, thus bringing Golodomor into the domain of "history unknown, ignored, and misunderstood."
Here is the truth, though. There was a lot of grain in those grain-producing areas, where Golodomor actually happened, and there was a natural need for grain redistribution. Armed detachments of grain collectors were sent by the Soviet government to all the villages that had large surpluses of grain, to leave the villagers with the bare minimum, while expropriating the rest for the purposes of redistribution, and, yes, selling surpluses to the West for desperately needed hard currency. These detachments, however, were meeting stiff resistance from the wealthy villagers, who would habitually engage in the practice of hiding their grain, to prevent the collectors from taking it away from them (many intended to sell it to their less fortunate neighbors later on), to the point of burying it in the ground, where it was very hard to find. Realizing that such acts of sabotage must have been taking place in areas where they expected to find a lot of grain yet found none the collectors would naturally become enraged, and, following the harsh instructions from above to collect the grain at all costs, while punishing the concealers of the grain as saboteurs and traitors, they would often end up leaving the stubborn villages devoid of any grain to feed themselves, as punishment. A lot of the grain buried under the ground would also come to rot, when the only persons who knew its location were taken away and shot, or permanently deported, leaving the others without a clue as to where the grain had been hidden. Needless to say, the collected grains were never redistributed back to the areas that were expected to feed themselves. Thus we uncover the paradoxical fact that the deadly famine was spread exclusively across the areas rich in grain, while the areas poor in agricultural blessings, and thus presumably expected to suffer the most from the famine, managed to stay famine-free, being properly supplied by redistributed grains, in small amounts, yet sufficient for their survival.
For some reason, the big question addressing this paradox (why did Russia suffer from Golodomor in grain-rich areas only, but not in the grain-poor ones?!) is not being asked. Should anyone dare to ask it, there has to come an immediate realization that something is wrong with the picture painted by the investigators, who pay no attention to the factor which I have placed front and center in this entry. The final question therefore is not whose picture is right and whose picture is wrong, but whose picture has an answer for the objectively key question above and whose representation ignores this question completely, as there is no way it can find a sustainable answer to it.