Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer (Icons) (Kindle Single) by Paul Johnson

Author:Paul Johnson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2014-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

3

Generalissimo to Paranoid

STALIN DID NOT distinguish between war and peace in the way we do. In his references to foreign affairs in speeches during the 1930s, he implies the Second World War had already begun. From his viewpoint it had. Chinese Communist troops were fighting the nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek for most of the 1920s and 1930s. The Japanese conquest of Manchuria and their full-scale invasion of China in 1937 led to clashes on the badly mapped Soviet-Manchurian frontier. Some of these were serious and involved large-scale tank battles, which the Russians, under Marshal Zhukov, won. As Stalin said, “The Far East is the ideal ground to try out our new tanks.” In the 1920s the Red Army had begun to create a massive tank force with the help of German experts, and sixteen large tank factories were built between the wars, most of them deep in Russia, to create heavy tanks. The same policy was adopted toward aero-engines.

This proved, in the end, the most rewarding aspect of Stalin’s industrial policy. But it required large quantities of hard foreign currency, and grain exports, though kept up by starving the Soviet masses, could not provide enough. In November 1928 Stalin ordered the curators of the Leningrad Hermitage (the old tsarist collection) to sell part of its contents immediately to millionaires all over the world. The largest sales went to Andrew W. Mellon, who bought twenty-one paintings, including a Van Eyck, a Rubens, five Rembrandts, four Van Dycks, two Raphaels, a Titian, a Velázquez, and a Botticelli, plus others, for a total of $6,654,053 in cash, a third of all Soviet exports to the USA in the year. This formed the nucleus of the new National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, which Mellon created in the 1930s. An even bigger coup, personally negotiated by Stalin, with the assistance of Molotov, was the acquisition of the Spanish gold reserve.

At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Spain had one of the world’s largest gold reserves, seven hundred tons worth $788 million (or £162 million). Stalin, instead of supplying arms on credit, as the Germans and Italians did to the nationalists, insisted on being paid in gold. In the end the Republicans handed over two-thirds of their gold to Stalin, who thus had no financial incentive to ensure they won, unlike the Germans and the Italians, who were owed over $500 million. Once Stalin was sure the Spanish government’s gold reserve was exhausted and their currency worthless, he lost interest in the war. It is a curious fact that Stalin, whose interest in economics was essentially theoretical, and who never bothered to open his own pay envelopes (hundreds of which were discovered in his desk drawers after his death in 1953), was always interested in gold. He regularly visited the vaults of the Soviet gold reserve in Moscow, just as the Daughters of the American Revolution conducted an annual inspection of Fort Knox.

Although Stalin built up the Red Army’s armored divisions and air

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.