This is CBSI in the world.

I'm John Batchel with Professor Sean McMeakin at Bard College.

His new book is Stalin's War, a new history of World War II,

how what we regard is the Second World War was a product of Stalin's manipulation and cold-bloodedness.

We come now to May 3, 1939. Hitler is a threat to all

of Europe. Everywhere. He's a threat to Stalin as well. However, Stalin means to convince Hitler

that they can work together in some fantastic way. Ideologically, it doesn't work, but bloody-mindedness in both Hitler and Stalin. May 3rd, 1939,

the NKVD, aka the KGB, state security, surrounds the foreign ministry, arresting the foreign

minister himself, Litvanov, and all of his staff who are Jewish.

Molotov, the gangster, a colleague of Stalin's from signing death warrants during the great purges of the 30s, and they will continue, becomes the new foreign representatives of

Stalin to Hitler.

Sean, why did they arrest Liefenov?

He'd been an accomplished Bolshevik all these years.

Well, he had been certainly useful for a time being when it came to things like public relations,

in part because he was Jewish and he was abused for being Jewish in these kind of Nazi propaganda caricatures.

And he had come to seem the face of, you might say, the more respectable Soviet foreign policy image.

That is, that the Soviets were anti-fascist because of the popular front.

They were devoted opponents of Hitler and so on.

And there's no reason to doubt that Lidvinov himself likely felt

that way. He was, after all, Jewish. However, he had already quietly been demoted even before May 3,

1939. He had been demoted basically from his prior responsibilities in charge of the European

desk. So effectively, he wasn't really running Stalin's foreign policy in Europe anymore.

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