The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

^{CHAPTER 8} RIDING THE NAZI TIGER

ON DECEMBER 23, 1940, THE SOVIET UNION’S SENIOR RED ARMY men descended on a snowbound Moscow. They were there to attend the annual military conference, where members of the High Command and other dignitaries would expound on the state of the Soviet Union’s defenses and the Red Army’s degree of readiness.

The conference was to be held in the People’s Commissariat for Defense, an elegant, strangely crenelated complex not far from Red Square that was one of the curiosities of interwar Moscow. Designed by the doyen of Stalinist architects, Lev Rudnev, and completed in 1938, the Commissariat for Defense was an uneasy combination of Italian Renaissance and modernist influences, with stucco walls, brutal basreliefs of stylized tanks, and an elaborate central tower sporting red stars instead of clock faces. Rudnev was very much the rising star of Soviet architecture, having completed the monumental Frunze Military Academy in Moscow in 1937—also with a decorative tank motif—and the massive Government House in distant Baku. In time, his star would rise still further, and his postwar authorship of the iconic Moscow State University building, as well as its unloved Polish cousin, the Warsaw Palace of Culture, would crown his career.

In the winter of 1940, however, Rudnev’s Renaissance brutalism played host to the High Command Conference. It was bitterly cold that winter, with a December record low of –38.8°C recorded in Moscow earlier in the month, but Muscovites were doubtless distracted by the usual diet of industrial statistics and war reports that filled the pages of Pravda. They would have been thrilled, for instance, by news of the increased production of tractors and by plans for larger and faster escalators to be installed in the Moscow metro. Elsewhere, the Moscow district Komsomol conference was attracting attention, as was a heated debate raging among critics about a new production of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, playing at the Kamernyi Theater, with Alisa Koonen in the lead role.

Naturally, military matters also dominated the press, with Pravda devoting a whole page each day to war reports from western Europe. The reciprocal air raiding between the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force was soberly reported, with “exceptionally intensive” German raids on Liverpool and Manchester counterbalanced by British raids on Berlin and the Ruhr. Churchill was reported as making a direct radio appeal to the Italian people, recalling the traditional friendship between the two nations and blaming the war—which Italy had entered the previous summer—on Mussolini. Hitler, meanwhile, was said to have made a Christmas visit to the western front, touring positions on the French coast.

Although average Muscovites reading Pravda could glean much information about the world around them that December, they would have searched in vain for references to the High Command Conference taking place beneath their very noses. Such was the sensitivity of the meeting that it was evidently thought prudent to conceal it from public view. So, while it was reported that Red Army Marshal Semyon Timoshenko presented awards to young people at the Komsomol conference, the real reason for the marshal’s presence in the capital was not revealed.

For all the reflexive secrecy, the High Command Conference was to be very significant. Unlike in previous years, Stalin had ordered the conference’s remit to be expanded to cover all aspects of Red Army doctrine, organization, and training; consequently, invitations had gone out not only to the members of the High Command but also to many others, including the commanders of the military districts, as well as numerous army, divisional, and corps commanders. In all, some 270 senior officers of the Red Army and Red Air Force were expected to attend. Although Stalin himself did not grace the meeting with his presence, his Politburo confederate Andrei Zhdanov attended in his stead and reported proceedings to his master every evening. Despite this, according to one participant, the conference had something of a holiday atmosphere: “Results were generally satisfactory,” he recalled, “and we were in a cheerful and confident mood.”

The conference consisted of only six presentations, covering topics such as military training, offensive operations, the war in the air, and the role of the infantry, with each lasting up to two hours, to be followed by an extensive, open-ended discussion. Chief of the General Staff General Kirill Meretskov got proceedings underway with an examination of the Red Army’s combat and command training preparations. The previous year, he explained, had provided a “complex international environment” in which the imperialists had fought among themselves and sought, without success, to draw the Soviet Union into their conflict. In addition, he suggested that the Red Army had gained much precious experience from what he euphemistically called the “march westward” into the Baltic states and the “provocation” of the Finnish War. Yet, despite such positives, he believed that the war had nonetheless revealed “major shortcomings” in organizational, operational, and tactical matters, with all levels of the military requiring substantial modernization if the Red Army was to serve its political masters and be ready at any moment to “take the field.”

Later speakers revealed deeper failings. Delivering his presentation, “On the Nature of Offensive Operations,” General Georgy Zhukov made an impassioned plea for the Red Army to learn from the military successes of the previous eighteen months and adopt something akin to a blitzkrieg strategy. Recent wars, he said, had demonstrated the utility of the sudden, bold, and coordinated use of airpower, airborne troops, and concentrated armor: the defeat of the Japanese at Khalkhin Gol in August 1939, for example, had shown the vital importance of air superiority, tactical surprise, and flanking maneuvers. Neatly sidestepping the lessons of the Finnish debacle, Zhukov moved on to analyze the German successes of 1939 and 1940, which, he suggested, were due to the “close interaction” between infantry, air, and mechanized forces and the key element of surprise, enabling deep, devastating thrusts into enemy lines. Only in this way, he concluded, by the use of “energetic, decisive and bold offensive operations,” could the Red Army “complete the tasks of the revolution.”

In his postwar memoirs, Zhukov was upbeat about the favorable reception his paper received and praised the conference for recognizing the “chief trends” in modern warfare and the pressing reality of German military might. Yet such reminiscences were rather rose tinted. In fact, Zhukov had come in for some hefty criticism from his colleagues, with one commentator, Lieutenant General Filipp Golikov, warning pointedly against “exaggerating the success of foreign armies.” Of course, Zhukov’s opinions shouldn’t have been remotely controversial: after all, he was only advocating that the Red Army should adopt the “best practice” demonstrated to have been successful elsewhere. Some of his rivals certainly perceived an implied slight of their own abilities in his thesis, but there was more to it than that. For one thing, the Soviet High Command in 1940 was no ordinary, objective body of men; rather it was an uneasy amalgam of the “political generals” who had Stalin’s ear and less-able commanders promoted as a consequence of the purges, with a minority of pure military men, like Zhukov, attempting to navigate a course between them. As a result of such tensions, as Nikita Khrushchev would later recall, the High Command was “like a kennel of mad dogs,” with all of those present “tearing at each other’s throats.”

In this febrile atmosphere, Zhukov’s advocacy of a Soviet variant of blitzkrieg was akin to rolling a hand grenade under the conference table, as it came very close to the theory of “deep operations” espoused by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky in the mid-1930s that had, for a time, been official Red Army doctrine. Tukhachevsky, however, had been one of the most prominent victims of the Soviet purges: exposed as an alleged German agent, his interrogation file spattered with his own blood, he had been executed in 1937. Advocating his ideas, therefore, regardless of their military merits, could be construed as a profoundly political—even heretical—act.

Notwithstanding such concerns, however, the argument for more offensive military planning carried the day. Another general, Dmitry Pavlov, presented a companion piece to Zhukov’s: “The Use of Mechanised Forces in Offensive Operations,” in which he argued for the development of concentrated, massed tank units along the German model rather than their piecemeal use in infantry support, as the French had attempted earlier in the year.

Lastly, after a few more presentations, Marshal Timoshenko once again took the floor for a rousing closing address, in which he, too, advocated the adoption of a more offensive mind-set: “Defence is not the decisive means of defeating the enemy,” he said. “Only attack can achieve that.” He ended by calling for increased political education for Red Army soldiers so that they might demonstrate their “boundless loyalty to the party of Lenin” and be better prepared to “defend their socialist motherland.” With that, the conference was brought to a close.

ALTHOUGH THE HIGH COMMAND CONFERENCE’S PARTICIPANTS DID not yet know it, the martial spirit they were invoking would be required sooner than they imagined. Stalin had been kept abreast of the numerous rumors emanating from Nazi Germany over the previous months—the private speeches and aired frustrations of senior Nazi personnel. Indeed, even before Hitler gave the order for Operation Barbarossa, the new Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Vladimir Dekanozov, had received an anonymous tip about the Führer’s aggressive intentions. It would have come as no surprise, therefore, when a document landed on Stalin’s desk on December 29—in the middle of the High Command Conference—claiming that “high military circles” in Germany had informed a Soviet agent that “Hitler has given the order to prepare for war with the USSR.” “War will be declared,” it went on, “in March 1941.”

Confirmation was sought from the Soviet military attaché in Berlin, and sources were checked and rechecked. Circumstantial corroboration was given by NKVD intelligence reports about German troop transfers in occupied Poland, the erection of barracks and fortifications, and the precipitate rise from late 1940 in border incidents along the German-Soviet frontier. An intercepted telegram from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Bucharest even suggested that the German army had “completed its full deployment” and was “confident of an easy victory.”

Stalin was unnerved. In the discussions that followed the conference, he was cold and unusually ill humored; Soviet foreign trade commissar Anastas Mikoyan even thought that he had become “unhinged.” As his policy of riding the Nazi tiger began to unravel, it was becoming clear that he would need all the military capability his High Command could give him. The urgency of the task was soon made starkly apparent. In the first weeks of the new year, two war games were conducted in Rudnev’s Defense Commissariat in which Zhukov fought his rival Pavlov, first as the Soviet defender and then as the Western attacker. The debrief that followed treated Stalin to a disconcerting insight into the mind of one of his senior generals, which demonstrated the difficulty he faced in reforming the Red Army.

Grigory Kulik was one of the few Soviet marshals to have survived the purges; yet his resistance to any technological or doctrinal innovation within the Red Army made him such a buffoonish liability that his survival can only be attributed to his closeness to Stalin. A bullying incompetent who sported an incongruous “Hitler moustache,” Kulik seemingly yearned for the simplicity of an earlier soldiering age. He railed against the idea of armored warfare (denouncing it as “degenerate fascist ideology”), deplored the development of the Katyusha rocket (favoring the horse-drawn gun), and described antitank artillery as “rubbish.” Yet, despite such antediluvian attitudes, he had been promoted to the post of deputy defense commissar, implausibly with responsibility for overseeing artillery development.

As if more evidence of his startling incompetence were needed, Kulik provided it at the debrief that followed the war games. While Stalin’s mood was not improved by a rather bumbling, evasive presentation from Chief of the General Staff Kirill Meretskov on the games themselves—which Zhukov had decisively won—Kulik’s intervention did nothing to help. Raging against mechanization, Kulik stubbornly espoused the use of horsepower for the military, complaining that the utility of tanks had been grossly exaggerated, before concluding, “For the time being, we should refrain from forming tank and mechanised corps.” He finished, embarrassing himself further, by showing his ignorance of basic procurement requirements. Stalin was uncharacteristically tolerant in his response. He reminded Kulik that “victory in war will be won by the side that has more tanks and more highly motorized troops,” before adding ominously, “The government carries out a program of mechanizing the armed forces, introduces the engine into the army, and Kulik comes out against the engine. It is as if he had come out against the tractor and the combine and supported the wooden plough.” It sounded like a death sentence.

Strangely, Kulik remained in his post, at least for the short term. Stalin had only recently ordered the general’s wife kidnapped and murdered for an unrelated indiscretion, so it is just possible that this stayed his hand. Nonetheless there were to be significant changes, most notably the promotion of Zhukov to the post of chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, replacing Meretskov. Despite the challenges that Kulik personified, therefore, Zhukov’s appointment signaled a step in the right direction.

One of Zhukov’s first actions as commander in chief was to oversee the promulgation of the Red Army’s revised mobilization plan, known as MP-41, in mid-February. Given that the plan had been in preparation since the previous summer, the extent of Zhukov’s direct influence over it must be questioned, but he certainly would have approved its main points, including the doubling of Red Army manpower to over 8 million, two-thirds of which would be stationed in the western military districts, and the stipulation that fully ninety divisions (nearly a third of the planned total) would be armored or motorized. In addition, that February saw the establishment of three front headquarters—the northwestern, the western, and the southwestern—on the USSR’s western border. Clearly, the Red Army was well aware of the threat that it might face.

That threat was indeed substantial. The strategic plan that Hitler and his generals had agreed on foresaw three separate army groups—north, center, and south, totaling over 3 million men—which would strike east into Soviet territory, enveloping and destroying the defending forces. It was expected that the Red Army would even aid the attackers’ cause by standing and fighting—rather than effecting a headlong retreat—as German planners considered that the Soviets could ill afford to lose such highly developed and industrialized regions as the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Leningrad. With its army destroyed and its western industrial heartlands and main cities conquered and occupied, the reasoning ran, the Soviet Union would surely collapse.

What was more, by that spring it was already clear among the German High Command that any coming conflict with the Soviet Union would not be fought according to the norms of warfare. In a supplement to Hitler’s earlier “Barbarossa Directive,” issued in mid-March 1941 by Chief of the General Staff Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the instructions were laid down for the expected German administration of the occupied Soviet Union. They included an outline of the “special tasks” to be assigned to Heinrich Himmler’s SS—tasks “determined by the necessity to settle the conflict between two opposing political systems.” Behind the euphemisms there lurked wholesale slaughter.

Stalin, meanwhile, preferred to err on the side of caution and, though thoroughly informed about the German threat, opted to stick to diplomatic methods, convinced that the military buildup and the rumor-mongering were little more than a Nazi negotiating tool—an attempt to exert psychological pressure as a prelude to the resumption of talks. Stalin was mistaken about much in the lead-up to the German attack, but we can no longer take seriously the idea that Hitler caught him at all unawares in the summer of 1941. He was kept informed throughout of the buildup of German forces and constantly received the very latest intelligence reports; yet he managed to convince himself that he knew better. Essentially, he shared Molotov’s outlook, demonstrated in Berlin the previous autumn, that the Soviet Union was in a position of strength in its relationship with Nazi Germany and that while engaged in the west against the British, Hitler would have to be mad to attack the USSR.

In addition, Stalin had a rather peculiar view of the German military, attributing to it far more independence of thought and action than was actually the case. In this, he was doubtless influenced by the experience of World War I, in which the German kaiser himself had been sidelined by the growing influence of the military, with the army duumvirate of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich von Ludendorff effectively running Germany as a “silent dictatorship” from 1916 onwards. Mindful of this, perhaps, Stalin appeared to trust the German generals even less than he trusted Germany’s politicians, perceiving them to be more hawkish than their political masters. This developed into an almost morbid fear, on Stalin’s part, of provoking the Wehrmacht: an obsessive unwillingness to do anything that might be construed as an aggressive or anti-German move for fear that the military might react and drag the politicians in Berlin unwillingly into war. “We must not respond to the provocations of the German military,” Stalin explained, according to his interpreter. “If we show restraint, and ignore the provocateurs, Hitler will understand that Moscow does not want any problems with Germany. He will then take his generals in hand.” In this, Stalin was thoroughly mistaken, as—if anything—the reverse was true. This misperception would have grave consequences. Zhukov would soon see evidence of this for himself. In March 1941, he submitted a revision of the MP-41 plan, which, although still essentially defensive in character, requested the call-up of Red Army reservists. Stalin regarded it as a potentially provocative gesture and refused the request.

Despite Stalin’s objections, the Soviet western military districts were not entirely silent in the spring of 1941. As early as the previous summer, Red Army reinforcements had been brought into the area, taking the total deployment to fifteen divisions in Finland, twenty in the Baltic states, twenty-two in occupied Poland, and thirty-four in Bessarabia. Further units to the immediate rear of these brought the Red Army force facing the Germans in 1940 to ninety rifle divisions, twenty-three cavalry divisions, and twenty-eight mechanized brigades. In March, Zhukov succeeded in pushing through a limited call-up of reservists, but the time frame was vague, and of the 250 Red Army divisions planned to be under arms in the western districts by the summer of 1941, many would inevitably be understrength and ill supplied.

A similar picture prevailed with the Soviet Union’s system of fortifications in the west. Since the mid-1920s, the USSR had been constructing a network of defenses along its western border: the ukreplinnye raiony, or “fortified areas,” known colloquially as the “Stalin Line.” However, with the addition of the territories gained in collaboration with the Germans in 1939 and 1940, those incomplete defenses now lay some three hundred or so kilometers east of the new Soviet frontier. Consequently, in the summer of 1940, a new network of defenses was begun further west, snaking through the newly gained territories from Telšiai in Lithuania, via eastern Poland, to the mouth of the Danube in Bessarabia. It would later be unofficially named the “Molotov Line.”

Like its predecessor, the Molotov Line was not a single complete line of fortifications; rather it was to consist of interlocking systems of earthworks, concrete bunkers, and other strongpoints, utilizing natural barriers wherever possible, to channel any invading force into areas where Red Army units could be concentrated. It was certainly ambitious, with nearly 4,500 installations planned to span the 1,200 kilometers from the Baltic to the Black Sea, requiring the work of around 140,000 laborers.

Up until the summer of 1940, however, those efforts had been very halfhearted, with the decommissioning of the older Stalin Line being carried out in a rather leisurely, piecemeal way, while work on the new Molotov Line to the west had not yet begun, despite a flurry of instructions. The fall of France in June 1940 gave some impetus to the program, but even then there were serious practical problems, due mainly to the USSR’s profound infrastructural and logistical shortcomings. Even the short-term fix of stripping out the fittings of the Stalin Line for use further west was stymied because the guns installed in the older line were often incompatible with the casemates of the new fortifications.

Despite such difficulties, there was little apparent sense of urgency until the early months of 1941. Part of that might have been tactical in origin: though the Mannerheim Line in Finland had thoroughly proved its worth in the Winter War, the Maginot Line had fared much less well in 1940 and so had done little to make the case for static fortifications. Yet by February 1941 there was a palpable shift, with various meetings, edicts, and directives ordering an acceleration of the construction on the Molotov Line, allocating 10 million rubles to the project and giving responsibility for it to former chief of staff Boris Shaposhnikov. With this prioritization, there was an upsurge in activity, and by April 1941 the number of fortified areas under construction in the western Soviet Union equaled the total number built in the decade before 1939, with a special focus on the approaches to Kiev and, tellingly, to the area between Grodno and Brest in eastern Poland—the historic road to Moscow. And still, an official report in the spring of 1941 arrived at the somber conclusion that “overwhelmingly” such defenses were “not militarily ready.”

For his part, Stalin tended to focus elsewhere in those months, preferring to concentrate on diplomatic avenues rather than the potentially provocative preparations being carried out by his military. His approach was essentially to use the economic relationship to appease Germany as far as possible, in the belief that Hitler’s saber rattling was purely a tactical ruse. In this, he was guided by his understanding of the materialist fundamentals of Marxism and the expectation that he could “buy off” Hitler’s antipathy with economic benefits. Moreover, he was already very well accustomed to using his economic connection with Germany as a bellwether of the wider relationship, smoothing matters when he wanted to court Germany, halting deliveries altogether when he wanted to show who was in charge. This pattern would become most marked in the early months of 1941.

Economic negotiations between the two sides had stuttered on, occasionally peaking in the run up to a headline agreement or dwindling almost to nothing. As was not uncommon, the talks had stalled again in the autumn of 1940, partly because the two sides were some way apart and partly as it made sense to await the outcome of Molotov’s visit to Berlin. However, in the aftermath of that meeting, a curious shift became evident. In late November 1940 the normally sober German negotiator, Karl Schnurre, was describing negotiations as “quite cordial” and praising what he called the “surprising indication of good will on the part of the Soviet government.” Accordingly, the two regimes signed a Tariff and Toll Treaty on December 1, 1940.

Somewhat trickier, however, were the broader talks regarding “Year Two” of the economic relationship, which included a number of points on which the two sides seemed as far apart as ever. Yet, even here, although there were inevitably conflicts, the Soviets demonstrated an uncharacteristic willingness to compromise: they agreed to compensation terms over the Lithuanian Strip, for example, and promised to meet property claims for those Volksdeutsche who had emigrated from their newly gained western districts. The German negotiators were delighted and attempted one evening to drink as much of the revised grain quota (in its distilled form) as they possibly could.

Sobriety restored, the final points of a new treaty were hammered out in the month that followed, and on January 10, 1941, a new German-Soviet Border and Commercial Agreement was signed in Moscow. It was, Schnurre enthused, “the greatest [economic agreement] Germany had ever concluded.” His colleague Karl Ritter concurred, praising it as “the largest contract ever between two states.” Given all that had gone before—every bone of contention, every tit-for-tat squabble, and every failed compromise—a Soviet concession such as this can only have had a tactical motive behind it. Having rejected Germany’s offer of the previous autumn, Stalin may have felt obliged to appease Hitler and used economics to effect some sort of political rapprochement.

It is worth clarifying that neither side was yet laboring in the knowledge of an inevitable attack in June 1941. The Soviets, for their part, were receiving a growing volume of evidence of a German buildup and of German intentions, but Stalin was still confident that diplomatic maneuvers could deflect any crisis, postponing a possible showdown into 1942 or beyond. His negotiators, therefore, while mindful of the political need to throw a concession or two Berlin’s way, certainly did not yet feel that they were bartering for the USSR’s life. In that sense, therefore, the tone of negotiations was still largely in line with what had gone before.

The German side was similarly unencumbered by coming events. Like many of his fellow “Easterners,” Schnurre—although ignorant of the order for an attack—was well aware of the broad anti-Soviet shift in Berlin and sought to use the economic relationship as a reason to reverse it. Hence, once the new treaty was signed, he traveled to Berlin to preach the gospel of economic cooperation with the Soviets, proclaiming that the treaty provided the “solid foundation for an honourable and great peace for Germany.” While the majority of senior Nazis nodded sagely, large sections of German industry and bureaucracy went into overdrive to fulfill Soviet orders, whereas before they had given priority only to Wehrmacht orders. Not even the Italians received such favorable treatment. Such was the German commitment, indeed, that deliveries to the Soviets in the first half of 1941 alone—over 150 million reichsmarks—would exceed those from the three years prior to the pact. It is not clear whether this was part of a deliberate campaign of deception, but it is perhaps more plausibly explained as a symptom of a communication failure between Hitler and the German Foreign Office, where the latter was responsible for most of the lower-level negotiations and tended to be much less anti-Soviet in outlook than its political master. Whatever its precise origin, it would nonetheless prove expensive to Germany, so much so that Hitler ordered that details of the shipments to the USSR were not to be publicized.

Up until March 1941 at least, Stalin’s diplomatic game with Germany had progressed quite favorably. Despite the hiccups of France’s precipitate defeat of the previous summer and Molotov’s inconclusive visit to Berlin the previous autumn, the Soviet leader had remained confident that he could keep Hitler on a tight leash. That confidence would be profoundly shaken in the weeks that followed.

A key battleground in the diplomatic chess game had been the Balkans. Bulgaria and Turkey had loomed large for Molotov in his talks in Berlin, not only as the two held the key to the straits—and thereby to one of Russia’s perennial strategic interests—but also because the erection of obstacles to German expansion in the Balkans would serve to frustrate Hitler’s more ambitious plans. However, in the aftermath of Molotov’s visit, that Balkan policy had begun to unravel. In quick succession in the weeks that followed, Hungary and Romania had adhered to the Tripartite Pact, thereby falling definitively into Germany’s sphere of influence. By early March 1941, Bulgaria had finally followed suit, spurning Soviet overtures in the process. Stalin suddenly faced the uncomfortable prospect of Soviet influence being excluded from the Balkans altogether. With Turkey resolutely neutral, only Yugoslavia remained as a potential ally.

By late March 1941, Yugoslavia was completely isolated. Surrounded on all sides by Axis-aligned countries, it was hamstrung domestically by internal ethnic divisions and militarily unprepared to resist outside aggression. Hitler’s terms for accession to the Tripartite Pact, articulated during numerous meetings with Yugoslav leaders earlier that spring, were comparatively generous, extending to a guarantee of territorial integrity and an assurance that Belgrade would not be required to provide military assistance or be used for stationing Axis troops. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Prince Regent Paul agreed, sending his emissaries to Vienna to sign the agreement on March 25, 1941.

Scarcely was the ink dry on the Yugoslav accession to the Axis, however, when Paul was overthrown in a bloodless military coup, forced into exile, and replaced as premier by former chief of the General Staff General Dušan Simović. The coup—sponsored by Britain’s clandestine Special Operations Executive and applauded by Pravda in Moscow—broadly reflected the majority anti-Axis attitude in the country, bringing thousands of ordinary Yugoslavs, predominantly Serbs, out onto the streets in protest of German machinations and in support of an alliance with the Soviet Union. Sensing an opportunity to shore up his faltering position in the Balkans, Stalin moved fast, seeking to dampen anti-German rhetoric in Belgrade while opening negotiations in the hope that an expression of solidarity with Yugoslavia would checkmate Hitler’s expansion. The result would be the Soviet-Yugoslav Treaty of Friendship and Non-Aggression, signed in Moscow in the early hours of April 6.

If Stalin thought this would deter Hitler from a fresh adventure, he was mistaken. Even as the treaty was being signed, Hitler’s Luftwaffe was already preparing its attack on Belgrade, code-named “Retribution.” Outraged by the coup, Hitler had ordered that Yugoslavia be hit “with merciless brutality”—no “diplomatic inquiries” were to be made, “no ultimatum presented.” That same morning, heavy air raids on Belgrade heralded a military occupation of Serbia and the collapse of the Yugoslav state, with Croatia declaring itself independent even before the capital fell less than a week later on April 12.

Stalin had been comprehensively outplayed: brute force had trumped his guile. Almost before it had been announced, his new treaty with Yugoslavia was shown to be a dead letter; Joseph Goebbels even mocked him for “waging war with bits of paper.” Stalin’s influence in the Balkans was now virtually extinguished, and with that, German domination of the continent of Europe was all but complete. If he had thought he could bring Hitler back to the table via diplomacy and economic sleight of hand, he was now obliged to think again, and he was running out of alternatives. For Stalin, the fall of Belgrade marked the moment at which the active appeasement of Hitler began in earnest.

His first opportunity presented itself that same month, just as the Yugoslav debacle was drawing to a close, when the Japanese foreign minister, Yōsuke Matsuoka, passed through Moscow while returning to Japan after a visit to the German capital. Talks with the Japanese had already rumbled on inconclusively for some time, but recent events had given them renewed impetus. Ribbentrop had advocated a Soviet rapprochement with Tokyo the previous autumn in Berlin, so Stalin naturally saw it as a way to improve his stock with Hitler. Moreover, Japan had been a cofounder of the Axis and had been at war with the USSR barely eighteen months previously, so any agreement with Tokyo had to be beneficial. Consequently, a neutrality pact was signed in the Kremlin on April 13, pledging “peaceful and friendly relations mutual respect” and neutrality in the event of conflict with a third party.

Convinced that he had pulled off a veritable coup—what Matsuoka would later describe as a “diplomatic blitzkrieg”—Stalin was in an exuberant mood and even appeared at Moscow’s Yaroslavsky railway station to wave off his new partners, something he had never done before. Somewhat the worse for wear following an impromptu breakfast banquet and the inevitable rounds of toasts, he embraced the Japanese delegation warmly while Molotov staggered about, shouting communist slogans. Matsuoka himself could barely stand and almost had to be carried to the train. Most significant, perhaps, was what happened when Stalin spotted the distinctive, towering figure of Hitler’s deputy military attaché, Hans Krebs, on the platform. “German?” he asked, to which Krebs stood to attention in affirmation. “We’ve been friends with you,” Stalin exclaimed after slapping him jovially on the back, “and we’ll remain friends with you.” It was clearly as much a wish as a statement of fact. But the wider significance of the new pact was not lost on Goebbels, who crowed in his diary in Berlin that the Russo-Japanese treaty was “marvellous and for the moment extremely useful,” before adding, “It seems that Stalin has no desire to make the acquaintance of our German Panzers.”

A week later Stalin had another opportunity to flutter his eyelashes in Berlin’s direction. After an evening at the Bolshoi on April 20, the senior members of the Politburo retired to the Kremlin, with the head of the Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov, in attendance. There, Stalin held forth on the prospects for world communism in general and the role of the Comintern in particular. His speech would shock many of those present.

Naturally, the Comintern’s role in fostering international communist revolution was not uncontroversial outside the Soviet Union and came to be particularly loathed by communism’s opponents on the right, such as Hitler. The Nazis had railed against the Comintern as an “international conspiracy” and even sought to make the Reichstag Fire trial of 1933 into an indictment of the Comintern itself by placing the organization’s regional leaders—including Georgi Dimitrov—in the dock alongside the supposed arsonist, the hapless Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe. Three years later, the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact was explicitly directed against the organization, which the preamble described as a “threat to the general peace of the world.”

In the spring of 1941, Stalin had clearly come to believe that the revolution’s “handmaiden” had become something of a liability. With Dimitrov present, he criticized the Comintern as an “obstacle” and advocated allowing national communist parties to be independent of it, so as to be able to adapt to their own local conditions. The Comintern, he implied, belonged to yesterday; today, national tasks must have priority. No time was wasted. Already the following day Dimitrov was hard at work rewriting the new terms for admission to the Comintern; he made no mention in his diary of what he thought of the shift. Stalin also demanded replacement of the usual communist slogans with more nationally inspired ones for the coming May Day celebrations. With one eye on Berlin, it seems, communism itself was being detoxified.

All the while, intelligence reports continued to pour into Moscow, where they were collated and presented to Stalin by the head of military intelligence, the same Lieutenant General Golikov who had criticized Zhukov a few months earlier. Golikov’s report of April 25, for instance, concluded that Germany had as many as one hundred divisions massed on the USSR’s western frontier, with another fifty-eight in Yugoslavia and seventy-two elsewhere in Europe. In addition, over the previous three weeks there had been eighty recorded German violations of Soviet airspace. Such raw data was added to the various human intelligence reports that had begun to come in from Soviet agents—such as Richard Sorge in Tokyo, Anthony Blunt in London, and Arvid Harnack in Berlin—all of which pointed to a growing German threat.

It is possible that Stalin also got wind of a speech that Hitler gave to over two hundred of his senior military personnel on March 30 in the Reich Chancellery, in which he outlined his reasoning for the coming conflict. Hitler began his two-hour address with an extensive review of the war and its historic antecedents, addressing the vexing question of why Britain continued to fight and the prospect of an American entry. Then he moved on to his main subject: the coming conflict with the Soviet Union. First, he explained, Germany had a moral justification for the attack, as Stalin had “gambled on Germany’s bleeding to death” in the autumn of 1939. Moreover, only the defeat of the Soviet Union, “the last enemy factor in Europe,” would clear the way for Germany to “solve the continental problem finally and thoroughly.” He was espousing nothing less than German hegemony over the entire continent.

But the war against the Soviet Union would be no ordinary conflict, Hitler warned; it was to be a “struggle between two opposing ideologies.” Bolshevism was an enormously dangerous “asocial criminal system.” “Everywhere. In Latvia, Galicia, Lithuania [and] Estonia,” the crimes of the Soviet commissars had demonstrated that they could only behave in “an Asiatic way.” Consequently, there could be no place for “soldierly comradeship with the enemy.” Instead, Hitler said, this was to be “a war of annihilation”: the Red Army was not just to be defeated in the field; it was to be exterminated. If any of those generals present were still laboring under the illusion that Nazi Germany was an political partner of the Soviet Union, this was a final wake-up call.

By late April 1941, then, Stalin would have been well aware that his relationship with Hitler had moved into a new, more challenging phase, demanding increased concessions and more exaggerated gestures. Crucially, however, he still did not believe that war was coming, and he was growing increasingly impatient with those who tried to persuade him otherwise. At the same time, while continued to appease his German counterpart, he simultaneously sought to demonstrate the USSR’s preparedness to meet an attack.

Thus, just as Soviet negotiators were pushing for solutions to long-stalled disputes with the Germans and floating the possibility of increasing raw material deliveries, Stalin was inviting the German military attaché and other senior personnel on a trip to the Urals and western Siberia to visit the factories producing the most modern Soviet tanks and aircraft, particularly T-34s and the Petlyakov Pe-8 long-range bomber. According to Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, there could be “no doubt” from this visit that the USSR was “arming on a grand scale.” At the same time, Soviet agents in the German Ministries of Aviation and Economics began to spread the opinion that war against the Soviet Union would be a catastrophe for the Nazi leadership. Stalin clearly did not want any underestimation of the enormity of a decision for war.

A week or so later, Stalin had another chance to impress the Soviet Union’s martial preparedness on the outside world. On May 4, he had himself appointed chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars by the Politburo. It was a largely symbolic change—previously Stalin’s official position had simply been that of general secretary of the Communist Party—but with this appointment, he effectively became head of state, formally concentrating power in his own hands. He was thereby sending a message of determination and resolve, demonstrating, as the official announcement put it, “absolute unity in the work of the leadership” during “the present tensions.”

The following day, he made his first speech in his new capacity as Soviet premier to an audience of 2,000 military academy graduates and senior military personnel gathered in the Andreevsky Hall of the Great Kremlin Palace. Introduced by Timoshenko, Stalin spoke without a script for around forty minutes, addressing the current difficulties. The Red Army had learned much, he said, from the Finnish War and the war in the west: “We possess a modern army, equipped with the latest weapons. We have tanks of the first order, which will break through the front.” The Red Army, he explained, “is very different from the way it was. It’s much larger and better equipped. It has grown from 120 to 300 divisions. One third are mechanized, armored divisions. Our artillery has been transformed, with more cannon and fewer howitzers. We didn’t have mortars and now we do; until recently we lacked anti-aircraft artillery and now we have a decent amount.” The Germans, he said, had “become conquerors,” shifting from the task of reversing the Treaty of Versailles to that of waging aggressive war. Their army was “dizzy with success,” but Stalin reminded his listeners, “There is no invincible army in the world and, from a military point of view, there is nothing special about the German army with regard to its tanks, artillery or air force.” Yet, he acknowledged, war was now likely.

At the reception that followed the speech, Stalin extrapolated on Soviet policy in reaction to an external threat. Intoxicated by the moment—and perhaps by the inevitable round of toasts—he may have said more than he had meant to. “Defending our country,” he stressed, “we must act offensively. From defence to go to a military doctrine of offensive actions. We must transform our training, our propaganda, our agitation, our press in an offensive spirit. The Red Army is a modern army, and a modern army is an offensive army.” According to one eyewitness account, Stalin was even more explicit. Responding to an ill-judged toast from a general who had praised his leader’s policy of peace, an enraged Stalin waved away the applause:

With that, it was reported, Stalin drained his drink and sat down while his audience stood in silence.

Understandably, the events of that night have proved highly controversial. At the time, the speech was given fairly wide coverage, with extensive front-page reports appearing in both Pravda and Izvestia the following day, the former printing a large, full-width photograph of Stalin addressing the ranks of academy graduates. Although the press outlined the broad theme of the speech—the readiness and competence of the Red Army—a verbatim text was not reproduced, as usual, and the subjects of the informal toasts that followed were not reported, so rumors duly swirled around Moscow about precisely what had been said. Indeed, no official record of the speech exists to this day, so details of its contents have to be pieced together from a number of sometimes unreliable eyewitness accounts. This uncommon secrecy has led to some wild speculation, and the speech became a key piece of evidence in the dubious theory that Stalin was himself planning a preemptive strike against Hitler in the summer of 1941.

Yet it is more plausible to see the speech not as proof of any supposed offensive plan but rather as a vital component in Stalin’s defensive armory. At the very least, Stalin was giving a pep talk to new military academy graduates, telling them that the Red Army was making good progress and that they had nothing to fear from any enemy. But by his show of brazen, saber-rattling confidence and his conscious inflation of the Red Army’s strength and capability, Stalin may well have also been seeking to deter Hitler. As one account has put it, Stalin’s speech had very clearly “been prepared for export.” Barely a week later, however, Stalin’s newfound confidence—or belligerence—would be tested anew and in an unexpected way.

ON THE NIGHT OF MAY 10, 1941, THE PILOT OF A LUFTWAFFE AIRPLANE, a Messerschmitt Bf-110, bailed out over Eaglesham in the Scottish lowlands, south of Glasgow. Coming to earth in a farmer’s field, he identified himself as Hauptmann Alfred Horn when apprehended by a farm laborer and was promptly taken to a nearby cottage, where he was offered a cup of tea. In due course, “Hauptmann Horn” would be revealed as Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, apparently on a mission to negotiate peace with Britain.

Hess’s precise intentions in flying solo to Britain in the middle of a war are still under contention, not least the fraught issue of whether he was lured and with whom he was intending to negotiate. He brought few concrete proposals with him beyond the broad idea that Britain should give Germany a free hand in Europe, and in return Germany would leave Britain to its empire. Through his interrogation and sounding out by a number of senior British figures—Foreign Office advisor Ivone Kirkpatrick and former foreign secretary Sir John Simon most prominent among them—his grand plan quickly foundered between the rock of German arrogance and the hard place of British intransigence. Hess would be interned in Britain for the remainder of the war, a sorry figure, increasingly viewed as a crank or lunatic even by his former comrades in Germany. As Goebbels exclaimed in his diary, “It is all too stupid. A fool like [Hess] was the Führer’s deputy. It is scarcely conceivable.”

The British had clearly arrived at the same conclusion. And although they evidently believed there was nothing to be gained by negotiation, they nonetheless saw an obvious propaganda coup to be scored with Hess’s arrival and capture. Churchill, who attached little importance to the deputy Führer’s escapade, was minded to play the affair with a straight bat, making only a public statement of the facts surrounding the case. But Whitehall’s mandarins, who saw it as too good an opportunity to miss, persuaded him otherwise. Consequently, only the barest details were made public while a whispering campaign was begun through covert channels, intended not only to unnerve Hitler and undermine German morale but also to stoke up Soviet anxieties about what the Hess mission might signify.

The British had long wanted to detach Stalin from his relationship with Berlin, seeing such a course of action as a prime weapon in the struggle against Hitler. But they had been perennially frustrated by their inability to make any headway in Moscow. As Alexander Cadogan, permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, noted bitterly, diplomacy toward the USSR was “completely hamstrung”: “unless you can (a) threaten (b) bribe it you can do nothing, because Russia has (a) no fear of us whatever and (b) we have nothing to offer her.” The Hess affair, however, appeared to provide a way out of the impasse, giving the British an opportunity, by adroitly managing the story, to exert a favorable influence on Stalin. The line spun to Moscow, therefore, was that Hess’s flight was a symptom of a split in the Nazi Party, with the purists (represented by Hess) displeased by Hitler’s collaboration with the Soviets and eager to clear the way—by securing British neutrality—for a final reckoning with communism. By stressing Nazi perfidy and the probability of an attack, the British hoped to turn Stalin against his former partner in crime and fatally undermine the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

This plan, though not entirely wrongheaded, was nonetheless fundamentally flawed. It not only underestimated the extent of Stalin’s paranoia but also failed to recognize that his distrust of British motives was just as great as his fear of German intentions. As the archetypal “imperialist power,” Britain held a special place in Soviet demonology, particularly as it had taken the lead in the Allied intervention against Soviet rule in the 1918–1919 Russian Civil War and Churchill himself had famously said at the time that Bolshevism was a baby that should be “strangled in its cradle.” Clearly, any story emanating from British sources was to be treated with the utmost circumspection.

The information on Hess came to the Soviets via a number of channels, among them British ambassador to Moscow Stafford Cripps, Cambridge spy Kim Philby, and the extensive Soviet intelligence network. It was fairly thin on detail, and most of it was managed in some way by Whitehall. Yet, rather than deducing a split in the Nazi Party, Stalin and his cohorts duly gleaned that Hess, and by extension Hitler, was trying to woo the British, and if Moscow were not careful, it could find itself facing the Nazis alone. As Khrushchev noted in his memoirs, the idea of Hess’s flight being unauthorized by Berlin was unthinkable. In addition, the news that Sir John Simon had been involved in the debriefing of Hess would have worried Moscow deeply; after all, many on the left viewed Simon as one of the architects of appeasement, an avowed “man of Munich.” Stalin would have been forgiven for wondering whether another round of appeasement was in the pipeline.

In fact, he thought the situation was much more serious than that: for Stalin, the Hess episode represented a dangerous anti-Soviet conspiracy. In a speech to the party’s central committee some days after Hess arrived in Britain, he outlined his thoughts on the subject: “On the one hand,” he said, “Churchill sends us a personal message in which he warns us about Hitler’s aggressive intentionsand on the other hand, the British meet Hess, who is undoubtedly Hitler’s confidant, and conduct negotiations with Germany through him.” The only obvious answer for Stalin was that the British wanted to provoke a war between Russia and Germany. “When Churchill sent us his personal warning,” he explained, “he believed that we would activate our military mechanism. Then Hitler would have a direct and fair reason to launch a preventive crusade against the Soviet Union.”

So, rather than galvanizing Stalin in his dealings with Hitler—as London had hoped—the leak of the Hess story did the opposite, confirming Stalin’s pathological distrust of the British as eternal meddlers and dissemblers. The imminent threat, Stalin concluded, came not from the Germans but from the British. As he explained to Zhukov, “Don’t you see? They are trying to frighten us with the Germans, and to frighten the Germans with us, setting us against one another.”

Thus, beyond deepening Stalin’s suspicion of the outside world, the Hess episode altered little. Golikov’s intelligence reports for May still gave an accurate assessment of the German military buildup on the Soviet western frontier—on May 5, it was estimated at 102 to 107 divisions; on May 15, at 114 to 119; and on May 31, at 120 to 122—but Stalin dismissed this as disinformation or an attempted provocation. Indeed, by this point, Stalin was growing so impatient with his subordinates that they increasingly tended to submit their reports “in fear and trepidation.” Golikov, meanwhile, was learning to present a deliberately ambiguous reading of his information, so as not to earn Stalin’s displeasure. On May 15, for instance, he chose to focus his report on those German forces earmarked for action against the British in the Middle East and Africa rather than those massing on the Soviet border.

Nonetheless, Soviet military preparations continued. In mid-May, mindful of Stalin’s recent call for a more offensive attitude, Zhukov revised the Red Army’s war plan to include a proposal for a preemptive strike against the Germans. The so-called Zhukov Plan argued that it was “necessary not to give the initiative to the German command” and advocated an attack on the Wehrmacht “at that moment when it is still at the deployment stage and has not yet managed to organise a front.” It ended with a request for Stalin to permit a “timely mobilization.”

That permission would not be forthcoming. Indeed, some have doubted whether Stalin even saw the Zhukov Plan at all. At the same time, defensive preparations continued. By the mid-summer of 1941, around 2,000 strongpoints had been completed along the Molotov Line, of which around half were armed and equipped. In addition, all of the “fortified areas” were ordered brought up to combat strength as soon as possible. In mid-May Zhukov succeeded in securing a “partial mobilization,” with reservists being called up and over 50,000 troops from the Caucasus and other interior districts of the Soviet Union being relocated to the western frontier areas. “Train after train began to arrive,” the general recalled in his memoirs. “It was gratifying. The apprehension that in the event of war we would have no troops in depth was dispersed.” The sobering truth, however, was that many of those new cadres lacked officers and basic materiel and would be no match for the battle-hardened Wehrmacht.

In economic affairs, too, the same pattern of behavior that had characterized the early months of 1941 continued into May and June. As the Germans had stepped up their deliveries to the Soviets over the previous few months, the Soviets followed suit, with Stalin using economics to appease Hitler as best he could. From April to June alone, the Soviet Union delivered over 500,000 tons of grain, nearly a third of the total delivered over the entire life of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. In addition new contracts were agreed in April for 982,500 tons of oil, 6,000 tons of copper, 1,500 tons of nickel, 500 tons of zinc, and 500 tons of molybdenum.

May was similarly bountiful, with 14 percent of the total value of Soviet exports to Germany being transacted that month alone and the usual squabbles over pricing and terms curiously absent. Such was the Soviet enthusiasm for trade in the early summer that the German infrastructure on the western side of the border in occupied Poland—already overburdened as it was by the enormous military preparations—was unable to cope with the increased volume, and hundreds of wagons containing grain, fuel, metal ores, and other raw materials were backed up on the Soviet side of the frontier.

It is telling that by June, when the Germans had all but halted reciprocal deliveries, Stalin still did not appear unduly worried. On June 13, for instance, Admiral Nikolai Kuznetzov reported to him that spare parts deliveries for the cruiser Petropavlovsk (the ex-Lützow), still being fitted out in Leningrad, had mysteriously stopped. In response, Stalin raised no concerns. “Is that all?” he asked.

Given the apparent alacrity with which the Soviets were still fulfilling their economic obligations, one might imagine that less hawkish opinions were being voiced in Berlin’s corridors of power. Certainly, it had long been the position of the Easterners in the German Foreign Office, such as Karl Schnurre and Ambassador Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, that Germany should not seek to slaughter the cow that it wanted to milk. Others now joined their chorus, however, most notably Finance Minister Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, who argued that Germany would certainly lose out in the event of war because of the inevitable dislocation and destruction. Schnurre went further, suggesting that the Soviet desire to appease Berlin was such that additional economic demands beyond the scope of the existing agreements could be made. Why make war when the Soviets were already willing to deliver almost everything requested?

There were shortcomings to this argument, however. For one thing, in their zeal to avoid conflict, Schnurre and others painted an excessively rosy picture of Soviet fulfillment. Moscow was still less than entirely forthcoming in certain areas of the relationship, and experience suggested that as soon as any crisis had passed, Stalin would revert to his old obstructionist ways.

As much as he might once have understood the complexities of the economic relationship with the USSR, by 1941 Hitler had moved on to much more seductive motivators, such as ideology and geopolitics. Indeed, he had so tired of those warning of economic doom following his planned invasion of the Soviet Union that in the spring of 1941 he complained to Hermann Göring that “from now onwards” he was going to “stop up his ears” so as not to have to “listen to any more of that talk.” Like many of his more ideologically minded countrymen, Hitler was by this stage motivated more by his prejudices than by hard facts. To his mind, Stalin was devious, a “cold-blooded blackmailer” waiting for his opportunity to spread communism westward. Only war against the Soviet Union, he believed, would decide the vital question of hegemony in Europe, and it was a war that Germany had to win. Goebbels elaborated on his master’s strategic thinking in his diary after a meeting in the Reich Chancellery that June. “We must act,” he wrote. “Moscow intends to keep out of the war until Europe is exhausted and bled white. Then Stalin will move to bolshevise Europe and impose his own rule. We shall upset his calculations with one stroke.” With such grand concepts at stake, the minutiae of economics found little purchase.

Hitler also needed the coming campaign against the Soviets to help solve the population problems that he had stored up for himself in eastern Europe. The process of ethnic reorganization in occupied Poland, initiated in the winter of 1939, had thus far proceeded only fitfully, its progress hindered by the exigencies of war and the lack of any coherent overarching plan. Indeed, by the winter of 1940, a renewed impatience among senior Nazis was forcing the question of “resettlement” back up the political agenda.

In the first instance, the question of the fate of the Volksdeutsche “liberated” from eastern Europe following the Nazi-Soviet Pact still had to be satisfactorily addressed. Over the second half of 1940, Poles and Jews had been deported en masse from the Warthegau into the General Government to make way for the Volksdeutsche arriving from Volhynia, the area of southeastern Poland annexed by Stalin. In March 1941, Nazi propaganda would boast that over 400,000 “Poles and Jews” had already been “resettled.” This resettlement process, though chaotic and hampered by logistical shortcomings, together with official disappointment over the ethnic “quality” of some of the new arrivals, sparked something of a “deportation fever” in Nazi circles as many regional potentates elsewhere sought to follow suit. As a result, late in 1940, some 70,000 “undesirables”—including Jews, criminals, homosexuals, and the mentally ill—were deported into Vichy France from Alsace and Lorraine, which had been annexed by the Reich. A further 6,000 Jews were deported west from the regions of Baden and the Saarland in October, making these the first Gaus of Nazi Germany to be officially declared Judenfrei (Jew free).

Following the lead of Baden and the Saarland, the gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, petitioned Hitler directly to request permission to deport 60,000 Viennese Jews. Permission granted, he began the action in February 1941, deporting 5,000 unfortunates to the district of Lublin, southeast of Warsaw, before logistical difficulties forced a halt to the operation. Although large-scale deportations of Jews from the Reich would not begin until October 1941, the Vienna Aktion provided a sinister portent of what was to come.

Those affected were brought, by night, to the Aspang Station in Vienna and loaded into passenger wagons. All heads of households had already signed away their remaining property and possessions to the German Reich and declared that they were being deported of their own volition. After a lengthy journey to rural Poland, the deportees—many of them urbane, cultured Viennese—were astonished by the conditions that they found. They faced little other than a slow death. As one desperate deportee wrote home, “You can imagine what our prospects are; no source of income whatsoever! I can only say to you that it would have been better if they had put us up against the wall in Vienna and shot us. It would have been a good death, but we have to die in misery.”

Some of Germany’s allies were similarly enthusiastic about ethnic cleansing. In Romania, still reeling from the territorial losses and the ensuing political collapse of the previous year, tensions were running particularly high, and it was widely believed that the nation’s Jews were primarily responsible for the catastrophe. Consequently, the country’s native fascist movement, the Iron Guard, which had been elevated into the government the previous autumn, was waiting for an opportunity to settle scores with its perceived foe. That chance came in January 1941, when the Guard revolted against its government partners and embarked on a three-day rampage, venting its anger upon the Jews of Bucharest. The results shocked even those who had been hardened to Romania’s recent crises and atrocities. “The stunning thing about the Bucharest bloodbath,” one commentator noted, “is the quite bestial ferocity of it. [N]inety-three persons were killed on the night of Tuesday the 21st. It is now considered absolutely certain that the Jews that were butchered at Straulesti abattoir were hanged by the neck on hooks normally used for beef carcasses.” Such violence was a grim foretaste of what would follow across much of eastern Europe, particularly in those areas that Moscow had annexed and Germany would “liberate” in the war against the Soviet Union. Throughout the region, blameless Jewish populations would be forced to pay the blood price for nearly two years of Soviet rule.

In Berlin, meanwhile, the piecemeal deportations from the provinces were brought to a halt in the spring of 1941. Frustrated that their previous efforts had achieved little beyond the shunting of unwanted peoples into the General Government, senior Nazis began talking rather delphically from late 1940 onward of a future “settlement of the Jewish question” through deportation to a territory “yet to be determined.” That territory was the Soviet Union. Deporting Europe’s Jews into former Soviet territory made logistical and ideological sense; after all, it was an easier solution than the previous suggestion to ship them to Madagascar. In addition, the destination was seen as a fitting, neatly encapsulating the Nazi belief in the link between Jewishness and communism. In the meantime, however, all further deportations were to be shelved, pending the expected destruction of the USSR.

Just as the Nazis were pondering their own program of “resettlements,” the Soviets were planning a new deportation of their own. Over the previous two years, the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina had been followed by a swift sovietization, with the rapid coordination of all administrative infrastructure, a thoroughgoing land reform, and a deliberate targeting of all those belonging to the old political elite. Now, a fresh impetus was given to consolidating the new territories and rooting out further potential sources of opposition from within the native populations.

Of course, Soviet repression and persecution of those who dared to transgress had continued apace. In Bessarabia, it was said that after only six months of Soviet occupation, the prisons were already so full that barracks were used to house those who had been arrested. Conditions and treatment were predictably brutal. In Lithuania, Juozas Viktoravičius was arrested in April 1941 for criticizing the Soviet system. After he had spent two weeks in the cells, the NKVD questioned him for the first time; placed in chains, beaten, and sexually abused, he fainted twice during a forty-five-hour interrogation. When he was finally returned to his cell, nobody recognized him. Elsewhere equally imaginative methods were employed. As one Bessarabian victim of the NKVD recalled, “Not only did they interrogate you but they also beat you like a dog. Their basements were filled with water and they would hold you in there, upside down, for hours. From time to time they would even touch you with electric wires.”

Now in a new phase of repression, the Soviet apparatus reverted to the time-honored tactic of targeting entire classes of otherwise innocent people in the belief that by their mere existence they posed a threat to Soviet power. A document drawn up by the head of the NKVD in Lithuania, Alexander Guzevičius, in the winter of 1940 listed some of the groups believed to constitute a “pollution” of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic:

1. All former members of anti-Soviet political parties, organizations, and groups: Trotskyists, rightists, socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks, social democrats, anarchists, and the like

2. All former members of the national chauvinist anti-Soviet parties, organizations, and groups

3. Former gendarmes, policemen, and former employees of the political and criminal police and of the prisons

4. Former officers of the tsar, Petliura, and other armies

5. Former officers and members of military courts

6. Former political bandits and volunteers of the White and other armies

7. Persons expelled from the Communist Party and Komsomol for antiparty offenses

8. All deserters, political emigrants, reemigrants, repatriates, and contrabandists

9. All citizens of foreign countries, representatives of foreign firms, employees of offices of foreign countries, and former citizens of foreign countries

10. Persons having personal contacts and maintaining correspondence abroad, foreign legations and consulates, Esperantists and philatelists

11. Former employees of the departments of ministries

12. Former workers of the Red Cross

13. Religionists, sectants, and active members of religious communities

14. Former noblemen, estate owners, merchants, bankers, commercialists, shop owners, owners of hotels and restaurants

Clearly, the Soviet net was to be cast extremely wide. By one NKVD estimate, fully one in seven Lithuanians merited inclusion on a list of so-called unreliable people. In practice, however, the numbers implicated far exceeded those who actually met the criteria as, across the Baltic states, family members were considered guilty by association. In Latvia, for instance, Augusts Zommers was arrested because of his membership in the local national guard, the Aizsargi, but his wife and daughter were also labeled as “socially dangerous” and targeted for deportation. His daughter, Ina, was only five-years-old.

Having identified their opponents, the Soviet authorities in the newly annexed republics then moved to eliminate these groups in the early summer of 1941, mindful of the growing threat on the western frontier and the pressing need to preserve political control in any coming crisis. Three previous waves of deportations had already been inflicted upon eastern Poland, so by the early months of 1941, the Soviet authorities were well versed in the practicalities of swiftly identifying, arresting, and removing large numbers of people. The procedures to be followed in deporting these enemies of the Soviet state were laid down in the so-called Serov Instructions, issued by the deputy commissar of the NKVD, Ivan Serov, in early June 1941. Serov ordered that the deportations be carried out calmly, without panic and excitement. Persons to be deported were to be identified in the first instance by a three-man troika of local Communist Party and NKVD operatives and apprehended in their homes at daybreak, at which point they and the premises were to be thoroughly searched, with any offending items—counterrevolutionary materials, weapons, or foreign currency—being listed and confiscated. The victims were then to be informed that they would be deported to “other regions” of the Soviet Union and could take with them household necessities—clothes, bedding, kitchen utensils, and a month’s supply of food—not exceeding a total weight of one hundred kilograms. Trunks or packing cases were to be labeled with the Christian name, patronymic, and surname of the deportee, as well as the name of his or her home town or village. Once prepared, deportees were to be transported to the local rail station, where the male heads of families were to be separated from the others. After a railcar was loaded—an estimated capacity of twenty-five persons per wagon was given—the doors were to be locked. The entire process from arrest to entrainment should be completed, Serov ordered, in under two hours.

For all the calm and clinical precision demanded by Serov, the experience of deportation was terrifying. The operation began in Bessarabia on the night of June 12–13, continued across the three Baltic republics two days later, on the night of June 14–15, and concluded with a further deportation imposed on the northeastern region of occupied Poland from June 14 to 20, 1941. Those affected awoke in the early hours to the arrival of arrest parties, usually a couple of local militiamen accompanied by Red Army or NKVD personnel. In Latvia, Herta Kaļiņina’s experience was typical: “Everyone was woken by a loud knocking at the door. Accompanied by soldiers, a Russian man and a rather distant neighbour of ours barged into the room. They ordered us to pack as many things as we could and said that we had to go and live somewhere else.” There was no sympathy for their plight. When her father asked the men what he had done to hurt anyone, he was told, “You are a class enemy and we are going to annihilate you.”

In the confusion, few had time to prepare for the ordeal to follow. Some arresting officers assisted by advising the deportees that they would need warm clothing and a good supply of food, but most were much less helpful. In Estonia, Aino Roots was given only a quarter hour to organize her three small children: “We had to get ready so quickly that all I had time for was to pull a coat over my nightgown. I had bare legs, shoes and nothing on my head. One of the men kept screaming that we only have fifteen minutes! What can you do in fifteen minutes? So I went to Siberia wearing just a nightgown, like a madwoman, with a coat over it.”

When the guards had gathered together those on their lists, the deportees were loaded onto trucks. In Poland, Maria Gabiniewicz recalled casting a last glance homeward as the NKVD truck pulled away: “The vehicle began to roll. One more look at our home, the buildings, the fields, and the path we knew so well leading up to the hill where we loved to walk and play. Mother blessed everything that remained behind with the sign of the cross.”

As if they were not already distressed enough, a new shock awaited many of the deportees when they reached the railway stations and learned that the male heads were to be separated from their families, with the accompanying fiction that they were required to travel in separate carriages to “prevent embarrassment.” For many women, it was the last time they would see their menfolk. When one deportee later asked the whereabouts of her husband, the guards just laughed at her.

Conditions aboard the trains were extremely primitive. Wooden cattle wagons were used, similar to those employed in the three earlier Polish deportations of 1940, with barred windows, a few bare wooden bunks, and a hole in the floor to serve as a toilet. Rather than the official capacity of twenty-five people, each would contain around forty deportees and their possessions, meaning that cramped, forced intimacy quickly became the norm. As Latvian Sandra Kalniete remembered, “Natural functions had to be taken care of right there in the car. [I]t was humiliating. Especially for the girls and women, who, from modesty, could not force themselves to go to the dark, repulsively smelling hole. The prisoners sat hunched on their bunk beds or on their belongings in the middle of the car. Their despondency interrupted by wailing and weeping.”

To make things worse, the trains were often obliged to wait, under guard, for several days until they were filled. As one eyewitness of the Bessarabian deportation recalled, “I remember a lot of soldiers, screaming, crowds and wagons filled with tormented people lying all at sixes and sevens, each one: men, women, children, clinging to their belongings. All different people were there: young clerks, shopkeepers, prostitutes and teachers, one thing united them: no one knew what would happen, and all of them were crying because they were so frightened and desperate.”

Some deportees were given buckets of water by their guards, but others received nothing beyond the supplies brought by locals or concerned friends. While they waited, and as the trains began their journey, some of the deportees threw notes and letters out of the wagons in a desperate attempt to let their friends and loved ones know of their fate. Remarkably, Estonian Robert Tasso’s letter reached his mother: “Based on what we have seen so far,” he wrote, “[we] are very deeply worried. After all, no one knows when their turn will come. But we hope for the best, and that hope must sustain us. Be strong, and don’t grieve for me.”

After the deportations got underway, conditions in the carriages deteriorated still further as the trains trundled eastward, in some cases taking as long as six weeks to reach their destination. Food and water were scarce, dependent, it seems, on the whim of the Red Army guards: some supplied water and bread at each stop; others merely threatened their prisoners and told them that, as criminals, they did not deserve anything. As one deportee recalled, medical care was nonexistent: “The dead were buried by the railroad tracks when the train halted,” she said, “for we were nobody.” The stress of the deportation was hard to bear. As one Estonian woman recalled,

Little Jaan would not survive the journey.

For some parents, it was all too much. One Latvian woman became convinced that all of them would be executed, and tortured by her anxiety, she killed her three small children and herself with a razor blade. When the Red Army guard was called, he merely crossed their four names off his list while carefully avoiding stepping in the spreading pool of dark blood at his feet.

Arrival at their destination did not bring an end to the deportees’ tribulations. A grim spell in a labor camp or gulag was the norm, and for those who survived, it was often the start of a lifelong exile. In this way, Stalin cleared the decks on his western frontier, purging from the newly absorbed territories those considered possible sources of German-inspired sabotage or subversion or simply deemed “anti-Soviet elements.” In the process, 34,260 Lithuanians, 15,081 Latvians, and 10,205 Estonians were deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and other inhospitable corners of the Soviet interior. It is thought that an additional 29,839 were deported from Bessarabia and that the fourth and final deportation from eastern Poland swept up an estimated 200,000. The majority of these deportees would never see their homelands again.

BY JUNE 1941, THEN, STALIN WAS IN LITTLE DOUBT THAT HE WAS staring down the Nazi barrel. Although he had tended to close his ears to the increasingly insistent news of German preparations, his actions of the previous months demonstrated that he was most certainly aware of the growing threat on his western frontier. He had hoped that by appeasing Berlin he could buy time to see out the summer and effectively postpone any German attack until the following year. As he would later confess, “I did not need any warnings. I knew war would come, but I thought I might gain another six months or so.” Stalin also expected that demands, negotiations, and an ultimatum from Berlin would precede any hostilities. Until that happened, he reasoned, his brinkmanship had not yet edged to the brink.

In addition, Stalin was inextricably linked to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The negotiations of August 1939 had marked the first time that he had directly involved himself in foreign policy matters, personally conducting the negotiations and setting the terms. As the German naval attaché in Moscow noted, Stalin was “the pivot of the German-Soviet collaboration”; all correspondence passed over his desk. The pact was widely seen as Stalin’s idea, his brainchild, his “signature policy.” Therefore, it was politically difficult for him to disavow the agreement; there was no scapegoat to sacrifice, no one else at whom to point the finger of blame. This goes some way to explaining Stalin’s stubborn intransigence; it may be that he saw his own fate intertwined with that of the pact.

Facing the cacophony of rumors in mid-June, Stalin was finally obliged to act. He drafted a communiqué to be carried, via the TASS telegraphic news agency, in every Soviet newspaper on June 14 and broadcast to the masses via public address. It began by outlining the “widespread rumours of an impending war between the USSR and Germany” that had circulated in “the English and foreign press.” It was alleged, the text went on, that Germany had made “territorial and economic demands” of the Soviet Union, which the USSR had declined, and that as a result the two sides were preparing for war. This was an “obvious absurdity,” the TASS communiqué declared; Germany had addressed no demands to the Soviet Union, and no negotiations were taking place. Moreover, “according to the evidence in the possession of the Soviet Union, both Germany and the USSR are fulfilling to the letter the terms of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, so that in the opinion of Soviet circles the rumours of the intention of Germany to break the Pact and to launch an attack against the Soviet Union are completely without foundation.”

Aside from the criticism of London’s alleged rumor-mongering, this was a rather desperate attempt to persuade Berlin to concur publicly with the Soviet statement—to induce some sort of commitment in kind from Hitler, a denial of belligerent intent, perhaps, or even an opening of the long-awaited negotiations. It was, as Molotov would later admit, very much “a last resort.” And it was met only with an echoing silence from the German side.

On the home front, however, Germany was not entirely mute. According to diarist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, the rumor that Stalin himself was coming to Berlin for talks ran “like wildfire” through the German capital on the following day, June 15. She heard it first from her milkman, who added the detail that two hundred women had been set to work sewing Soviet flags. A neighbor then repeated the story, stating that Stalin was arriving in the next few days “by special armoured train.” After Molotov’s appearance in the capital the previous autumn, it must have seemed plausible, but Andreas-Friedrich was unimpressed, particularly when she claimed to have found the origin of the fable: Ribbentrop’s office.

Back in Moscow, the evidence for an imminent attack was still piling up. On June 16, Deputy Commissar for State Security Vsevolod Merkulov forwarded new information to Stalin—from the NKVD’s agent “Starshina” (Harro Schulze-Boysen) within the German Air Ministry—stating that the final order for the attack on the Soviet Union had been given. Exasperated, Stalin’s reply was definitive. “Tell the ‘source’ in the Staff of the German Air Force to fuck his mother,” he scrawled back to Merkulov. “This is no source, but a disinformer.”

Two days after that, it was Zhukov’s turn to feel Stalin’s wrath. On June 18, he and Timoshenko attended a three-hour meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin during which they explained the current situation on the western frontier and asked Stalin to allow them to place the Red Army in “full military readiness.” Stalin, however, grew increasingly irritated as Zhukov spoke, tapping his pipe on the table in frustration. Finally, as Timoshenko recalled, he exploded with rage, shouting at Zhukov, “And what, have you come to scare us with war, or do you want a war, as you are not sufficiently decorated or your rank is not high enough?” When Zhukov then backed down, Timoshenko persisted, but Stalin would have none of it. “It’s all Timoshenko’s work,” he told the assembled guests of the Politburo. “He’s preparing everyone for war. He ought to have been shot.” Stalin went on, “You have to realize that Germany on her own will never fight Russia. You must understand this.” And, as he left the room, he fired a last Parthian shot: “If you’re going to provoke the Germans on the frontier by moving troops there without our permission, then heads will roll, mark my words.” With that, he slammed the door behind him.

By the eve of the expected attack, June 21, there was no ignoring the mounting evidence. The staff of Moscow’s German embassy had already been evacuated along with their families and their belongings; paperwork had reportedly been burned in braziers in the courtyard. Further messages had been received from London, from America, and from Richard Sorge in Tokyo. Closer to home, Polish women reportedly shouted across the frontier on June 15 that the Soviets should expect war within a week, while an upsurge in spies, saboteurs, and defectors crossing the frontier appeared to confirm that prediction. One Soviet border commander noted what he called the “growing insolence of the Hitlerites,” as German sentries now began to turn their backs on their Red Army counterparts when they had previously stood to attention and saluted. In Romania, meanwhile, wild rumors were circulating not only that a joint German-Romanian attack was imminent but also that lists of functionaries had been drawn up to be appointed in Bessarabia and that the National Theater was rehearsing plays to be staged in the regional capital, Chișinău, after its liberation from Soviet rule. It was said that the Romanian leader, General Ion Antonescu, wanted to enter the city on June 27, a year to the day since the province had been lost.

It has been claimed that, in the ten days before June 22, Soviet intelligence was informed of the invasion from forty-seven different sources. One of the last of those was Alfred Liskow, a Wehrmacht soldier and communist sympathizer, who swam the river Bug on the night of June 21 to warn the Red Army that an attack along the entire front had been scheduled for dawn the following morning. After midnight, Zhukov phoned through to the Kremlin to advise Stalin of the new claims. The dictator was unimpressed, however, and ordered Liskow shot for his disinformation.

Only three hours later, German ambassador Schulenburg telephoned Molotov’s office in the Kremlin to arrange a meeting. He had already had a torrid night. Earlier in the evening, Molotov had summoned him to explain German violations of Soviet air space. The interview became a grilling. Why had the German embassy staff left Russia? Why had the German government not responded to the TASS communiqué? Unable to glean any answers, Molotov had complained that “there was no reason for the German government to be dissatisfied with Russia.” Now, a few hours after that meeting, Schulenburg was hurrying to see Molotov once again. This time he was authorized to provide an official response.

The ambassador solemnly read the telegram that had recently arrived from Berlin, carefully skipping the litany of accusations that prefaced its main message. It was “with the deepest regret,” he told Molotov, that he announced that the German government felt itself obliged to take “military measures” in response to the buildup of Soviet troops on the frontier. He took care to mention his own “utmost efforts” to preserve “peace and friendship” but conceded that he believed that “it meant the beginning of war.”

Molotov was aghast. Stammering with disbelief, he tried to explain the troop concentrations away, before complaining that Berlin had not presented any demands to the Soviet government. “Why,” he asked, “did Germany conclude a pact of non-aggression, if she so easily breached it?” The attack, he exclaimed, was “a breach of confidence unprecedented in history. Surely we haven’t deserved that.” Schulenburg, who had been one of the primary architects of the German-Soviet relationship, could only shrug in response.