Stalin

Vasily Stalin, in the latter half of March 1940, completed his two-year course of study at the military aviation school near Sevastopol with marks of “excellent,” according to a report sent to Stalin. He received the rank of air force lieutenant.²⁴⁷ Later that year, he would marry Galina Burdonskaya, a student of the Moscow Polygraphic Institute, also nineteen years old, who lived in a communal apartment. Stalin would not be informed until after the wedding. “You’re married; so be it,” he would write to Vasily in red pencil. “I pity her, marrying such a fool.”²⁴⁸

A RECKONING

A harsh internal Soviet reckoning of the Winter War—which would make no mention of Stalin’s errors or his prior murderous rampages—commenced on March 26–28, 1940, at a Central Committee plenum, two weeks after hostilities ended. Molotov reported on the settlement with Finland, prompting Litvinov to criticize the course of foreign policy since his dismissal, while predicting that Germany would attack the Soviet Union. Molotov tried, and failed, to cut Litvinov off; Stalin remained silent.²⁴⁹ Voroshilov gave an unusually self-critical opening report and offered to resign.²⁵⁰ Mekhlis was one of those who piled on (hearsay accounts have Mekhlis complaining that “Voroshilov cannot stand Mekhlis,” which was true, and likely reflected how every officer in the room felt).²⁵¹ But Stalin upbraided his attack dog for “a hysterical speech,” called Mekhlis “a good man, a hard worker, but unsuitable for army leadership,” and praised Voroshilov for conceding his errors. “It does not happen often around here that a people’s commissar speaks so openly about his own shortcomings.”²⁵²

Stalin, in the discussion, brushed off the circumstance that the war had been launched in winter. “We are a northern country,” he said, and “if our military leaders had studied the history of the Russian army and followed the fine traditions of the Russian army, then they would know that all of our most impressive victories were won in winter.” He mentioned Alexander Nevsky against the Swedes on the ice, Peter the Great against the Swedes and Charles XII on the Baltic, Alexander I’s conquest of Finland from Sweden, and Kutuzov’s victory over Napoleon.²⁵³ Stalin also criticized the army’s use of biscuits instead of dried bread toasts (sukhari), stating that in Finnish frosts, the biscuits froze and became inedible. “Kutuzov, a real count, visited the soldiers to see what they were eating, but the ‘self-made count’ Kulik did not do that. (General laughter.)” Despite this dig at Kulik, Stalin praised the artillery. “Now we know the secret of how to smash a fortified defense line. We are the only country that knows this secret. The answer is that first you need to crush the enemy physically and morally with heavy artillery, and after that send in the infantry.” Stalin added, “The rank and file constitute superb material, but the commanders turned out not to be on the heights. . . . The goal is to improve the commanding corps and then our army will be the best in the world.”²⁵⁴

On the final day of the plenum, Ribbentrop coincidentally instructed Schulenburg, in Moscow, to revive the invitation of a reciprocal trip by Molotov to Berlin. “It goes without saying that the invitation is not to be confined to Herr Molotov,” the Nazi foreign minister telegrammed. “It would suit our own needs better, as well as our really ever closer relations with Russia, if Herr Stalin himself came to Berlin. The Führer would not only be particularly happy to welcome Stalin in Berlin, but he would also see to it that he would get a reception commensurate with his position and importance, and he would extend to him all the honors that the occasion demanded.” Schulenburg replied that he felt confident Molotov would fulfill his obligation to reciprocate, albeit not in the current circumstances, for it would undermine the appearance of Soviet neutrality and potentially risk inviting a Western declaration of war against the USSR.²⁵⁵ Molotov, in a speech to the Supreme Soviet on March 29, 1940, venomously denounced Britain and France, insisting yet again that the Soviet Union would never become a “weapon of the Anglo-French imperialists in their struggle for world hegemony.” He said that a British buildup in the Near East might entail “objectives antagonistic toward the Soviet Union.”²⁵⁶

All the while, Soviet merchants were still shopping in Berlin. Also on March 29, Ivan Tevosyan, a German-speaking ethnic Armenian from Karabakh, met Göring. The corpulent Luftwaffe head promised shipments of the contracted Junkers 88 airplane in April and May, noting that “there has never been an instance in which I, Göring, did not keep my word,” and adding that “the interests of both countries demand that Germany and the Soviet Union are together. This is the Führer’s opinion. He has decided this firmly and irreversibly. . . . This wish of Hitler is known to the duce; England and France know about it.” Göring further observed that “he personally had told the Finns repeatedly that it was senseless for a small state to fight with such a large country and had recommended accepting the USSR’s conditions.” Tevosyan—who had barely escaped Beria’s clutches as an alleged “German spy”—underscored the friendly character of bilateral relations, “reconfirmed in the February 11, 1940, economic agreement,” but he pointed out that although the Soviets had shipped everything required of them, “Germany so far has not made a single shipment to the USSR, not one rivet.” Göring interrupted to express his regrets at this news of German delays. “I give you my word, I am the guarantee.”²⁵⁷

On March 31, a Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic was established through the merger of Soviet Karelia and territories annexed from Finland (part of the Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia). The KFSSR became the twelfth Union republic, but the only one whose titular nationality, ethnic Finns, made up a minority of its inhabitants (around one quarter). Stalin soon named Kuusinen the KFSSR’s head of state.²⁵⁸

Back in Moscow, at a follow-up military conference on the Winter War (April 14–17), Stalin scapegoated his head of military intelligence, Proskurov.²⁵⁹ In the war’s run-up, Soviet military intelligence had produced a photo-and-sketch album of the Mannerheim Line (possibly based on maps delivered by the Germans after the 1939 Pact signing). This album lay on Meretskov’s desk.²⁶⁰ True, there had been subsequent modernization of the defense belt. But Meretskov misunderstood or ignored the implications of the fortifications for his battle plan.²⁶¹ That said, extreme hypersecrecy seems to have kept some centrally held intelligence from being shared with the Leningrad military district, to which Stalin had handed the war effort.²⁶² More broadly, one young military intelligence officer on the front, who later defected, observed, plausibly, that “the maps of Finland supplied to us by military intelligence were extremely poor, an indication of sloppy work. . . . Ironically, we soon found that the maps of that part of the Soviet Union were just as poor.”²⁶³ Proskurov, in the discussion at the military conference, pushed back against the criticisms leveled by Stalin, Mekhlis, and Meretskov, whose own head was on the line.²⁶⁴ Meretskov complained that the army command had no access to foreign newspapers, with their wealth of information about the course of military matters. “An intolerable situation,” Stalin interjected. Proskurov pointed out that information from foreign newspapers was translated into Russian, just not circulated. “Why?” Stalin asked. Proskurov: “It contains slander against the Red Army.”²⁶⁵

Proskurov, a hero aviator, took the fall (and, later, a bullet to the neck).²⁶⁶ Stalin did criticize himself, too, albeit indirectly. “We expected to bag an easy win,” he stated (April 17, 1940). “We were terribly spoiled by the Polish campaign.”²⁶⁷ It was the royal “we.” His main theme was that the Russian civil war “had not been a real war, because there was no artillery, aviation, tanks, and mortars used.” One more heroic cavalry charge was not going to drive off tanks and artillery. “What hindered our commanding staff from conducting the Finnish war in a new way—not by the civil war style, but in a new way?” Stalin asked rhetorically. “What hindered us, in my view, was a cult of the traditions and experience of the civil war. How did we evaluate commanders: ‘Did you take part in the civil war?’ ‘No, you did not take part—then get lost.’ ‘That one, did he take part?’ ‘He took part—let’s appoint him.’” Stalin urged everyone—really, himself—“to renounce the cult of the civil war, which only reinforces our backwardness.”²⁶⁸

Stalin’s closest civil war crony, Voroshilov, suffered guilt, anger, and anguish over the regime’s massacre of so many innocent officers in the Red Army and his complicity therein. One night at the Near Dacha, during the Finnish events, the despot and his defense commissar went at it. They all must have been even drunker than usual. Stalin “was in a white-hot rage and berated Voroshilov severely,” Khrushchev recalled. “He got irate, jumped up, and [verbally] went after Voroshilov. Voroshilov also blew up, got red in the face, rose, and hurled Stalin’s accusation back in his face. ‘You’re to blame in this! You annihilated the military cadres.’” True enough, although Voroshilov had signed 185 extant execution lists—fourth behind Stalin, Molotov, and Kaganovich. After Stalin answered him in kind, “Voroshilov picked up a platter with a roast suckling pig on it and smashed it on the table.”²⁶⁹ That pig, in a way, was plucky little Finland—the “pig rooting around in the Soviet garden,” in the dismissive phrase used on the eve of the war—but now it was also Voroshilov’s military career and, by association, Stalin’s military dilettantism.

LEARNING

With its strong incentives for lying and an absence of institutionalized consultation or corrective mechanisms, despotism is particularly prone to strategic blunders, and yet despotic systems—and despots—can learn. The Winter War launched Stalin’s belated military reeducation, which was a long time coming.²⁷⁰ Prior to the Finnish experience, the Spanish civil war had delivered valuable firsthand experience in sabotage operations behind enemy lines, had battle-tested Soviet weapons systems, and had enabled study of Nazi Germany’s arsenal. The initiative to collect this valuable information was taken by Soviet military men whom Stalin then mostly murdered, but the data and analyses remained for their successors. Case studies of individual battles in Spain became available for study at Soviet military schools, in order to assimilate the tactical and operational lessons for artillery, tanks, airplanes, navy, and combined operations, much of which was published in the army newspaper, Red Star, for the broadest possible audience. Voroshilov and his aides selected key material on Spain to present to Stalin.²⁷¹

Some key lessons that had been drawn from Spain were blatantly misguided. Kulik, for example, had concluded that the use of large mechanized tank units had turned out to be wrongheaded, for in Spain the infantry had not been able to keep pace with the tanks.²⁷² He was hardly alone in this misreading, but with Tukhachevsky and others murdered, Kulik’s misread had gone largely uncontested, and Stalin had approved the Red Army’s dismantling of stand-alone mechanized tank units. Lessons from the border war with Japan were distilled by Zhukov, who was holed up in Ulan Bator. His long report labeled the incompetent commander he had relieved a “criminal” and underlined problems arising from poor battlefield communications and inadequate intelligence, but overall, he called the engagement “a victory which, in our view, should be carefully studied by all commanders.” This document was completed only in November 1939, not in time for the Winter War planning.²⁷³ But Zhukov and Stern had improvised back into existence stand-alone mechanized units and demonstrated, in practice, the devastating effectiveness of massive application of tanks and aircraft. Now, after Finland, these units would make a belated comeback. Nonetheless, in front of the full military during discussion of Finland in April 1940, Stalin belittled the brilliant 1939 victory in the border war with Japan.²⁷⁴

Development of military technology involves strategic decisions concerning manufacturing capabilities and spare parts availability, cost, ease of use and repair by soldiers, and, of course, effectiveness in combat, all decisions that take time to unfold. In the meantime, the enemy’s technology can improve.²⁷⁵ The consequences of mistakes can be immense. Kulik would soon block the placement of the advanced F-34 guns on the T-34 tank, which would be launched into mass production in fall 1940, largely because the superior gun was not his initiative.²⁷⁶

One hard Spanish lesson that the Soviets had learned was the squandering of their initial aviation advantage. The Soviets were winning the quantitative arms race with Nazi Germany, producing 4,270 airplanes in 1936 (to Germany’s 5,112), 6,039 in 1937 (to Germany’s 5,606), 7,727 in 1938 (to 5,235), and 10,362 in 1939 (to 8,295).²⁷⁷ But German quality had improved more significantly. Germany had opened a gap with its upgraded Heinkel bomber (He-111), which was capable of carrying 3,000 pounds of bombs, and its Messerschmitt fighter (Me-109), which had a range of 400 miles, a high rate of climb, a bulletproof fuel tank, and a top speed of 350 miles per hour, and had shown its deadliness at Guernica.²⁷⁸ The belated Soviet responses—Yak-1, Yak-7, MiG-3, and LaGG-3—finally appeared in 1940, but only in experimental production.

The despot summoned the thirty-six-year-old aviation commissar, Shakhurin, and his deputy, the thirty-three-year-old Yakovlev (the designer of the “Yak”), to the Little Corner, and they arrived in the middle of a large gathering. Without asking them to sit, Stalin began to read aloud from a letter written by an airplane designer who complained that he had a brilliant idea for a new killer plane but that the deputy commissar would not brook a rival and was blocking the innovative design, forcing the letter writer to appeal directly to “the Central Committee.” Silence ensued. Yakovlev responded that the designer had never actually approached him. (Shakhurin did not know anything about the proposed plane.) “Of course, he should first of all have spoken with both of you,” Stalin allowed. “Not speaking with you, and writing a complaint about you, is not the way. I don’t know about this proposal—maybe it’s a good airplane, maybe it’s a bad one—but the promised specs are alluring.” Stalin then asked how much it would cost. They answered, “8 to 9 million [rubles].” Stalin ordered it built, adding, “I ask you not to go after this designer for writing the letter. . . . For you it is unpleasant, probably, that such letters are written. But I am pleased. By the way, it is not the first letter.” As Yakovlev neared the exit to the Little Corner, Stalin called out. “Do not persecute the designer for writing the complaint; let him build the plane. We shall risk the millions; I shall take the sin on my soul.” The plane was duly built. It crashed on its maiden flight, taking with it one of the country’s best experimental pilots.²⁷⁹

All the while, significant interruptions were occurring in German deliveries of contracted military weapons as called for in the new commercial agreement. Stalin began demanding a new short-term trade agreement with Germany to ensure compliance. Mikoyan, in mid-April 1940, complained to his German interlocutors that he could “no longer afford to make a fool of himself, in practice conducting a bilateral exchange of goods but unilaterally delivering goods to Germany.” Stalin had been retaliating for the German shortfall: out of a contractual 1 million tons of grain for Germany, fewer than 150,000 had been delivered.²⁸⁰ Soviet oil deliveries had barely reached 100,000 tons, just one ninth of the contractual amount and less than 15 percent of German stocks.²⁸¹ But Romania was supplying huge multiples of that in oil, while Swedish iron ore shipments dwarfed Soviet supplies to Germany. The major Soviet contribution would come in feed grain and legumes. The original 1 million tons of grain would be raised to 1.5 million, and the Germans soon sought yet another 1 million.²⁸² In the face of Germany’s nearly insatiable demand, Stalin raised prices.

RED ARMY RESURRECTION

At the conclusion of the Finnish war military reckoning, on April 17, 1940, Stalin formalized the appointments of three new deputy heads of the Council of People’s Commissars: Mikhail Pervukhin (b. 1904), the chief engineer and then director of the Moscow Energy utility, who had rocketed to first deputy commissar of heavy industry in 1938; Alexei Kosygin, who had been a shop foreman on a factory floor as late as 1937 before becoming textile industry commissar in 1939; and Vyacheslav Malyshev, a locomotive designer and the recently named commissar of heavy machine building. They joined Molotov’s six other deputies: Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Nikolai Bulganin (b. 1895, chairman of the state bank), Nikolai Voznesensky (b. 1903, head of state planning), Vyshinsky, and Rozaliya Zemlyachka. The latter was an old revolutionary terrorist (b. 1876), but otherwise these were predominantly economic managers.

Notwithstanding these promotions, the terror continued to cast its shadow. In May 1940, no annual reception took place at the Kremlin for the young graduates of military academies, where arrests and executions during the terror had damaged the level of instruction. On May 4 and 5, Stalin, the immediate retinue, and surviving military elite were gathered in the form of a commission of the Main Military Council to codify the lessons from Finland.²⁸³ No one on that commission, or at the various meetings with Stalin present, blamed the tough going in Finland on the terror, but the thought was on people’s minds. At a separate May 1940 meeting on military ideology, Dmitry Pavlov, a Spanish civil war veteran and high-ranking tank commander in the Finnish war, stated, “We had so many enemies of the people that I doubt that all of them could have been enemies.” He added, “Here it is necessary to say that the operations of 1937–38, before Beria arrived, so compromised us that, in my opinion, we would [otherwise] have easily had our way with an adversary like the Finns.”²⁸⁴

Military personnel changes were the most consequential since 1925. On May 7, 1940, Stalin named Timoshenko defense commissar and kicked Voroshilov “upstairs” to the post of deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars—making him the tenth.²⁸⁵ The despot also promoted Timoshenko to the rank of marshal. Stalin had always been taken by Voroshilov’s gifted sociability and doglike loyalty, insurance against a Bonapartist coup, but the price of his military shortcomings had become too high and the despot had hit upon a replacement. The peasant boy Timoshenko had won Stalin’s trust in a way that the brilliant aristocrat’s son Mikhail Tukhachevsky never could.²⁸⁶ Returning the number of marshals to five, Stalin also promoted Shaposhnikov and the dense Kulik.²⁸⁷ Two days before, Stalin had colluded with Beria to have Kulik’s beautiful Jewish second wife, Kira Simonich, kidnapped. The despot then pretended he had no idea where she might be, advising Kulik to remarry and forget the “nympho female spy.” She was the daughter of the former okhranka chief in Helsinki who had been executed by the Cheka in 1919; her first husband had been a NEPman with foreign connections; her two brothers, one of whom had been an officer for the Whites, were arrested for espionage; her mother left for Italy in 1934. Nonetheless, Kulik had refused Voroshilov’s entreaties to divorce the fetching Kira.²⁸⁸ Such compromising associations would have been more than enough to bury any Red Army officer; Kulik, in addition, had been a Socialist Revolutionary, not a Bolshevik, before the October Revolution. He supplied a steady stream of denunciations on the other military men.

Two of the five marshals (Voroshilov and Budyonny) were civil-war-era cavalrymen who defended the role of horse-riding troops deep into the era of tanks and planes. The strategically literate Shaposhnikov—the highest-ranking former tsarist officer still around—had not been able to block the wrongheaded breakup of mechanized divisions, but he had closely advised Stalin on the military operations to recover the old tsarist borders.²⁸⁹ Nevertheless, the despot soon replaced him as chief of staff with, of all people, the Finnish-war failure Meretskov.²⁹⁰

The big story was Timoshenko: the defense of the socialist motherland now rested upon his shoulders. On May 7, 1940, at a celebration of Tchaikovsky’s centenary, Timoshenko appeared in the imperial box at the Bolshoi in a threesome with Stalin and Molotov—a Kremlinological signal to the elite, whose whispers could be counted on to spread word of the coronation. With the transfer of the defense portfolio, a chastened Stalin also allowed Timoshenko to conduct a genuine investigation into the state of the Red Army.²⁹¹ He sent Timoshenko to inspect key Soviet military districts in person. The despot and his new defense commissar forced through sweeping reforms, including greater discipline and genuine basic training.²⁹² Military production, already immense, was savagely ramped up, including the mass manufacture of machine guns, which Stalin’s idiot cronies had dismissed but the Finns had put to devastating use. Mikoyan negotiated new defense-related trade pacts with more than a dozen countries, which forced still deeper shortages on the Soviet populace in order to free up resources for export.²⁹³ Timoshenko oversaw a hasty expansion of officer training: in 1940, the Soviet Union counted eighteen military academies, plus eight military departments at various civilian universities, as well as 214 schools (uchilishche) for the army and six for the navy. Training courses lasted from forty-five to ninety days. The defense commissar also rushed to extend rail lines and build airports—a target of 950 by the end of 1941, meaning more than 300 new ones.²⁹⁴

Stalin approved the reintroduction of the ranks of admiral and general on May 7, 1940, as well. Meretskov would be among those promoted to full general, while naval commissar Kuznetsov became a new admiral. “Stalin by that point did not entertain objections,” Kuznetsov recalled. “A kind of thick cloud had formed around him of bootlickers and obsequious types who blocked the necessary people from accessing him. For us, young people raised up by the ‘unquiet’ 1937–38 period and striving out of inexperience to ‘develop our own views,’ we quickly learned that our part was to listen more and speak less.” Still, Kuznetsov noted that “back then I bowed before Stalin’s authority, not doubting anything that emerged from him.”²⁹⁵

There were some 1,000 senior officer promotions altogether. Zhukov, who had remained in Mongolia and missed the Finnish campaign, was among those elevated. Voroshilov recalled him from Ulan Bator, and Stalin summoned him to the Little Corner. “I had never met Stalin before and I went to the meeting very agitated,” Zhukov recalled. “Greeting me, Stalin, puffing his pipe, immediately asked, ‘How do you assess the Japanese army?’” Zhukov gave a detailed answer, after which Stalin inquired about the performance of Soviet troops and the Soviet commanders Kulik, Dmitry Pavlov, and Nikolai Voronov. Zhukov claimed he had praised the latter two, but not Kulik. After further discussion, Stalin said, “Now you have combat experience. Take over the Kiev military district”—which Timoshenko was relinquishing—“and use your experience in the training of the troops.” Zhukov returned to the Hotel Moskva but could not fall asleep. “Stalin’s external appearance, his soft voice, his concreteness and depth of thinking, his attentiveness in listening to the report, impressed me greatly.”²⁹⁶

Stalin also authorized Beria to release more than ten thousand Red Army officers from the Gulag.²⁹⁷ Colonel Konstanty Rokossowski, who had been arrested as a Polish spy, had been released on March 22, 1940, without explanation, after thirty months in confinement. He had served under Timoshenko back in the Volga military district. Rokossowski, aged forty-four, had refused to sign confessions to crimes he had not committed, but his toes had been smashed to bits with a hammer and nine of his teeth knocked out.²⁹⁸ He was promoted to general. The regime feared its own returning soldiers who had seen the capitalist world. The Finnish general staff had organized an occasional newspaper for Soviet POWs. Under the rubric “Truth is dearer than everything on earth,” the first issue stated, “We consider that your main misfortune and the misfortune of the entire Russian people consists in the fact that you do not at all know the truth about the life that surrounds you. Your authorities kept you isolated from the whole world and told you only what they thought you needed to know. Fate had it that by falling into captivity in a free country, you got the chance to know the truth about how other nations live. . . . You will learn the truth and will be able to compare your life with the life of other countries.”²⁹⁹

• • •

STALIN EMERGED from the war he launched against Finland with both a crushing victory and a severely impaired military reputation, emboldening the country’s potential enemies, maybe even more than he had with his executions of his own military. He also undermined further the Soviet Union’s international standing as a supposed bulwark of peace. “My anti-Communism, half suppressed by my friendships and the need for Soviet support against the Third Reich, burst forth,” noted the French intellectual Raymond Aron of the fall of 1939. “Those who did not denounce Stalin and the German-Soviet pact became unbearable for me.”³⁰⁰ In Philadelphia on November 17, 1939, Professor Carlton Hayes, of Columbia University, noted the convergence of German, Italian, and Soviet “force against Czechs and Albanians, Poles and Finns.”³⁰¹ Hayes spoke at the first academic conference devoted to the concept of “totalitarianism,” which would provide a cudgel for principled opponents of the Soviet regime, both on the right and on the left.³⁰² On April 25, 1940, Rudolf Hilferding, the Austrian Marxist luminary and author of Finance Capital (1910), published an essay in the Menshevik émigré paper in Paris, titled “State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy?” He lent his authority among socialists to the view that in the Soviet Union, as in Germany and Italy, politics determined economics, and that the Bolsheviks had “created the first totalitarian state, even before the name was invented.”³⁰³

The Red Army, in 1940, would acquire five times as many weapons as it had as recently as 1935.³⁰⁴ Stalin also appeared to have caught a stupendous break: on May 10, 1940, Hitler attacked the Low Countries and France. The despot could scarcely have hoped for more.³⁰⁵ Previously, during what now, in retrospect, became the First World War, the Russian general staff had shuddered at the thought that a quick German rout of the French would lead to a separate peace on the western front, which in turn would give Germany a completely free hand against Russia in the east.³⁰⁶ But their fears were misplaced: the fighting had lasted four stalemated years. Surely France, assisted again by Britain, even with the Soviet Union on the sidelines, could again stalemate Germany?³⁰⁷ Like the British, Stalin seemed to have a high opinion of French military capabilities.³⁰⁸ With a presumed protracted war in the west, he seemed set to gain all the time needed to correct his mistakes, and force-modernize the massive Red Army.